Thoughts on "right" . . .

As nearly everyone who has been alive knows, we live in the age of rights.  Rights are expected, demanded, and cherished as if they were the most important things of all.  The cause of a right has changed nearly everything from marriage to family to government to friendship.  Most of all, we seem to cherish the right to be insulated from those things we do not like and to insist upon the things that do.  Under it all is our insistence upon the most basic right of all -- the right to be happy.

I am not at all sure that a system built upon rights alone can endure.  In the press of the moment it may sound reasonable enough but it is not sustainable.  Rights claimed or earned or insisted upon cannot themselves protect or defend us against our enemies and they certainly have no power to provide the elusive happiness we so desire.  Indeed, as important as they can be, rights are a fragile foundation for community and relationships and even weaker support on which to build a whole society.  Chesterton put it well:   “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

Rights are often in conflict.  Speech is free except to cry out "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire.  We are constantly engaged in a battle of wits trying to figure out how to protect a right which insists that others can disagree with you in an offensive way -- with impunity!  Religious freedom insists that everyone has a right to their own beliefs but that often leaves it as if there is no such thing as religious truth -- only opinions without fact or truth.  How does Christianity want to live in a world in which the Word of God is but another word competing for the claim of belonging to a deity?  It is most difficult and even less satisfying to live as if those who worship a mushroom are the same as those who adore the Son of God in flesh.

Yes, rights are often very important but there is something even greater.  It is being right.  Righteousness.  To possess a right is well and good but to be right is more profound and more profoundly needed.  That is why religion remains important even as society wanders further and further away from Jesus Christ.  For His is a faith built less upon rights than the righteous One who alone is good and holy but who is good and holy not at all for Himself but for those who are not.  He is come not to claim something for Himself but to give Himself for those whom He has claimed -- sins and all.  Now there is the proof of Chesterton's pithy phrase.  He is right because He has forsaken His right to be equal to God and chosen to wear our flesh, suffer for our sin, and die our death.  We are righteous not as an accomplishment of ourselves but as those who wear His clothing of holiness to cover the naked bodies risen from baptismal water, shed of their sins and given a new name and a new identity.  What we claim can be all well and good but to know Him who is righteousness embodied is to have that which is far nobler and so much more significant.

It is curious that on this Epiphany we celebrate those who laid aside every weight of glory humanity could afford in order to kneel at the bed of a baby, led by a star to the unlikely place where they peered in and beheld the face of God.  He is righteousness.  For Him they gladly bent the knee in worship and brought out the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Such gifts were valuable less because they were precious but because they prefigured who He was and is, what He had come to do, and for whom He came.  Minus the weight of their gifts, they left gladly for the Child who was born of the Virgin by the Holy Spirit promised something so far beyond the value of these earthly treasures that they had to tell about it all.  They had found the One, the only One, who valued right more than rights and in so going gave to those who could not earn it and had done nothing to merit it the most precious verdict of all.  Righteous.  This God entered on donkey to claim the battle that would cost Him His life before He could claim the people and their worship.  How amazing to join them at the bed of the Christchild and yet how much more amazing to join them in the heavenly chorus.  In those anthems of the new Jerusalem, there will be no more talk of what we are owed but only what we have been given.