No Nonsense about God 3: The Goodness of God

Each of the previous two sermons has started with an obvious statement – God must be great, God must be true – otherwise he is not God. And this one will begin with a third obvious statement: God is good, God must be good. God must be good, utterly and totally: if there were anybody, anything, any moral standard, which was better than God or which showed God to be not completely good, then God would not be God. And at any rate, if God was not utterly and entirely good: though he were never so powerful, I myself would not wish to have anything to do with him, and I would not recommend you to, either.

But the God we imagine is certainly not always or entirely good: the God who is peddled by some of his followers, and the God we may have built up in our minds. The great Jesuit spiritual adviser and author Gerard W Hughes, in his book “God of Surprises”, says that he had talked to a great number of people who had finally dispensed with God in their lives, and always asked them what this God was like whom they no longer desired to serve. And eventually a sort of identikit picture was built up: of a God whom he calls “Good old Uncle George”. This is how he describes him:

“God was a family relative, much admired by Mum and Dad, who described him as very loving, a great friend of the family, very powerful and interested in all of us. Eventually we are taken to visit ‘good old Uncle George’. He lives in a formidable mansion, is bearded, gruff, and threatening. We cannot share our parents’ admiration for (him). At the end of the visit, Uncle George turns to address us. ‘Now listen, dear,’ he begins, looking very severe, ‘I want to see you here once a week, and if you fail to come, let me just show you what will happen to you.’ He then leads us down to the mansion’s basement. It is dark, becomes hotter and hotter as we descend, and we begin to hear unearthly screams. In the basement there are steel doors. Uncle George opens one. ‘Now look in there, dear,’ he says. We see a nightmare vision, an array of blazing furnaces with little demons in attendance, who hurl into the blaze those men, women, and children who failed to visit Uncle George or to act in a way he approved. ‘And if you don’t visit me, dear, that is where you will most certainly go,’ says Uncle George. He then takes us upstairs again to meet Mum and Dad. As we go home, tightly clutching Dad with one hand and Mum with the other, Mum leans over us and says, ‘And now don’t you love Uncle George with all your heart and soul, mind and strength?’ And we, loathing the monster, say, ‘Yes, I do,’ because to say anything else would be to join the queue at the furnace. At a tender age religious schizophrenia has set in and we keep telling Uncle George how much we love him and how good he is and that we want to do only what pleases him. We observe what we are told are his wishes and dare not admit, even to ourselves, that we loathe him.”

Obviously this is a caricature – or is it? If you claim to believe every word the Bible says about God, then you will believe 1 Samuel 15.2-3: Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ And the early books of the Old Testament contain much more in the same vein. Is this a good God? Such a God would be angry about the massacre in Srebrenice, not because of all the carnage it involved, but because there wasn’t enough of it! They only killed the men, and actually spared the women and children, sheep and the rest. Such a God would have no problem with war crimes, genocide, or ethnic cleansing: Stalin, Pinochet, Radovan Karadzic and the rest would all be grist to his mill. Good old Uncle George! If we believe in the goodness of God, we must reject the God of 1 Samuel 15, the God of the biblical fundamentalists.

But suppose we change the scenario a bit and get on to more dangerous ground. Suppose our country has been at war with another country which has committed a number of atrocities: we win the war, and immediately demand justice for their terrible deeds. It is suggested that maybe we should put everyone, or at least quite a lot of people, to death; but no, that isn’t good enough, we decide the only thing that will satisfy us is if we kill, not these criminals, but someone perfect. The trouble is, there isn’t anyone at all perfect among them – so we decide to kill one of our own number instead. We look around, and find – let’s say – Abigail Witchells, someone who has been in the news not only for suffering a terrible assault, but for the courage and faith she has shown in the wake of it. She’ll do. We decide to put Abigail Witchells to death, and not just any old how but in the nastiest way we can possibly devise. Then we shall be satisfied and can be reconciled with our former enemies.

Obviously this couldn’t happen, and anyone who suggested it would be put away with the criminally insane. Yet this is just how many Christians picture God. A God whose ‘justice’ has to punish, cannot just forgive; who can only be satisfied with the shedding of blood; but who has set the world up so ineptly that the only way out of the hole he has dug for himself and for humanity is to have his own Son put to death in one of the most unpleasant ways that could be devised. This is not the God of Love, the God of infinite forgiveness proclaimed by the Christian Gospel, the God of Jesus Christ! No, it’s good old Uncle George again! Whereas the true God, the good God, did not sit up in heaven drumming on the table until his own Son had died an agonising death: the true God loved the world so much that he came among us in the person of Jesus, and suffered for us and with us in the person of Jesus, rejecting revenge and anger and bloodlust in favour of forgiveness and mercy and self-giving love. Indeed God transformed anger into mercy, and revenge into forgiveness.

And now one final appearance of Uncle George. There is a very strong myth around that, at the end of our lives, we shall all get judged and be sent either to heaven or to hell, according to whether God is happy with us. The criteria for what makes him happy tend to vary – he may ask if we’ve been good and kept the commandments; whether we’ve gone to church on a regular basis; whether we have subscribed to the ‘correct’ view of Christianity, been converted in the accepted manner; or, most worryingly of all, whether we happen to be amongst those he chose in a wholly arbitrary manner before we were even born. But the gospels don’t say any of this, and the two main stories which are used to back up such views actually say something quite different. In the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25.31ff) the question to be asked on Judgement Day is not Have we been paid-up Christians, but Have we been generous, have we seen and served Christ in our fellow human beings? And in the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16.19ff) the rich man isn’t sent to a place of torment because he hasn’t kept the commandments, but because he hasn’t loved his fellow humans like himself. Jesus’ criterion for judgement is “Have we lived up to the image of the good God which has been sown in all of us?”, and of course the answer is always no: we all fall short of the perfect, divine humanity to which we are called; we shall all have some catching up to do between our death and our final arrival in that fullness of God’s presence which we call heaven – and sometimes that catching up may be pretty uncomfortable. Our God is a God of mercy: and arbitrary condemnation on the basis of arbitrary rules - that’s a matter for Uncle George, not God.

Our good God is not a tyrant to be feared, because of his vengefulness and his tantrums and his anger and his absolute power: our God is to be adored in amazement, because of the way he constantly pours himself out in love, as he did in the person of Jesus Christ: good measure, shaken together, pressed down, running over.