God Is Good, and So Are You

When watching a movie, starting anywhere other than the beginning can be very confusing.  When the “The Bourne Supremacy” came out in the theaters, my wife was itching to see it. After watching the first Bourne movie to get caught up, we rushed to the theater to catch the movie in time.  We ended up being a few minutes late, so we were not surprised to see the movie had already started when we found our seats.

The movie was confusing.  There were characters and developments that went unexplained, and we were scratching our heads.  45 minutes later, the movie was over. “That's got to be the shortest movie I've ever seen,” I told her.  Come to find out, we had actually walked into the wrong theater where the movie had already been playing for over an hour.  That was embarrassing! No wonder we were confused.  

In my experience, Christians often make a similar mistake when looking to scripture.  You would think, given the way the Gospel is preached in many churches, that the bible starts with Genesis 3, the story of humanity going against God and experiencing a fall.  Many preachers rail about the sinfulness of humanity, and how we are utterly depraved. What seems to be ignored is that this is not how the story of humanity begins. That moment comes earlier when scripture tells us,

"God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them...God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."

This is the beginning of the story, the origins of who we are. We were created in the image of a good God. We don't need to try to be good as much as we need to learn that we are good. The rest will follow. 

So why do we so often get the story so backwards? We could talk about all the church environments where the story is begun in the wrong place, where we are told we are rotten "sinners in the hands of an angry God," as Jonathon Edwards put it, depraved and devoid of goodness. 

But for many of us, it starts before that. We often don't need the religious environments to tell us that we're bad; they're only confirming what we have suspected about ourselves. Because when we're young, we only know how to think in binary, black and white terms. If we do a bad thing, we assume that we are bad. And if bad things are done to us, particularly by grown ups, our childhood selves can't wrap our heads around the adults in the room being messed up. They're the adults, we're the kids. So once again, we assume we are bad.

But it is, of course, not that simple. Whatever our past looks like, whatever mistakes we've made, it doesn't change who we truly are. We are not bad people who need to be punished; we are scarred people that need to be healed. And as we learn of our innate goodness, it begins to hurt more and more to live out of our false identities, to live as though we're bad. The truth of our goodness lights our way.

Bishop Kalistos Ware reminds us, "The creation in its entirety is God’s handiwork; in their inner essence all created things are “exceedingly good." That includes you. Nothing that you've done or has been done to you can change this. You are good.