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The season of Lent is an invitation to examine our lives, our thoughts, our attitudes, and to
let go of those things that prevent us from experiencing God’s goodness. Lent reminds us of
our need for repentance, of a new mindset, if we want to become all that God intends for us
to be.

But, if we’re not mindful of the conditions, the journey of self-examination can be a
dangerous one.

As a child I loved the stories of Greek mythology. Of all the heroes, my favourite was
Odysseus. Odysseus was the cleverest hero in the Trojan war, it was his idea to build the
Wooden Horse that enabled the Greeks to win the war. After the war he endured a 10-year
journey home, in which he had to overcome many obstacles to return to his wife Penelope
in Ithaca. One obstacle he had to overcome was the danger of sailing his ship through the
narrow strait of sea between Italy and Sicily. On one side of the strait was a giant whirlpool
known as Charybdis and on the other side was a monster named Scylla. Odysseus decided to
veer closer to Scylla because it was better for a few of his men to be snatched from the deck
than for the whole ship to be sucked down in the whirlpool.

Without Jesus at the helm of our lives, self-examination can become a treacherous journey,
with the Charybdis of self-despair on one side, and the Scylla of self-deception on the other.
This is because examining our lives brings us face to face with one of the underlying
universal problems of human life; the question of whether we, as human beings, are
essentially good or sinful.

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Admittedly, most of us don’t live our lives in constant debate about whether humans are
good or bad. But all of us, through upbringing and experience, have come to some
fundamental assumptions about human nature, and our assumptions characterise our
outlook on life:
Whether we’re optimistic or pessimistic.
Whether we’re suspicious of other people’s motives or willing to give people the benefit of
the doubt.
Whether we see the worst in people or the best in people.
Whether we think of people as being the problem or part of the solution.

The first thing I learned in my undergraduate course on International relations, is that the
world of global diplomacy is dominated by two opposite viewpoints: There are Idealists who
believe that nations can get on if we focus on common values and goals. And there are
Realists, who believe that nations, like people in general, act only out of self-interest, and
that the only way to successfully negotiate is with the use of force. We see the Idealists at
work in international commitments on issues such as climate change, or in institutions like
the United Nations. We see the Realist’s perspective played out in the current dispute
between Australia and Facebook, or in the recent squabble between Europe and Britain
over the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.
So, we may not be conscious of this question all the time, but it shapes almost every aspect
of our world, from how we deal with each other in our personal relationships, all the way
through to how governments and companies of the world deal with each other.

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Many Christians have emphasised the fact of human sinfulness. The Reformation leader,
John Calvin claimed that all of human nature is characterised by total depravity. Meaning
that without God’s grace we are incapable of good.

At least with God there is hope. But there is a non-Christian or secular expression of this
view, that unmoored from faith, doesn’t have such hope. I’ve had conversations with
environmentally minded people who consider humans much the same way they consider of
rats and possums; as pests that would be best eliminated. Not that anyone is putting out
human traps, but we are often told, and our young people pick this up in School, that the
best thing we can do for the planet is to not have children.

The danger with this way of viewing ourselves, veering completely to the side of human
sinfulness, is that we get sucked down in a giant whirlpool of hopelessness. We look at the
world with all its problems, and at people, who are the cause of most problems, or at
ourselves, and we despair of anything getting better.

Other Christians veer off bravely in the other direction and focus only on the fact that God
has created us in his image and declared us good. This way of viewing human nature also
has its secular version – that humans are essentially good, and that we can lift ourselves up
by our own moral bootstraps, through education or self-improvement. In Christianity this is
known at the heresy of Pelagianism, after a British Layman named Pelagius who lived in the
late 4th Century. A number of years ago a Catholic priest named Matthew Fox upset
mainstream Catholic theologians when he wrote a book called “Original Blessing”. In that
book he argued that Christians need to stop focussing on Adam and Eve’s Original Sin and
instead see ourselves in light of God’s Original Blessing. I think we all get that. Of course, we
need to know that God loves us and intends only good for us! But that doesn’t mean we
should be naïve or superficial about human goodness.

If we overstate human goodness we end up sailing into another kind of danger. In Greek
mythology, Scylla, the sailor crunching monster, was originally a beautiful maiden. Odysseus
could have celebrated the original goodness of Scylla all he wanted, but it wouldn’t have
changed the danger they faced. It may seem comforting to talk about our inherent human
goodness, but it won’t do us much good if we’re heading into the jaws of a monster. We
need to be honest about what we’re dealing with, when we’re dealing with human nature.

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It’s a complicated issue. And the Bible tells us in many different ways, that both ways of
looking at the world and at ourselves are true.

When God creates the world in the story of Genesis we’re constantly reminded that God’s
creation is good, is good, is very good. The world and humankind with it, are as a whole,
very good. Our own human goodness is intended to be a reflection, an image, of God’s
goodness. And we still see such goodness reflected in human acts of generosity, self-
sacrifice and forgiveness. We witness kindness among Christians and non-Christians, and in
all kinds of cultures.

But the Bible also describes human nature perfectly when it tells the unsettling story of
Adam and Eve’s sinful disobedience. The curse of sin affects, not only human life, but all of
life, and shows up every day in the world around us.

When songwriter Nick Cave sings, “People just ain’t no good, I think that’s well understood”
he’s claiming something for which there is much evidence.
People are selfish and unkind.

Biologists are also quick to point out that nature isn’t all fragrant flowers, flavoursome fruits
and stunning sunsets. Nature includes weeds, disease, sandflies and climate change.

Both of these truths about people and nature are evident, in the Bible and in our
experience. We can appreciate the traditional Jewish custom of eating sweet and bitter
herbs on the night of Passover as a reminder that life is a mix of the bitter and sweet.

But of course, the heart of Biblical faith, of the Gospel faith, is to acknowledge both the
bitter and the sweet of human nature while putting our trust in God.

German theologian and activist Eberhard Arnold, living through the 1920’s and 30’s, wrote
“this is our deepest joy: to see clearly the momentous conflict – the indescribable tension
between life and death, man’s position between heaven and hell – and still to believe that
life, love, and truth will triumph over all opposition, because we believe in God.”

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Jesus has a mission to restore people to right relationship with God. We see Jesus begin that
mission in Mark’s Gospel, coming into Galilee and announcing that the time is ready, that
God’s Kingdom is at hand, and for people to repent.

Jesus took goodness seriously. But when people spoke casually about human goodness he
reminded them that God alone is good. Afterall, if people are so good, why do we have such
a hard time being good? And if we do need to rediscover God’s original blessing, surely
we’ve headed off in some direction that we shouldn’t have? Clearly, some kind of
repentance, a U-turn of the heart is needed on our part.

A U-Turn of the heart is exactly what Jesus tells us we need, if we want to live and enjoy
human life as God intended.

If we’re unwilling to confess that we ourselves are part of the problem, if we’re only
focussed on our how good we are, it’s other people who end up getting blamed for being
the problem. One of the things that concerns me about our society at the moment, is just
how judgemental, how smug, we’ve become. When other people make mistakes, when
other people do wrong, they’re quickly labelled as bad apples and given no redemptive path
back to human wholeness.
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Early on in Genesis God regrets making humankind and sends a flood to destroy “every
creeping thing on the face of the earth.” It’s not a picture of infinite patience or care-free
blessing on God’s part. Humans mess up. God gets miffed. That’s part of the story we need
to deal with. But in the story of the Flood, we never lose sight of God’s faithfulness or of
God’s hope for humankind. After the flood goes down, God makes an agreement with
Noah’s family and with every living thing; that God will never again destroy the earth with a
flood.

Something to notice about this story. God isn’t so focussed on the issue of whether people
are bad or good. God knows how complicated and conflicted we’ve made life for ourselves.
The preacher in Ecclesiastes once pointed out, “God made human beings straightforward,
but they have devised many schemes.” (Ecc. 7:29)
But God knows something else about us that is even more important than our
doubleminded . God knew, when he was talking to Noah, that although we have gone
astray, we have been created for good works! That’s a message repeated many times in the
Bible, and especially the New Testament. Paul reminds us, in Ephesians 2:10, “We are what
he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to
be our way of life.”

The focus of this story is not on whether we deserve punishment or not, but that God
doesn’t want to wipe us out, or write us off, while there is still the hope of redeeming us, of
reclaiming us, for our God given purpose.

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The Gospel, the Good News of Jesus, makes it possible for all of us to live our lives honestly,
in light of God’s mercy and goodness. As we examine our lives, with Jesus at the helm, we
do not need to be sucked down the whirlpool of despair or be consumed by the monster of
self-deception. Jesus has given us the grace to make honest confession, to receive
redeeming forgiveness, and to live in the hope of renewed relationship with God.

God is good and has always desired good for us. And into God’s goodness, we bring all that
we are, the good and the sinful, in the hope that by grace we may grow into the people that
God has created us to be.