goodness v. righteousness

I’ve been turning this one over in my mind the past week. On Monday I stumbled across this well-known passage in Romans:

"You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (5:6-8).

Whenever I’ve heard this passage discussed, the emphasis is generally on that last sentence. We’re supposed to, if we haven’t heard it too many times to grow a callus over the eardrums, sit struck with wonder: such a wonderful God, to love horrible us.

But that verse contains very little power without its preceding statements. This is the problem with lifting pithy verses out of their context and steaming them onto T-shirts: Any buildup of argument, any progression of power, evaporates if you focus merely on the conclusion. And Paul is all about argument.

So we hear, While we were still sinners, Christ died for us, and think, maybe, Neat. It’s a jaded, bored reaction, mostly the jaded, bored reaction of Gen-Yers raised with a Bible tied around their heads or put in tape players on repeat until the words have lost all meaning; and ours is a generation marked for its distaste for triteness and unthinking acceptance of ideas, and for the value it places on genuineness.

So handing out tracts with Romans 5:8 on it (this is a verse on "The Romans Road," isn’t it?) doesn’t really get our attention; nor does pasting it on a bumper sticker. Can you blame us? What does that statement really mean on its own? Of course it’s true, but it’s overused to the point where it’s like a strip of reused masking tape. (This is, by the way, mostly due to the judgmentality implied in its use; most people of my generation hear the word "sinner" come out of someone’s mouth and immediately – and usually correctly – identify the speaker as a hypocrite grandly passing judgment on someone else and ignoring his or her own glaring faults. Did I mention that we hate hypocrisy?)

So with passages like this one you have to read the preceding, not just verses, but chapters, to understand what Paul is getting at. Romans has a bad rap for being judgmental and full of doom, by the way. Tucked into the first two chapters’ recounting of man’s condition are plenty of interesting, thought-provoking little gems.

But none of that is what I actually wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about verse 7. So I will. Because in this verse is a really fascinating distinction between two remarkably different concepts, and it really makes me wish I knew Greek so that I could find out if the difference exists in the original language the way it exists in the English translation.

I still have some passage searching to do to verify all of this, in order not to sound like an ass. But I thought Paul’s distinction between righteousness and goodness is fascinating.

He writes, "Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man..." True that. Nobody wants to sacrifice his life for a person who obeys every letter of the law; such people are usually boring and self-aggrandizing, and think they’re better than everyone else because they’re so good at following the rules. Nobody loves a righteous person; righteous people love themselves more than enough for the whole world. When the chips are down – or up – a righteous person, to paraphrase Firefly, "makes people feel guilty and judged." And who’d die for that?

"...though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die." Goodness gets you farther. This is hilariously cheesy, but when I think of someone dying for a good man, I think of Spartacus. Everyone died for him. Why? Because he was a good man. He certainly wasn’t a righteous one; he murdered and stole and (gasp) fornicated. But he was a good man. And you don’t have to be perfect, or righteous, to be good. Goodness is something that relates man to man; goodness implies kindness, helping out others, showing a little compassion, a little love, a habit of putting other people’s needs before one’s own. Goodness implies an embodiment, not of the letter, but of the spirit of the law. And that kind of person breeds a little more loyalty in his fellowmen.

It made me think. It’s something that has occurred to me before, but not quite so explicitly. In the evangelical churches in which I was raised, righteousness, as a concept, and as something to strive for, was bandied about rather generously. Along with the other children I knew since grasshopper age, I was encouraged to seek righteousness, to be righteous, to follow the letter of the law, and to press my righteousness on others. It was never comfortable – I could see how much people hated it, and it never felt quite right to me, but as I understood it at the time, I had to go through with pushing my righteousness around ("No, I don’t drink"; "no, I would never smoke"; "please don’t swear, God doesn’t like it") because that’s how people knew I belonged to God, and they should know that their lifestyles were wrong and mine was right(eous).

Paul demolishes that whole concept in Romans 4, when he identifies righteousness as something we attain by faith. Not by being dedicated to the law. Not by never sinning (as much as possible). Not by throwing rules in everybody’s face. Not by being better than everyone else. By faith. In chapters 1-3 he paints a pretty clear picture of how generally impossible it is for people to attain righteousness on their own, because we tend to screw it up (not always a lot, sometimes just a little), and so God grants us righteousness by our faith in the justification offered by Christ.

So. Righteousness is a package deal with our faith, an eternal constant in our fluctuating lives, something we cannot accomplish but which is ours nonetheless. It means we don't have to worry about divine condemnation. It means we can stand confidently clothed in those white robes while we go about our work of being better people and leading better lives. (Oo. See that? "Better"? That’s the comparative form of "good." Not of "righteous.")

Righteousness, interestingly, is not one of the famous Fruits of the Spirit; but goodness is. Peter doesn’t urge us to add righteousness to our Christian lives; but he does goodness (2 Peter 1:5). Goodness, it seems, is one of those qualities toward which we must strive, as goodness reflects the active nature of God, and tends to relate, not to how we ourselves stand (as righteousness does), but to how we treat others.

I don’t know if I’m alone in this connotation of "goodness," but when I think of the term, I think of someone who does the right thing however much it might hurt him; of someone who sticks to his convictions; of someone who is kind – who is good – to others. It’s about more than tally points on the moral scoreboard; it’s about love and humility and strength of character – and those qualities matter in how we’re supposed to live. Since our righteousness didn’t originate with us, we might as well take it as a given (though not for granted), and as something for which we can take no credit; and instead of being all wrapped up in our righteousness and treating our fellow man like poop (which a "righteous" person might, but a good person would never do), we should strive to be, not more righteous (I don’t think there is a "more righteous"; it seems like you are or you aren’t and there are no degrees), but better, people. Righteous is what we are through faith in Christ; good is what we become as we live out that faith in, as the end of the Mass says, "the service of God and our fellow man."

Like I said, I’m still in the preliminary stages of checking up on this. But I liked the way my mom put it, when we were discussing it the other day:

"So, righteousness is about justification," she said, "and goodness is about sanctification."

"Yes," I said. "That’s exactly what I meant. Yes."