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An underground current in our thinking has it that being good is no fun at all. This idea usually comes out in a humorous way. Perhaps we don't want to admit that we share the belief. So we tell a joke. The point is made. The tension is relieved. And we go on about our business. Our sense of what we ought to believe is preserved. We never quite say right out loud that morality is a grievous burden. Let me give some examples of how we make the point with humor.

A cartoon in a magazine shows two men being led down into hell. One of them says to the other, "I envy you. Mine were all sins of omission." Poor guy. What a tragedy. Here he is on his way to hell, and yet he missed out on all the good times he could have had with all those sins of commission!

Another cartoon shows Moses on the mountain receiving tablets of stone with the ten commandments on them. Moses says to God, "Couldn't you give them to us one at a time?" The point is obvious. Morality is hard and burdensome. Wouldn't it be nice to tiptoe into the laws of God and not have to face the whole set at once?

Ty Ty, the old man in Ernest Caldwell's novel God's Little Acre, put it this way. "Coffee is so good, I don't understand why it's not a sin to drink it." We smile when we hear that because deep in us is a suspicion that if we really enjoy something, if it really feels good, it must be bad. How long has it been since you heard someone say, "Everything I like to do is either illegal, immoral, or fattening"?

The very day I was writing this, I got another illustration from the comic strips. Hagar the Horrible is sitting down to eat. He points to the plate in front of him and asks, "What's this?" His wife says, "Eat it; it's good for you." Hagar replies, " 'Eat it, it's good for you' is my least favorite dish."

Finally, you all know the story of the teenage girl who is leaving for a date. Her mother says, "Be good. Have a good time." The girl answers, "Well, make up your mind. Which is it?" Somehow "being good" and "having a good time" don't seem quite to fit each other.

We could multiply the examples. We all recognize that floating around in our heads is the notion that fun, pleasure, and enjoyment are bad or at least bad for you. Morality, duty, and righteousness are burdensome, a drag. A partial explanation may be that a bit of what we caricature as Puritanism still informs our mental outlook. I believe it was H. L. Mencken who defined Puritanism as "the fear that somebody, somewhere, is having a good time." It is still hard for us even today to associate having a good time with living up to the highest moral standards. In a special way, we have associated sex with naughtiness or even badness. Or at least we suspect that it might be more fun if morality did not put restrictions on its enjoyment. That may be changing a little bit. Now some of us older people say, "I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty." We associate other indulgences of the flesh with the good life. It is common for someone to say, "People who don't drink, smoke, gamble, or overeat don't really live longer. It just seems longer."

If we dwell only on the idea that morality and the pleasures of the body don't mix, we will miss the deeper dimension of the problem. We also have in our minds the notion that righteousness and duty are strenuous, difficult, and self-denying. We have a sense that what we ought to do and what we naturally want to do are in conflict. And well we might think this way. Consider what Jesus said about the way of salvation. When the lawyer said that the greatest commandments were to love God with all your being and your neighbor as yourself, Jesus agreed and said, "Do this and live." In the Sermon on the Mount, he defined the righteousness of the kingdom in even more demanding terms. Go the second mile. Love your enemy. Go the second mile voluntarily with the obnoxious Roman soldier who compels you to carry his things the first mile? Love your enemies -- those who would destroy you if they could? Consider your neighbor's good equal to your own? Be as concerned that your neighbor's children get a college education as you are dedicated to your own children? If that is what is required of us, surely the law of God is a burden. Righteousness and love do not seem to define the good life, if that is what is required of us. Where is the good news in all that?

The problem is stated eloquently in Plato's Republic. Socrates is trying to define justice and to defend it as being identical with the best life possible. Glaucon makes the opposite case. He argues that people naturally prefer doing injustice to doing justice. People agree to live justly with each other as a compromise between the best life, which is to do injustice without being punished, and the worst life, which is to suffer injustice without having the power to retaliate.

Glaucon went on to illustrate his point by telling the story of Gyges's ring. Suppose there were a magic ring that would make you invisible if you turned it around on your finger. Just think what you could do if you had this ring. You could go into stores and take whatever you wanted. You could seduce your neighbor's spouse. You could listen in on any conversation you wanted to. You could go wherever you wanted to and do whatever you chose. You could live like a god! Now suppose there were only two of these magic rings. Let us give one to a just person and the other to an unjust person. If we observe them, sooner or later we will see them doing exactly the same things. Since the benefits are so great, would not everybody with such a magic ring end up living the unjust life? Glaucon ended his argument with the proposal that the very best life would be to live unjustly but to have the reputation of being just. The worst life would be to live justly but to have the reputation of being unjust.

Adiemantus jumped into the fray. More remains to be said. The universal voice of humankind is that justice and virtue are honorable but grievous and toilsome. Pleasure and vice are easy and to be preferred. Well, Socrates, what do you have to say to all this?

Socrates admits that the challenge is formidable. To answer will require a serious and lengthy inquiry. You will be pleased to know that the details of the argument will not be repeated here. What it comes down to is this: Socrates builds his case on the proposition that justice in the soul is like health in the body. Justice, whether in the individual or in society, is present when all the parts of the organism work together, each doing its own proper task in concert with all the rest. Justice is a state of health, harmony, integrity, unity, and wholeness. It is like a finely tuned musical instrument. Each string and each note contribute to the pleasing effect of the whole. Health is excellence of functioning in the body. Justice is excellence of functioning in the individual soul and in society.

That is the heart of the defense Socrates makes of the proposition that justice is to be preferred to injustice. I offer it as the strongest case that can be made. We do not always live that way. But deep inside we know that health is intrinsically good and to be preferred to sickness and disease. Surely that is what we must say to the skeptics in our time. And that is what we must say to the skeptical part of our own minds that laughs at the jokes and the cartoons that suggest that being good is no fun at all.

Certainly the Psalmist seems to agree with Socrates that righteousness is the health of the soul. Living in accordance with God's law is joy and happiness. "Blessed is the man (the person) who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but ... takes delight in the Law of the Lord" (Psalm 1:1). Such a person is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields fruit in its season. The righteous person is like a healthy tree that prospers and produces fruit pleasant to the eye and good to eat.

If Socrates and the Psalmist and we agree that virtue is to the soul what physical health is to the body, why do we laugh at those jokes? Surely health is to be preferred to sickness. If righteousness is the life of harmony, wholeness, and excellence, and if that kind of life is intrinsically good, why do we find those cartoons funny?

Let me make some suggestions that search for the conflicts in our thinking and living. Remember that in the background is the assumption that humor is the way we deal with our divided minds. The first possibility has already been mentioned. It may be that in some of us there are still remnants of the view that pleasure and enjoyment are morally suspect. If that is the case, we need to move into a better understanding of a biblical way of thinking in which life is to be enjoyed to the fullest. Life should be robust, zestful, full of joy, involving all the senses and including the pleasures of the body. The only constraints are health and justice. The only restriction is that we do no harm to ourselves or others. The only prohibition is that we do not exalt ourselves at the expense of others. Our pleasures must not deny others equal or just access to the same opportunities.

The villains are selfishness and excess. Selfishness is the pursuit of our own ends that denies the rights and claims of others. And there is always the temptation to exceed healthy boundaries. Mae West once said, "Too much of a good thing is wonderful." We are always in danger of falling into that error. When things get out of hand, the quest for this world's pleasures becomes sensuality, gluttony, inordinate love of luxury, ease, and comfort. The good life requires restraint, moderation, a capacity for denying some immediate gratifications for the sake of our own well-being and the needs of others. I want more chocolate cake than would be good for my body. So the tension that sometimes becomes a contradiction lives within. We want enjoyment, but we resist discipline. We want pleasure, but we resist self-restraint. We relieve the tension in laughter.

The recognition that health and justice require effort and discipline already takes us into a second level. Health of body and soul is intrinsically good. It is to be preferred to illness and injustice. Yet the plain fact is that doing one's moral duty requires activity, energy, time, and sometimes blood, sweat, and tears. George Bernard Shaw once said that he got his exercise by being a pallbearer for his friends who took exercise. Well, George, that is a good line, but it is mostly nonsense. A healthy body requires vigorous, regular, proper activity that uses the muscles of the body. My doctor tells me that to keep my heart healthy I should work out on my "NordicTrack" for at least thirty minutes every other day with my pulse rate in my training zone. Some days I am tempted to skip.

With regard to meeting the needs of our neighbors, it is easier to center our concern on ourselves than it is to bear the burdens of others. Who wants to worry about starving children, the homeless, and victims of AIDS? Why can't the poor just go away or at least keep out of sight and let us go about our business? The moral demands of Jesus are strenuous indeed. He requires that we clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit those in prison, heal the sick, and comfort the afflicted. He requires us to see to it that the poor and the outcasts get justice and relief. He urges us to love the unlovely and to take into account the needs of our enemies. It is summed up in the requirement that we regard our neighbor's need as equal to our own. The moral life is in some sense like climbing a steep mountain over a rough trail. The selfish life is like sliding downhill over smooth terrain. Loving others makes demands on us. This is where the basic contradiction arises.

We just seem naturally to prefer our good to the good of others. The Church has been nearly unanimous over the centuries in defining sin as loving ourselves too much and our neighbors too little. The basic fault is prideful exaltation of our own interests above the just claims of others. A conflict exists between what we naturally want to do and what ethically we should do. And we make jokes to relieve the tension.

This brings us to the third and final point. As long as any selfishness remains in us, loving our neighbor equally with ourselves will be a grievous burden. The more life is lived in tune with God and with our deepest nature, the less conflict there will be between what we want to do and what we ought to do. What, then, is required before we can take delight in the law of the Lord? The word of Jesus is clear. You must be born again. Only radical conversion from preoccupation with self to equal regard for neighbor can obliterate the gap between duty and desire. Only an inner transformation from prideful exaltation of self to loving God with the whole heart can erase the line between ought to and want to.

In recent years feminist theologians have insisted that this way of putting it is one-sided. It reflects a point of view that pertains to men more than to women. It applies to whose who have much power more than to those who have little. Here we have to refer again to Socrates. Health is balance, harmony, unity -- neither too much nor too little. Those, whether men or women, whose sin is self-abnegation, self-depreciation, and lack of self-esteem also are in need of conversion. Transformation will be away from subservience, timidity, and passivity toward healthy self-affirmation. It will involve living out the claim to equality in every sphere of life in church and society.

In any case, whether our sin is that we love ourselves too much or too little, those who live in love and in balanced harmony with their neighbors can truly take delight in the law of the Lord. Happy is the person who does what is right, whose life is in tune with God. Blessed are those who do what is right as a good tree produces good fruit.

All this brings us to a surprising conclusion. Only the saints find that doing good is a lot of fun. And that is no joke!