Am I self-righteous?

“Jesus said to them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."”

Mark 2:17

A few years ago, I was approached by a woman handing out food. She was wearing a ‘Muslims love Jesus’ t-shirt. A thought went through my head: you don’t know who Jesus is, and I do. I said no, thank you and walked on. Was I being self-righteous? Yes. I was sure that I was right and she was wrong. More than that, I thought that made be better than her. But there is nothing in my faith that gives me the right to feel like superior to anyone else. In that moment, I was being self-righteous in spite of my faith, not because of it.  

Sometimes, we are justified in our belief that some Christians are acting self-righteously.  At other times, though, a Christian may come across as self-righteous because the way she approaches faith differently to someone who doesn’t share her beliefs.

We live in a culture of self-improvement. Whether it’s your personal best or your curriculum, it seems like most of us are trying to improve ourselves in one way or another. And so ‘spirituality’ becomes just another aspect of self-improvement. Through anything from mindfulness to the power of reason alone, we can become spiritually or morally enlightened. It is something each of us achieves in our own way and through our own effort. In this mindset, the plethora of spiritual and religious practices around us are merely alternative ways of seeking the same God.

Sometimes, the parable of the blind men and the elephant is used to explain how this works. You’ve probably heard it before. Three blind men touch different parts of an elephant to try and find out what it is. The first man feels the trunk and decides that it must be a snake. The second touches the side of the elephant and is certain that it is a wall. The last man, after putting his hand on the trunk, assumes that he is holding a spear. The idea, of course, is that we each perceive God in different but equally valid ways.

From that perspective, the Christian who claims to be right about God seems to be saying that he is wiser and more spiritually enlightened than anybody else. But Christians don’t believe that you can come to a greater knowledge of God through human effort. In Christianity, we can only know God because He has revealed Himself to us. (Surprisingly, God doesn’t necessarily reveal himself to the most ‘spiritual’ people. In fact, it’s often the opposite.)

In that way, the God of Christianity is vastly different to the God of that parable. It’s no coincidence that the story uses an animal to represent God. The God of the parable is an unknown, even unknowable that cannot speak to the people he has created. Another parable, one where the blind men touch the hands, feet and chest of another human being, would have a very different ending. No one with an ounce of compassion would let the blind men come to such flawed conclusions about the object that are touching. Yet that is the God of the parable. And what kind of a God is that?

While the claim that only Christians can know God may seem exclusive, the God of the parable is even more exclusive because everyone is excluded from fully knowing that God.

When the Apostle Paul, one of the earliest Christian missionaries, came across a group of people who believed in such a God, he didn’t claim to be superior to them. Instead, he told them that he himself knew the God they were trying so hard to find:

“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: . So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you…God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way towards him and find him, (Acts 7:22-27)

According to Paul, the unknown God was not unknowable. In fact, that unknown God wants us to know Him. While Paul might sound self-righteous when he claims to know God when they do not, he was not claiming to have gained an understanding of God through his own effort.

Paul was never an ideal candidate for spiritual enlightenment. Though he had led a deeply ‘religious’ life, all his spiritual practices hadn’t led him anywhere near a state of moral perfection. In fact, when God was first revealed to him, Paul was his way to Damascus, where he hoped to find and kill Christians. As he was travelling, a light came down from heaven and Paul heard a voice saying; “Why do you persecute me?” Moments later, the person speaking revealed His identity: Jesus.

None of this gave Paul any reason to be self-righteous. He had considered Jesus a heretic, yet Jesus was revealed Himself to him. Far from claiming to be spiritually superior, Paul would later describe himself ‘the worst of sinners’ (1 Timothy 1:15). Elsewhere in the Bible, he wrote that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)

When I thought I was better than that Muslim woman, I was being unchristian. Far from being superior to anyone else, I am just a ‘weak thing of this world’. Yet the God who created me has revealed Himself to me. And He revealed Himself to all of us when, unlike the unknowable God of the parable, He entered our world so that we could know Him. He died and rose from the dead so that man’s broken relationship with God could be restored. And since the offer of a personal relationship with God is open to everyone, weak, unenlightened and morally-imperfect Christians like me really have nothing to be self-righteous about.

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Romans 5:8