The Means Justifies The End
The Means Justifies The End
Jesus was not results driven, at least not in the way we use the phrase now. He cared enormously about what happened to people, but he never seemed willing to corrupt the process to improve the numbers. He didn’t cut corners for influence, massage the message for market share, or decide that a little compromise was acceptable because the eventual outcome would be worth it. We live in a world where the end can rather conveniently justify the means, especially when the end is something we desperately want. Compromise becomes strategy. Ambition gets renamed vision. The questionable thing we would normally recognize immediately becomes a “necessary concession” because apparently God needs us to help things along.
Paul gets underneath all of that in 1 Corinthians 13. His argument is almost embarrassingly severe: you can be a spiritual virtuoso, speak beautifully, understand mysteries, possess extraordinary faith, give generously, sacrifice enormously, perhaps even change the world—and still completely miss the point. Accomplishment is not proof of character. Spiritual prowess without love amounts to noise. And love, as Paul describes it, isn’t sentiment. It shows up in patience, humility, mercy, restraint, the refusal to keep score, the discipline of not using people on the way to somewhere important. In other words, God appears to care not only about what we accomplish, but about what accomplishing it is turning us into.
That makes Christianity considerably less impressed with success than we sometimes are. The question isn’t simply, Did it work? Did it grow? Did we win? Did people notice? It is also: How did we get there? Who got hurt? What did we compromise? What happened inside us while everybody was applauding what happened outside us?
Maybe we’ve had the old saying backwards.
The means justifies the end.
Malcolm du Plessis
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