The Wicked

“Surely,” says the Psalmist, “thou wilt slay the wicked, O God.” (end of Psalm 139)

Psalm 7:9 ~ “Oh let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end; but establish the just.”

Psalm 9:11 ~ “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.”

Etcetera.

The wicked. Who are they? Their behaviours are logged by the Psalmist and prophets. They oppress the poor, their commercial practices are unjust, and they turn away from the tenets and prescribed lifestyle of the Jewish faith. Oh. That would be you and me, then, certainly if we are to be lumped together with a whole society - "the nations that forget God."

I began thinking about “the wicked” as a discrete category on Christmas Day. Something I look forward to immensely at Christmas is the Christmas Eve carol service broadcast from Kings College Cambridge – I think about it in excited anticipation for ages. This year, I settled down to watch it, and it began (as per tradition) with Once In Royal David’s City, the first verse a choirboy’s solo, as always. The next thing that happens is the Bidding Prayer (I posted the words of it here), surely one of the most beautiful prayers of all time. But this year, instead of the bidding prayer we had a sort of short lecture from the dean about the First World War (because it’s the centenary year of its beginning). My head was so busy exploding with indignation that the bidding prayer had been shoved aside for this, that I didn’t pay too much attention to what he said – but if my memory is to be trusted he mentioned the famous Christmas Day truce in the trenches, when the Germans were heard singing carols known internationally – eg Stille Nacht – and both sides came out from behind their barbed wire, looked into each other’s eyes, shook hands, wished each other a happy Christmas, told each other their names, played football, exchanged gifts – then went back to killing each other.

The story was somewhat impressed upon me because it was the subject of a long Christmas advert for Sainsburys this year, and also the subject of the Queen’s speech on Christmas day.

In that war, the Germans were “the wicked”, then for a short space of time on Christmas Day they weren’t, then they were again. Then they were “the wicked” again in World War II.

In the 2^nd World War, my beautiful mama was a teenager growing up on a Yorkshire farm. German prisoners of war were sent to work for her father. She felt intensely curious about them – the wicked Huns. What would they be like? Still today, in her late eighties, she remembers her astonishment at discovering them to be quiet, ordinary men – just like the English ones she was used to, except possibly more courteous. “The wicked” were not like she imagined they might be.

As time has gone on, “the wicked” have been different people in different places. Just now, most of the world is in agreement that “the wicked” are white Western men.

I read an article by an African doctor based in an English university town, scathingly lashing at the attempts of her host country to help address the grave problem of Ebola. Africa doesn’t need white saviours, she said. Africa can sort out its problems without help from the white Western world.

I read an article about the period of time when the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu ended, and the wretched plight of children in Romanian orphanages hit the news. There followed what the journalist described as a “feeding frenzy” of adoptions from other parts of Europe and the USA. That’s the kind of perjorative term for an compassionate attempt to help that it is okay to apply to “the wicked”.

I read an article – posted by a white Western woman – asserting that black-to-white racism is impossible. A statement or action or attitude can only be racist if the perpetrator is white. Black people can say what they like about white people, it can never be racist. Oh. What? How does that make the world a better place?

“Black.”  “White.” “The wicked.”  “The infidel.”

“Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God.”

How helpful is this?

The wicked usually turn out to be someone else. I have met a number of people whose behavior was astonishingly obnoxious, but only one person who self-identified as “wicked.”

She was an old lady in an institution for the mentally ill. Broken, weeping, seemingly beyond help, her problem was that she believed herself to be wicked. This is important. Surely a crucial aspect of being “the wicked” is that you know you are? If “the wicked” always applies to someone else, by definition change cannot happen. But if “the wicked” agreed with their accusers, they would cease to present the problems they do – they’d all be paralysed with grief and shame like this old lady I met who had become convinced that she was “the wicked”.

In those days I was a minister of religion. She wasn’t in my congregation, but hers had entered a patch between ministers, so they called me in to see if I could help. We talked. She explained to me that she was wicked. I thought about this for a bit. I asked her if she believed Jesus to be wicked. She said no, absolutely not. Jesus was good. I spoke to her about the Eucharist, how in Commuion we take right into our gut the presence of Jesus. When we say our “Amen” and eat the bread, drink the wine, we are inviting Jesus into our being, to be indivisibly one with who we are. I explained that the thing is, goodness will always overpower wickedness. Where light has come, darkness automatically ceases. I told her how, when I make my Communion, I always silently pray: “Jesus, please put to death all that is evil in me.” I said that Jesus and wickedness cannot co-exist in the same place, and that if she ate the bread and drank the wine of the Eucharist knowing this, consciously embracing this, then her wickedness would be dissolved, zapped, done for, by the presence of Jesus in her. I asked her if she wanted this, and she said, “Yes.”

I brought the holy things, and she sat quietly in her vinyl-covered high-backed institutional chair in the calm, bare room, attending closely as the familiar prayers were said. She ate the bread, she drank the wine, inviting Jesus in, trusting in the logic that wickedness could not co-exist with him. And she got better. The next time I saw her (at a church service), a calm, confident, radiant, extremely happy and grateful woman met me. She was well again now. She was no longer “the wicked”, because Jesus had come to dwell in her, and his Light shone inside her – you could see it, actually.

And that was the only instance I have ever come across of someone who believed herself to be “the wicked”.

In my own personal circle of acquaintance, the most destructive interactions I have seen were all set in motion by people who thought that “the others” were “the wicked”. The actions and attitudes of those who so believed caused suffering, division, and long-term deep misery. So. In that case, were they “the wicked”? 

It’s a carousel, isn’t it? It could go on for ever. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”

As you can tell, I don’t find “the wicked” to be a useful term. I prefer St Luke’s phrase – “the lost”; they need to be found by others. I like Echart Tolle’s phrase “people who are unconscious”; we cannot blame them, but must do what we can to gently awaken them.

Best of all, when it comes to categories and otherness, “the righteous” and “the wicked”, I treasure that thing Jesus said to “the Pharisee” about “the Prostitute”. He said, “Simon, do you see this woman?” And that’s what they did on Christmas Day in the trenches, isn’t it?