The scriptures referred to are in the text.
Jimmy, a newly minted doctor, returns to his idyllic hometown to join the practice of Dr. Cook. Dr. Cook acted as a surrogate father to Jimmy when his own abusive father died. Everyone loves Dr. Cook, who has devoted his life to 2 things: the town and his garden. While working for the good doctor, Jimmy finds something disturbing. The patients' charts contain the same code the doctor uses in the card catalog for his award-winning garden. Specifically, the letter “P” appears in both. For the flowers it means “Prune.” So why is it also found in the charts of patients who have died, like Jimmy's father? The young man confronts his mentor and is horrified to discover that his town is so wonderful precisely because Dr. Cook has been “pruning” it of the bad people. The 2 men fight and Dr. Cook falls, clutching his chest. He asks Jimmy to go get his heart medicine. Jimmy starts to but then hesitates. If he does nothing, Dr. Cook will die and be remembered as a beloved man and not as a monster. The town need never know what he was doing. The dying doctor looks at the young man and recognizes that train of thought. His last words are, “You see how it starts.”
When I saw this movie of the week, Dr. Cook's Garden, in 1970, I was blown away by that chilling last line. Here was a mystery that had a moral. Or rather it asked an ethical question. Is it ever right to play God in this way, eliminating evil by killing bad people? The writer was Ira Levin and many of his plays, novels and films revolve around that question. In Rosemary's Baby the question might be restated, “If you knew your infant was the Anti-Christ, would you murder it or nurture it?” In The Boys from Brazil a Holocaust survivor turned Nazi-hunter uncovers a plot to clone Hitler—several times over! At the end of the story he refuses to give the list of the boys' names and locations to a member of the Jewish Defense League for fear that they will kill the boys. He would be no better than Hitler were he to have children killed simply because of their genetic origin.
Though he was an atheist, perhaps it is the fact that Levin majored in philosophy that led him to pose these questions. Anyway, his thrillers, like The Stepford Wives, do tend to make us think about the ways in which we might be tempted to play God. And that was part of the reason I took a role in Marathon Community Theaters' production of one of his lesser known plays, Veronica's Room. (Well, that and the fact that the director kept after me about it for the better part of a year.) It is one of Levin's darker stories.
A young woman named Susan and a young man named Larry are at a restaurant on a date when a charming and elderly Irish couple approach her about how strongly she resembles Veronica, the long dead daughter of their deceased employers. They talk them into coming to the old mansion where they work, taking care of Veronica's ailing sister Cassie. They show her Veronica's room and eventually ask her if she would dress up as Veronica. They want her to assure Cassie, who has dementia and thinks it is still 1935, that her sister Veronica, who died of TB, hasn't abandoned her because she hates her. Susan consents. But when they go to get Cassie the couple locks Susan in the room.
In the second act, everything has changed. The older couple aren't elderly or Irish. They call Susan Veronica and treat her as a rebellious daughter who is making this Susan stuff up. They tell her it is 1935 and she has been locked in her room because at age 15, she seduced her younger brother Conrad and killed 13 year old Cassie to keep her from telling their parents. Susan vigorously denies this. Her hope of being rescued by Larry is dashed when he reappears as Dr. Simpson who is treating her for her delusions. She denies she is Veronica to him but when the 2 men hold her down to give her a sedative, she stops fighting and says they were right after all. She is Veronica, she did kill her sister and asks for forgiveness. The parents discuss this but the older woman says, “We don't forgive you, Veronica. We kill you.” And as the 2 men hold her down, she smothers her. Then the young man claims the body.
It turns out the older couple are Veronica and Conrad and the young man is their son, whom they simply call “Boy.” They have enacted this psychodrama before in an attempt to help Veronica feel that her terrible deeds with her siblings have been punished. But she doesn't feel that this time it's done the trick though Conrad reminds her this was to be the last time. He tries to get her to leave the room but Veronica still does not feel freed from her sins. She starts acting like she is 15 and imprisoned again. As she pleads with her parents to let her out, Conrad fearfully locks the door on his mad sister/lover.
Creepy, huh? So why would I, then a priest-to-be, want to be part of what my mentor Father Ed Winsor cheerfully called “a fine bunch of sickos?” Well, as repugnant as the subject matter is, it is not as far-fetched as we'd like to believe. While the play was in rehearsal, we, the cast, were shocked by a news story about a 15 year old girl who convinced her 10 year old brother to hold down their 6 year old brother while she killed him. And, as we see in Genesis, fratricide, killing a sibling, is a very old crime. (Genesis 4:1-16) Sadly, stories pop up from time to time about brothers and sisters in incestuous relationships. One such couple here in Florida not only had a large family together but the brother was suspected of fathering his own grandchildren. Shades of Lot and his daughters! (Genesis 19:30-38) When it comes to evil, as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
But what actually interested me to this play was a new wrinkle to Ira Levin's obsession with people playing God. Here the issue is not merely ethical but theological. Veronica is not killing someone evil to prevent future evil from being committed; she is killing someone innocent to erase evil done in the past. She is trying to perform her own private substitutionary atonement.
When we say that Christ died for our sins, what do we mean? Do we mean that God needed to punish someone and Jesus volunteered so God took it out on him? That's what many people, including some Christians, think is going on at the cross. But that makes God a person with anger management problems. He doesn't care whom he hits as long as he hits someone. That sounds more like a diabolical spirit than the God of love Jesus preached.
Some treat sin as a purely legal issue. God makes laws. We break them. Someone has to be punished in order that the demands of the law are satisfied. So God and his son engineered this tricky way to let us off the hook. But is that what the universe is like? Is God just some slick lawyer? Worse than that, is God himself under the law so that he has to figure out a legal way to get around it?
Even the scribes and Pharisees felt that the law was an expression of God's nature. God is good and holy and just and so is the law. (Romans 7:12) God is eternal and so is his word, which includes his moral laws. (Psalm 119:89, 91, 144) His moral laws are like the laws of physics: they are descriptions of how the universe that he made works. They are not arbitrarily chosen rules of ethical etiquette. When the God who is love creates a world, it means things like murder and theft and unfaithfulness and envy and greed and arrogance run contrary to the principles behind creation. (1 John 4:8; Romans 13:10) Which means they have negative consequences which ripple through the fabric of our interconnected lives.
So why did God make it possible to break his moral laws unlike, say, the law of gravity? Precisely because he is a God of love. He made us in his image. And to truly love someone you must do so voluntarily. He could have made a sinless world. Disney has and you can tour it. Hundreds of cute robots cavort and sing a relentlessly cheerful tune of peace and harmony. But they have no choice. They are programmed to look and sound loving, but it is a sham, just like the sexy come-hither looks of models in ads. Real love involves choice. Real love involves risk. A world without choice and risk would be a small, small world after all.
God has allowed us to live in a large world with many possibilities for expressing our love for him and for others and for his creation. It is also a world in which we can choose not to love him or our fellow human beings. He calls this attitude towards life sin. And because sin goes against the principles of a healthy life it is a spiritual disease. Our individual sins are the symptoms of the spiritual malaise that causes us to turn from the source of love and pursue our selfish ends. Eventually, these turn out to be dead ends and they result in the death of our spirit which we call hell. Hell is a self-imposed exile from God. Just as Veronica is really imprisoned in her mind, we find ourselves so committed to our illusions of being in control of our lives and our pride in our knowing better than God about how we should live that we bar ourselves from true joy. We are locked into the course our lives take by our sins and our regrets and our compromises.
But if God has created a world in which the choice not to love is a possibility, he has also provided a remedy for that. The way out is not to deny our sins, nor to ignore them, nor to project them onto others. Veronica is trying to create her own personal scapegoat but, like most people, she doesn't understand what that means.
In ancient Israel on the Day of Atonement, 2 goats were brought to the high priest. One was sacrificed for the sins of the people and its blood was sprinkled on the altar and the objects in the tabernacle to cleanse them. The high priest would lay his hands on the head of the other goat and recite the people's sins, symbolically placing them on it. Then it was released into the desert where demons were thought to dwell. (Leviticus 16: 7-22) This enacted the 2 major consequences of sin: death and exile. Thus a scapegoat is not someone you blame for your sins. You must admit to your sins. (Leviticus 26:40; 1 John 1:8-9) Only then does the fate of the scapegoat bring redemption.
I do not mean to imply that what Jesus did on the cross was merely symbolically taking on our sins. It was not some extreme display of God's love for his lost creatures. Look at it this way. You may have heard of the butterfly effect. Chaos theory and quantum physics have turned cause and effect on their heads. The world is so complex that the flutter of a butterfly's wings in China may mushroom into a storm on the other side of the globe. The spiritual realm works the same way. Ever have a day where everyone at work seems to be having their own individual bad days and it turns into a group bad day? In his movie Do The Right Thing Spike Lee shows how the accumulated hate, pettiness, bickering and misfortune of several characters in a neighborhood can eventually come together and lead to a riot that nobody wanted. The general rebelliousness and disunity of the world affects everyone in ways we cannot always see and understand. Basically, the cross stands at the confluence of all of humanity's sins. Jesus put himself there and took the brunt of all the harm we have done.
Jesus' death on the cross was not merely a legal requirement for our forgiveness by God, nor was it a grisly object lesson. It was necessary for our redemption in the same way that for a dying man to receive a new heart, the heart donor must die. On some cosmic level, Jesus had to die for us to receive new life in Christ, that is, his life. And the source of all life had to undergo death in order to reverse its power over us. And reverse it he does. After 3 days days in the grasp of death, Jesus bursts from the tomb, transformed and transforming. Now there are no boundaries to stop the Lord of love; there are no dark corners he cannot illuminate; there is no guilt he cannot heal.
And we are not talking merely about guilt feelings. Veronica's family is trying to create a scapegoat to remove her feelings of guilt. But she is still guilty of her crimes and does not herself confess to them nor renounce them. She and Conrad still live in incest. Not only has she not come to terms with her murder of Cissie, but they are all guilty of the murder of who knows how many pseudo-Veronicas. And they feed the necrophiliac habits of the product of their twisted love, a child they never named but only call “Boy.”
A lot of people confuse guilt feelings with real guilt. But the 2 are not the same. We all know of people who, while guilty of some great evil, do not feel guilty. And we all know people who feel guilty about things that are not their fault. What Jesus did removes our actual guilt. When we acknowledge the outrages we have committed against God, against those created in his image, and against the rest of his creation, and then invite his Spirit into our hearts, we unite ourselves to him. And Jesus' death to sin and rising to new life becomes ours. Think of it as a blood transfusion. A donor gives her blood that it might give life back to someone dying. A part of her enters that person and heals him and revives him and unites him to her. You may remember Nicholas Green, that little boy who was killed by bandits while he and his family were vacationing in Italy in 1994. His parents decided to give his body over to be used for transplants. His eyes help others see, his heart beats in someone's chest, his liver cleanses and invigorates another person. He is in them and they are a part of him and they are now linked to each other through him. We too are united in the body and blood of Christ, whose gave his life for us and to us and whose resurrection promises possibilities we cannot conceive. (Ephesians 3:20)
The guilty project their sins onto the innocent and make them suffer for it. In that sense, Veronica's Room is just a grotesque parody of how we all victimize each other. But Jesus voluntarily takes on the role of victim only to transform it into the rule of the victor over death and sin. Only by facing our guilt, asking for forgiveness and granting it to others, by aligning our will with his and living in his Spirit, can we transcend those prisons of the soul that threaten to smother us and find instead the true freedom to act in love as we were created to do.
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