taste and see

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described the challenge of celebration as reconciling God's view of creation with our experience of it. That is, God created the world and called it good... celebration is the task of engaging in the world as it ought to be... as God sees it. Of course, this is difficult given our regular encounters with evil, ugliness, and brokenness. And we find this is even more difficult when we recognize our own broken desire for ugliness rather than goodness and beauty. Indeed, celebration is a challenge.

The good life, as the Bible reveals it, is not so far from what has been intuitive to most cultures. Many worldviews will suggest that happiness, enjoyment, or mere pleasure are necessary elements of a good life. Humanism, for instance, tries to measure the quality of life using precisely these characteristics. I do not think they have misunderstood what makes a life good, but rather how one might attain these things. From this naturalistic viewpoint, it is a matter of equations, of experimentation and medication. By fully investing in the science of pleasure, the good life could eventually be patented and sold at your local pharmacy.

In Psalm 34 King David sings, "Taste and see that the Lord is good..." suggesting that we must experience the good Lord with our senses; goodness is something our taste buds and eyes and hands and ears can discover. This kind of experience, when we are attentive to the uniqueness of the moment, sensing the divine gift of goodness, recognizing the personal Creator through his masterpiece... when we engage in the world as it was created to be... this is celebration, this is worship. We are required to live a life of celebration, a life of goodness. The life that is attentive to the good Lord, while it may require sacrifice, can only be described as good. David says that, "Those who look to the Lord are radiant." The good life is certainly one filled with joy and beauty, for, "Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing."

But the Biblical approach to the good life is different than that of the Humanist. David continues in his song, "Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days... turn from evil and do good..." Goodness is found in obedience. We must do good if we want to experience it. For King David, to "taste and see" meant to live by God's statutes, by His law, by His revealed word: Psalm 119 says, "How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!" A good life is a life of good action. It is a moral life. But this is not in opposition to the other intuitive qualities of a good life. Rather, to live a morally good life is to simultaneously live a life of pleasure. What is sweeter than a good deed? What meal does not taste better when it is shared? And because worship is a moral action, all aesthetic qualities are enhanced when we engage them with God. That is, a daisy is brighter and more fragrant when we see it with God. It is a matter of obedience to engage in creation as God created it to be... to reconcile God's view of the world with our experience of it.

Only the Creator, the One who defines goodness by his being, can reveal to us what is good. If we are to experience a good life by doing goodness, we must learn what it is to do good. The good life is revealed in the Word made flesh. Jesus lives life as it is meant to be lived, experiencing the world with God, perfectly obedient. Jesus' obedience to God was radical, unprecedented; no one in in human history had lived a life of such obedience. The essence of this obedience is love. To say that Jesus was perfectly obedient is to also say that Jesus loved perfectly. Thus, doing goodness, as revealed through Jesus, is to engage all of creation with love. To smell a flower,to chew a meal, to heal a wound... all of these things must be done with love if we want to experience goodness. Everything Jesus did was with love, and when we follow Jesus, we are choosing goodness... the honey-sweet life of love.

But this is curious... his perfect obedience, or love, led to suffering, not pleasure. It is because as the Suffering Servant, Jesus not only models the good life, he redeems it and all the ugliness around him. It is our ugliness and brokenness that killed Jesus, yet somehow God overcomes it and writes the most beautiful story in the universe through the love of Jesus. That is redemption. Making ugly things good and beautiful again. Our lives, no matter how ugly we have made them, can be beautiful again, for "love covers a multitude of sins." God is rewriting and redeeming and restoring through the powerful turning-point in humanity's story when the love of Jesus makes beauty possible again. The long, lonely life of a man who has been destroyed by alcoholism is made into a beautiful story of love and redemption because he chooses to follow the way of Jesus. This is the joy that was set before Jesus as he endured Calvary, and it gave his suffering a profound sense of true goodness. The good life has been redeemed and opened to us. Our choosing to follow Jesus, to do goodness, will transform any life from ugly to beautiful and good.

To say it as concisely as I can, the good life is life as it was intended to be, and therefore it is a life guided by an obligation to its Creator. Yet, this is obligation does not rob us of beauty and pleasure, but the very opposite. By doing goodness as God has revealed it through Jesus, by engaging the the world with Love himself, we can "taste and see that the Lord is good."