For the Eleanor Shellstrops of This World

“Hello, everyone, and welcome to your first day in the afterlife. You were all, simply put, good people … So welcome to eternal happiness. Welcome to the Good Place.”

The Good Place S1 E1, ‘Everything is Fine’ (2016)

 

Some of the promotional material for The Good Place featured a stunned Eleanor clutching a number of balloons, so I decided to run with that as a theme.

I lose count of the quarters from which The Good Place has been enthusiastically recommended to me since the first episodes materialised on Netflix in 2016.¹ It’s really funny, everyone told me, plus, it would make great blog fodder. I ummed and aahed a bit about that. I often find stories whose prominent events occur after the characters involved have died to be slightly uncomfortable viewing, not, perhaps, so much because they entail gross inaccuracies about what really awaits human beings after death (though they certainly do), as because of my general distaste for the subjection of protagonists to what I perceive as grossly excessive suffering. I mean, our heroes almost always have a pretty rough time of it – peril and anguish make for engaging storytelling, after all – but to deny them relief from their troubles even after they’re dead just seems to push that streak of sadism a little too far for my liking.² Still, every rule has its exceptions, and it was into that category that The Good Place, which I finally starting watching just before the end of the last calendar year when my older sister sat me down in front of it, proved to fall.

Eleanor Shellstrop is dead. She wakes up outside the office of a kindly-looking bespectacled chap called Michael who tells her that in the afterlife, there’s a Good Place and a Bad Place. In Eleanor’s case, the good deeds she performed while she was alive have stacked her up enough moral points for her to snag a coveted spot in the Good Place, specifically in a brand-new neighbourhood of which Michael is architect and general in-charge person. There’s just one problem: every detail of Eleanor’s moral uprightness that Michael has in his records is a total lie. Eleanor was not a good person when she was on earth, and she knows it. Now, it seems, her only chance is to figure out how to become the kind of person that actually belongs in the Good Place before she’s exposed as a fraud and sent to the Bad.

To help her achieve this, Eleanor enlists the help of her designated soulmate Chidi Anagonye, who was a professor of moral philosophy when he was alive – exactly the sort of ethically savvy, robustly principled individual that belongs in the Good Place. Here come the spoilers, though – really, really big spoilers; seriously, I’m about to ruin the entire first series for you if you haven’t seen it – because it turns out that Chidi doesn’t belong in the Good Place, any more than Eleanor does. The giant word-flipping twist at the end of the first series is that Michael’s entire neighbourhood is in fact a fake: it’s not part of the Good Place, but a corner of the Bad Place that he’s appropriated for the conduction of an experiment into whether it’s possible to get human beings to emotionally torture one another (which would spare him and his fellow denizens of darkness from having to do all the torturing themselves). In truth, the only inhabitants of the neighbourhood who are real dead humans, rather than Bad Place staff pretending to be dead humans, are Eleanor, Chidi, and their neighbours Tahani and Jianyu. Although actually, Jianyu’s name isn’t Jianyu; Michael’s been introducing him to everyone as a Taiwanese Buddhist monk who’s still maintaining the vow of silence he took as a child, but he’s really Jason Mendoza, an amateur DJ from Florida who died during a failed robbery. If Jason isn’t surprised to find himself in the Good Place, that’s only because he hasn’t got the mental wherewithal to be; his behaviour on earth was arguably worse – certainly more criminal – than Eleanor’s. His designated soulmate Tahani, on the other hand, is completely confident of her right to be in the Good Place; during her life she was a prominent event planner and philanthropist who raised billions of pounds for charity.

Though none of the four humans has actually accumulated enough righteousness points to make it to the real Good Place, then – and yes, I know the whole premise of any human (bar one) achieving his or her own eternal reward through moral excellence is totally daft, but let’s take fiction as fiction, shall we – they fall very neatly into two categories as to how that fact plays out. While Eleanor and Jason have to have their very obviously morally lacking lives papered over with extensive and elaborate lies in order for it to seem at all plausible that they should ever have been allowed into the Good Place, Chidi and Tahani both completely buy that they genuinely have made it to the Good Place on the strength of the real way they remember having conducted themselves while on earth. And so does everyone else, actually. Even after she figures out that they’re really in the Bad Place, Eleanor has to ask Michael: “Wait, I don’t get something. I know why Jason and I were sent here, but why Tahani?”

“Oh yeah,” interjects Jason. “Didn’t you raise, like, a thousand dollars for charity, or whatever?”

“Er, sixty billion, actually,” Tahani corrects him. “So…” She looks up at Michael, and twigs something; her smug expression collapses into one of hurt despair. “Oh. But it didn’t matter, because my motivations were corrupt. I didn’t care about helping the people I raised the money for. I just wanted to prove my parents wrong, stick it to my sister, get fame and attention. My only real goal was to snog Ryan Gosling at the Met Ball. Which I did. Couple of times, actually.”

 

Probably not quite sixty billion dollars there.

Eleanor isn’t done with her questions yet, though. “But wait, why is Chidi here?”

Chidi assumes a solemn expression not dissimilar to Tahani’s a moment ago. “Well, er … there’s something you don’t know about me.” Eleanor looks over at him in sudden alarm, as he ploughs on: “I read an article saying that growing almonds was bad for the environment, and yet I continued to use almond milk in my coffee–”

“No, dingus!” Michael interrupts him. “You hurt everyone in your life with your rigidity and your indecisiveness.”

Chidi’s eyes widen in sudden realisation. “Oh, fork!³ You’re right. Every friend, every girlfriend was driven nuts because I couldn’t do anything. I missed my mom’s back surgery because I had already promised my landlord’s nephew that I would help him figure out his new phone. I made everyone miserable.”

Before that moment, though – before being confronted with the fact that they were already experiencing posthumous punishment for their misdeeds, and needing an explanation for that – neither Tahani nor Chidi had any idea that they weren’t the good people they thought they were. Chidi even needed Michael to spell out the precise nature of the wrong he’d done before he could see it at all. Eleanor knew she wasn’t a good person, and it was for that reason that she started taking moral philosophy lessons from Chidi in order to try to become a better one. She knew she wasn’t a good person and that that was a problem that required a solution. Neither Chidi nor Tahani saw any such problem in themselves, nor, therefore, any need to seek a solution.

The analogy just falls out of this jazz, doesn’t it?

And the scribes of the Pharisees, having seen that he was eating with the sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples: He eats with tax collectors and sinners? And having heard, Jesus said to them: The healthy have no need of a doctor, but the sick; I didn’t come to call righteous people, but sinners.⁴

Jesus says he didn’t come for the righteous. Well, of course he didn’t. If you’re righteous – if you’re morally upright enough to gain your eternal reward all by yourself – then what the heck would you need Jesus for? Why would you ever need him to do something as drastic as drinking the cup of God’s wrath to the dregs on your behalf, if there’s no cause for God to hold any wrath against you anyway?⁵ If there’s no problem, in short, why seek a solution? It’s for the Eleanor Shellstrops of this world that Jesus came, for those who aren’t good people and know it. And the thing is, adelphoi, you all know that. You know that in the depths of your soul. It is so obvious. It is so, so obvious that Jesus came to call sinners like us. The very fact that we’ve been called by him makes it obvious to us. But I’m not sure it’s obvious to everyone else.

I suspect that quite a lot of people think that the big, difficult obstacle of thought one has to get past in order to become a Christian – the fundamental prerequisite belief after which the rest can fall into place without hindrance – is there is a God. And to a large extent, who can blame them, when so many of our apologetic efforts are concentrated in that direction? Nor, to most people, is that proposition by itself an intolerably unattractive one. It’s certainly not the hardest sell among our most basic doctrines. But of course, there’s no point, no point at all, in convincing someone merely that there is a God; assent to that fact no more amounts to the repentance and belief necessary for salvation than refusing to speak makes one a Taiwanese monk called Jianyu. What I think the big, difficult obstacle of thought that sits in most people’s way on this front actually is, is this: I am not a good person.

I mean, obviously you have got to start believing that there is a God in order to turn to him for forgiveness – but you’re never going to turn to him for forgiveness if you don’t think you need it, even if you believe he exists. Tahani and Chidi didn’t seek a solution for their moral undeservingness, because, real as the problem was, they couldn’t see it. It was Eleanor who knew something had to change if she was to come to belong in the Good Place.

I am not a good person is a harder sell than some of the other basic tenets of our faith. It’s a less appealing thought. It’s a more difficult proposal to communicate in a loving way. But if Jesus didn’t come to call righteous people, then it is absolutely crucial that we do nonetheless try to communicate it. If Jesus didn’t come to call righteous people, then people need to know that they are not righteous before they stand any chance of turning to him. I think we all know this with respect to ourselves – by necessity, if we’ve repented and believed, we’ve grasped the error of our former ways – but we need to know it with respect to others too.

It goes without saying that we can’t just suddenly make someone see his or her own moral inadequacy, but we work in partnership with a God who can. Funnily enough, indeed, convicting the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement is precisely what Jesus said the Holy Spirit would do when he came, which, spoiler, he now has done. We preach the gospel in word, backed up by how we live; the power of the Spirit brings the conviction that needs to come along with that in order for the chosen to come to hope in the Lord Jesus Christ.⁶

And, magnificently, once one does come to hope in him, that’s the end of one’s moral inadequacy in the eyes of God. Eleanor Shellstrop knew she wasn’t a good person and she sought a solution – but moral philosophy lessons with another human little better than herself never stood any chance of making her truly righteous. The blood of our Lord spilled on our behalf, by contrast, makes us – in spiritual terms, such as pertains to heaven and the world to come – so unimpeachably good, exactly as good as he is, that there is no way in all creation that that status could ever be diminished or revoked. I am not a good person may sound like a hard sell as a concept, but it’s the gateway to the best deal anyone has ever been offered. Preach the gospel. And lean your hope ever more firmly on the one who came to call Eleanor Shellstrops like us.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is: https://www.netflix.com/title/80113701. If you have any inclination to watch the first series, you might want to do that before reading the rest of this post.

² “But don’t you believe in eternal damnation of the lake-of-fire variety, Anne?” Yes, I do, but that’s God’s job, not ours. The principle extends more broadly that what’s right for him to do isn’t necessarily right for us to emulate.

³ Bad language is censored to similar-sounding common nouns in the fake Good Place, just to make that clear.

⁴ That’s from Mark 2: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+2&version=ESVUK. The scribes’ question might have had a ‘why’ on the front of it, depending on where you want to put the punctuation, but it’s a weird word for ‘why’, so I wasn’t totally convinced. Either way, though, the gist is the same.

⁵ Try, for instance, Jeremiah 25 for that concept, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+25&version=ESVUK, and compare Jesus’ remarks in Matthew 20:22-23 or Mark 10:38-40, and John 18:11.

⁶ I here quote John 16:8 and riff on 1 Thessalonians 1:3-6 a little.