Tactics for self-justification
A piece of Sunday's sermon about avoiding the hard thing
[This is a portion of the sermon I preached last Sunday about the story of the Good Samaritan.]
As I was preparing for this message I left my office and went downstairs to where Emma and Juniper were together in the living room and asked Emma if I could have some support. One of the excellent benefits of being married to another preacher is getting to bounce our sermon ideas and processes off of each other.
“I need a personal illustration to help me introduce the concepts that I want to preach about,” I said. “Can you think of a time that I was self-justifying or self-righteous or self-satisfied?”
And I tell you what, I would really have appreciated if she had hesitated at least a little bit. But her immediate and verbatim response: “Well yeah! You’re self-righteous a lot!”
Ha!
Sigh.
Guilty as charged.
It’s good to be known, isn’t it? And loved all the same.
The most recent instance had to do with me not thinking that I needed to research best practices for bottle feeding infants. Me thinking that I could just figure it out on my own. But after Juniper screamed in my face quite a bit, and Emma sent me an article or two to read (*nudge nudge*), and insisted that I needed to become skilled at feeding our baby a bottle ASAP because Mama deserves some autonomy time—I did get with the picture, accepted that I needed support, sought that support, learned a thing or two, and now… I can wield a bottle with the best of ‘em.
I hope I’m not alone in this—at times I can really get lost in my defensiveness, stubbornness, sense of I-can-do-it-on-my-own // my-way-is-the-best-way superiority.
But I’m also pretty good at noticing when I’m lost, and correcting course and coming around to my qualities of being curious, being open, and wanting more than anything to grow, to better myself and better the world.
More than anything else, that’s really what the parables that Jesus so often told are all about. They are set right in the earthly mess of being human—and they’re about course correcting, and being more true to who we want to be and what we want the world to be like.
There is a common misconception when it comes to biblical parables.
That misconception is that parables are “earthly stories with a heavenly meaning”. As if every parable has a simple spiritual truth to it that is somehow separate from the messiness of our everyday existence.
That misconception lets us get away with making the often radical messages of the parables safe and sanitized, domesticated. What if we heard them instead as the wild tales that they are, laden with layers of insight?
Rather than “earthly stories with heavenly meaning” what if we treat them —as bible scholar William Herzog suggests—as “earthy stories with heavy meanings”. They are stories that meet us right in the midst of all of our best efforts, failed attempts, and course corrections at being the sort of people that we most want to be.
There’s a whole cast of characters in the story of the Good Samaritan. There’s the unfortunate traveler who is set upon, beaten and robbed by the bandits. There are the two religious leaders who each pass by the wounded traveler. Then there’s the Samaritan, who has compassion on the traveler. And the innkeeper who the Samaritan hires to nurse the traveler back to health.
Outside of the parable there are some other characters. Jesus, of course, is there telling the story. But the reason he’s telling it is because of the lawyer who approaches him with some questions.
I want to consider the lawyer a little bit. He is called that because he is a teacher of biblical law. He’s got a pretty tightly held sense of what is right and what is wrong according to the letter of the law as he understands it. A real type-A personality. He sees things as black and white, no room for grey.
And we get hints that his theology, his relationship with the divine, is one that is transactional: If I do all the right things, laid out for me in the law books, then God is duty bound to reward me with the inheritance that is due to me.
You hear this in the first question that he asks Jesus—approaching not really with a spirit of curiosity, but as one aiming to examine a witness: “What do I need to do to inherit eternal life?” he asks.
His question presumes a certain theology that is common for those who live with considerable privilege, it’s a theology where salvation—even spiritual salvation—is considered to be in the same category as a transfer of wealth.
This is an insider, an elitist theology that maintains: As long as I don’t disrupt the status quo, then the inheritance that is due to me will, in the end, come to me.
“What do I need to do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus is savvy.
He doesn’t collude with the lawyer’s skewed theology, instead he turns the question back on him: “You’re the lawyer.” Jesus says: “You tell me. What does the law say?”
And straight out of the law books—Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, for those keeping score at home—the lawyer responds: “Love God with everything we’ve got, and love our neighbors as we do ourselves.”
“Well, there you have it,” says Jesus. “That’s what you’ve got to do.”
Then, the gospel of Luke tells us this: “Wanting to justify himself, the lawyer asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’”
Hmm.
Are you ever as intentionally obtuse as this guy, trying to dodge something that’s uncomfortable or inconvenient for you?
He got himself an answer to his initial question: Love God and love your neighbor. Pretty straightforward. Pretty clear. But he follows up with another question—again not out of curiosity, but wanting to justify himself. Kind of snarky and defensive, this attempt at self-justification.
The theologian Ched Myers comments on this, calling it a “classic intellectual dodge”. The lawyer pretends that this guidance to love god and love our neighbors is too ambiguous to actually practice without parsing it out, without analyzing it further.
Have you ever done that sort of dodge?
In other words, the legal scholar here is trying to dodge the simple truth by being clever.
You see this happen all the time—for example when politicians or their spokespeople spin the truth, or more accurately distract their listeners with an irrelevant detail or a question that purposefully confuses the listeners or raises doubts, so that there isn’t actually any accountability to address the truth.
But it’s easy these days to point fingers at politicians. Necessary, sure. But also: I’m wondering, when do you and I do some version of that? When do we hide behind dodgy justifications? When do we use cleverness as an escape from the truth?
Where might you be making a simple practice of love or creativity or contribution more complicated than it needs to be, than it actually is?
Where might you be complicating matters in your head with clever questions and justifications in order to save face or in order to make an excuse, let yourself off the hook from needing to get your hands dirty, put your reputation on the line, and do the hard thing that is clearly the right thing?
[You can watch me preach the whole sermon here if you like.]
I love this so much! You give me hope that the Bible, and especially the parables I know so well, can be shared as a way to move us forward, not take us back.