The Christmas decorations gather dust now in their storage places. Weeks ago we put them away again for another year. Our attention has shifted from the happy holiday of Christmas to the somber notes of Lenten hymns and midweek services. We move from a baby in a manger to a bloody condemned Savior on a cross.

Jesus came to die for us so that we might be declared righteous. That’s Lutheran. Along with the Lenten season and its concentration on the suffering and death of Jesus, we look to remember again that we have the righteousness of God as a gift by faith in Jesus.

But when we talk of the righteousness of God, we don’t make a lot of sense to the world around us. It’s an old problem. The word righteousness is not part of everyday language. To make matters worse, the righteousness we talk about can’t be understood by what you see, touch, feel, taste, and smell. Those around us walk by sight. The righteousness we know by faith is understood by the work of the Holy Spirit and defies observation and experience by the senses.

At first Luther was confused by the term too. He considered the righteousness of God a fierce standard. We humans must struggle against sin and do God’s work until we become righteous. Luther was terrified because no matter what he did, it was not good enough for God. In that, he was correct.

The light dawned in Luther’s heart and mind when the Holy Spirit broke through his misunderstanding. Then Luther understood that the righteousness of God was the holiness and perfection of Jesus and God’s free gift to sinners by faith. We still sing of that righteousness. I especially treasure these words: “Jesus, your blood and righteousness, my beauty are, my glorious dress” (Christian Worship 376:1).

In this world, not everyone wants to sing the same song. Sadly today even Christians do not understand righteousness. Too many are where Luther was and think of righteousness as something we must achieve. It is a rightness of behavior, justice, or fairness—a quality within our hearts and a characteristic of our lives. True enough, but such definitions of righteousness most often make Jesus an example of right behavior and skip the righteousness he achieved for us by his suffering and death. It makes me bristle. When I read this distortion, I think of Luther’s comment that such people make the Bible a wax nose that they twist and shape to fit their own ideas and opinions.

What happens when we remove the comfort of the cross and the righteousness Christ won there for all humanity? Such righteousness or justice launches us into an endless swamp of human effort. At each step we sink into the mire and struggle to pull ourselves from the muck for another step, only to sink again. In the end, we are exhausted and unable to reach the goal God demands of us.