The sixth fruit of the Spirit listed in the Letter to the Galatians is sometimes translated as “goodness”. So that seems a fitting place for us to arrive at on this day in the Church calendar that has been known as ‘Good’ Friday since the early Middle Ages. 

And the strange paradoxes of this day remind us that goodness is not an easy or sentimental thing in the Christian tradition. The use of the term ‘good’ for the day on which Jesus was executed seems to imply not a pleasing day but rather a day infused with holiness, a day when God is intensely present. German sources suggest that “Good Friday” may have come to us from Gottes Freitag, God’s Friday. 

So what is the nature of this goodness that is grounded in the divine being? More recent translations of the fruits of the Spirit help us here in naming the sixth fruit as “generosity”. God’s goodness is not a niceness or a mere resistance to corruption. God’s goodness is giving. It is the self-giving we call generosity. 

In the modern world where human beings have become radically atomised and where meaning has become structured around accumulation and competition, expressions of godlike generosity are rare. It is much more than the safe and sometimes self-congratulatory generosity of the philanthropist, more than the generosity of occasionally letting a car cut in front of you when sat in traffic, more than buying the odd copy of the Big Issue – though all of these may be smaller fruits. True generosity, true self-giving is a difficult fruit to cultivate in a world that trains us to see ourselves as more deserving than others and that prizes self-responsibility above mutuality. 

That is the spirit represented by the figure of the elder brother in the famous parable of the prodigal son. Like most of us in today’s society, he is working hard and feels underappreciated. He doesn’t see why his irresponsible and disgraced younger sibling should receive benefits denied to him. But the father isn’t seeking to punish him for his steadfastness. As he says, day by day he shares all he has with this loyal son. But his generosity to the wayward son reflects an abundance of joy at a relationship restored. The generosity of God is not a calculation, it is a disposition of love. 

We could well imagine that the older brother views himself as a generous sort of person, maybe self-consciously so. For there is also a caricatured form of self-giving that can be an equally dangerous kind of egotism. The seductions of believing we can justify ourselves through manic charitable activity is a sin we are warned against in debates going right back to the early church. And still today we can recognise a kind of generosity that just feels paradoxically ungenerous, somewhat controlling. As C. S. Lewis mockingly caricatures in the Screwtape Letters: “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.” 

So the kind of generosity we are talking about is profound, but unselfconscious. It is sacrificial, but it’s not a self-sought-out martyrdom. The hymn in the letter to the Philippians speaks about Christ in precisely these terms. 

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 

who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
    he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross. 

This is the ultimate expression of the generosity of God, the God who, while his wayward children were still far off, saw us and was filled with compassion. This is the God who runs to us, puts his arms around us and kisses us. This is the abundantly generous God we see hanging on the cross on Good Friday.  

But as we consider how we grow in this fruit of generosity, the Philippians language of self-emptying might also have some pitfalls. A generosity that leaves us empty, either materially or emotionally, doesn’t seem to capture the abundant character of the father in this parable. This makes me think of some of my students who, typical of so many young people today, are drawn into a highly commendable self-giving activism about the causes they care about – climate change, racial justice, the appalling conflict in the Middle East. They are passionate and committed, but often they come to a point of crisis and disillusionment. They burn with righteous anger until they find themselves burned out – exhausted, physically and mentally, while feeling demoralised by how little they have achieved.  

I encourage such students to focus not on fighting activist campaigns but on the longer-term business of cultivating lives of witness. To be a sustainable activist you can’t just be motivated by a burning anger but rather by the generosity of living for others. It needs to spring out of love and not rage. It needs to emulate what is presented to us as one of the first images of God in the Bible: the Burning Bush that Moses encounters while tending his sheep at Horeb. We are told that “the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.” 

God gives of Godself abundantly, yet is not exhausted. God burns in the fire of Horeb and is poured out in tongues of fire on the Day of Pentecost, yet is not consumed. To bear the fruit of generosity is to live out of that loving generativity. And as we translate that to our own lives, perhaps all these limited forms of generosity we’ve explored have something in common. They lack a more fundamental surrender of our own will, our own ego. Comfortable or occasional acts of generosity clearly do little to decentre ourselves as agents of power. A manic performative generosity is its own form of control, continuing to assert our will through an exaggerated and false humility. The burnt-out activist, while clearly self-less in their commitment to a cause, can’t deal with their own inability to assert the changes on the world that they wish to see. 

What’s often overlooked in the parable of the prodigal son is that the father’s generosity is not just shown to the returning son who he treats, not as a hired hand as requested, but with royal dignity and feasting. And it’s not just shown in the generosity extended to the elder son to whom he also goes out and persuades to come into the party, mirroring the going out to the younger son while he is still far off. What is most extraordinary is the generosity at the start of the story when the father grants the foolish son’s wish to take his share of the inheritance, to go and make his mistakes. 

God has granted us free will, which means that God has relinquished something of his own will. He does not force us to worship or to show gratitude for the blessings of creation or indeed for our very existence. He lets us be. He lets us make our mistakes. And there is in true generosity a willingness to let others be who they will be, a willingness to give to others for their own sake, to love them for their own sake. Apparent generosity can so often be a transaction to assert our will, to bring about a change we want to see or a reaction we want to provoke. But God just gives. He loves us as we are. How hard we find it to replicate that kind of pure generosity.  

The abundance of God’s grace, the fire that does not consume, is first noticed by the elder son in this parable in the form of music. “As he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing.” The Greek word is symphonia, a symphony. It probably didn’t sound like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy or Rachmaninov’s Second. It was probably a bit more raucous. But I find it fascinating and delightful that music is found at the heart of this parable as a sign of the generosity that it illustrates. Making music, with others and for others, is a great act of generosity, a gift that creates a connection without imposing the will. So as we meditate on this great parable that encapsulates the heart of the Gospel, and as we meditate on the mystery of the Cross, the greatest manifestation of the generosity of God, let us allow music to help cultivate in us the fruit of generosity – an abundant self-giving to others for their own sake.