Vengeance is not the Gospel

Dear People of Christ Church,

This week, I've been staying up late reading the Millenium series, the Stieg Larsson trilogy that begins with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. They are awfully violent, and there is a lot of sex in them, so as your pastor I would hesitate to recommend that you read them. But they are engrossing! It's hard to argue with a smart crime novel. I read the first two on vacation and got the third when I got home, and I'm almost finished with it. At the same time, I happened upon a book by Larsson's lifetime partner, Eva Gabrielsson. They lived together for 30 years, but since they never married legally she was shut out of inheriting his literary-and financial-legacy. There Are Things I Want You To Know About Stieg Larsson and Me is in part a love letter to a dead spouse, in part a righteously angry story of betrayal, and (the interesting part) a biography of Larsson himself, about his political work as a journalist and his ethical motivations behind writing the books.

Before he was a novelist, Larsson was an activist and journalist; his anti-racist and feminist work was the cause of his life, Gabrielsson says. They met as teenagers at a peace meeting. Leftist politics was his life, and the Millenium stories are not just stories; they are moral tales of revenge and justice-seeking. The original Swedish title of the first book is Men Who Hate Women-and the title is accurate. The crimes that happen in the book are all taken from real-world events of women being treated in ways I will not describe here. What's fascinating, though, is the way vengeance, "getting even" is celebrated. The rapist is raped, the killer killed, a vigilante style of justice that picks up when the protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, has lost complete faith in traditional channels of justice because she has been so injured by them (the whole back story doesn't come out until book 2, and it is, indeed, awful). She wouldn't answer a yes or no question to anyone in authority; she's certainly not going to report a crime to the police. For Larsson, telling her story is about revealing that horror, and telling a new truth about self-sufficiency and making your own choices. In that way, I suppose it is a rather American story.

So what is so compelling about these people? Do we like them? Should we? What is, really, the moral tale to be told? The tireless journalist exposing child labor violations and political crimes against children is to be admired. Larsson's own political work, fighting against hatred in all its forms, is a fine example to follow. But it's not the Gospel.

The reason the Millenium series is such a self-indulgent read isn't just for all the free love and fast paced plot-it's because of the simple arithmetic of vengeance. Some part of our reptile brain feels good when people get even, when the 100 pound heroine shoots the 250 lb bully. We have that story in the Bible, too, but the Bible goes beyond it.

And vengeance will not free us. As a perpetrator of another crime, the one who retaliates still lives in the shadow of the aggressor; her actions are still determined by the one who hurt her. Our Gospel reading for this week is part of a teaching on forgiveness that includes Peter's visit to Jesus: "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times." (Matthew 18:21-22) The challenging generosity of the kingdom of God is beyond what we can imagine-not one, but one hundred. Not an afternoon of giving, but a lifetime.

Blessings,

Sara+