Ecclesiastes and the Green Mile

I get the most out of the Bible when I pick a book and set up camp for a few weeks. That way I can read the book several times, journal about it, and munch on it over a long period of time. I have found that when I do this, the truths of Scripture seep into my mind and heart more deeply.

A couple weeks ago I pitched a tent in the book of Ecclesiastes. I’ve read it about four times now, in addition to looking at some outside helps for additional perspective (a commentary by Tremper Longman, an essay by Ed Curtis, and a book by Peter Kreeft). I plan on wrapping up my study within the next week or so, and so I’ll post some of my thoughts on the meaning and relevance of Ecclesiastes in the next several days.

But before that, I wanted to say something about the central theme of Ecclesiastes, and its relation to a movie I just saw. One of the main messages of Ecclesiastes is the meaninglessness of life apart from God. The author of Ecclesiastes (traditionally viewed as being Solomon) performs an experiment to search for the meaning of life “under the sun.” Everything he tries (money, pleasure, work, philosophy) proves to be empty and futile. The world seems to be a place full of things which promise much but deliver little. It is a very grim and pessimistic view of the world.

How does such a pessimistic book end up in the Bible?  But doesn’t this contradict the Christian message of hope? One answer I have heard is that Ecclesiastes provides a great dose of realism to our perspective on the world. If we are honest with each other and with ourselves, the world is full of pain and futility. Even if the glass is half full, that does not negate the fact that it is also half empty. The difference between optimism and pessimism, then, is which point you focus on. But if you want to justice to everything in reality, you have to acknowledge that there are many evils in the world.

A few days ago I watched a movie called the Green Mile, which stars Tom Hanks and tells the story of a group of guards and soldiers on death row. As I watched this movie, I realized that it was commenting on some themes that were very close to the themes of Ecclesiastes. If you were to sum up the overarching theme of the movie in a word, it would be this: the horrific and unbearable nature of evil in the world. In watching the Green Mile, you visually experience several stark evils which are representative of the evils in the world. (What follows contains mild movie spoilers, so be ye warned.)

I would say this happens through three different characters. The evil character Percy not only gets on everyone’s nerves, but he continuously exhibits and acts out a self-centeredness and a hatred of others which is utterly repulsive and blood curdling. Percy is so bad that it seems impossible to imagine someone more evil. That is, until you meet Wild Bill, who is on death row for the rape and murder of two little girls. (It is interesting that this movie shows stark evil on both sides of the fence–both inside and outside the prison cell.)

The third character does not portray evil through people hurting one another, but through a natural evil–the evil of sickness. It is the warden’s wife, and she is a sweet and delicate woman whose body is violated by cancer. The movie portrays the cancer as something which is offensive and wrong and in need of remedy.

But the Green Mile not only contains a vivid portrayal of the evils of hatred, murder, and sickness. It magnifies them through an angelic character, John Kofe, who is unjustly condemned to death row. Kofe’s character, who is lovingly simple and gigantic, possesses a unique ability–he is hypersensitive to evil. It is almost as if he has a sixth sense which enables him to feel the evils of the world more forcefully. As human beings, we are really oblivious to much of the evil in the world, except that of our own experience and the experiences of those we know. Add to that the evils we hear of around the world, but those we feel to a lesser degree. But what if we really and truly felt all of the evils which are going on around us? John Kofe describes it as pieces of glass being crammed in his head all the time, every day. Through the character of John Kofe, we are able to see the evil of evil. Without giving away the ending too much, the movie’s conclusion may leave you with a strange taste in your mouth, and a somewhat bleak outlook on the world.

So the question becomes, is the world really as bad as Ecclesiastes and the Green Mile make it out to be? This question is an important one. The answer to this question, I submit, redeems the book of Ecclesiastes to be very Christian and very profound.  The Bible wants us to be realistic about the world that we live in.  It is only when we view the world honestly, through the dark eyes of Ecclesiastes, that the gospel makes sense.

And what about the Green Mile? Perhaps what we have is a film which captures deep truths about reality in a powerful, visual form. That is, after all, what artists created in God’s image are able to do –they create an experience which provides a window into some corner of reality. Maybe the makers of the Green Mile stumbled onto something true about the world, something which has been attested by God in the book of Ecclesiastes.

(Disclaimer: The Green Mile is Rated R, containing offensive language and sickening violence, as you can easily infer from my remarks above. It is not a family movie, and you probably should only watch it if you are in the right frame of mind and with the right people.)