I was in a local store the other day when I noticed a young man being pulled aside by store security for shop-lifting. The young man did not protest or claim that he was innocent; he knew he had been caught in the act of stealing.  As I watched this take place I was reminded of a time years ago when I was asked to speak to an 8th grade class who, as a group, had been caught cheating on a final exam. They too, did not protest or claim innocence because they too realized that they had been caught in the act.  The cheating had been so extensive and so disheartening to their teacher that she actually thought about resigning from teaching altogether. Fortunately, she did not resign. She was an excellent teacher and she dealt with her cheating students in a forthright way so that they indeed, as she put it, "learned their lesson".  After she had "settled" with her wayward students, she asked me to come into her class to teach them something about ethics and integrity.

   I began my class with them by asking the students to explain this passage from Mark's Gospel: "Jesus said, ‘For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet to lose his soul in the process?" (Mk 8:36) After what seemed like a tremendously long period of silence, the students began to respond. One said, "I think it means that what good is it to have a lot of money or power if you don't get anyone's respect or you don't even respect yourself." Another student thought it meant that evil will consume you until you become a really bad person.  Other students said similar things.  My favorite response was a bit different. It was spoken by a quiet young man who said:  "When my Dad found out that I had cheated, he was really mad at me.  He made me tell him everything I did and then he told me that he was disappointed in me. Even when I told him that everybody was cheating and that nobody got hurt, he was still mad at me. He told me that no one likes a liar or a cheat. Then he made me memorize a saying: "There is no right way to do a wrong thing."

   Isn't that a great line? I liked it so much at the time that I scrapped all that I had prepared to use in that class, and used that saying as the centerpiece for the rest of the day's discussions.  Finally, at the conclusion of our time together, I asked the students, "So, what do Jesus' words mean - "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet to lose his soul in the process?"  Their response was short and sweet: "There's no right way to do a wrong thing."

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