Visible Goodness
Day 275 – 2 October
Good by Whose Measure?
“So Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.'” (Mark 10:18, NKJV)
A Line in the Courtyard
Visitors to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich love to stand with one foot on either side of the meridian line set into the courtyard, and many of them hold up a phone to photograph the moment they stood at zero. The satellites in the phone tell a slightly different story, since the zero of longitude used by modern satellite systems runs about 102 metres to the east, across the park.
The reason is a lovely piece of honesty in the history of science. When George Airy set up his transit circle in 1851, the instrument that would define the Greenwich line, he aligned it with a basin of mercury, trusting the pull of gravity to show him true vertical. Gravity on that hill leans ever so slightly, deflected by the shape and density of the ground beneath, so Airy’s line was faithful to the plumb and a fraction away from the axis on which the Earth spins. In 1884 delegates from twenty-five nations met in Washington and adopted his line as the world’s prime meridian, though France abstained and went on using the Paris meridian for decades, and so every map on the planet came to measure its east and west from a strip of brass on a hill in south-east London.
That strip of brass carries a simple lesson about measuring, which is that everything depends on where you set your zero. A navigator who measures from the wrong line can do every sum perfectly and still arrive in the wrong harbour. The image has its limits, because a line of brass is a signpost for a single point and never a portrait of God, yet it opens a conversation Jesus once had on a roadside about where goodness is measured from.
A Compliment Handed Back
That roadside conversation began at a run. Mark tells us that as Jesus set out along the road “one came running, knelt before Him, and asked Him, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?'” (Mark 10:17). The man was earnest, he was respectful, and he reached for the warmest title he could find. Jesus handed it straight back: “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.”
Read in its setting, the reply is neither a rebuke nor a denial. Bengel noticed long ago that Jesus asked “why” and stopped there, saying nothing to disown the word, and Gill took it as a way of leading the man towards a truer understanding of what he had just said. The word itself is agathos (good), the ordinary Greek word for what is good in substance, and the man had used it the way people still use it, as a ranking among teachers, a compliment that places one person a little higher on a human scale. Jesus moved the measuring back to its true zero. Goodness, He said in effect, is measured from God, and anyone who uses the word of a teacher had better know what the word means.
That question still lands on us whenever we grade goodness, our own included. We measure ourselves against the colleague who cuts corners or the relative who never helps, and by that scale we come out rather well. Jesus took the scale away and set the man’s eyes on the One from whom every good thing is reckoned.
Two Ones in One Conversation
That One is the centre of the verse, and the Greek word for it is heis (one). Jesus said, literally, that “no one is good except one, God”, and a devout listener could hardly miss the echo, since every faithful household in Israel confessed daily that the LORD is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). Gill heard the creed in the sentence, and later in the same Gospel Jesus would quote that confession Himself as the first of all the commandments (Mark 12:29). On this road, then, Jesus answered a question about goodness with Israel’s oldest creed: God is one, and goodness is measured from Him.
Then the conversation moved, and the same word came back in another form. The man insisted, “Teacher, all these things I have kept from my youth” (Mark 10:20), and he very likely meant it. Mark adds the detail the other Gospels leave out: “Then Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” The verb for looking is emblepsas (having looked intently), a steady gaze that takes a person in, and the verb for loving is ēgapēsen (He loved), so the first thing the man received after his boast was love. Only then came the diagnosis: “One thing you lack.” The word is hen (one thing), the very word Jesus had used of God three verses earlier, now in its neuter form.
The two ones belong together. The man had a long list of commandments kept and a large estate held, and both had become his zero line without his noticing, the place he measured his life from. What he lacked was one thing, and the one thing he lacked was the One who alone is good, standing on the road in front of him with love in His eyes and an invitation on His lips: “come… follow Me” (Mark 10:21). He “went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Mark 10:22), and the sorrow was his own, the grief of a man unwilling to move his line, while the love that had looked at him stayed exactly where it was. Goodness at its source, it turns out, is a goodness that looks with love even at the person who walks away.
Measuring From the Right Line
Walking away is never the end of the story while that love keeps looking, and this Friday is a good day to check where your own line runs. If you have been measuring your goodness from the people around you, the result has probably been either pride on a good day or despair on a bad one, and neither is the measure Jesus used. Set your zero where He set the man’s, on the One who is good, and two things happen together. You lose the right to feel superior, since no one is good but One, and you lose the reason to feel worthless, since the One who is good looks at you as Jesus looked at that man, intently and with love.
Then, as the day unfolds, practise handing compliments back the way Jesus did, gently and without false modesty. When someone thanks you for a kindness this week, say thank you and remember where the kindness was measured from, because every visible goodness in an ordinary life is borrowed from the One who is good. And if a single thing has crept into the place where the One belongs, whether a bank balance, a reputation or a long record of rules kept, name it plainly before Him today. The look He gives in return will be the same look that rested on a rich man on a dusty road: steady, searching, and full of love.
Declaration
Every measure I take of myself today starts from a false zero unless it starts from the One who alone is good. I give up grading myself against the people beside me, because that scale flatters me on easy days and crushes me on hard ones. I set my zero where it belongs, and I find that the goodness I am measured from is looking at me with love. If one thing has been standing where the One should stand, I name it and loosen my grip on it. And when someone thanks me for being good, I accept the thanks gladly and hand the word back to where it was always kept.
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