Good and Wrong

From the vantage of the 21st century and the passage of some 40 years, I smile to recall the difficulty I had accepting a woman Bible professor my first year of college. Her name is just outside of my memory, but her presence remains vivid, and I am grateful to her, for she opened my eyes to a world of moral complexity, and she prevented me from becoming a moralist or prig. At 18, I understood sin as giving in to temptation—doing forbidden things. In one class, we engaged St. Paul's concept of bondage to sin. I saw bondage as weakness, an inability to "just say no." What a person needed to be holy was to be stronger. It was a simple matter of choice. Very gently, she suggested another idea. Did I think St. Paul was weak? Of course, I didn't. What then was he talking about? Perhaps the fallen world is such that sometimes our choice is not between good and evil. Perhaps bondage meant that sometimes we must choose between two evils.

She did not present this idea lightly. She made it clear that such a choice could be made only after struggle—and never with Pharisaical confidence.

In the days after 9/11, an incident in my small hometown brought this dilemma back to me with a twist. Not only could we be faced with a necessary choice between two evils, but we could choose to do a good and merciful thing and do wrong.

I remember watching the falling towers, the fleeing people, the smoke and dust rolling up the streets and my wanting to reach out to help—to escape my helplessness. One member of our community, an EMT, probably feeling the same, took action. Without consulting anyone, he went to the fire hall, got in the newest ambulance, and drove 400 miles to New York City.

That night, other members of the local rescue squad responding to a call discovered the ambulance missing. They used the back-up ambulance to transport a heart attack victim and reported the new one stolen. The next day it showed up on television, parked on a New York City Street where it wasn't needed.

Our overeager EMT took all his empathy and all his skill and offered it as he thought right, but he did wrong. His reaction placed his local community at risk, and the local community consequently removed him from the rescue squad. Choosing good requires discernment and judgment as surely as choosing not to do wrong. The right thing at the wrong time—without consideration for context or consequences—can be the wrong thing.