Do you and I worship “niceness?
I say…quite possibly.
As Americans, we prefer nice churches in nice neighborhoods with nice seats in nice auditoriums.
Gone the days of squawky P.A. Systems, our churches rumble with the latest and greatest in audio gear. The sound is…pretty nice. The job of doing PowerPoint and creating video clips is now the domain of a “Pastor of Visual Arts.” The stuff on the screen, frankly, looks pretty nice.
Nothing wrong with any of that. But niceness—as a frame of reference—can go too far. It comes to a crash up against an old hymn that’s fallen on hard times:
Man of sorrows, what a name.
For the Son of God who came.
Ruined sinners to reclaim.
Hallelujah! What a Savior.
Wow! We love Jesus the nice teacher. We love Jesus the nice healer, Jesus the nice good-deed-doer. But that name, “Man of sorrows”–lacks any of the niceness we crave.
The language is so blunt, even stark. “Ruined sinners.” Not the least bit nice.
We want so badly to believe better of ourselves.
So we labor under false notions of a humanity that somehow has a shred of something worth redeeming. Something nice. But we don't. Apart from Christ, there is not so much as a single atom within us that is nice.
Quite the contrary assures Isaiah 64:6: “All our righteousness is like filthy rags!”
Which makes the rest of the song so remarkable:
Guilty, vile and helpless, we
Spotless Lamb of God was He.
Full atonement—can it be?
Hallelujah, What a Savior!
The grand gospel story, of course, is more than the ugliness of sin. Much more.
But it is far too epic to stoop to mere niceness.