"as it is written,
'There is none righteous, not even one;"
Romans 3:10
In the past year there have been two significant
shootings in Europe. One took place in Norway and was accompanied by a bomb,
and the other in France at a Jewish school. I thought the response of the
people from these countries was interesting and I have a few thoughts.
In both cases the gut reaction was to declare the
criminal to be crazy. This reminded me of one of my favorite movies, the 1995
thriller Seven, in which a serial
killer undertakes a sequence of murders according to the seven deadly sins.
Throughout this movie, the two detectives (played by Morgan Freeman and Brad
Pitt) are having a continual conversation about the saneness of the killer. The
young, naïve Brad Pitt insists that the actions of this murderer come from his
mental problems, while the more experienced Morgan Freeman argues that his
actions come from the simple fact that he is sanely choosing to do evil things.
At the end of the movie they meet the killer and discover
that he is closer to a genius than a madman. He has full charge of his
faculties and knows exactly what he is doing. The movie is a powerful message
about the depravity of man, as Brad Pitt’s character soon learns that he is
also capable of the sin that he had formally stood as judge over. In the end,
he was just as adept at murder as the serial killer.
Freeman’s character
understood human depravity from his years of police work. We have the
opportunity to understand it from God’s word. Romans 3:10-20 is an emphatic
statement about the true nature of humanity. It boldly affirms that no one is
righteous. This is not merely a theological doctrine but a terrifying and
ever-present reality. People are evil. This scares us.
And, because this
scares us, we want to imitate Brad Pitt’s character and write these killers off
as crazy. If they were less than human then we would not be capable of their
sin. We could continue to think of mankind as basically good and not have to
worry that we have weaknesses of our own. The frightening truth, however, is
that these killers do not represent an aberration from the norm. The same
weakness that dwells in them also abides in us. Mankind is not basically
good…and neither am I.
The European
killers ended up being remarkably similar to the killer in the movie Seven. One had a far right-winged political
agenda, and the other was a militant Islamist. They knew what they were doing
and did it intentionally, much the same way we intentionally choose to hate our
brothers and rebel against God. These crimes shatter the humanism of our
postmodern world and force us to a higher ethic. We answer to God’s law, and we
will be judged by it. Perhaps God will have mercy on us murderers
Seven
ends with a great line by Morgan Freeman’s character in which he quotes from For Whom the Bell Tolls. He says, "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine
place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part." Indeed.
