Compassion, Victims, Offenders, and Johnny Manziel

Compassion or No Compassion?
If you are a sports fan (or even if you aren't) you are probably aware of Johnny Manziel. Last season Manziel became the first Freshmen ever to win college football's highest honor, the Heisman Trophy. Since that time, his life has been a trainwreck. He has been in the tabloids on a consistent basis, making bad decision after bad decision. He has regularly alienated his family, his teammates, his coach, and his fans.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard a sports radio show in which one caller said that he felt compassion for Manziel. The host responded by saying that he felt no compassion for Manziel, since he had been handed a silver platter, and then had made all of these bad decisions on his own.
Is Johnny Manziel worthy of compassion? This question brings up a bigger issue.

Victims or Offenders?
A while ago I was having a conversation with my friend Phil Shahbaz and he made a comment that stayed with me. He said that when people behave badly, they do so because they are acting out of a place of pain. His point was that when we, as church leaders, interacted with people who were rude or angry or condescending, that we needed to step back and recognize that their bad behavior was an opportunity for compassion.
Phil's point might seem obvious to many, but this was not the case with me. While I smiled and nodded, in my heart I disagreed. I thought, "No, we don't sin because we are victims of pain. We sin because we are sinners." After all, I attended The Master's College. I embrace evangelical theology. At the core of what I believe about humanity is the teaching that our primary problem is that we are sinful rebels who have offended God and gone our own way. When we behave badly, we don't reveal that we are victims; we reveal that we are guilty.
The more I thought about Phil's comment (and my reaction to it), the more I began to conclude that it is overly simplistic to conclude that we are simply victims or simply offenders. After all, Phil was not denying that we are sinners. And I was not denying that we have pain that impacts us. But most of us champion one of these realities at the expense of the other.
For the record, this is not just a Christian problem. Every four years we get a solid dose of this debate. I know I am oversimplifying here, but most conservatives say that the problem with society is that people are not taking personal responsibility. People need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, own their mistakes, and stop mooching off others. For the most part, conservatives are harder on crime, and they are less supportive of government intervention in bailing people out of their messes.
On the other hand, liberals tend to say that people find themselves in bad situations because they have been kicked around and received a tough lot in life. They are in favor with giving people more chances, and they support government involvement in helping people who are down on their luck.
So, what does the gospel of Jesus say about this? Are we victims or are we offenders?
Scripture definitely does not paint us as innocent victims of this world. We are all sinners, enemies of God, children of wrath. We all have turned away from God to go our own way. In the garden Adam and Eve willfully chose to sin despite the fact that God had shown nothing but goodness to them. We are not simply victims of our difficult circumstances.

Victims and Offenders?
Not simply victims . . . but we all have certainly been victimized. We live in a broken world, surrounded by broken people. Even those of us who grew up with both of our parents around were still raised by broken and sinful people. We grew up with broken and sinful siblings. We've had broken and sinful teachers, broken and sinful friends, broken and sinful neighbors, and broken and sinful employers. The culture around us assaults us with temptations toward further brokenness. Some people in our world have been horrifically victimized through molestation or physical abuse at the hands of those who should have protected them. We all have experienced the crippling pain of loneliness and rejection and harsh words. While we are not simply victims, it does us very little good to overlook the fact that we all have pain.
Through the gospel, Jesus comes to us not only to bear our personal sins, but to bear all of our pain. He does not simply make of innocent before God, but he gives us life in God. He does not simply promise us a future in which we will no longer be guilty, but a future in which we will have no more pain and death, and in which every tear will be wiped away. Jesus acknowledges both our guilt and our pain and he sets us free from both.

Unqualified Compassion
On a practical level, this reality has huge implications not only for how we think of our own pain and sin, but also in how we relate to others. We all experience times when others behave badly toward us. If we see those people simply as victims, then we will dehumanize them by robbing them of the chance to grow and take responsibility for their actions. If we see people simply as offenders, then we will have no compassion on them, since their bad behavior is all their own fault. But if we embrace the gospel, something profound happens. We are able to have compassion on others, even while we hold them responsible for their actions. I can believe that those who hurt me are wrong and sinful. And yet I have compassion that their pain is so deep that they would lash out at me.
As a Christian I can have compassion for prisoners, even when they are guilty of crimes. I can have compassion on the divorced man, even if he was unfaithful. I can have compassion on the pregnant teenager, even while believing that she made bad choices. Compassion is not reserved for the innocent, but can be freely given to all.
Thank God that compassion is not reserved for innocent victims. After all, Christ compassionately came to die for sinners. He freely showed us compassion, and yet he did not dehumanize us by excusing our decisions. We can do the same. The gospel allows us to give people the dignity of believing that their actions have true significance, but it also sets us free to show compassion even to those who exploit their freedom by hurting themselves and others.
With Jesus, compassion is unqualified. It is offered to all. And the more that we realize that we are recipients of divine compassion, the more that we will be set free to offer that compassion to others.

Failed Experiments in Removing Evil

Almost immediately before he lost his mind, M. Night Shyamalan made a movie called The Village. The story revolved around a cloistered community of people who had experienced such pain as a result of human evil that they had looked to remove themselves from society.
The movie was not great, but the theme and the message were great.
Without going into specifics, it became evident that the experiment of seeing if they could remove themselves from evil failed. The reason it failed was that they realized that the evil was not somewhere "out there" in the world. The evil was "in here," inside each one of us. In fact, the greatest evil in the movie was manifested through the person who appeared to be the most innocent.
When God flooded the whole world in Genesis, it was not an experiment. God doesn't do experiments because he knows everything. But when we read it, we experience it as if it was an experiment. God sees the intense evil in the world and he chooses to wipe out humanity and preserve only a small, God-fearing family. As we read we might think, "Okay, this is how God is going to remove evil from the world. He will wipe away all the evil people and preserve only the good people." If this is what we think, we are soon disappointed.
After the flood, Noah and his family ushered in a new start for humanity. In the midst of this, God promised never to use a worldwide flood to wipe out humanity again. But look at what he said when he made this promise in Genesis 8:21: "Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done."
God didn't say, "I will never flood the earth again because I have removed evil by removing all those rotten people. Therefore I will never have a need for another flood." He hadn't removed evil and he knew this. And this reality became unmistakably evident in Genesis 9 when Ham selfishly humiliated and violated his own father. Evil remains. The flood couldn't remove evil because evil is not out there, it is in here.
Ten chapters later, we get a strikingly similar story. Lot and his daughters are removed from the evil city of Sodom. God's angels graciously took them away from the corrupt and evil city. Then, as soon as they are clear of Sodom, Lot's two daughters got their father drunk and seduced him so that they could continue the family line.
I remember one of my professors saying, "You can take the people out of Sodom, but you can't take Sodom out of the people."

Throughout Genesis, God shows us these "experiments" with how to remove evil. All of them fail. God demonstrates that the only true way to deal with evil is not to deal with out external circumstances, but to deal with our own evil hearts. And, in anticipation of the Messiah, this is exactly what he promises in Ezekiel 36:25-27:

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

What Gatsby Teaches Us about Humanity

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favorite authors. I feel a little guilty saying that, since I have only read three of his novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, and The Great Gatsby (many, many times). Still, I have found myself totally engrossed in all three of these novels, despite the fact that none of them are action-driven stories. Fitzgerald has a way of bringing you into a world and allowing you to submerge yourself in it. My wife loves reading fantasy and sci-fi (as well as classics, and, well, pretty much everything). I don't really like reading sci-fi and fantasy; I jokingly tell her that Fitzgerald is my favorite fantasy author because he brings me into a different world.
That said, I was thrilled when I found out that a new movie version of The Great Gatsby is due this December. I was even more thrilled when I found out that Leonardo Dicaprio will star as the title character. It's due out this Christmas. Can't wait!
I got so excited when I heard this news that I had to read the book again, and I did so this last month. It was, as always, a joy to read. Fitzgerald once again transported me into a world in which amoral characters struggled their way through life, trying to make sense of things. The narrator, Nick Carraway, walks the reader through 1920s New York with all its glamour and confusion.
Fitzgerald's choice of Carraway as a narrator is telling because he is probably the least interesting character in the story. We are meant to relate to him. He is everyman. He is unassuming and unexceptional. At one point he tells the reader that he is one of the few honest people he knows.
I won't walk through the entire plot (some of you know it; those of you who don't should read it), but events spiral out of control and tragedy strikes the characters in the story. In the end, Nick Carraway finds himself troubled and often disgusted by the characters in the story, even those who were his closest friends. Fitzgerald is unflinching as he writes about humanity chasing after the wind, pursuing empty and elusive pleasures. While he is not promoting a Christian worldview, he seems to have a grasp on the lostness and evil of mankind.
Or does he?
In this reading, I was struck by the fact that Carraway was disgusted by everyone. . .except himself. This despite the fact that he participated in raucous partying, aided an extramarital affair, assisted in covering up a different affair, and regularly looked the other way when evil and deception ran rampant. He seemed to have no sense of his own culpability in the tragedies that occurred in the book.
I don't know if this is how Fitzgerald saw himself, as an innocent onlooker, watching other human beings make a mess of their lives. But I do know that this is often how we see ourselves. We complain about the loss of morals, about the corruption in Washington, about the warlords in Africa, and about the starvation that results from greed. We are troubled about the evil in the world, but we often overlook our role in it. Even as believers in Jesus, this is easy to do.
The person who has embraced Jesus must never see himself as Nick Carraway, a good and moral person surrounded by evil and corruption (and often looking the other way or helping it continue). The believer must embrace the fact that he is Gatsby, he is Tom Buchanan, he is Meyer Wolfsheim (these allusions are much more meaningful if you know the book). We are Hitler and Bin Laden and O.J. Simpson. We are broken and lost and evil people who are only rescued from the evil in the world and the evil within by the powerful sacrifice of Jesus Christ and by his certain return.
Fitzgerald brilliantly walks us through a journey of humanity's empty pursuit of meaning under the sun. However, he gives us no real solution. The incarnation of Jesus Christ brings the meaning and salvation that we so long for.

Are We All Breaking Bad?

The critically acclaimed television show Breaking Bad begins with a normal high school science teacher and family man named Walter White living an average suburban life. The show then follows Walter as he begins to make destructive decisions ("breaking bad" is a saying that refers to someone who is making poor choices). This average person slowly but surely makes compromises and justifies his actions. Sometimes his decisions are so extreme that they are only believable because of the deep inner turmoil that is evident in the character. On the one hand, he knows that what he is doing is wrong. On the other hand, he finds ways to sear his conscience so that he can avoid condemning himself.
The reason the show is so powerful and relevant is that those of us who are average suburban Americans have a hard time separating ourselves from Walter White. He's a normal person who loves his family and tries to make a living. We want to look at his actions and condemn him as evil, but we see too much of ourselves in him.
Breaking Bad brings out a profound truth about the darkness of humanity. We like to believe that there are good guys (us and our friends) and bad guys (drug traffickers, pimps, and lawyers). We like to believe that we may be capable of small sins (lower case "s"), but that only evil people are capable of really bad Sins (murder, rape, exploitation, oppression). As much as this belief seems appealing, it is in no way biblical. The biblical truth is much more dark and grim (and much closer to Breaking Bad than to the normal Christian perception).
Most Bible believing Christians have a hard time with the fact that the Bible teaches that all people are broken. The Bible teaches that this brokenness not only refers to the fact that we are victims, but to the reality that we are also victimizers. We are both the oppressed and the oppressors.
In Matthew 7:11 Jesus casually referred to average fathers as "evil." Romans 3:9-20 is a grim passage about the utter wickedness of humanity. Jesus himself said that no one except God should even be called "good" (Matthew 19:17).
Despite this, we routinely refer to ourselves and others as "good persons." And when we're accused of doing something wrong, we respond with phrases like, "What kind of a person do you think I am?" and "How could you think that about me?" and "I would never do that!"

These phrases reveal that in our heart of hearts we don't embrace the biblical teaching about our own darkness. We still think we aren't capable of the really bad sins. This thinking will lead us down the roads of denial and self-justification. After all, these roads are necessary to reach the destination of pronouncing ourselves "good persons." This thinking also leads us to revel in our own "goodness" and despise others for being so "bad."
On the other hand, when we embrace what the Bible says about our own brokenness (a painful reality), some wonderful things begin to happen. For starters, we begin to revel not in our own goodness, but in the grace of God that Jesus bought with his precious blood. We also begin to rely more completely on God's daily grace and help as we look to say "No" to the slavery of sin and "Yes" to the freedom that God brings. And on top of this we begin to see the broken people around us as people who are in need of the same grace that we need.
We make a significant mistake when we underestimate our own potential for evil. When we do this, we put ourselves in danger of denial and self-justification. And we also miss out on the joy that comes with coming face to face with our own wickedness and seeing God love us through it.