Two men each put ten dollars in an envelope and send it to the same house.
One of them is sending money to his children, because he loves them and they need it.
The other owes that money to somebody he can't stand, and he's angry the whole time he's licking the envelope.
Same money. Same day. Same house. But if you asked which of those two men did a good thing, you'd know straight away — and you'd know it wasn't about the ten dollars.
That's the first thing to get. Doing right isn't only about what you do. It's about who you're doing it for.
There's a word in the Bible for this. In English we say righteousness, which sounds like a school report — like being good, or getting a tick, or having more of it than the kid next to you.
But it doesn't mean that.
It means being right with somebody. Not right about something. Right with someone.
A dad is doing it when he looks after his kids. A referee is doing it when she makes a fair call even though one team is yelling at her. A friend is doing it when he stays your friend on the day everyone else has stopped.
You can't do it on your own. There has to be another person there. That's the whole point of the word.
Now the strange thing.
A man called John was standing in a river. People were coming to him one at a time, and they were sorry — properly sorry, about things they'd done. John put each of them under the water, and they came up again, and it meant I'm starting again.
It was a long queue.
Then Jesus joined it.
John saw him and stopped. He said: No. You've got this backwards. I should be the one coming to you.
And John was right. Jesus had nothing to be sorry for. He didn't need to start again. He was the only person in that whole queue who had no reason to be in it.
He got in anyway.
Jesus said something back to John, and it's the first thing anybody ever wrote down that he said out loud in public.
He said: Let it be, just for now. This is the fitting thing for us to do.
Two words in there matter.
Fitting. Not I have to. Not it's the rule. Fitting — like the right thing to wear to a wedding. It just suits the moment. Jesus didn't get in the water because he was made to. He got in because, right then, it was the right thing to do.
Us. He didn't say me. John had just argued with him, and Jesus put him in the sentence anyway. Us. You and me. We're doing this together.
So why did he do it?
Because that's what being right with someone looks like.
He wasn't in the river to show everyone how good he was. He was in the river because that's where we were.
He didn't stand on the bank being better than the queue. He got in it. He stood in the water with people who had made a mess of everything, and he had made a mess of nothing, and he stood there anyway.
That's the whole thing, and it never changes. Right at the end of Matthew's book, Jesus tells his friends to go and do the same — to go out to everybody, everywhere, and put them in the water too. The story starts with two men in a river. It ends with the door held open for the whole world.
So here's the question, and it's a better one than am I being good?
Who am I standing with?
You can do all the right things and still be facing the wrong way. And you can be somebody nobody's giving ticks to, standing next to a person who needs you, doing something small — and that's the thing God actually calls right.
Being good is a score.
Being right with someone is a place you stand.
This is the eight-year-old telling of a longer piece. The full argument is in the article Fitting (Matthew 3:15), and the word behind it is set out in the word study Tzedaqah / Dikaiosynē.