Published With Thanksgiving

“In answer, Jesus said, ‘Do you think these Galileans were more guilty than every other Galilean in that this happened to them'” (Luke 13.2).

If you’re not a fan of scary movies you might not have encountered the idea of a Final Girl. It is a recognizable character in a number of films made throughout the Seventies and Eighties. She’s the one person who survives the monster’s rampage and, in some stories, the one who defeats him.

Laurie Strode—played by Jamie Lee Curtis—in the film Halloween is the archetypical Final Girl. She is innocent and pure—a virgin. And while her promiscuous friends meet violent ends, Laurie manages to be saved from the killer’s knife. She alone stands in the aftermath, injured but alive.

I mention the virgin characteristic; because, it’s an important part of the trope—only those who remain chaste will survive the nightmare. One’s purity, one’s goodness is a shield that protects them from the hand of evil that has taken everyone around them.

Luke records a time when some people tell Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with Jewish sacrifices. The implication is that these poor souls were an example of people who didn’t live righteously. They were obviously horrible sinners to deserve such a fate, weren’t they?

Jesus responds with what I’ve found to be the most avoided words in the Gospels. Do you think it was because they weren’t good people that this happened to them? What about those eighteen people who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them? Were they evil people?

In other words, do you think being good or holy or a virgin is going to protect you from the chaos of this world?

This, I think, gets to the heart of what I find so intriguing about the Final Girl trope. There, on screen, are our beliefs and our fears writ large. With no subtlety whatsoever, we are given a story that plays out our deepest, oldest hope: that if we’re good and follow the rules, we’ll be okay.

In the decades since, the Final Girl has been reexamined in a number of horror films. Films have dissected this idea that a person’s goodness or badness determines their fate. Perhaps in a world of 9/11 and a global pandemic, Jesus’ words have taken on new meaning. That being good is no guarantee of being safe.

Is that frightening? Yes, it is. But so is the story we tell again and again: about a man whose goodness did not protect him from arrest, torture, and death. Though we might want to rewrite the narrative , our broken world is not one where the good boys and girls remain safe while bad things only happen to evil people.

But it’s also a world, like those of horror movies, where the creatures of darkness, evil, and death do not get the last word. It’s one where, at its conclusion, the monster lies defeated. And despite our injuries and the fear we knew, we have survived. We have made it to the end.

Just like the Final Girl.

Risen One, it can be so tempting to believe that our goodness is tied to our safety, our purity to our prosperity, and if something goes wrong we must have sinned or you must not be just. Help us live into the uncertainty of our days with the knowledge that love instead of goodness and purity is what matters. And that no darkness can stand against it.