The Direction of Rightness
There is something deep within us that makes us want to be right. Perhaps you love to debate to prove you are right, or maybe you just ignore other people because you already know you are right and they are wrong. There is even the ongoing joke where men say, “my wife is always right”. Let’s keep it in the family and acknowledge how parents are “always right” when it comes to instructions or disagreements with their children.
Before you quickly dismiss what I have to say, let’s just be honest…we like to be right. Okay, let’s be more honest…no spouse is 100% right, and no parent is 100% right because we are all flawed and finite human beings. No one is ever right all the time, and yet we often live our lives in a quest of being right or proving to others how our opinions (formed through our education, environment, and experiences) are the right ones.
I was this person. I was a naive college graduate who thought I had it all figured out. My ego would almost give me a headache if I wasn’t careful. Then, my ego got crushed when life wasn’t going as smoothly as it once did. Everything I thought I knew and had “figured out” was an utter facade I had created to hide the reality of my own insecurities. It was in this season that I heard Brene Brown say, “I don’t want to be right; I want to get it right.” This was a powerful and life-shifting perspective for me.
Recently, I have been preaching through the book of Luke, and the text for one morning focused on the woman who anointed Jesus with perfume and washed his feet with her tears and hair. The setting for the story is almost like a bad religious joke…A sinful woman, a pharisee, and the prophet Jesus walk into a bar….(Okay, not the bar part, but everything else is pretty accurate.)
It is a comical and unlikely pairing of people. A religious scholar named Simon who knows this woman and rebukes Jesus for letting her wash his feet. An unnamed woman known only for her faults displays immense courage and hospitality to Jesus. The son of God who graciously teaches Simon and blesses the woman.
As I studied and reflected on this passage, I had a powerful epiphany. Simon’s desire to be right distanced him from this woman and Jesus. The woman’s desire to become right with God helped her overcome all fear and awkwardness to encounter Jesus. Jesus’s rightness led to him drawing near to the woman and offering her salvation and peace, but it also drew him toward Simon as he lovingly taught him to shift his perspective.
Simon was overly concerned with being right, and it was this desire that distanced him from Jesus (aka God) and from this woman (aka his neighbor). This is the profound lesson and the painful evaluation for those who claim to follow Jesus: Does your desire to be right, or perceived rightness, draw you towards people or distance you from them?
If your being right is leading you to be judgmental and distance yourself from others, it just isn’t the Jesus way. The Jesus way asks so much more of us. It asks us to go beyond our normal boundaries of comfort and safety. The Jesus way invites us to participate in God’s restorative and redemptive work of making all things right. It demands that we don’t dismiss the people our society is so inclined to step over or push out. Yet, it also demands that we don’t become bitter, jaded, and unforgiving towards those who did the stepping over and the outcasting.
It’s a radical way to us mere mortals because it is the divine way of the savior of the world. It’s the right way, the Jesus way, that lovingly directs us towards God and others time and time again.
Grace and Peace,
Austin