I'm good

The story of Jesus and someone who came to him with a question is a significant one. In one version this young man comes speeding round to the house where Jesus is staying — indeed, the Lord is at the doorstep, bidding farewell to his host, when the young man grabs hold of him, preventing his departure, so urgent is his question or does it perhaps tell us about his own self importance? In Matthew’s version of the story the young man asks about good deeds. Jesus, surprisingly, responds by saying “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good.” We need to note that.

Jesus has no time for the modern answer to the question “How are you?” “I’m good.” No you are not. None of us has the right to claim to be good. There is only one who is good. To say “I’m good” is to make a claim to godlike perfection; at the very least it is to make a claim about one’s moral or ethical standing. And if you object, as you might, that I am deliberately misconstruing the significance of an innocuous phrase, and positive version of our more usual English understatement “Not bad, thanks” then I would alert you to semantic shift! Perfectly good words abused in this way lose their original meaning. A guidebook to this church published forty years ago describes our founder, a minstrel at the court of Henry I, as a gay cleric and many a novel tells of gay parties in the 1930s, 40s and 50s — but we have sadly lost the ordinary descriptive use of the word. We must not take such a cavalier approach to goodness.