His father hears that the older brother is outside, refusing to come in. He goes out to bring him in, just as he went to meet the prodigal brother when he saw him coming down the road. But the good brother resists. He wants to have his goodness recognized and rewarded. He's angry that his father is being so easy on the prodigal. The situation suggests that there's nothing special about being good and loyal all your life, that it makes no difference whether you've earned respect and honor or wasted them. The father says, “Your brother was dead and is alive again!” But the older brother isn't sure that's a reason to celebrate.
At the end of the story, we don't know whether the good son decides to go indoors and join the festivities or whether he decides to stay outside and sulk. Has he made such a sharp distinction between himself and his younger, more irresponsible brother that he can no longer see the two of them as linked; or will he choose to see himself as part of the family's restored and loving unity? Good question!
This isn't a trifling issue, nor is it purely an individual one. A sense of moral superiority can actually cut a person off from the humanity we all share with one another. In the larger community, moral superiority (or even the claim to it or the appearance of it) can produce chasms dividing one group from another. A sense of moral superiority can erect walls between social groups—or can be used to justify walls erected for other reasons. It can also be a tool or weapon to give one group an advantage over another.
Consider the ways we use moral superiority as a political weapon in the modern world. Some seek to claim this moral superiority by presenting themselves as “the virtuous people,” the ones who can be relied on to abide rigorously by the requirements of morality. Interestingly, this often turns out to be a charade, with high moral claims being used as an effective cloak for dirty dealing. It's proverbial that the TV preachers who rant about sexuality often prove to be describing the very temptations they are giving in to themselves. And how many politicians who wave the flag of “family values” have proven to have family lives that won't stand up to inspection? These examples just confirm the prestige that the mere claim to moral superiority bestows. That's what makes it such a favorite ploy of the “religious” Right.
Another way of seizing the moral high ground is by claiming to be “the innocent victim.” The claim of victimhood can be used not only to defeat the group that has victimized you but also to justify your own mistreatment of others. Because you have been a victim yourself, the assumption (both yours and others') is that you certainly wouldn't make victims of other people. You can therefore proceed to do so without detection—either by others or by yourself. This “moral” ploy is generally preferred by groups on the political Left, though the Right wing tries to exploit it, too.
The “victim mentality,” which uses past wrongs to discount present ones, and the claim to special virtue, which cloaks the intolerance of the religious Right in the supposed virtue of a relatively established and conservative class, are two sides of the same coin. It's a coin that has been used and continues to be used repeatedly in our times. The intolerance that self-assurance breeds, whether it claims victimhood or virtue as its source, can legitimately be called the principal social and political problem of our time.
Think, for example, of those film clips you have undoubtedly seen from the middle of this century featuring crowds of well-scrubbed young people with their bright and shining faces, their idealism, their commitment to high causes, their willingness to endure hardship in order to right the wrongs done to their country, their immense sense of their own moral rightness. I mean, of course, the Hitler Youth. They must, for the most part, have thought of themselves as decent, responsible, committed, respectable, patriotic people. They wanted to put right what they saw as the unfairness of the settlements after the First World War. They were attacking what they claimed was a great evil in the world as well as a threat to their own well-being and virtue. I suspect they managed, for the most part, not to notice that they were committing one of the great horrors of all human history.
We can still see the same kind of “virtue” creating the same kind of disastrous animosity in virtually every part of the world. Whether it takes the form of nationalism and “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia or of religious fundamentalism and its efforts to “purify” society in Afghanistan; whether it is the politico-tribal bloodbath of Rwanda or the class warfare of El Salvador, self-righteousness turns out to have no conscience and no humanity. Virtue, when it begins to admire itself too much, turns out to be as dangerous to the world as the more obvious forms of vice.
There is a seldom-cited text of scripture that deserves to be taken more seriously in this connection. In it, someone writing in the name of Solomon rejects both extremes: “Do not be too righteous, and do not act too wise; why should you destroy yourself? Do not be too wicked, and do not be a fool; why should you die before your time?” (Eccles. 7:16–17, NSRV). The best thing is to know ourselves as we are—a mixture of good and evil. That will give us a sense of our common bond with one another, with righteous and wicked alike. “Solomon” would presumably not have made the mistake of the Pharisee in Jesus' parable.
For our own sake and for our neighbor's, then, we need to make a shift away from asserting our own virtue and relying on it as the source of our worth. Does this mean that public virtue is unimportant? Of course not. We need more honesty, integrity, reflectiveness, compassion, loyalty, and truthfulness in government, not less. But true virtue will add to these qualities the important gift of humility. True virtue doesn't waste energy calling attention to itself and does not stoop to using the appearance of righteousness as its principal argument in an election. The person who does claim moral superiority should be automatically suspect.
The consequences of self-assured righteousness run amok can be appalling. That alone would be enough to explain why God has chosen to deal with us not through complimenting and rewarding our goodness but through forgiving us. If God's love comes to us without regard to what we have earned, this undercuts the ugly misuse we make of our own goodness. Our basic relationship with God is based not on our merit but on God's generosity. Does that mean that virtue is bad? No, it just acknowledges that we need protection from our own misuse of it.
There's another important reason that God chooses to deal with us by forgiving us rather than by rewarding our virtues. Forgiveness gives us the breathing room we need to live and grow. If God's goodness to us is based on forgiveness, that leaves us room to make some mistakes in life—room actually to be human. I'm not advocating the making of mistakes; I don't need to, in any case. I'm simply recognizing them as inevitable. They are part of the way human beings grow and mature.
Which of us has been able to accomplish whatever is good in our lives without making some mistakes along the way? Often we have learned things from our mistakes and false starts in life that we could have learned in no other way. Human life seems to be constitutionally messy. It's part of the way we've been created. We are finite beings, without full, perfect comprehension. We feel our way through space and time as we learn and grow. There is no highway from infancy to maturity. It's all country roads with detours, dead ends, even places where we have to scout our own trail across untrodden country. The journey of human life and growth is an adventure, not an easy and predictable commute.
And there are places, of course, where we wander quite off the trail because we aren't paying attention or even run off in pursuit of something that, deep down, we already know is a mistake. The amazing thing is that even those mistakes become part of our path. As we emerge from our floundering in the brush, our wandering in the forest, and find a new sense of direction, we discover that we have not merely left our off-road misadventure behind. Instead, it has become part of us in unexpected ways. It has given us new insight, new courage, new humility, new life.
Perhaps it would be comforting, in a way, to imagine