A few years ago, one of the biggest movies out was Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The film tells the story of Oskar Schindler—a money-hungry, philandering German industrialist who makes a fortune manufacturing pots and pans using Jewish slave labor during the Second World War. Shot almost entirely in black and white, the film goes on to show how—in the shadow of Auschwitz and mass murder—Schindler somehow has a conversion experience, and saves hundreds of Jews from death by keeping them in his own factory. The black and white cinematography that is used in the film heightens the sense of dehumanization at the center of the world depicted in Schindler’s List.
In the ghettos, where Jews are rounded up by squads of screaming soldiers, or stacked six in a row and then shot with one bullet (to save ammunition); and in the camps, where prisoners are casually executed by a banally sadistic commandant, the color of life, the color of love and hope and joy and even sorrow seems to be drained away, leaving only a lifeless ideology—people imprisoned in black and white.
Yet, within this gray world, Spielberg introduces two moments of color. The first of these is in the red coat of a young Jewish girl whom Schindler sees during the round up in the ghetto. Appearing in several different scenes, at several different moments, the coat startles the eye, prepared and accustomed to black and white. And when, for the last time, the red coat appears in a pile of dead bodies, what is striking and moving is—at first—not the great pile of gray corpses, but the presence of this red coat—this particular death, this particular loss, this single irreplaceable spirit, crushed in the violence and cruelty of a great gray ideology. And what hit me, at that moment of recognition, was that every body was like that red-coated girl—every one a unique and irreplaceable spirit, a shock of red amid a black and white world.
There is a second time that color appears in this movie—and, at first, it seems quite unrelated to the little girl in red. In the factory Schindler runs, he gives permission for a Sabbath celebration—even though he knows that such rituals are forbidden and could result in his own arrest. And, as the Sabbath candles are lit, they glow—in the midst of the black and white—with a soft, yellow and red glow of color. In the midst of unbearable loss, in the midst of slavery and the abiding threat of death, the living light—the Spirit of life, the promise of the covenant, the power of God, who gives color to a black and white world—all this somehow remains in the candles of the Sabbath liturgy.
“Do not be saddened by this day, for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength!”
In Schindler’s List, in the moments of color amid a world of black and white, we are reminded that the presence of God is the promise of life, the promise that each person—unique and particular—is seen and beloved. It is the hope of covenant—in a world of violence; a pledge of homecoming given to a people in exile from their own lives and from their own hearts (that is to say, given to all of us).
This promise of covenant and pledge of homecoming lies at the heart of the first reading, for when Ezra brings the Law before the assembled people, it is an assembly just returned from 60 years of exile in Babylon. For the first time, they stand again as one nation, on the hill of Zion in Jerusalem, in the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, and they hear the message that they are the beloved of God.
“Today is holy to the Lord your God”—the words Ezra proclaims are not a command, not an order that the people should be holy or that they must make holy this day; rather, the words are a revelation, that the day is holy not only to the people, but to God, as well. Here is covenant love, that makes the coming together of the people a holy event to God, a God who does not remain outside the celebration, but joins in as a member of the community; a God who rejoices with the people; who lives in their midst and shares with them the joy of return, the relief that their exile—not from God, but from their own life, symbolized in the Temple and the Law—relief that this exile is ended.
In the same way, when Jesus comes into the synagogue and unrolls the scroll to read from the prophet Isaiah, he brings with him the life—the color—of God. And so, when he speaks “in the power of the Spirit,” it is not to declare some future promise, or to remember some past event; it is to proclaim that, on this very day
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year
acceptable to the Lord.”
The God who pours out the Spirit upon Jesus is not the God of the future, of a someday land of color and light. Rather, in Jesus the covenant of liberty and healing, of hope and freedom—the covenant which transforms exile into homecoming—is fulfilled each time we hear, each time we listen, not just with our ears, but with our hearts. What this first proclamation of Jesus’ public ministry means is what the rest of his life, what his death, and what his resurrection will affirm: not that suffering and injustice, blindness and oppression have disappeared—we who have seen the 20th century and who look at the world of the 21st know that this is not the case—but that these things have lost their power to overcome us.
Today, in the papers and on the news, this community of St. Aloysius heard an allegation of abuse and misconduct by a former priest of this parish—the late Jesuit Father Peter O’Grady. It seems another grey moment in the long dark crisis of the Church, and we are tempted—I am tempted—to move into the black and white world of legalism and spin, of damage control and asset protection. And at the same time, others are tempted by the same black and white world—tempted to embrace vengeance and retribution, anger and cynicism. Yet, if we fall prey to these temptations, we can lose sight of the girl in the red coat—of the particular persons who have been hurt; of the individual lives—precious in the eyes of God—which have been harmed.
As Christians, we have been called back from exile, raised out of darkness, and even in the face of pain, we must not allow ourselves to abandon this call. We—not just them, not just some abusive priests or some gray authority—we—I—have failed to see as we should; we have been blind and have lived in exile from the law of love and responsibility with which God would bless us. And for that, many particular lives—in all their color and beauty—have been harmed. I am sorry for that—sorry for the pain and sorry for the loss and sorry for the shadow and sorry for the exile.
Yet, for all this, we are not overcome. Rather, we stand like the people of Israel in the remnant of a Temple, a Church, defiled but not destroyed—darkened, but still made holy through the living light of God and through the red blood spilled from the wounds of Christ.
The unity of God with the human family has become irrevocable—and if we hear, if we see, if we allow ourselves to be liberated from the black and white prisons of ideology and self-absorption, of defensiveness and denial, of anger and retribution, then the color of the world can shine forth, and what is fulfilled in Christ will, at last, fully fill our world.
“As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ.”
Let us pray, this day, that we might grow to love the Spirit that shines in every corner of our world. Let us live as people repentant, who have returned from the exile of blindness, to see the colors with which our God has filled creation, colors of healing and hope, of forgiveness asked and forgiveness offered; colors that mark “a year acceptable to the Lord.”
Let us rejoice as women and men, Jew and Greek, slave and free, that there is no simple black and white in this world, but that all the colors of God are meant to be made visible, to be seen and loved, so that we might all be Christ’s body—diverse and colorful, healed for the life of the world.
John D. Whitney, S.J.
Provincial |
