I recently came across a news story from Massachusetts that stayed with me.
A bar wanted to provide a safer space for immunocompromised people, so it required all patrons to wear KN95 masks or better. At first, the idea did attract a group of customers who valued what the bar was trying to create, and business was initially fairly good.
Over time, however, attendance declined. The bar also wanted to care for people who were struggling financially, allowing some patrons to enter even when they could not afford the admission fee. Eventually, bills went unpaid, and the owners and staff could no longer pay themselves.
In an attempt to keep the bar financially viable, they made just one change: on Saturday nights, masks would become optional.
The response online was immediate. Critics accused the bar of ableism, and some even used the language of “eugenics.” Two days later, the bar apologized—only to face further criticism because the apology image did not include alt text for visually impaired readers.[1]
What struck me most was not simply the question, “Have these people become too extreme?”
Because several things in this story were genuinely good.
Protecting immunocompromised people was good. Allowing people without enough money to enter was good. Trying to preserve a community space where people could belong was also good.
And that is precisely where the problem becomes interesting.
If all of these are good things, should every one of them be pursued at any cost?
If something is genuinely good, does pursuing it more completely always make it better?
This question is not far removed from Christian discipleship.
Holiness is good. Commitment is good. Gathering with other Christians is good. Reading Scripture is good. Holding firmly to our convictions is good.
But can one genuine good, when given ever greater weight, begin to crowd out other genuine goods?
If so, the question is no longer simply, “What is right and what is wrong?” It becomes:
When several good things are present at the same time, how do we know what we must not let go of? And if we must hold on to both, how do we know which carries greater weight?
This is where wisdom becomes indispensable.
“Hold on to this, and do not let go of that”
Ecclesiastes contains a rather strange passage.
The Teacher first describes what he has seen in this fleeting life: a righteous person may perish despite his righteousness, while a wicked person may live long despite his wickedness (Eccl. 7:15).
“Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them.” (Eccl. 7:16–18, ESV)
What “do not be overly righteous” means is itself a debated interpretive question. But the passage can hardly mean, “Do not be too good; a little evil is fine.” The section does not conclude with “everything in moderation.” It concludes with the fear of God.
In other words, the Teacher is not telling us to take a little righteousness and a little wickedness. The context more likely warns against imagining that our righteousness or wisdom gives us control over how life will turn out. Reality does not always follow the simple formula that the righteous prosper and the wicked immediately suffer. Faced with such a perplexing world, the answer is neither to abandon righteousness nor to permit ourselves a measured amount of evil, but to continue living in the fear of God.
That makes the image in verse 18 especially worth pondering:
Hold on to this, and do not let go of that.
Wisdom is not necessarily about splitting everything down the middle. It is more like this: do not hold so tightly to one truth that you drop another.
This is very different from simply saying, “Let’s call it a draw.”[2] It is not a matter of giving each side half the weight whenever both appear to have a point.
Some things cannot be compromised. Some commands do not cease to bind us simply because another interest is involved. But many of life’s hardest decisions are difficult not because good and evil are clearly set before us, but because two things we should not casually abandon are present at the same time.
Maturity is neither compromising everything nor finding one correct principle and pushing it as far as it can possibly go.
Wisdom means knowing what must not be let go—and, when two things must both be held, knowing which carries greater weight.
Some things really are “weightier”
One of Jesus’ rebukes of the Pharisees is especially important here.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” (Matt. 23:23, ESV)
The phrase translated “weightier matters” is τὰ βαρύτερα τοῦ νόμου—literally, the “weightier” matters of the law.
Jesus does not say that everything else is worthless. In fact, he explicitly says that the weightier matters should be practiced without neglecting the others.
Both may matter, but they do not carry the same weight.
Mature moral judgment involves not only distinguishing good from evil, but also recognizing the relative weight of different goods.
The problem is not necessarily that everything the Pharisees did was wrong. The deeper danger is that we can give more and more weight to something we have good reason to do until it obscures the things that are “weightier.”
When a way of protecting the command becomes the command
This also helps me understand why Jesus could be so severe in his criticism of human traditions.
Mark 7 is not simply saying that “tradition is bad.” Any community trying to live out its faith will inevitably have to turn principles into concrete practices.
The problem is that a practice developed to help us obey God can gradually acquire more and more authority.
I want to take God’s command seriously.
↓
This seems to me the safest way to obey it.
↓
Serious disciples should do this.
↓
If you do not do this, you are not faithful to God.
By that point, we may have forgotten to ask: What exactly did God command, and what did we add as a way of putting that command into practice?
Later rabbinic tradition organized prohibited Sabbath labor into thirty-nine principal categories. But that classification, preserved in the Mishnah, should not simply be projected backward as though “the Pharisees in Jesus’ day added thirty-nine rules.”
A practice created to protect something good can gradually acquire the moral weight of the good it was meant to protect.
This is not a danger unique to ancient Pharisees. We can do it too.
Christian life contains more than one kind of good
Paul writes in Philippians:
“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:8, ESV)
This verse is not directly teaching us how to resolve conflicts between values. But it does remind me of something important: Christian moral vision is multidimensional.
Truth is good. Justice is good. Purity is good. Loveliness is good. What is honorable and worthy of praise is good.
Scripture does not reduce a mature life to one single measure that can simply be pushed higher and higher.
So we cannot ask only, “Is this a good thing?” Sometimes we also need to ask, “What other good things are present in this situation?”
This is not a call to “balance everything”
There is, however, an opposite mistake waiting for us here.
Saying that “different goods need to be balanced” can sound wise while actually saying very little.
Truth and falsehood do not need equal consideration. Faithfulness and betrayal do not need to be balanced. There is no room for negotiation between holiness and sin.
Some things God has clearly commanded. We cannot take something that is simply more convenient for us, call it “another good,” and use it to lower the weight of God’s command.
That is why I have become increasingly hesitant to describe maturity simply as “balance.”
The better questions are:
- Is this something God has clearly commanded?
- Am I holding to the command itself, or to a method I developed for putting the command into practice?
- What other genuine goods in this situation should not be casually abandoned?
- Does Scripture indicate that some of these things carry greater weight?
- Who is bearing the cost of my decision?
And there is an even deeper question:
What kind of person is this choice shaping me to become?
We can push good things too far as well
That is why I do not want to stand outside the Massachusetts bar controversy and laugh at it.
If the only conclusion we draw is, “See? Some people are just too woke,” then we have probably missed the most important point.
Christians can do the same thing in a different vocabulary.
We can care deeply about holiness and gradually become suspicious of virtually all popular culture.
We can care deeply about church gatherings and commitment and forget that real lives may also involve family responsibilities, caring for the sick, and other genuine obligations.
We can care deeply about our convictions and slowly turn choices we made in order to be faithful to God into a measuring stick for whether other disciples are serious enough.
Each of these deserves a fuller discussion of its own.
The fact that something is good does not mean it carries unlimited weight in every situation.
Maturity requires practice
Hebrews describes mature people in a way I have come to appreciate more and more:
“But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” (Heb. 5:14, ESV)
The picture here is not of someone who has finally received a thicker rulebook. It is of someone whose powers of discernment have been trained through repeated use.
When we first learn to follow God, it is natural to ask, “Am I allowed to do this?”
As we grow, we begin to ask, “What biblical principle is involved here?”
But perhaps we need to go one step further.
Real life does not always place one obvious “good” and one obvious “evil” in front of us.
Sometimes this is good, and that is good too.
Sometimes we must not let go of this, and we must not let go of that either.
At that point, what we need is not simply another rule. We need wisdom.
I am not writing this because I have mastered that kind of wisdom.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that I am still learning it myself.
It is easy to see when someone else has pushed something too far. It is much harder to see ourselves doing the same thing—especially when the thing we are pursuing really is good.
So perhaps what we most need to remember is not, “Don’t take things too seriously,” but this:
Maturity is not the absence of principles. It is knowing that even a right principle cannot simply be extended without limit.
Wisdom is not maximizing one good. It is giving each good its proper place.
Because even when we are pursuing something good, we still need wisdom.
Notes
[1] The account above is based on The Boston Globe’s September 22, 2026 report on the controversy surrounding a bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The venue had required KN95 masks or better, initially did reasonably well, later experienced declining attendance, allowed some patrons who could not afford admission to enter, and eventually struggled with unpaid bills and staff compensation. After making Saturday nights mask-optional, it faced accusations including ableism and eugenics; an apology posted two days later was itself criticized for lacking alt text.
[2] The Chinese version uses the Hong Kong catchphrase “打和啦，Super!” (“Call it a draw—Super!”), popularized by the television series Super Trio. It is often used humorously when two sides are treated as equally valid and the matter is simply declared a draw.
[3] “Purity spiral” is a term used to describe a process in which a group’s moral standards keep moving toward greater “purity,” so that positions once considered acceptable gradually come to be seen as inadequate.