Playing Goodies and Baddies

  It's amazing to me how persistent the worldview is that puts sharp lines between the goodies and the baddies. We do it all the time. The baddies are...secularists, Muslims etc etc. We take our cues from certain words and images just like the old cowboy films where you could spot who to cheer for because he (always a he) had a light blue suit or hat. The baddie would, funnily enough, always wear black. And even when we think we're beyond such polarisations, we find ourselves judging those that do the judging (this time the baddies are conservative evangelicals, big business etc etc).

This has come home to me again in the horrors around Gaza. I'm so aware that this is an emotive issue, and the last few weeks have witnessed the most appalling acts of terror and unbridled aggression. But the coverage and so many of our responses are in danger of making new baddies (Israel - Jews) and new goodies (Hamas) with all the dangers that that entails.

Real truth is uncomfortable because it implicates everyone. I think that's the stock of the Christian gospel: it challenges 360 degrees. I loved that recent new take on the Western "No Country for Old Men". There's a scene at the end that is a steal from the classic Gary Cooper Western "High Noon". The jaded, cynical, about to retire, sheriff Tommy Lee Jones is sat in front of a large clock as it ticks away. He's talking about the "biggest badass baddie" that has been in town (if you haven't seen "High Noon" Gary Cooper has to face up to the "baddie" arriving on the midday train, sat in his office waiting as it ticks loudly). You realise that for Tommy Lee Jones, the real baddie is actually death itself. No one is obviously sorted and clean, no one can rescue and redeem....Well that's the bleak conclusion to "No Country for Old Men".

But it's a bit nearer to the gospel as I see it: flawed, broken, in need of Jesus, we challenge sin, speak out about justice, but always face the truth of who we are, what the whole of creation is. In essence, it's the fundamental call to make Jesus Lord...not our agendas, not our politics, not even our religion.

Comments

[andii]

Part of the problem culturally is that we don't know what we mean by 'good' and 'bad'. Rather, we have a dualistic conception going on akin to the myth of redemptive violence as per Walter Wink. I've just been seeing some past episodes of 'Charmed' where some of the conceptions of good and bad just do not bear closer scrutiny and look more like the relatively arbitrary labels for opposing sports teams rather than matters of ultimate reality. Now that would not matter were it not for the fact that time and again I see this repeated in popular entertainment and in the reflexive ways that people talk about good and evil.

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*the era has passed, nothing that belongs to it exists any more.