Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Books

The Monster of Me

by Tim Lien

There are many of you that know that I am currently preaching through the epistle of Philippians. A condensed summary of Saint Paul’s letter can be expressed with, “joy in suffering.” To accompany my sermons with illustrations, I started reading Elie Wiesel’s trilogy about the Jewish Holocaust during WWII. “Certainly,” I thought, “these horrific accounts will supply my need for illustrations that depict true suffering.” This past week I finally finished the third installment. (Book 1: Night, Book 2: Dawn, Book 3: The Accident)

As I was reading Night, I noticed that I had a wincing expectation for the graphic and horrible. I knew the Nazi concentration camps were ghastly libraries of sordid stories—I just needed solid facts, names, and eyewitness accounts to confirm this. All of the stories made me sick, sad, and angry. But I knew they would.

Nothing, however, prepared me for the hollow aching void I felt after I finished The Accident. It is a cruel, hopeless, and penetrating observation into the soul of man. Wiesel’s desperation with humanity, the inaction/non-existence of God, and final observations of meaning in the midst of depravity—lead him to a restrained and minimal hedonism found in friendship and “lies that breed true happiness.”

But the haunting of Wiesel is what haunted me after I had closed the cover. He writes that the survivors of the holocaust did not use their freedom to punish and hate the Germans. Rather, these “living dead,” who could show no capacity for truly living, were more saturated with the guilt, shame, and debasement that occurred within their own souls. They were consumed with self-hatred for every act they performed to protect their own lives. Wiesel mercilessly and accurately reveals the internal state of every “normal” human being. (And not the sadistic victimizer, but the victim!) And then he stops. No solutions. He offers only philosophical silence.

The lingering effects of Wiesel’s trilogy have been brutally helpful, in that, I have been reflecting long on the nature of my own heart. Of course, I have heard it said: “We are no different from Hitler, save the blood of Christ.” But embedded in those self-effacing statements is the assumption that we, too, are capable of atrocities given the same circumstances. However, Wiesel coldly and consistently points out that the human heart is the same under normal, urbane, educated, and cosmopolitan influences. The acts that were constantly relived with cold sweats and nightmares came from quiet, peaceful, small-town people. In other words they came from me, you, and the sweet lady up the street. And this is where Wiesel’s scathing blade cuts the deepest, leaving little hope for humanity and even less for life.

But as a believer in Christ as Messiah, I think that this is precisely where the Gospel is given any incredulous magnitude: when we see the great depths of the human capacity to manifest evil, while simultaneously seeing the hope granted by Christ to make us clean. Being able to say to the man who beat an old man to death for a piece of bread: “Believe, and you are righteous” To the men who pitched babies into the air for Nazi target practice: “Believe, and you are righteous.” To the man who wrung his own crying baby’s head off to protect his family from being discovered: “Believe, and you are righteous—your sins are no more.” To the girls tortured as sex slaves at the age of 12: “Believe, you are clean, virginal, and righteous.”