Heroes. We all want to have one, if we can’t be one. We want to believe there are people who get it right, who do the right things for the right reasons. We want to believe that bad people are different, and don’t have anything in common with good people. If that were true, we could gather up the bad people, and the good people who were left could live good lives without trouble.
But… in our heart of hearts, we know it’s not that easy. Each of us has the potential for great good, and great harm as well. The portraits drawn in Scripture show us people as they are, not how we wish they were. Our Sunday school lessons often left out the unsavory parts, but once we were old enough to read for ourselves, we could see that life is much more complicated than the Sunday school stories told us.
So it is with Joe Pa. Here was a man who spent 61 years working with young men, raising them up to be good men, not just good players. And yet, at a time when he could have made a real difference in the life of a kid (or kids), he dropped the ball.
There are folks who will always remember him only for the choice he blew, by trusting his superiors and not pressing harder for the truth. But we should all be aware that, in the same situation, or ones even worse, we would have made the same mistake, or a bigger one. Nobody bats 1.000 in this life. If we are judged in the afterlife by the ratio of good deeds to bad deeds we still wouldn’t make it.
This is where the message of the Ragamuffin Gospel is so needed. The good news is, God knows we’re screwed up. He doesn’t expect us to obey all the laws — he knows we can’t. The law was given to prove to us that we ourselves are messed up. But it’s only when we realize that we are messed up that we look for redemption. You won’t value the coupon your neighbor gives you for a free paint job on your car, until you see the effects of the acid that was accidentally thrown across it. So Jesus came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The trick is, none of us are righteous. Some of us think we’re better than others, but we all blow it. Even Joe Pa had to come to grips with his failings. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8).
What does this mean to us now? It means that every person who fails is a person for whom Christ died. We need to treat each other with respect and grace, and understand that “there but for the grace of God go I.” This doesn’t mean we allow others to continue to act in sinful ways — that wouldn’t be respectful to them either — but we treat no one as a hopeless case, outside of God’s ability to save. Even serial adulterers, and even clueless coaches.
I wonder. Maybe it was God’s plan for Joe to go through this before his death, to demonstrate what the remorse of a good man looks like. We don’t often get to see that anymore.