Last week, I had the blessing of walking through Central Market with Emily and our girls. We love the Market and I was musing, as I often do, on Lancaster County as we wander from booth and through the alleys and flowering trees of the City. Lancaster’s Central Market is not like Whole Food in Manhattan. It is not frequented by rail thin wraith hunting for the best bite of food because there will only be one bite of food to have. It is overflowing with children. Strollers abound. Fecundity washes over you in waves. Husbands and wives glory in the joy of productive love and life at Market. It is not like a city (or like so many of our inner cities). There seem to be no thieves at Market. There is no need for thievery. All the booths have samples out. You can feed yourself on them. My kids do. Thievery at Market would be some sort of blasphemy. In short, Lancaster County is what life can be on earth. A warm embrace of love, duty, frugality, joy, goodness, and general kindness. This is why Lancaster is the happiest place in the nation. This is why life is good here!

This led me to thinking about 1 Corinthians 2. In that passage, Paul talks about the “natural man”. Sadly, as Chesterton mentions in Orthodoxy, this phrase has been butchered by the translators. They tend to translate it negatively: “old man”, “natural man”, “unbelieving man”. The phrases make us think of man at his worst—in the prison, in the gutter, in snide prideful unbelief. Stanley Oakes (from The Kings College) and Douglas Wilson helped me see that this is exactly what Paul DOES NOT mean by this phrase. Paul is using a phrase from Aristotelian philosophy. He uses the word psychikos (ψυχικος). This is not man in the gutter. It is man at his best. This is the philosophy living life exactly how it should be lived. This psychikos does not understand or accept the things of God. Aristotle has a picture of man as philosopher being “the best.” What I saw at Market was even better. Lancastrians live a culture that has been impacted by the gospel. We clean up nicely. We are better, I think, than Aristotle’s psychikos.

Yet, beholding all this happiness and joy, seeing mankind at their best, I was left with one thought: Why would He die for us? Why do it? Sure we clean up nicely, but we are obviously broken people. We are breaking more things every day. When He, when Light, came to us; we hid in the darkness. We pretend to long for innocence, but when the one innocent man fell into our hands we slaughtered Him. We killed Him not because He threatened us with destruction, or because He was angry, or shouting, or condemning. We killed Him because He threatened our pride and place of honor (Caiaphas) or because He shined a light on our hypocrisy (the Pharisees) or because it is just easier to let things run their course (Pilate). He went as a lamb to the slaughter and we all sharpened our knives. The happiness of Easter will be upon me (and all of us) before we know it. I will be laughing and singing some hymns by the Wesleys. That light and joy must be seen, however, as contrast to the darkness of our hearts—and at our best (our Lancastrian best) they are still dark as midnight.