Canter Bridge

It is no small thing to have one’s character summarized by the words ‘good and just’. One doesn’t stumble upon such an outcome as the fruit of one day’s jog around the park. It is rather the recognition that a thousand small decisions have leaned cumulatively in the direction of integrity.

The man we know from the gospels as ‘Joseph of Arimathea’ found himself so described. Known in the gospel tradition only through a pair of brief cameos, he is styled ‘a good and just man.’ This adjectival salute is then fleshed out with a bit of narrative:

Now there was a good and righteous man named Joseph, who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action. He came from the Jewish town of Arimathea, and he was waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then he took it down, wrapped it in a linen cloth, and laid it in a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever been laid.

From both his membership in ‘the council’ and his access to Pilate, we surmise that Joseph was a man with something to lose. Yet he had found the courage not to place his personal seal of approval on the council’s action against Jesus and then complemented this principled non-action by a most courageous maneuver: he asks Pilate for the body of Jesus and buries him in his family’s rock-hewn tomb.

One frequently speaks with people who wonder whether they have the stuff to endure under affliction or persecution. Far-away ‘martyrs’—whether the distance between those heroes and our own mundane lives is measured by time or space—seem always to have stood in waiting for their heroic moment.

In fact, they do not live that way. The principled victims of injustice rarely know whether they will stand in the evil hour. They doubt. They tremble.

It is only in the moment itself that heroes stand apart from the inert mass of followers and self-savers. They are as likely as surprised by the courage of their moment as any who look on.

Yet, as C.S. Lewis reminds us in the Great Divorce, each of life’s small decisions is an investment in a certain kind of person that we will prove to be in some tremendously important future. Goodness and justice in these small times are the best predictor of courage in the large, unscheduled moments of truth that lie somewhere up ahead.

A man from Arimathea could be described as good and just. Perhaps no one—least of all this Joseph himself—imagined him knocking on Pilate’s door.