So did you see the movie? I loved/hated it. My humanitarian, peacemaking, conflict-mediating, follow-the-golden-rule self could hardly watch its characterizations of evil — not just on the side of the movie’s antagonists but in its protagonists as well. Like the chant sounded so often by the stump speeches of the leaders of our more liberal party, “GM is alive; Osama Bin Laden is dead” (which has, in fact, stirred my justice-seeking, evil-attacking, take-no-prisoners self to join its refrain a few times over), the presentation of the protagonists’ attack on darkness by utilizing weapons of darkness awakened an unholy hatred within me — which made me feel joyously and bitterly triumphal at the movie’s end.
In short, “Zero Dark Thirty” shook me to the core.
Living as I do in a relatively safe, moderately affluent, suburban community affords me the luxury of owning no weapons. Heck, I’ve never shot a gun of any kind (unless you count a BB gun — shot just once when I was a teenager). Oh, I’ve faced evils in life, the worst coming in my church office, as I’ve counseled with victims of sexual abuse. But while their stories provoked a “castrate that man” response deep in my soul, I generally suppressed that impulse both out of the victims’ need to talk to a non-anxious counselor and out of my innate desire to maintain professional decorum. Apart from those pastoral encounters, my own experience of evil has come in the standard battles with the seven deadly sins’ lures that tempt everyday humans.
I’ve never found myself pouring my every waking minute into the pursuit of a monster, as did Maya (played by Jessica Chastain), the young CIA operative, who led “history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man,” as the Oscar-nominated movie has been billed.
But when it came to the evils of his day, Jesus didn’t maintain his professional decorum. He didn’t glide above at a treetop’s distance. When he encountered a man-turned-maniac due to demon possession, he wrestled him free from the evil spirit. When meeting a group of lepers, he didn’t look the other way. He touched them — sharing germs with them. And he healed them. When he met the woman caught in adultery — and her accusers — he got his hands dirty, pronouncing divine forgiveness on her and repudiation to them. When he faced the hypocrisy of the religious, he confronted them in terms that would embarrass us if we were to really listen to his tales of “Woe!” in the shrill tone of voice he most certainly used.
Most of all, when cynically betrayed, dishonestly denied, illegally tried, dismissively humiliated, monstrously tortured and brutally executed, his dying self did not understate his suffering. He did not cry out “Father, excuse them, their hearts are in the right place.” He did cry out, “Father, forgive them.” He absorbed the punishing blows of their evil acts against him — bestowing upon them the gift of forgiveness that only a victim can give.
Then his fully human but also fully divine self encountered the ultimate darkness, vanquishing the devil and all his works, and rising victorious over the darkness of death on the glorious third day. Like the Navy SEALs who completed Maya’s work by taking out the monster of 9-11, Jesus’ dark Saturday conquest brought an Easter victory that freed his whole kingdom’s realm that had been paralyzed by the specter of the enemy’s next attack. Christ’s resurrection not only threw open heaven’s gates for an ultimate entry for those dying in faith; it also brought an empowerment to the whole family of God that can come only when the enemy of one’s soul is stripped of its power.
If we will allow ourselves to watch the high-definition, widescreen version of “Zero Dark Holy Week” we will see that the happy ending comes only by way of an ugly, painful encounter with the darkest of evils that the world has ever seen. But when we allow our eyes to behold the true story of the price paid by our Savior’s own encounters with darkness, we there will find the liberation that he has bequeathed to us.
