Everyone is a good guy

(Note: a version of this editorial was published in the Northfield news in March of 2018.)

Everyone is a good guy.

This requires some explanation.

When someone –in or outside my congregation - is struggling with some action that caused (or is causing) harm to someone else, I often find an eagerness to tell me just why it was the only right action, why it had to happen that way, why it was in fact a good thing to do.

I was talking with a colleague about this, and he told me a story about a parishioner who had abandoned a destitute wife and children in another state decades before – because “God called me to this city to preach for a Holy Ghost revival.” As an old man in a nursing home, he was still telling that story. The city in which he found himself did not have any such transformative experience, and he found himself with no congregation or following to speak of. His children did not come to his funeral.

That’s a sad story of a man insistent, even in the face of strong evidence, that he was the good guy.

He is not alone. For example, the perpetrator of the Mother Bethel AME Church shooting in Charleston in 2015 was clear his intent was to start a “race war” in America. The shooter at the Orlando PULSE Nightclub had been radicalized by ISISrelated online propaganda, and was reported by coworkers to have expressed negative views on Jewish people, Hispanic people, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The shooter at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, CO, called himself a “warrior for the babies,” and had praised previous attackers on abortion providers for doing “God’s work.” The shooter at a congressional Republican baseball practice in Northern Virginia in 2017 belonged to Facebook groups called, “Terminate the Republicans” and “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans.” Covenant Presbyterian School in Tennessee, the University of Oklahoma in Norman, the Isle of Palms. . .2023 has begun with its own horrifying litany of death by gun, and each shooter had some reason they did what they did – some left manifestos, some a series of disturbing conversations, others social media histories: but the common denominator for each of them was that each one took up a gun as their major tool to right what they believed was wrong.

Each thought they were doing the right thing when they took weapons in hand and started shooting. Each one thought that he was the good guy with the gun.

Repentance follows an act of harm – some of these shooters will never come to that, because they remain convinced that they are in the right. While for some this is a function of illness, we need to be very careful in attributing all such actions to mental health issues: every country in the world has people who suffer from mental illness, but not all have the same rates of firearm deaths. Ill or no, left to our own devices, we will always self-select as the good guys in the story we are telling. And we can be very, very stubborn about that.

Every story has a villain, a victim, and a hero. That is what electrifies the Christian story during holy week. Each year we stand with the crowd as they cry, “CRUCIFY HIM! CRUCIFY HIM!” We cast ourselves as the villains in the story – those who demand the death of the innocent to appease the powerful, those who wash their hands of Jesus’ fate, those who jeer as he is raised on a cross against an indifferent sky. We do this to remind ourselves that we are the bad guys in the story, in need of Repentance and in need of resurrection.

If, as Paul writes, “there is not one righteous; no! Not one” (Romans 3:10), we should wonder in humility whether any of us ever could be, with a gun, “the good guy.” I have my doubts about myself. And as followers of Jesus, our mandate does not come from the bill of rights or any other government document, but from the commandment to love God and our neighbor as ourselves. It is ultimately our obedience to these commandments – not our self-righteous commitments, however satisfying the anger – that will determine whether we were the good guy in the story God is writing.

Blessings,

Rachel