3-14-14! Actually this time!
I'm trying to figure out, actually, how the title relates to the message this time. The message today is about how our righteousness must surpass that of the scribes and the pharisees and...oh wait, I think I see it.
The reflection talks about being people of "life and not death, love and mercy, truth and joy". To be doers of active good. The Bible verse warns against Official Morality or what I think of as Checklist Morality -- I have not done A, B, and C, therefore I am a good person even if I secretly think the world revolves around me and can't be bothered to help my fellow man. Or even, I care about my fellow man in a general, abstract way, so it doesn't matter if I'm totally rude to this random person having a bad day.
Especially when you sit in judgment on people who do A, B, and C while thinking yourself righteous...
Actually, the term "self-righteous" might be the best descriptor of a lousy phenomenon in human behavior ever. I've always looked at is a shorthand for "self-proclaimed righteous" but it's more than that. It's not just assuming the moral stance and declaring yourself to be so awesome and in the right -- it's determining your own righteousness based on rules you made up in your head to keep yourself from having to change your life.
Yes, I know, I started this Lenten journey talking about letting someone else determine your morality for you being a form of laziness. But there's a difference between doing the hard work of figuring out what's right and wrong and deciding that you will define righteousness or the more simple "good person" as "someone just like me, who only has small flaws, like mine."
I have a theory on the world that most people I have told about it find weird:
There are two kinds of people in this world:
People who like to think of themselves as good people,
And those who are willing to work at it.
I sometimes finish it by reminding myself not to judge someone in the latter category because they have further to go than I do in coming to that place. But that's really what I think the defining difference is: whether you're willing to self-examine and change and work at being a good person. Whether you're willing to work at being a good person all the time, especially when it's inconvenient or difficult to figure out, or you are tired and cranky and just want a break.
When you don't take excuses but cop to your mistakes. When you are righteous, by your own moral code, yes, but not self-designated righteous. Not a kind of righteous that means little outside of your own head. When you live by a code even when it takes work. Work that you don't get credit for.
When you stop keeping score and realize that every moment counts on its own, individually, for whether you acted righteously. Whether you were righteous in that moment. You don't just have to stay even or slightly above even in the good/bad you bring to the world. You don't "balance out" to a righteous person. In each moment, you are or you aren't. You make that choice, and you own each and every one -- failures and successes, to grow and change and work at being righteous constantly.
You are righteous if you never rest on the laurels of it.
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