My tickets to the new Les Miserables (Les Miz) movie
have been purchased for a couple of weeks.
I am taking the family on Christmas day.
I have seen the musical numerous times and cannot wait to see the
cinematic adaptation. While not traditional
“holly jolly” fare for Christmas, Les Miserables may be a suitable Christmas
Day story.
While not a “religious” play, Les Miz has numerous
spiritual themes. Most of the characters
are dealing with their ideas of God, sin, punishment, grace, or providence. Jean Valjean has broken the law and paid with
consequences and makes a spiritual journey from bitterness to gratitude and
love. His path involves a spiritual
encounter of grace mediated by the priest that takes him in and passes through
his own struggles with personal responsibility and self-sacrifice. The grace of the priest who gives Valjean his
silver is contrasted by the police detective, Javert. Javert’s life is built on a religious
certitude in which he works to ensure that every crime is punished and every
law is followed. He is driven by his
desire to live a morally upright life and he, therefore, has little patience or
grace for those that do not follow those rules (even when for a supposed “greater
good”).
The women of the play seem to have less a sense of
control of their own destinies. Fantine
and Eponine both deal with harsh realities of life and struggle with
disappointments and tragedy. Fantine’s
moving song, “I Dreamed a Dream” is a gut-wrenching examination of how life can
be so different from the dreams and expectations that we have when we are
young. Eponine’s “On My Own” is more
melodramatic, but includes her feelings of hopelessness, loneliness, and
despair.
Each of the above characters spends some time in
reflection on life’s meaning and purpose, while the Thenardiers, in their
comedic relief, provide an example of the unexamined life. Thenardier does provide a bit of reflection
on the dark side of humanity, but he seems to accept his own evaluation and he
bases his life on lack of trust and his own selfish ambitions. Both Thenardier and Madame Thenardier
readily use others for their own gain and represent the more base aspects of
human nature.
All of these reflections on the nature of God and
humanity are beautiful representations of our own struggles as we deal with the
realities of our own world. We are
confronted with the evil of school shootings, a growing sense of financial
insecurity, a government in stalemate, wars around the world, and struggles in
our daily lives. It can be easy for us
to long for a time when things will be set right and it can be tempting for us to
fall into despair and feel alone and forsaken.
This is the world and reality into which God inserted himself and took
on our frail form; not the form of a soldier or a king, but the form of an infant. In the Baptist tradition, we often want to
move too quickly from this Advent story to the story of “Good Friday” and
Easter, but each of those holidays has its own reality. The time of Advent is the time to reflect on
the reality that God has come to us in our form. God knows our struggles and knows our
fears. God has come that we may know
that we are not alone and that we may know God’s love that casts out our fears.
The last sung line of the musical, “Les Miserables”,
is “To love another person is to see the face of God”. Throughout the musical, as throughout our
lives, the terrible is moderated by the loving and caring presence of another. While we continue to hope for the day when God
will come to us again and set everything as it should be, for now, the presence
of God is not experienced as the absence of strife, but as “God with us”
(Immanuel) as mediated through the love of another. As we seek to live out the kingdom of God in
our own lives, to embody the love of God, we mediate God’s presence for others
and find peace within our own existence.
God broke into our world in a miraculous way and took our form and those
of us who follow His way should seek to embody God’s form for those in our
lives. The hope of God in the midst of uncertainty, fear, and tragedy is the
story of Christmas and the baby Jesus lying in a manger. Let us rejoice with the angels in singing “Gloryto God in the highest and on earth peace to all.
