Abstract
When Paul announces by letter that he has fought the good fight, that he has finished the race, and that he is quite sure a crown awaits him, does he come across to you as a bit self-righteous? When Timothy read the letter that contains those words, would his toes have curled a little at that point?
‘Self-righteous’: nothing wrong with the ‘righteous’ bit, but it’s the ‘self’ bit that contains the danger. The self-righteous person you want to smack irks you because he has judged himself and passed the judgement with flying colours, because she has chosen a standard of piety and is in no doubt she has met it, because they have organised their group in a way they are sure God likes, because you… well I won’t say anything about you.
St Paul, we know because he admits it, was a Pharisee (and a self-righteous one at that) long before he knew anything of Jesus and the Gospel. Has he really changed? He is just as single-minded; he is just as sure he’s right; he is just as ‘stop-at-nothing’. He may be Christian now, and influential and inspiring and leader-like; but is he really more loveable, and is he really less self-righteous?
Self-righteous: awfully close to self-satisfied, but in a holy kind of way…
In other parts of his writings Paul almost makes the opposite mistake, the mistake of the person who is fixated on not being self-righteous, self-satisfied. Like Uriah Heep, they pile on the humility and self-deprecation and apparent self-loathing until, well, you want to smack them too. But that can spoil the finest humans as much as the sleaziest ones: nothing is achieved by the righteous person who denies it for fear of seeming self-righteous.
So how does Paul manage it, to triumph without being unbearable; and how does he know how to manage it?
He seems to do two things that enable him to keep his spiritual balance. The first thing he does is leave it to God and other people to make the judgements, constantly in his correspondence opening himself up to scrutiny, showing the picture of his life with the warts showing, inviting readers to make their minds up, and fearlessly expecting God to do the same. It isn’t self-righteousness if it doesn’t begin with self-judgement; and it isn’t self-satisfaction if everything has been done to satisfy a calling, inviting, sending God.
The second thing Paul does that allows him to declare his own successes without being just a prig, is to measure himself against standards beyond himself, the standards of the example of Christ and the claims of the Gospel. So he knows he can rejoice in lives brought into the movement of the Church, brought partly by his, Paul’s, work and witness and words. His joy is in the kingdom not the speaking. And he knows he can be thrilled to see hope in the eyes of the poorest inhabitants of the Roman Empire because he, Paul, told them of the Gospel that favours most those who seem least. His joy is in the Gospel not the telling.
Paul isn’t self-righteous, because he is righteous.
And how does he know that simple truth? The Scriptures he has known all his life, and the stories of Jesus that are swirling round the Empire creating thousands of tiny revolutions: that’s how he knows, because the examples of that truth are all over those places.
Jeremiah presents a sharp exchange between God and his people, a people so self-righteous they’ve got to the stage of judging God and finding him wanting in some respect. They can see that they are not engaged face-to-face with the divine, so they assume it must be God who has turned away, faced in another direction, stopped even looking at those he is bound to love and protect as his created and chosen people. They don’t bother to accuse God of being too weak to help them, as so many of our contemporaries do when their faith in no religion is put to the test. No, these ancient Hebrews are more brass-necked than that; they decide their strong God has simply looked away.
God points out the obvious alternative; that the people are the ones who have changed their point of view and turned away and focussed on different priorities and slipped and slithered and begun to lose themselves, or rather, really, without judging them unfairly, lost themselves completely.
The people own up to the truth of what God is saying, acknowledge their failings, plead for his mercy, remind him of his covenant, demand his loyalty… and the reading and the chapter end. And you turn the Bible’s page expecting one of those cave-in moments that change the heart-rate of the Bible in the stories of Abraham or Moses or David. No, not this time you don’t. They didn’t turn him, not in that moment. Saying the things you think God wants to hear doesn’t make you righteous, only maybe self-righteous. Not even when it’s words that sound like contrition.
For Jesus’ story of the Pharisee and the tax-collector in prayer points to the final, failsafe guarantee of righteousness in face of the temptation of self-righteousness: and that is searing honesty of self with self, standing beneath God’s grace that makes it bearable. The Pharisee’s standards were his own prejudices and his culture’s discriminations, and he could only end up self-satisfied and self-righteous. His judgement was not of himself, but of himself in comparison with someone he was terribly misjudging, and there could be only one outcome. The tax collector was looking at himself with a thousand-yard stare, infinitely deeply down and down inside himself and only himself, and not minding showing God what he found. His was not false Uriah-Heep modesty, because he allowed himself to be justified by that moment of profound exposure, and discovered a – the –wonderful truth.
Who judges themselves in such a way these days: deeply honestly, and in the eyes of other people, and under the claims of the Gospel? It takes two doses of courage to do it. The first courage is the one you need to stand all alone before God and God’s knowledge and make that your knowledge too, to look for righteousness and not cheat with self-righteousness instead, to long for the justification you know you do not deserve and not try to argue for one you think you do deserve. The second courage is the one you need in order to be that kind of soul before the friends who know you well and who rather liked the other you, the blustering you, the humanly-achieving you. It’s the courage to risk being suspected of self-righteousness, when you know you feel more like the tax collector than the Pharisee.
The Churches of the Reformed tradition describe themselves as ‘always needing to be reformed’, which must be the ideal defence against self-satisfaction. Perhaps that must be the unspoken motto of every Christian spirit who has not yet seen the other end of the race or the conclusion of the fight or the glittering of the crown.
A personal account of a journey to faith
Sue Mills, The Butterfly Train (Weybridge: New Wine Press, 2012. £5.99. pp. 96. ISBN: 978-1-905-99179-2).
Sue Mills describes what she has written as, ‘(a) very personal account of my journey to faith’. It is that – and more. It is a very honest account of the way that one or two bad decisions can lead to many years of trauma and chaos. It gives an insight into the small decisions that could have been made by any young person – a reminder that it can be all too easy to judge others. Many of us have found ourselves in situations where we were only one or two steps away from taking a wrong turning in our lives; some of us were fortunate enough to change direction in time.
Sue was a rebellious teenager who was enticed by the promise of an exciting life with a ‘bad boy’. She allows us to observe that attraction, to share in her desire for an adrenalin rush. She helps us to understand that people use drugs, and continue to use them, because they like the effects. Unfortunately, some people then find themselves trapped by the drugs or the impact of the drugs on their physiology. She also helps us to glimpse inside an abusive relationship; to begin to understand the impact of psychological abuse and the loss of self confidence that results.
Her journey to faith was as dramatic as it was unexpected. She had what might be described as an awakening into faith and formed a very straightforward relationship with her God. The simplicity of that relationship is striking. Sue had spent such a long time in the wilderness that she simply needed to be held in the grace of God.
This is an easy to read personal testimony. It offers insight into a particular lifestyle, one that will be unfamiliar to many readers. However, its value is as a personal story and it would be wrong to extrapolate from this book in an attempt to better understand the lives of people who find themselves trapped in a drug-using world. This book is no more a definitive treatise on drug use in middle class families than Trainspotting is a definition of life in Edinburgh in the 1980s. Its value is as a quick read that charts the territory known to the writer. It tells a part of a much bigger story; for anyone interested in understanding the motivation to use drugs and the long term impact of using those drugs, it serves a useful purpose.
However, its simplicity is also its downfall. In particular, the immediacy of Sue’s relationship with God is something that many will be able to recognize, but most will also recognize that spiritual journeying is a complex and challenging process. Sue Mills found herself in a situation where she was floundering. She found a way out of that situation and she found a way to faith. For its honesty and openness, this book cannot be faulted. The discerning reader will look elsewhere for deeper theological reflection.