ver.: 25 January 2008
This harvest of spiritual fruit is ripe for the picking :
goodness : the state or quality of being good, especially morally good or beneficial. In a sense, it's the quality of having quality. [ OE g¯od (good) ]. Other words in the word-field of goodness : beneficial, gainful, useful, helpful, profitable, excellent. Moral "goodness" is grouped with words such as uprightness, virtue, benevolence, worth, value, generosity.
The Greek term in Galatians 5 is agathosune, which is from agathos : good-natured, helpful, beneficial. Another form of agathos is found together with pistos in the phrase "good and faithful" servants, in the parable of the talents.
God's goodness is described as abundant, enduring, and universal. God shows this by blessing people with goods and in spiritual ways such as forgiving sin.
You see goodness when someone is consistently seeking your good or those of another ahead of their own. Goodness is not just a matter of being good or doing good or being taught goodness -- the teaching feeds the doing, the doing feeds the being, the being enables us to grasp the teaching, which feeds into more doing and being. Jump in at any point to start the cycle.
Jesus spoke a lot about false goodness, about how many leaders of the faith are putting on Oscar-worthy performances of their own goodness in front of an audience of God or their community. (This is true for both 'moral' goodness and good-naturedness or helpfulness.) God's not impressed. And "fake it 'til you make it" doesn't make it before God. Mark Twain once wrote that it is "very wearying to be good". It takes work to be consistently good, because it's so thoroughly against our natural inclinations.
Goodness also has a way of setting things straight. When we see other people being or doing good, it often reminds us of how not-good we are. Which brings out a suitcase full of excuses. The exposé can be quite a shock, puncturing one's self-image. Even when we do good, goodness may have nothing to do with it. While nothing entirely gets rid of this tendency in this life, God has given us a way to face up to it : confession. It not only opens us for God's response to our un-goodness, it also brings about a more truthful self-image. The only way to become more good is to know what ways we're bad so we can replace that with goodness.
Well, what are you waiting for, do something for goodness' sake!
Looking Up to Top
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