The Bible is full of contradictions, some people will say, and they usually say that because that’s either the byline on the story of why they no longer believe in God or have abandoned Christianity, or they will say that as part of trying to make the case as to why you should not believe in God or believe in the things contained in the Bible either. The Bible is full of contradictions, they say, and they usually say that because they’ve not read the things that supposedly contradict in context, they’ve not done even a bit of basic research. And by basic research, I mean, maybe if you read the five or six verses before that and five or six verses after that, before getting into any commentaries or anything like that, but it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say that it’s full of contradictions.
And we have to remember that in some sense, that’s not an altogether bad thing, if it appears there are contradictions, because God tends to operate in a realm of apparent contradiction, because God is perfect, and God is infinite goodness. And God became man to enter into a world that was anything but perfect, that was broken and fallen and mired in the darkness of sin. And so when God comes to fix all of this, it’s going to feel backwards from what we’re accustomed to.
And there are many texts of Scripture that attest to this sort of shock of this great reversal, Mary’s own canticle of praise, when Elizabeth identifies her as the mother of the Lord, says this, he will cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty, because everything that we are accustomed to in this broken, fallen world of ours is in some sense the reverse of what it is that God comes to do. And because we are so mired in the badness of sin, the goodness of God feels like a bit of a shock. So it’s fair to say that God loves contradiction, because what we are used to rather contradicts His own goodness.
But I would say there are some other lesser forms of these contradictions that anyone who has a bit of logic and good sense could easily see are not contradictions. We hear of one of these apparent contradictions today in Scripture, again, something that we should not be afraid of when we encounter it, because as I say, God sort of deals in contradiction, it seems like, and also because if you’re preaching, apparent contradiction is a wonderful rhetorical device for really padding out your run time and making it seem like you’ve got a more substantive point than you do. So not that I’m speaking from experience, necessarily.
But we hear something today that contradicts something else that sends us a bit of a mixed signal, as it were, about what does Jesus ask of us? What does Jesus command morally? Your light must shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Heavenly Father, He says. He illustrates this with the fact that if salt loses its taste with what can it be seasoned, it’s no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. A vivid image and one that’s a little bit unreachable if you think about it, because salt is one of those things that doesn’t go bad.
I actually saw a photo posted online the other day of somebody had bought some Himalayan pink salt that had an expiration date on it, and they said that the salt sitting under a glacier for 12 million years apparently is going to go bad in a couple of weeks or something, and so apparent contradictions run rampant. But think of salt losing its taste and we just have to throw it out, it’s not useful for anything, that why would we have salt if it wasn’t going to taste like something? That’s a rather extreme state of affairs if your salt has become unsalty, because salt can remain salty again for several million years. You are the light of the world, he says, a city set on a mountain cannot be hidden, an image again easy to conjure up, that cities are rather hard to hide.
Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket, it is set on a lampstand where it gives light to all in the house, and this is what really brings around the point. You are the light of the world, you’ve been given light, and you’ve been given light from outside of yourself, because it ultimately comes from God, so what good is it if you try to hide that? What good is it if you don’t let your light shine, so that others will see your good deeds? And this is how he says that light is to shine, by the good things that you do, and thus glorify the Heavenly Father. Where we run into the apparent contradiction of that is that elsewhere Jesus tells us not to do good things so that they will be seen.
When you give alms, he says, let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and this is why it is usually not a good practice, say, to publicize that you’ve given to charity, because there runs the temptation that you are doing it to be seen doing it. It’s one of the reasons why when they ask me at the checkout stand, it always feels a little bit pressured, do you want to donate to whatever the thing is that they round up your purchase to, and I usually say no, because I don’t want to do that in public. You know, that this is why we are to give in secret, because as Jesus says, our Father who sees in secret will give us our reward in secret, that the real reward comes in the depths of our hearts, because we found union with him, and not because others have seen us doing it.
He says when you pray to go into your inner sanctum, go into your inner chamber and shut the door, and not to pray to be seen praying, because if you pray just so people will see you doing it, you’ve received your reward, that’s all you’re going to get out of it, is people saw that, and that’s all the benefit you get. So we have an apparent contradiction, we’re being told to do good things in public in one place, and we’re being told not to do good things in public in another, so how do we resolve that? Do we just not do good things at all? Do we abandon the whole project? Do we say that Jesus clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because he seems to contradict himself, so maybe I should just kind of do whatever I feel like doing? And the answer is no, because this is only a contradiction if we think that the fact that we can go wrong in two different ways concerning one particular area of our action is itself a contradiction. It would be like when we cross the state line into South Carolina, and you’ll notice, I remember I laughed the first time I saw this, because it just sort of furthered a stereotype about South Carolina being something of a lawless place, and after you pass that first couple of firework stands and the liquor stores that sit right, like the parking lot is right off the off-ramp, and the off-ramp is only about 15 yards long, and you see the signs that say that there’s a posted speed limit, and then there’s a posted minimum speed, so they’re saying don’t go too fast, but don’t go too slow either.
Now we have a too slow in North Carolina, we just don’t post it, which is why I thought it was funny in South Carolina. But that would be like reading that sign and thinking, well it says don’t go too fast and don’t go too slow, so I shouldn’t drive at all is what that sign is saying. And that’s not what it’s saying, and that’s not what Jesus is saying either, when He says that we can sin by excess or we can sin by defect, and this is true of every virtue that there is.
That there is a virtue, and the virtue is the good thing to do, it is the middle, and not just sort of the mean between two extremes, but it’s the peak, it’s the top of the mountain, and then on either side there are two valleys of vice. There are two ways in which we can go wrong. So we could do good things so that we are seen doing them, in which case we sin in one way because we’re doing it for the wrong reason.
And there’s a lot of good things we can do that we can do for the wrong reason. And that doesn’t negate the ultimate good that is done, it just means that it doesn’t really benefit us who have done the good. If you give me a gift out of the kindness of your heart, because you want to give me a gift, you want to express love by giving me a gift, I benefit from your gift and you benefit from the act of love that you’ve made.
You grow in the virtue of charity. But if you give me a gift because you want some kind of favor from me, I still benefit from the gift. I still get something out of it.
Maybe my bank balance goes up, maybe my liquor cabinet gets a little fuller, whatever it is, but you don’t benefit from doing that because you have acted unvirtuously. So even though the net economic benefit might favor me, the net spiritual benefit actually is to your detriment at that point. Not to say, not to give me gifts, but we do it for the right reason.
That goes to the other extreme then. Jesus says you are to do good deeds so that others will see them, but not because that’s the intention that you have in doing them. You do good things because they are good.
You do good things because they give glory to our Heavenly Father. And that’s really the linchpin of all of it is we being open to the grace that God gives us, then reflect His glory by doing the good that comes from the transformation we receive from that grace. That’s why we come here every week and do what we’re doing here.
We hear the exhortations of Scripture and the preaching of the Word of God that tells us kind of what’s the path, what’s the roadmap. We receive from the Eucharist the grace to then do what is good because we’ve received God Himself within us and that transforms us so that we then go out and transform the world by doing the good that flows from that transformation. If you listen to the prayers of the Mass, that’s what we’re asking for in the post-communion prayer most of the time.
We have received God’s goodness in the Eucharist, so let us go out and make the world see His goodness by what it’s done to us. And so we shouldn’t do the good simply because we’re seen doing it, but we also shouldn’t avoid the good even if there’s that fear that I’m only doing it to be seen because that can stop us in our tracks as well. We can be caught up in thinking, I want to do good things, but my intentions are not perfect, so what am I to do with that? The path to virtue doesn’t come from waiting for the right disposition.
It comes from doing what’s good so that forms us in the right disposition. If you wait until you are good to do the good, you will never do the good. You have to start doing it even if you do it badly and in time it will form you.
And you have to allow that then to be energized and guided by the grace of God. In so doing, we are receptive to His light, we reflect that light to others, we receive His grace and His truth, and we are transformed by that grace into reflections of His truth so that the whole world may know Jesus Christ.
