Every Church an Evangelizing Community!
 Robin Williams’ movies frequently raise profound questions–about personhood, freedom, forgiveness, healing, and the search for a sense of home. This booklet traces how these themes have developed through Williams’ career, and then shows how the teaching of Jesus from two thousand years ago speaks to them.For the full text of this booklet in PDF format, click here.
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For my money Schindler’s List is the Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony of movie-making. Steve Spielberg has come a long way since Jaws and ET! If you haven’t seen it, go with a friend you don’t mind crying with, and with whom you can share the silence afterwards. You won’t want to talk.
The story of the film, a true story, is about how Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and at least nominally a member of the Nazi party, rescues 1,098 Jews from the Holocaust simply by employing them in his factory, which, he claimed, was an essential part of the German war effort.
After watching the movie, I read the book it was based on… twice.(1) Then I found a Saturday Night magazine article about the real-life Schindler.(2) And increasingly I found not only Spielberg’s images disturbing, but also the deeper questions it raised.
For me, the questions cluster around the two main characters: Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth, the Nazi officer he has to deal with. In some ways the two are quite similar. Keneally is quite explicit:
Goeth was some eight months younger than Schindler, but shared with him more than the mere year of birth. Like Oskar he had been raised a Catholic and had ceased observing the rites of the church… Like Oskar too, he had graduated from high school in the Realgymnasium ñ Engineering, Physics, Math. [Goeth] shared with Oskar…his weakness for liquor [and] a massive physique…As well like Oskar, he never suffered the hangovers he deserved. (159f.)
Kenneally ponders the parallels:
The reflection can hardly be avoided that Amon was Oskar’s dark brother, was the berserk and fanatical executioner Oskar might, by some unhappy reversal of his appetites, have become. (171)
In his mind, they come to represent good and evil, God and Satan: towards the end of the movie, Oskar proposes to Goeth that they play cards for the life of a servant girl, Helen:
As for Oskar’s part in this proposal, he had made it lightly. He did not seem to see, in his offer to Amon, any parallel with God and Satan playing cards for human souls. (279)
The main contrast between these two men takes places over precisely this same issue: people. My first question was a line from the movie:
What’s a person worth to you?
In the beginning, Schindler (played by Liam Neeson) is simply out to make money for himself. He tells his wife, Emilie, he is in the factory “To make money for me.” He wants people to say of him, “He came with nothing and…left with a steamer trunk ñ no, two steamer trunks ñ full of money.”
However, quite early on, you see a hint of a different attitude when he meets Stern (who will become the accountant for the factory). Stern (played by Ben Kingsley) introduces himself, “By law I have to tell you, sir, I am a Jew.” Schindler shrugs and replies, “Well, I am a German, so there we are.” By saying that, he levels the playing field and refuses to play the Nazis’ game. If Stern has to state his racial origin, Schindler will do the same. They are equal.
Little by little, not least through influence of Stern, this side of Schindler comes to the fore. One person highlights the change happening, and why it happens: an elderly, one-armed man who comes to thank Schindler, and is then shot by Nazis.
The Nazis show what is the logical end of asking, What’s his use? If the man has no use, then he has no value ñ so they get rid of him. Schindler complains that he has lost a worker…but already there is ambivalence. He knows what he has lost is not just a worker, but a person.
This is foundation to the whole movie. Keneally says:
Schindler’s camp…was the only camp in Nazi-occupied territory where a Jew was never killed, or even beaten, but was always treated as a human being. (391)
Towards the end, when Schindler is trying to arrange to have his workers moved to Czechoslovakia, the question is actually spelled out: Goeth asks him, “What’s a person worth…to you?” The question is not answered directly, but in practice, Schindler’s answer varies. On one occasion, he is able to prevent the killing of one of his workers by offering the soldier with the gun a bottle of vodka. The officer doesn’t understand. Keneally says:
For working all day behind the machine guns… the massed and daily executions in the east ñ for shooting hundreds ñ you were given half a liter of vodka…And here the Herr Direktor offered him three times that for one act of omission. (214)
Later, in the new factory, even before anything could be manufactured, we are told:
Oskar was paying…nearly $14,000 US each week for male labor; when the women arrived the bill would top $18,000. Oskar was therefore committing a grand business folly. (304)
But in philosophical terms, he obviously believes people are beyond price. Is it folly? On one scale of values, of course; but not in another way. In fact, at the end, he is overwhelmed by the realisation that he didn’t do enough, he could have done more.
The question that came to my mind was: Why do we care so much about people? Why do we think they’re so precious, so priceless, if they are (as I once heard atheist Kai Neilson describe them) “big-brained lumps of slime”? Why, in terms of the movie, do we root for Schindler as he gives all he’s got (literally) to save people’s lives? Where does this deep instinct come from that this is right? I have never heard anyone say, Well, Nazism was OK for their culture. Schindler should not have interfered. Rather we say, He was right on. People are of immeasurable value. But on what basis do we think that?
My answer as a Christian is Jesus’ view: people are valuable because they are made by God in the image of God. Not that God bestows on people a value they don’t otherwise have. But Jesus explains why we feel so strongly. Professor Glenn Tinder, writing in Atlantic Monthly (3) a few years ago, puts it this way:
In the act of creation God grants a human being glory, or participation in the goodness of all that has been created…The Lord of all time and existence has taken a personal interest in every human being, an interest that is compassionate and unwearying. The Christian universe is peopled exclusively with royalty…
[Without this faith,] the notion that all people…have equal claims on our respect becomes as absurd as would be the claim that all automobiles or all horses are of equal excellence.If you believe that what Schindler did was right and good, why do you believe that? What is the basis for your belief? If all people are created equal, doesn’t that imply the need for a Creator? If you don’t have a good reason for believing it, it’s difficult to maintain it under pressure.
Which leads to the other side of the coin in the movie:
Amon and the nature of evil
The evil in the movie revolves around attitudes to people, just as does the good. If Schindler’s heroism lay in treating people as people, Goeth’s guilt lies in his treating people as less than human ñ for instance, his practice of shooting prisoners at random from his balcony, just for target practice. (192)
This is where lists take on symbolism. After all, the movie’s title is a list (the book was originally called Schindler’s Ark), but Schindler’s list takes on its significance by contrast with other lists. Generally, speaking, in this story, with one exception, lists mean evil. Keneally mentions at least eleven evil lists:
SS lists of unsatisfactory or seditious ghetto dwellers (99); 1,000 ghetto dwellers who had been rounded up according to Symche Spira’s lists and marched…to the cattle cars (104); Spira had another list and it was either twice or three times as long as the last (127); Spitz and Forster…had drawn up lists for the imprisonment of thousands (143); a list of thousands for deportation (144); labor lists and transport lists..lists of living and dead (227); the man with the list, the man who opened and closed the doors on the cattle cars (231); the list of insurgents (273).
Schindler nearly loses Stern because he gets on the wrong list. In one scene you see why these lists are evil: a Nazi officer at train station cannot rescue anyone who is “on the list.”
Keneally describes the scene this way:
Oskar could see in the man’s left hand an enormous list ñ pages of names… You can’t have them back, said the young man. They’re on the list. “It’s not my place to argue with the list,” said Schindler. “Where is your superior officer?”… The officer also made a statement about the holiness of the list. For this man it was the secure, rational and sole basis for all this milling of Jews and movement of rail cars. But Schindler got crisper now. He’d heard about the list, he said …With emphasis in his pen strokes, the officer removed the Emalia workers one at a time from the list and required Oskar to initial the pages. “Sir,” he said, “it makes no difference to us, you understand. We don’t care whether it’s this dozen or that… It’s the inconvenience to the list, that’s all.” (124f.)
So people are reduced to a name on a list. The list is more important than people: one name on a list is much like another. The list teaches the soldiers how to treat the people: impersonally. A sign of Schindler’s humanity is that he is not impressed or intimidated by the list.
Why do people do these evil things? In the movie, the specific question is asked why Amon does what he does. Oskar thinks it must be the bad local liquor he drinks (217).
He also muses whether Amon is a lunatic (173); Keneally too uses words like mad (253), berserk (235) and deluded (390) to describe him. We shouldn’t use the word mad loosely however. Madness is a relative term. In fact, Oscar is also described as being mad, because what he does is outside the range of what we think of as normal human behaviour, just as much as what Goeth does.
There is another possibility: duty. Keneally says, “Duty, as so many of their superiors would claim in court, was the SS genius” (368). The notorious Milgram experiments at Yale in the 60s “demonstrated the extent to which ordinary citizens might engage in brutal behaviour at the direction of a malevolent authority.”(4) Yet in the case of Goeth, he so clearly went beyond orders, and enjoyed what he was doing, that duty seems an inadequate explanation.
Part of my own interpretation is based on the fact that, generally speaking, we act in line with our beliefs. So if we have reason to believe that all people have worth and dignity, then we will treat them accordingly. If we believe that some people are more valuable than others, or even that some are worthless, then we will treat the “inferior” ones as less than human.
Alan Bullock, in his classic study of Hitler (5), comments that the sin which Hitler committed was that which the ancient Greeks called hybris, the sin of overweening pride, of believing himself to be more than a man. (385) His belief about who he was implied certain beliefs about others, and a certain way of behaving towards them. It is significant that Hitler specifically rejected the teachings of Christianity because they taught the dignity of all people, and favoured compassion towards the weak:
In Hitler’s eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest…”Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.” (389)
So Hitler’s belief in himself led to certain kinds of action towards others. His belief in the survival of the fittest led to a certain attitude towards the weak and helpless. He knew that Christian beliefs about the value of people would have compelled him to an opposite kind of behaviour, and so, Bullock says:
once the war was over, he promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian churches. (389)
The contrast between Oskar and Goeth is that Oskar (probably unconsciously) held a Christian view of persons which he probably learned from his Catholic background; Goeth, following Hitler, held a different philosophy.
But evil is not only a matter of what you believe about the world. Professor Tinder again:
The twentieth century…has displayed evil in extravagant forms. Wars and massacres, systematic torture and internment in concentration camps, have become everyday occurrences in the decades since 1914… [The Christian understanding is that] the inclination toward evil is primarily an inclination to exalt ourselves rather than allowing ourselves to be exalted by God. We exalt ourselves in a variety of ways: for example, by power, trying to control all the things and people around…
Tinder is not writing exclusively about Nazism. But his description is certainly apt. Bullock writes:
To say that Hitler was ambitious scarcely describes the intensity of the lust for power and craving to dominate which consumed him. It was the will to power in its crudest and purest form, not identifying itself with the triumph of a principle… for the only principle of Nazism was power or domination for its own sake. (382)
In Christian understanding, however, having a wrong view of yourself or of others not only damages those others: it dehumanises you. So it is significant that Keneally writes of Goeth’s experience:
A man paid for [his inhuman deeds], for by evening the fullness of this hour would be followed by such emptiness that he would need, to avoid being blown away like a husk, to augment his size and permanence by food, liquor, contact with a woman (168).
Tinder writes:
Sin is ironic. Its intention is self-exaltation, its result is self-debasement. In trying to ascend, we fall.
Evil is the logical conclusion of putting self at centre of universe instead of the Creator. But the scary thing is that we all have the tendency to do precisely that. Timothy Findley in Famous Last Words (6) writes about those who collaborated with the Nazis:
“We should never have done these things,” they will say, “were it not that men like…Mussolini, Dr.Goebbels and Hitler drove us to them. Otherwise we should have stayed home by our quiet hearths and dandled our children on our knees and lived out lives of usefulness and pace…” Missing the fact entirely that what they were responding to were the whispers of chaos, fire and anger in themselves.
The third question the movie prompted for me may not immediately appear to follow. But it does. The question is:
What is God like? People in our society often have a hard time figuring out what God is like. Most acknowledge that there is a supreme Being, probably the Creator, but if you ask what this Being is like, they have a hard time. Similarly, people say, I believe in God, but I don’t understand where this Jesus fits in. Schindler, in some ways, offers us insight into what God is like, as least in Christian thinking.
I say this because, to my surprise, I found that (in the book more than the movie), there are more religious references than I can count to Oskar Schindler:
[Schindler] told [his workers], “You’ll be safe working here. If you work here, you’ll live through the war”… The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? (91)What he did is described as salvation (213, 232), redemption (literally “buying back”) (276), and a “massive Biblical rescue” (256). One of the Schindlerjuden (as they came to be called) said, “He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.” (330) He was “the grand, magical, omniprovident Oskar” (332). Schindlerjuden “stated that Oskar was their Savior” (394).
When his women workers are taken to Auschwitz by mistake, one asks: “Where’s Schindler now?” and another replies, “You’ll see, it will all come out. We’ll end up somewhere warm with Schindler’s soup inside us.” (310)
Keneally draws an explicit parallel with Jesus:
When you look at other events of that mad winter, you can see that Oskar wanted the extra 30 [workers] not because they were used to lathes and machine tools, but because they were simply an extra 30. It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie’s wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved. (350 cf.317)
This caution is important. In some ways, Schindler is clearly not like the Judaeo-Christian understanding of God. Keneally says elsewhere:
Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double-faced ñ in the Greek manner-as any small god; endowed with all the human vices. (232)
But if we bear that in mind, there are some things we can learn. Once again, the lists are helpful. The whole story is a tale of two lists: one gives life, the other death. With one, it doesn’t matter who’s on it; the other is individual, and Schindler and Stern rack their brains to remember individuals who should be on the list. In this clip, Oskar makes up his mind to pay Goeth whatever it takes to buy his Jewish workers and ship them to relative safety in Czechoslovakia. Goeth, of course, with his opposing world-view, does not understand. Madrisch, another industrialist, lacks Oskar’s passion, and is not willing to take the same risk, as we see in the scene where Schindler gives money to Goeth, and pleads with Madrisch to do the same.
Keneally describes the list this way, again in religious terms:
Oskar’s list, in the mind of some, was… more than a mere tabulation. It was a List. It was a sweet chariot which might swing low. (276)
Stern in the film quotes Keneally’s words:
The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins lies the gulf… It was blasphemously close to creating people anew just by thinking of them. (290)
The Christian understanding of God is that God feels so passionately about the people God has made that God is willing to do anything to rescue us from the consequences of our own evil. Christians believe that in Jesus, God was writing himself into the script of the movie we call human life, and that Jesus demonstrated God’s passion for us, not by giving a fortune to buy us back, as Schindler did, but by giving his own life to buy us back, and so that we too might be created anew.
Conclusion [In 1961] Schindler was declared a Righteous Person, this title being a peculiarly Israeli honor based on an ancient tribal assumption that in the mass of Gentiles, the God of Israel would always provide a leavening of just men. (394)
Oskar Schindler died in 1974. He is buried in a cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the only member of the Nazi Party to be so honoured.
Notes
(1) Schindler’s List Thomas Keneally (Toronto: Simon and Schuster 1982)
(2) Saturday Night, April 1994, pp.40-77
(3) Atlantic Monthly, December 1989, pp.69-85
(4) Allan J. Kimmel, Ethics and Values in Applied Social Research (Newbury Park: Sage Publications 1988), p.60
(5) Alan J. Bullock, Hitler: a Study in Tyranny (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1962)
(6) Timothy Findley, Famous Last Words (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1981)
Freedom has been one of the grand obsessions of the Western world for 400 years. The roots of this passion go back further, of course, at least to the Greeks. But the love affair has heated up significantly since then, fuelled in turn by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Romantic movement.
The 20th century stoked the fires still more, with the rise of communism and fascism, and the feeling that the West was the last fortress against a rising tide of oppression & subjugation. Hence the West went so far as to call itself “The Free World.”
Yet for many, the love affair has gone sour: in Russia now, there is a freedom of speech that was never possible under the former Soviet Union, yet the country is threatened with anarchy. In the West, we have the freedom to choose between 25 kinds of toothpaste but often we can’t choose to get a job. There is freedom of education but increasingly it is so expensive that that freedom is a luxury many can’t afford. We have the freedom to vote but it doesn’t seem to change anything (as one wit said, “If voting changed anything, it wouldn’t be allowed anyway”).
Somewhere in the relationship, something started to go wrong. We need to go back, and retrace our steps.
To help us, I want us to consider the movie Groundhog Day, which illustrates three different definitions of freedom. The main character, played by Bill Murray, is Phil Connors, a TV weather man who is sent to report on the Groundhog Day ceremony at Punxsutawny PA.
Everything goes according to schedule, except that, when it’s time to leave the town, Phil and the TV crew can’t leave because of a blizzard, and are forced to stay an extra night. Then, when Phil wakes up the next day, he finds that it is still Groundhog Day: the same old Sonny and Cher song is on the radio, he has the same job to do, the same colleagues, exactly the same conditions. And the same is true the next day…and the next day and the next.
At first, Phil feels trapped. Then, as he discusses it with two new-found friends in a local bar, he realises that actually there could be some advantages to having the same day over and over and over. That gives us the movie’s first definition of freedom:
1. Freedom is doing whatever you want
Phil realises that, if there’s no tomorrow, “We could do whatever we wanted… All your life, it’s clean up your room, pick up your feet, be nice to your little sister, take it like a man.” Then he concludes, “I’m not going to live by their rules any more.” Rules, after all, are the opposite of freedom: they imply responsibility, accountability, relationships… society. Now, he doesn’t have to worry about anything: there need be no responsibility because there can be no consequences.
It sounds nice…maybe. He drives on the railway line, pursued by police. He may be put in a prison cell, but the following morning, he will still wake up in his own bed…again. He seduces Nancy, promising her marriage. After all, he knows he will never have to follow through on his promise. He robs a security truck and buys himself a Mercedes. His TV producer, Rita, unimpressed by his egotism, quotes Sir Walter Scott to him: “The wretch, concentred all in self.” That describes precisely what Phil becomes.
In real life, of course, nobody lives consistently like this. If I want freedom for myself, I have to allow others freedom too, and compromise becomes necessary. My freedom to party impinges on my neighbour’s freedom to study all night. Someone has to back down. Not all freedoms are compatible. Or again: most of are willing to give up what we consider lesser freedoms in order to enjoy greater freedoms. Most of us (unlike Phil) do not exercise our freedom to drive on the railroad tracks because we value the greater freedom of staying alive.
It’s also interesting that most of the things we feel best about in life are actually those where we did not do exactly what we wanted, where we disciplined ourselves and made some hard choices: the exams we passed, the risks that paid off, the training that produced results. If we had always done exactly what we wanted, none of those things would have happened.
Even in Phil’s world, it does not work. For a start, he cannot seduce any woman he wants. He tries to seduce Rita, building up information about her little by little so he can fake the same interests as her. But she knows he is manipulating her, though (of course) not how. Finally, her resistance makes him rethink this whole way of living.
The movie then offers us a second definition of freedom:
2. Freedom is becoming the best you can be
Phil gradually realises that his day offers opportunities to help others. Little by little he begins to take those opportunities, until finally he lives a day where he goes from one good to deed to another: catching a child falling out of a tree, changing a flat tire, saving a man from choking. Obviously, Hollywood sentimentalisation plays a big part here. Yet the principle underlying what happens is significant.
Phil has finally figured out what he is “supposed” to do. The jobs he does are in a sense waiting for him…though he did not even notice them at first. He chooses to do them, though in another sense he hardly has a choice.
There is a strange paradox here. The first freedom, though it seemed to promise him breadth, actually narrowed him and made him less human. This second kind of freedom looks narrower and more restrictive, yet turns out to be the entrance to a wider place where he becomes more human, more himself.
An elderly couple who sheltered Jews during the Second World War were interviewed not long ago, and asked the inevitable question: Why did you do it? Their reply was simple: We had no choice. Was that bad, a limiting of their freedom? Of course not. For them, helping the anti-Nazi effort was being the best they could be and that is a wonderful kind of freedom. Certainly, there was a sense of inevitability, of destiny, about what they did ñ but that is not incompatible with this kind of freedom.
In general, I suspect this is what we mean when we talk about freedom: freedom of opportunity, freedom of education, freedom to travel, to get a job. In all these things, the underlying hope is that they will enable you to become the best you are capable of becoming.
Notice a couple of important features of this freedom:
It is connected to love. Phil learns to be a more loving kind of person. Instead of thinking about himself all the time (the first kind of freedom), he thinks more of the needs of others. Psychologist Scott Peck has written, “Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s… growth.” (1)
It is connected to truth: the truth is that people cannot be indefinitely manipulated for our selfish ends; the truth is that a self-centred kind of freedom does not bring the happiness it initially promises. Phil has to bend his mind around that hard reality. He cannot bend reality to his mind.
It is connected to rules. Phil used to say, “I’m not going to live by their rules any more.” But human beings only function well with rules. Take the rules of language. At first, the rules seem boring and you are self-conscious about using them. Eventually, however, they become natural to you, and you forget them in the freedom of being able to express yourself and to relate to others. (2) So in a sense what Phil finally learns is the rules of truth and love which we need to guide us in the expression of freedom.
It does not automatically bring happiness. Phil has to work to be free in this sense. Suppose you feel what you are made for is athletics. You want the freedom to excel at athletics. You follow the rules of training and competing. Are you happy? Ninety percent of your involvement in athletics will be sweat, exertion, pain, effort, failure, giving up, trying again… When it comes down to it, probably only ten percent of what you do could be described as “happiness” ñ though probably that is too weak a word for what a successful athlete feels.
That same principle applies not only to sport but to life in general. If it is true that to be the best we can be involves love, love too requires courage, work, risk, pain, failure, sacrifice and concentration. But it is worth it.
However, there are still problems with this definition even though it is an improvement on the first one. For instance, we may not be the best judges of the best we can be. Others may know us better than we know ourselves. Even more complicated, what we are best at may not always be attainable: we may fail a course, not get the perfect job; perhaps someone dies, or you cannot get money for grad school, or you find you have to care for an ageing parent.
What becomes of freedom then? What becomes of “becoming all I am capable of becoming”? Fortunately, there is a deeper meaning, a third definition of freedom. After all, Phil is still not out of the Groundhog Day trap. The third, ultimate freedom is:
3. Freedom is belonging to someone who loves you
At the end of the movie there is a bachelor auction. Two women bid for Phil’s services. Rita is horrified at their low bids, empties her purse and bids everything she has: the princely sum of $339.88. It is this which sets Phil free, in the obvious sense that when he wakes up next morning it is (finally) the day after Groundhog Day.
There is a paradox here: when Phil was trapped in time he experienced a certain kind of freedom, not least in relationships. Now that he is in a sense trapped ñ in a relationship ñ a new kind of freedom is possible.
Of course to belong to someone can be very negative: it can mean slavery, the very opposite of freedom ñ but not necessarily. Many people have known the freedom that comes from committed, loving relationships ñ with a parent, a grand-parent, a teacher, a friend. Because of that relationship, where we are accepted and nurtured, we have experienced the freedom to be ourselves, to live with assurance, to take risks, to fail, and even (for some of us even harder) to succeed.
If this is true of a human being ñ that they can give that kind of freedom ñ in Christian understanding, it is even more true of God.
That nurturing parent, that accepting friend, is, according to Jesus, a picture of what God is like.
Why is the freedom of being in a relationship with God so special? Jesus said, “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (3) He taught two freeing truths about God in particular:
God is Creator: God made us and therefore knows us best. God more than anyone knows who we are capable of becoming.
We may not get the job we want or the salary we “deserve”, but God is more concerned for the development of our character, our personhood, and specially to make us like Jesus ñ Jesus the normal, normative human being ñ a person as persons were always meant to be, fully alive. God can do that for us in any and all circumstances.
To become like Jesus is to become fully human, to become fully alive, to be as we were meant to be ñ to be free.
God is also rescuer
In Christian understanding, many human problems come because we have alienated ourselves from God, looked for freedom and fulfilment in self-directed ways ñ the first definition.
But the God Jesus taught about is a God who came after us and bought us back, provided a means of reconciliation. Rita (Andy McDowell) emptied her wallet to buy the one she loved. Christian understanding is that in Jesus God emptied out his life to buy back…us.
On this view, true freedom is to belong to the God who made you, who loves you, and who gave everything to win your friendship. But God gives us a further, ultimate freedom: the freedom to accept this possibility of relating to the Creator or of rejecting it. And that freedom is the scariest of all.
Notes
(1) Scott Peck. The Road Less Travelled. New York: Simon and Schuster 1978. p.81
(2) I am grateful for the suggestion of this analogy to Bill Van Groningen, Christian Reformed chaplain at Queen’s University, Ontario.
(3) The Gospel of John, chapter 8, verse 32.
Going to a movie with Louise is an experience. She absolutely loves movies. But there are some problems. First, there’s the dog. Where does he sit, or lie? Does he prefer his popcorn with or without butter? But mostly there is the constant need for a running commentary. “Why are they laughing?” “It’s just the expression on her face.” “Now he’s getting his gun out.” “She looks as if she’s going to explode.” “They’re all watching the sky.” Louise, if you hadn’t guessed, is blind.
Seeing is absolutely fundamental to the experience of most of us. In the movie, we understand the significance of the raised eyebrow, the glowering red sky, the sign saying “Enter at your own risk”. It is all lost on Louise.
Believing in God has to do with seeing too. I talked to David recently. As we looked out over a lovely winter landscape, he shook his head. “Why can’t everyone see God in that?” “Did you always see God?” I asked. “No”, he replied. “What came first-believing or seeing?” He thought for a minute. “I think I believed a bit, and then I could see a bit, then I believed some more and I could see some more. And now I see it all, all the time.”
The scientist sounds sceptical when believers say that believing comes before seeing. Surely we should only believe what we see? Even scientists don’t always follow that rule. Often advances come because a scientist has a flash of insight into a problem. She believes she has found the answer, rushes to the lab to try it out, and discovers that what she believed actually is the case: it can be seen. Believing first, seeing afterwards. Of course, that kind of believing is itself a kind of seeing, a vision, an in-sight. But not physical seeing: rather, seeing with the eyes of faith.
After a debate once, I began thinking about the man I had debated with. He lives in precisely the same world I inhabit. We walk the same university corridors, are friendly with the same people, eat in the same restaurants and order from the same menu. But all the time, we see things differently. I see God everywhere in my world. I look for God in the lives of the people I meet. I thank God for providing my food. My friend does none of those things. They seem to him bizarre and inappropriate, even neurotic.
To say that people are “spiritually blind” is not an interesting theological theory. It is not the rash overstatement of a zealous evangelist. It is an observable reality. People simply do not see God, where to the believer he is clearly standing and beckoning. They do not believe in him . . . so they cannot see him.
The movie Honey, I shrunk the kids (1989) is not exactly Oscar material. But it says a lot about seeing and believing. Rick Moranis plays the father, an eccentric scientist, who really does shrink his kids, and then by accident sweeps them up and puts them out with the garbage. Before he figures out what has happened, they have begun to make their way painfully, slowly, through the immense jungle of the backyard, to their house.
When realisation dawns, Moranis takes perfectly logical action: he arranges a system whereby he and his wife are suspended from a thing like a rotary clothes line, and scan the ground from a distance of three feet or so with pairs of binoculars, trying to spot their microscopic children. The neighbours decide the scientist and his wife are totally out of their minds. And so by any “normal” standards they are. But to us, the viewers, their actions make perfect sense. We, and they, know that there is a whole world, invisible to full-size people, which needs to be treated with utmost seriousness.
The way believers live is equally eccentric to the agnostic or atheist. Their lifestyle-actions, attitudes, priorities-only makes sense once you understand that they live in the light of a world that is totally invisible to the unaided eye. Then it becomes utterly logical. Believers know something, see something, the unbeliever does not.
But how do you help someone see what they cannot see? In a recent discussion on the existence of God with some philosophy students, I showed them a picture. You may have seen it. Looked at in one way, it is the picture of an old woman’s face. But many people see it as the picture of a young woman’s face. “Who sees a young woman?” I asked. “An old woman? Both?” The class was split three ways. The interesting thing then was to see those who saw both trying to help those who saw only one. The most helpful tool was not a form of reasoning but the index finger: “Look,” they said. “Don’t you see how the old woman’s mouth can be the young woman’s choker?” Philosophy seemed to have gone out of the window. They were learning to see.
Finally, they all got it. But it was hard. Peer pressure certainly helped. “How come all these other people see a young woman and I only see an old woman? Am I stupid or something?” Imaginative effort helped too: “Try to think of the nose on your old woman as a chin”. Sounds strange, but it is the only way. And eventually, for all of them, there came the moment of illumination, the moment when they said, “Aha! Now I see.” They believed that their friends were probably right-that it was not a conspiracy to make fools of them-and eventually their believing led to seeing.
The movie gives another clue. The apparently eccentric couple explain to their sceptical neighbours what has happened-to the neighbours’ children as well as to their own-and little by little the neighbours come to believe that it must be true, because, bizarre though it sounds, it is the only explanation which makes sense of everything that has happened.
So how do people get to see? They have to be convinced that those who say they see are not totally crazy. They have to understand how this new explanation actually makes more sense of things, in spite of its unfamiliarity. They have to be told, little by little, how the world appears once you have this new way of seeing. And, most importantly, they have to want to see, in spite of the cost. Unlike physical blindness, this kind of blindness is to do with choice.
Another word for helping people to see spiritually is evangelism. Living consistently in the light of a world they do not see, so that they begin to feel its reality even before they see it. Talking about the way the world appears to believing eyes. Explaining what we see in the movie called life. Until, sometimes long after, they say, “Now I see for myself what you meant.”
Originally published in Christian Week, 1996
