“Good Guys and Bad Guys”

Sunday, May 16, 2021

We use many different tools to make sense of the world around us.  Some of these tools were built by people like us—the instruments in our vehicles that tell us how fast we’re moving, the news media we use to stay informed about what’s happening across the world, the phones that allow us to easily communicate and make plans with distant friends and relatives, and other things like these.  Then, there are tools we didn’t build, that were given to us by God—our eyes and ears, which help us to create a 3-dimensional map of our surroundings; our nerves, which give us immediate feedback when we touch something, including whether it’s going to immediately damage our bodies; our memories, which allow us to store information we’ve already gathered and recall it later in order to make decisions or analyze complex situations; and there are many more of these, too.

One of these tools, which God has built into our minds, is narrative.  We use it to see the relationship between cause and effect, to predict the outcomes of our present decisions, to sort out our moral obligations, and more.  Much of the Bible is written in a narrative style.  Sometimes the narrative is meant to be taken literally, like the story of Nehemiah overseeing the rebuilding of the wall around Jerusalem.  Other times, the narrative is not the relation of facts, but a metaphor, such as the parable that begins, 
My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. (Isaiah 5.1-2)

In this case and others like it, we don’t ask, “where was the hill?” or “how tall was the tower?” because we understand that it is an analogy.  That doesn’t make the point of the story any less true, of course.  The narrative conveys a point that the audience may have struggled to understand when the simple facts were related.  But when a story was presented—even a figurative one—the lesson became more clear.

As we automatically frame our understanding of the world through narrative, we often oversimplify the reality in order to better relate to the story.  One of these oversimplifications is the casual way we toss characters into one of two buckets: the good guys, and the bad guys.  This is a childish way of looking at things, of course.  Young boys for ages have played games and participated in fantasies that make use of this simple distinction, with names like “cops and robbers,” the now grossly offensive “cowboys and Indians,” or even the amusingly simplified version simply called, “good guys and bad guys.”  But it’s not just kids.  When we watch a movie, read a book, or hear a story being told, the first question we generally ask ourselves without even realizing it is, “who’s the hero, and who’s the villain?”  Everything about the story hinges on the answer to that question.  Sometimes it becomes fashionable to show that the hero has a flaw, and in the genre of tragedy, the biggest flaw is a villain in itself, bringing about the hero’s downfall.  But he’s still clearly the hero, and the audience still roots for him, even while disapproving of his bad behavior and, hopefully, taking home the lesson: don’t exhibit that flaw, if you don’t want to end up like Hamlet, or Oedipus—or for some more modern examples, Harvey Dent, Ned Stark, or Anakin Skywalker.

Since we understand reality through storytelling, it’s worth asking, who’s the hero in your story?  We see the world through our own perspective, and so the most natural answer is that you yourself are the hero.  But now, we have a problem.  If you’re the hero, then you can either be an oversimplified and unrealistic “good guy”—a character we don’t see around us in reality—or if you are willing to acknowledge that you are flawed, you could be a tragic hero—in which case the story ends with your downfall.  If you’re unsure, or think that maybe you’re the white knight in shining armor, let’s remind ourselves that God tells us very plainly, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Ro 3.23).  

There are other options: you could be an antihero, or the villain, or any one of many types of second- or third-order supporting characters, but some of those are off the table due to unacceptable endings, and others would mean it’s not really your story, but someone else’s.  Let’s tug on that final thread.  Is it really all about you, or could there, perhaps, be another figure at the center of the story?  Has there ever been anyone who truly lived up to the shining white knight character trope?  Of course!  Jesus is even portrayed in the Bible as follows: 
Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. (Revelation 19.11)

We’ve been looking at the story from the wrong perspective.  You’re not the hero of your own story, nor are you the villain.  The hero is Jesus, and the villain is Satan.  But you don’t have to be some random, uncredited extra on the film set.  In fact, each of us is a uniquely important character, a member of the hero’s love interest, the human race.  That doesn’t mean the story will necessarily end with a “happily-ever-after” for you, though.  That’s only for Christ’s Bride.  He has already defeated the great red dragon in order to rescue you.  Soon, he’ll slay the beast.  The choice is up to you: do you prefer to stay imprisoned with the dragon until the end, or will you go with the hero?

Jeremy Nettles

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