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Lately I’ve taken a deeper interest in bad guys. But then, they’ve always captured my imagination. After all, as many of you well know, I spend a lot of time on the theological topic of remorse, the idea that our life of faith is about all of us getting better. (Maybe it’s my background as a psychotherapist, or my background as a Lutheran: those identities will always be alive in me.)
For whatever reason, I’m intrigued and inspired by the notion that in our life of faith, we’re supposed to learn things, improve our behaviors, turn from our bad attitudes, repent from our selfish impulses, grow in maturity, stop hurting our neighbors … in short, we’re supposed to get better. And if that means we need to talk about scary or repellent topics – topics like sin – well, it’ll be worth it. Look at the devastation around the world: our faith offers humanity a robust solution in the form of human redemption and restoration.
But I hasten to say that I’m not talking about shame. I’m talking about sin and remorse, about forgiveness and reconciliation. We discard shame as the abusive and damaging emotional hell that it is, and we simply get in touch with our common human need to get better, to improve, and – always with God’s help, always with God’s power – to reveal God’s own image and likeness that shines from our essential identity as ethical human beings.
All of that fascinates me.
And so, in turn, bad guys fascinate me – villains, adversaries, rogues, crooks, killers, the worst people, and how the worst of humanity can lurk within all of us. And that’s why, when a group of us began rehearsing to perform the entire Gospel according to Mark, I insisted that I be cast in all the bad-guy roles. I speak none of the lines of Jesus, but instead enter the performance as the Pharisees, as Herod, as Pilate, as Judas.
I even take up the parts of the family of Jesus and Simon Peter in the moments when they oppose or try to restrain Jesus. When his family worries that Jesus is out of his mind, they briefly become bad guys: they become opponents of the Holy One. When Peter reprimands Jesus for predicting his passion and crucifixion, Peter briefly becomes a bad guy (and he foreshadows his betrayal of Jesus later on). Peter becomes an unwise voice of caution that would tempt Jesus to abandon his cosmic and cruciform mission of grace and redemptive justice.
And here’s something I learned when I took up the parts of all the Gospel bad guys: I began to understand them, to empathize, to see the world from their perspective. And when we understand someone who does terrible things, we can become more effective in reforming them … or at the very least, stopping them from doing more harm.
We hear from two groups of bad guys today: the family of Jesus in their brief episode of bad-guy opposition to Jesus, and the scribes, a class of religious leaders who study the Torah, the prophets, and the writings of Hebrew scripture. The scribes might remind us of the Pharisees: they are religious leaders of their day. They are the keepers of the flame: they interpret to the people what the scriptures mean, and what God wants from God’s people.
Mark sandwiches the challenging scribes between two encounters of Jesus and his family. We see this kind of thing often in the Gospels. If the evangelist wants to get something across to us, they structure their storytelling to fuse two story lines, making vital comparisons, or emphasizing sharp contrasts. In this section, Jesus is under fire: both his family and the scribes are resisting him.
And I happily get to play these provocative parts next Sunday afternoon in our Mark performance. I get to say, “He has gone out of his mind!” and “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons!” I relish these parts, because I have come to understand why they feel these fierce feelings.
From his family’s perspective, Jesus is indeed out of his mind. He is disappointing and disturbing them, behaving in ways that could bring shame upon the whole family and cause dangerous resistance against them as well as himself. And the scribes truly want to do and say the right things. They are guardians of the tradition, and their objections are heartfelt. They are not just cynics or nihilists. They want things you and I want: they want the world, and God, and the faith tradition, to all make sense.
And they might also want personal safety and contentment.
Bad guys misbehave, sometimes violently, but their motivations are often understandable. Now, again, this does not excuse bad behavior! Remember: I am preoccupied by remorse and relationship repair – I want justice. But if we try conscientiously to look at the world through the eyes of the bad guys, we can begin to understand them, and that helps us work effectively with them, and with our own internal bad-guy impulses.
All of this reminds me of a classic bad guy in popular U.S. culture, and how the person who portrayed her wanted everyone to understand her better. The actor Margaret Hamilton played the memorable part of the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. As a child, I trembled with fear – and looked away from the screen – whenever the Wicked Witch appeared. Every time I watched the film, Hamilton’s performance was disturbing.
Finally, in 1975, Margaret Hamilton appeared on the children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She (and Fred Rogers) wanted to reassure children like me that we need not fear the Wicked Witch of the West. Margaret Hamilton visited Mr. Rogers and told him that she was delighted to play the wicked witch because as a girl she had always chosen the witch as her Halloween costume. They talked about how children love to play scary parts – children love to explore the experience and identity of bad guys.
And then, remarkably, Mr. Rogers said, “Girls and boys like to play witches, don’t they?” “Yes they do,” replied Margaret Hamilton, “yes, they certainly do!” (This was 1975!)
Then Margaret Hamilton offered her reflections about the witch, and how the witch’s motivations made sense. “Sometimes the children feel that she’s a very mean witch,” Hamilton said, “and I suppose she does seem that way, but I always think there are two things about her: She does enjoy everything that she does; whether it’s good or bad, she enjoys it; but she also is what we sometimes refer to as frustrated: she’s very unhappy because she never gets what she wants, Mr. Rogers. You know, most of us get something along the line, but as far as we know, that witch just never got what she wanted, and mainly she wanted those ruby slippers, because they had lots of power and she wanted more power.” “Yes,” Mr. Rogers murmured, with evident empathy. Hamilton continued: “...Sometimes we think that she’s just mean and a very bad person, but actually you have to think about her point of view. It wasn’t as happy a time as she wanted it to be because she just never got what she wanted.”
Then these two remarkable people pulled the witch’s costume from a steamer trunk. Margaret Hamilton tried it on, saying with delight, “That’s my skirt!” (She also noticed – well ahead of her time, I think – that the skirt had pockets. “Even witches have to have pockets!” she said. Yes. Even bad guys need pockets.) And once she was fully dressed as the familiar Wicked Witch of the West, she good-naturedly played the part for a few moments, so that children need not be so troubled by the character.
Sometimes each one of us is a so-called “bad guy.” We resist the good, we kick against what’s right, we listen to the weaker, frightened, and hurt voices within us. And often we misbehave simply because we have not gotten what we wanted. The witch wanted power, and that alone is not automatically a bad thing: one can use power for good purposes. If she were not so frustrated, Margaret Hamilton seems to have believed, the better angels of the witch’s nature could have emerged.
I’ll add just one more idea to all of this, to close our reflections on bad guys and the Gospel. Recently I encouraged my goddaughter Jubilee to watch The Good Place, a sitcom about heaven and hell, and how a woman died and went to heaven – to “the Good Place” – only to discover that she was not supposed to be there. Jubilee watched the first couple of episodes with me, and then continued watching it with her mother, Alissa.
Alissa recently told me that Jubilee was troubled about heaven as it appeared on the show. Jubilee had a hard time understanding how it could even be heaven, because, she said, “everyone gets everything they want, but they don’t get what they need.” Once again I marvel at the wisdom of our younger theologians. Heaven, for Jubilee, is the place where everyone gets what they need.
And this is my amendment, offered in humble gratitude, to Margaret Hamilton’s take on an iconic bad guy. The Wicked Witch of the West did bad things because she did not get what she needed.
And what do bad guys need? Well, if they’re the distraught family of Jesus, they need to understand who Jesus is, and why he is calling so many people into a dangerous and controversial mission. If the bad guy is a Judean scribe, he needs to understand why religion at its best is not safe and orderly, but prophetic and disruptive.
And when you and I are “bad guys,” doing and saying things we really should not do or say, often enough we simply have deep needs, too. Our faith calls us to serious purposes, to a daunting mission, to a way of life that will change and challenge us. We need one another for this way of life; we need Jesus for this life of faith; and we always, always need to look at the world through the eyes of those we least understand.
If we don’t get all of these things that we need, then we may have trouble – and get into trouble – along the way. But God in Jesus knows this about us, and always meets us with mercy.
My prayer for you, and for myself, is that we will receive all that we need.
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Preached on the Third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 5B), June 9, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
1 Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35