A Reflection for Lent: Evil

We stand less than two weeks from Easter and anticipation of the resurrection is growing. However, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that Lent still continues until then. In my own reflections and readings during Lent I have been thinking recently about evil.

Evil is something that we often attach to others. Hitler was evil. Osama was evil. Big government is evil. Etc. This is so easy and natural for us to do. It is like breathing.

But as I journey through Lent, I am reminded that evil is not found primarily in others. Evil is also not far off. Evil lives in me. As N.T. Wright has said, "[T]he line between good and evil is never simply between 'us' and 'them.' The line between good and evil runs through each of us" (Evil and the Justice of God, 38.) Yes it is true that I have been forgiven and redeemed by Christ. Yes it is true that the Holy Spirit lives within me. But it is also true that until Christ returns, I am marred by sin and evil.

In watching the "Noah" movie this past weekend, one line from a conversation between Noah and his wife stuck in my mind. His wife was attempting to convince Noah that he and their family were basically good people. He responds by saying, "And yet, wouldn't we readily kill others to protect our children?" The fact is, when things are stripped away from us, when we feel our lives threatened, we too easily revert to those basic sinful tendencies--greed, selfishness, pride, lust, violence.

One of the things that saddens and frustrates me is the culture of anger and blame-setting I see on Facebook among other places. We as a culture are so quick to place and accuse others. Don't get me wrong, I think it is good to stand against injustice. But what I see people posting so often is inflammatory, accusatory, prideful, and (quite honestly) impulsive and ignorant. We seem to think that those who shout the loudest will be found in the right.

But what if we learned from this season and took a lesson from the cross? What if we recognized that the problem was not always in the others whom we quickly blame, but is often within ourselves? If we recognized that we don't really have much claim to the moral high ground, maybe our speech and actions would be marked with more humility.

The message of the cross is that sin and evil are real. And, it is not just a reality for "bad" people, it is a reality for ALL people. Jesus had to die for me as well as for "them." Furthermore, I am called to "take up the cross." This is not some nice metaphor for enduring hardships or sickness. It is a call to self-denial. On the cross I choose to crucify my selfish desires. I choose to sacrifice my rights for the sake of others. I choose to admit that I have sin in need of crucifying as well. May we take this message to heart during these final weeks of Lent so that when Easter comes, we can be all the more thankful that the Resurrection can overcome even an evil heart like mine.

Noah movie review blog (or novel...)

I finally saw “Noah” in theaters this weekend. I know there have been countless articles and blog posts about the movie already, but here are a few my thoughts. [Spoiler alert]

First, one of my hopes going into this movie was that seeing an interpretation of the story that relies heavily on extra-biblical sources might “break open” our own interpretation of the Noah story and help us see new aspects of it we may have missed before. Here are some ways in which I felt the movie succeeded.

1. I was reminded of the theme in Genesis 1-11 that cities are bad.

In the movie, the line of Cain develops industrialized cities and civilizations. This is portrayed negatively in the film as these cities end up destroying God’s good creation. Interestingly enough, in Gen. 1-11 we also find cities portrayed negatively. In the genealogies of Cain and Seth (Gen. 4-5) the only cities mentioned are in the fallen line of Cain. In fact, the first comment about Cain besides the fact that he gained a son is that he “built a city” (4:17). Likewise, in the post-flood world, the only cities mentioned are in connection with the fallen line of Ham. Eventually, the evil city-building finds its climax in the story of the Tower of Babel (“Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower” in 11:4). God deals with this sin by “scattering” the people.

This common theme should force us to look closer at the biblical text. Why does Gen. 1-11 depict cities as a challenge to God? The movie claims that such industrialization destroys the good earth. While this may be true today, it probably was not the main issue for the writer of Genesis. This is a import from our modern culture. Rather, in Genesis the problem is that God twice commands humans to “multiply” and “fill the earth”—once after Creation and once after the flood. Gathering in cities rather than scattering across the earth is direct disobedience of this command. In Genesis, cities are not inherently evil, but only evil in so far as they are built in opposition to the decrees of God.

2. Which brings us to the matter of ecology

Many Christians have critiqued the movie because the director depicts Noah as an ancient environmentalist. I agree insofar as saying that the strong emphasis on environmental issues has been imported into the text from our modern world. However, at least the writers and director are conscious of this imposition. Many Christian movies about the Bible have been made with little knowledge or awareness that their storytelling is also an interpretation influenced by their cultural biases.

That being said, perhaps we need an ecological reading of Genesis 1-11. American Christians have been far too dualistic in the past when it comes to thinking about the earth. Faulty thinking about the afterlife has taught many of us that we simply go to heaven when we die, so ecological endeavors are pointless. This world is going to burn after all, right? But if we remember that the Bible teaches resurrection—an affirmation of God’s good creation—then suddenly we must be more conscious of our earthly actions. God created the world and called it “good.” Why would he throw His masterpiece into the trash in the end?

Hopefully this movie refocuses our attention on Gen. 2:15 where God commands the man to “cultivate and protect” the garden. Creation does not exist simply for our own benefit. We are co-creators tasked with overseeing and being good stewards of God’s created world.

Maybe Noah will also help us expand our vision of salvation. God’s salvation through Jesus is not just about “saving souls.” It is about redeeming all of God’s good creation. Paul says in Romans that all creation “groans” and “waits for the sons of God to be revealed” (Rom 8:18-25). Paul says all the earth (animals and plants included) has been cursed because of our sin. Therefore, God’s ultimate plan for salvation includes redeeming and restoring that good creation. In that light, Russell Crowe’s Noah doesn’t sound all that unbiblical.

3. This is a dark story

Perhaps another reason many Christians got up in arms about the film was that this is not a “safe for the whole family” story. We sometimes have a bad knack of taming down the rough patches in the Bible. I remember watching an atheist rant on a YouTube video about a baby’s bible. He pointed out that key biblical stories, like Noah, David/Goliath, and the Crucifixion, completely omitted the ugly parts. For example, few children’s Bibles talk about (or illustrate) why Noah got to go on a fun wooden cruise with zoo animals.

Now, I’m not for destroying the innocence of children too quickly (another theme of the movie ironically), but I do think this same thinking affects us as adults. Have we as adult Christians truly pondered the dark places of the Bible? Or, are we still stuck in Kindergarten Sunday School mode? Do we think of rainbows and zoo animals when we hear Noah’s name, or do we think of the devastation of the world and the massive loss of human life that was the result of sin?

This new movie forces us to come face to face with the ugliness of sin and the tragedy it causes in the biblical story. One of the most haunting images of the film was a picture of the final surviving humans clinging to the last dry land of a mountain. Noah’s family hears the victims crying out, and then we see them, futilely clawing past each other like zombies to escape their fate. It reminded me that this too is in the story of Noah. While the text may not spell it out, have we seriously considered the line “All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind” (7:21)?

4. Christians critiqued Noah’s character for the wrong reason

In reading the critical reviews of the film, one thing that kept coming up over and over again was Noah’s “homicidal” character. How could any film-maker portray Noah as a person ready to kill his own granddaughter? More on this in the next point. However, by the end of the film, Noah shows mercy and chooses love. With that in mind, I think Christian critics completely missed another way they could have attacked the movie’s depiction of Noah (probably because many critics hadn’t even seen the movie when they started throwing accusations).

Toward the end of the film we get an interpretation of Noah’s drunken nakedness (which is in the Bible by the way). In the biblical text, Ham sees Noah’s nakedness, but does not cover his father. Instead, he tells his brothers who in turn cover Noah (just as in the movie). It is at this point that the film diverges from the text. In the movie Noah is grieved over Ham’s actions, but still offers a blessing for Ham in the final scene. This has the effect of us ending with a “good” Noah in the film. No longer is Noah a homicidal maniac, but a good patriarch. Meanwhile, in the Bible there is a total break between Ham and Noah. In the Bible, Noah curses Ham and his descendants. There is no ooey-gooey family love here. If the movie’s portrayal of the biblical Noah is to be critiqued, we should really critique it on its sugar-coating of the family dynamics at the end. But, like us Christians, we can easily turn family into an idol that comes before faithfulness.

5. IS humanity worth saving?

One final area many Christians were dissatisfied with was the cinematic Noah’s willingness to let humanity die out. Some Christian critics pointed to Gen. 1 to remind us that humans were made in God’s image. We are more valuable than animals, so of course the ark was to save humans, not creation. As above, perhaps we do think a little too highly of ourselves when it comes to salvation. Nonetheless, this question—Is humanity worth saving?—is a central theme of the movie. And, I think it is a good (and perhaps biblical) theme.

One of my friends pointed out to me that Noah’s “offering” to God and the rainbow scene are misplaced in the film. The order of Noah’s drunkenness and the offering/rainbow scene are reversed in the movie from its biblical order. In the Bible, the last major detail we hear about Noah is his wine debacle. This scene serves almost as a second Fall for the second creation. If you thought humans had escaped sin, you were wrong. And very quickly, sin once again escalates as we read genealogies of Israel’s enemies and hear the story of Babel. Even restarting humanity was not enough to get humans on the right track. By the time we arrive at Genesis 11, the reader should be asking, “Is there any hope? How can the cycle of sin and death ever be broken?”

This is essentially the question Noah wrestles with in the movie. He understands very correctly that evil runs through all of us. Too often we want to say with Noah’s wife that we are good people. The evil ones are “them.” But as Crowe’s Noah points out in the film, all of us are tainted by sin. None of us is good. (Isn’t this the starting point of our understanding of the Gospel.) Therefore, I can sympathize with Noah as he contemplates cutting off humanity’s future. If humans can’t escape sin and evil, maybe they should just die off to fulfill God’s command to “protect” creation (Gen. 2:15).

Yet, the film pushes us between alternate extremes. While Noah stresses human sinfulness (which is true), others including Tubal-Cain emphasize humanity as the valued “image of God” (which is also true). And both are in Genesis. Genesis 1 stresses that humans are the pinnacle of creation and are to “rule over” creation. But, then Genesis 2 places humans alongside the rest of the created order and also calls us to “protect” the garden of God. The beauty of the film is that is forces us to consider both sides and struggle to find the healthy middle ground between mercy and justice and between creation abuse and creation worship.

----------------------

I know this is a very long post and that I probably should have made at least two posts, but I need to type this while it is still fresh in my mind. So, if you’ve read this far, bear with me for two more quick points.

Another theme I loved concerned the silence of God. In one provocative scene, the villain Tubal-Cain cries out to the Creator asking him to speak. He desires God to end the silence, but there is no answer. A little later in the film, Noah pleads to God to help him decide what to do about his pregnant daughter-in-law. But instead of an answer, the sky clouds up more and Noah is met with silence.

This theme resonated with me because I have often had to deal with the silence of God. There have been times in my life when, like Tubal-Cain, I have shouted out, “Why don’t you answer?!” The film makes me ask about how to respond when it seems like God does not. This is a tough question worthy of another post, but I think a good question we Christians should take more seriously.

Second, at the end of the movie I couldn’t help but think how our current evangelical obsession with biblical literalism has caused us to miss some amazing opportunities. Once the credits began to roll, I heard one man in front of me (presumably a Christian) remark to his wife, “Well that was funny wasn’t it?” My first reaction was to wonder if we had even watched the same movie. Yes, a movie filled with violence, slavery, murder, contemplated infanticide, strained parent-child relations, and the death of thousands is “funny.” While I shed a few tears, all he could say at the end was that it was “funny.”

Of course, I knew what he was implying—the movie was not “biblically accurate.” It was “funny” to him because this Noah was nothing like the Noah he envisions when he reads Genesis. This is the attitude I think that drove almost all of the negative Christian reviews. My reply to that is simply, “Yes, it is ‘biblically inaccurate,’ but let’s get over it.”

Does a story have to be exactly what is contained in the Bible for it to carry truth? Even then, when it comes to the extra-biblical material, how do we really even know it couldn’t have been similar to the Bible’s contention? While the movie did contain some really off-the-wall moments (rock giants, anyone?) I have also heard some pretty off-the-wall ideas from conservative Christians when it comes to Genesis (such as a “firmament” of water surrounding the earth and peculiar views of the Nephilim that go way beyond anything the Bible says). The bottom line is there is much about the world of Gen. 1-11 we simply don’t know and never will.

With that being said, we need to view this movie as a work of art, not an attempt to recreate a historical account of how the Noah story actually might have happened. If we can get beyond the biblical “inaccuracies” (while not ignoring them) and really dig into the themes, we may find that this movie contains some powerful truths and questions for us to ponder as Bible-believing Christians.

Along that line, maybe we need to view the movie as a Midrash of the flood narrative. In ancient Judaism, rabbis would often take familiar Old Testament stories and add new twists or details in order to deliver a new theological point. (For an interesting look at how this movie employs some actual Jewish Midrash, check out this article.) What do these new (and yes, extra-biblical) details in the movie reveal about us as people and about our culture? What truths and questions do the themes push us toward? Does the movie allow us to rediscover truths in Genesis that we have overlooked for too long?

In the end, I don’t believe this movie is an attack on Christians or even on the Bible. There will certainly biblically illiterate people who will think this is all in the Bible, and we should gently point them to the actual story. But for the rest of us, maybe we can step back and learn something from a movie that was very intentionally and artfully constructed. Or, if you can’t do that, at least go see it to make fun of some rock giants.

*If you aren’t sick of reading yet, you may also check out this article containing an interview with one of the writers.