Someone should have started a book long ago entitled “The World’s Worst”. Like Guinness describing the most and best, this tome would list the things at the other end of the spectrum. Surely, there’s a list somewhere. Perhaps Dickens cataloged them in an undiscovered appendix to his novel idea: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
Ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper, I heard that term used about all kind of folk for all kinds of situations. “Why, she’s the world’s worst when it comes to keeping her house clean”, or “He’s the world’s worst golfer”. Certainly, this is only a generic disclaimer; these folks are not the world’s worst whatever. How in the world would you prove such a proposition? Even at a deeper level, when we’ve wronged someone, we say to ourselves or a close friend “I feel like the world’s worst person for what I did”. The feeling is usually authentic, and we try to find some way to make amends and restore ourselves at least to the world’s average person — maybe even to slightly better than average.
Why do we do such a thing? Is it a way of getting off the hook or justifying ourselves and our mistakes? Theologians might say that this is simply acknowledging our “sinful nature, prone to evil”. But it is never meant to reflect such a deep notion. It is more relativistic. It’s our way of sizing up a situation with respect to our fellow human beings. We cozy up to the notion that grace means that God grades on a curve, and while we may be horrible at some aspect of life, we are basically decent people with a few minor faults. Compared to others, we feel fairly good about ourselves.
This is where the water hits the wheel when Jesus shows up with a new ethic where every person should be loved, respected and honored as the world’s finest child of God. Did that ever set off a religious time bomb among the spiritually elite who used their religious supremacy to look down on those “others” whom they deemed the world’s worst! Jesus himself would end up in the scope of their righteous rifles and soon be nailed to a cross between two of the world’s worst criminals.
P. Buckley Moss, the artist of the Amish in the Shenandoah Valley, expresses this consternating contradiction when she paints this little girl praying these words above her: Dear God, please make the bad people good and the good people easier to live with.
P. Buckley Moss, the artist of the Amish in the Shenandoah Valley, expresses this consternating contradiction when she paints this little girl praying these words above her: Dear God, please make the bad people good and the good people easier to live with.
