Why Be Good?

I’m delegating my column this week to Fr. John Foley who has some great thoughts on this Sunday’s scripture readings. –Msgr. Rob

Why Be Good?

In the early Old Testament there seems to have been an ongoing belief, one that we hang on to today sometimes: that good people are rewarded and sinners are punished even unto death. When someone virtuous turns away from virtue to commit iniquity, and dies, it is because of the iniquity he committed that he must die. But if he … does what is right and just, he shall preserve his life.

There is so much good sense in this [Sunday’s first] reading. Sin really does mess up our lives, letting them come apart at the seams, doesn’t it? And those who live lives of virtue usually are edging toward integration and freedom. The Psalm for this Sunday is a straightforward request for being included with the favored ones: “Remember your mercies, O Lord. … ” But throughout the Hebrew Testament, an opposing and terrible observation gradually arose. Good people do suffer and die while scoundrels often have a fine time of it. How can this be? How could a good God be unjust? We hear that question today from the Ukraine. Many Psalms are filled with the same lament also.

The Book of Job is an ancient and puzzling repetition of the same question. God decided to show us motivation that cannot be reduced to self-interest. Before reading further, you might want to think about your own answer to the question. Why do bad things happen to good people? There are clues. First, how many people do you know who are completely good or completely bad? A childlike, over-simple belief says that good friends are always good. Adults, on the other hand, know how mixed the human reality is. Each of us has a jumble of “good plants and weeds” within us.

That is what the Gospel is about. A father asks his younger son to go work in the fields and the son says “yes, of course I will do that for you, father.” He must be the good one, mustn’t he? But in fact he does not do what he promised. He becomes the famous prodigal son. The older son originally says something like, “No. I will not go out in the heat and pull your damned weeds. Why should I?” Yet of course, he does go out and work all day. Today we know him as the good son, though he had been mean at the beginning.

The lesson? God the father loves everyone, whether they are sinners or not. And in order for any of us to love like God does, we must prepare to love them in spite of the drawbacks in their personality, the hurts we receive, not just the good things. This can be horrifying! The great example of a good man suffering is Jesus’ cross. The Second Reading puts it this way:

Though he was in the form of God,
[he] did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death.

Though God’s son was perfectly blameless, he took upon himself the mixed nature of human beings. He showed once and for all the mysterious reason why good people suffer, as he suffered. Let God make you good. –John Foley, S.J.