Proclaimer Blog
Delighting in the good
A small snap-shot for you of the happy life we try to live in PT Towers: on a warm afternoon recently during a break for Magnums (Classic or Almond), the conversation turned to favourite films. A wide variety of tastes was presented with some vigour, which is of course all to the good. It turned that I share with a certain Mr A.R. of this blog a love of the Coen brothers’ film Fargo (lately turned into a TV series). A certain Miss C. Sandom of this parish fails to share that love, as is entirely her right. I digress, though.
What I love most about the film Fargo is that it makes the good-hearted characters who live ostensibly dull lives seem far more interesting than the evil ones (and one is really nasty). Whenever I watch the film I feel that in some way my self-centredness is shown up as petty and boring and that any goodness in me feels like the really exciting thing about me.
I felt very much the same reading Dickens’ Bleak House, which I have just finished. The vicious and self-obsessed characters are of course painted by Dickens in vivid and often comic ways, but they are in the end essentially dull and monotonous in their unpleasantness. By contrast the morally good characters regularly find surprising new ways to show kindness and self-sacrifice to others.
Now here’s my point: most popular culture that I consume – which for me is primarily feature films and music – works precisely the other way round. It portrays selfishness and evil as essentially more interesting and sophisticated than goodness and self-sacrifice, which are usually more dull. Reading the closing chapters of Bleak House had, I felt, a positive effect on my soul, making me genuinely delight in good and find selfishness abhorrent. It is rather chilling to suppose that the majority of my cultural diet persistently has the opposite effect without me noticing very much.
This is surely one small reason why the NT Gospels present not a series of theological statements about Jesus but snap-shots of him in narrative action. Before us on those pages is the most excitingly good man who ever lived, showing up the evil of human self-righteousness in all its monotonous and destructive bleakness. May and I we be genuinely more excited by that goodness than by anything else. We may become very sophisticated readers and preachers of the Gospels; may we never lose a sense in our hearts and on our lips of discovering the most thrillingly unanticipated fact: the entire goodness of God came as a man and lived out his life, even as far as death, among us.