Psalm 119:115 Evildoers

The Dark Knight, Warner Brothers, 2008

Joker: Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair!

[Still holding the gun, Harvey Dent pauses and takes out his coin]

Harvey Dent: [Showing Joker the good side] You live.

Joker: Mm-hmm.

Harvey Dent: [Showing the scarred side] You die.

Joker: Mmm, now we're talking.

The Dark Knight trilogy, from which the above quote comes, couldn't have been more unlike the Batman series of the 1960s. Instead of over the top camp and primary colors, the newer take on Batman is dark, brooding, and cynical.

Heath Ledger's Joker is cast as the epitome of evil. As Bruce Wayne's butler, Alfred, says, "Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."

But this version of the Batman doesn't go for a simple good vs. evil trope. Batman isn't portrayed as the ultimate good hero in contrast to the evildoer. This Dark Knight is fleshed out in darker tones. He's battling his own inner evil.

The film even seems to prop up other heroes as the embodiment of good, only to show their true darkness. Jim Gordon, who becomes police commissioner, is a crusader for justice who uses the most corrupt members of his police force to accomplish his goals. Harvey Dent, whom Bruce Wayne thinks is the hero Gotham needs, becomes unhinged mentally under the pressure of great suffering and loss.

The lesson of the Dark Knight is that we are all evildoers.

Away from me, you evildoers,
that I may keep the commands of my God!

Psalm 119:115

Who are the evildoers, in God's eyes?

The Hebrew word describes people who are actively in opposition to God, to society, or to the norms of society. They might even be chaos engines, introducing a little anarchy in opposition to the way God intended the world to work.

They also might be you and me.

A friend told me recently, "You're a better person than I am."

"No. I'm not," I replied, after getting over my shock. "You don't really want to read my mind or see my heart at its worst."

If the people of God allow ourselves to believe we're better than "those evildoers", we've missed the point of being the people of God.

We're not His people because we're worthy of His name. We belong to Him because the blood of Christ covers our evil and His grace welcomes us home.

Our purpose, as His people, is to walk alongside our fellow evildoers on the 1 road of life, the ones who don't know Him.

If they actively try to pull us aside and join them in their evil plans, we should keep as much distance from them as necessary to keep from being dragged along with them.

And yet, at the same time, our ultimate goal isn't to build walls and isolate ourselves from our fellow evildoers, but to introduce them to Christ and shower them with grace. Because every one of us met a fellow evildoer along the road who welcomed us into fellowship with God.