I remember that I had become a little bored with many books that year. I had outgrown most books aimed for kids my age but did not yet have the maturity to match my reading level. Mockingbird must have been the perfect fit. I devoured it. I do not remember often being as engrossed in a novel as I was that summer. When my English Literature class began that February and we were all asked to name our favourite novel, I said To Kill a Mockingbird. It was soon supplanted by The Outsider, then by Nineteen Eighty-Four and then by many other books, but I have never forgotten the intensity of my joy on reading it for the first time and, over the decade-and-a-bit since I read it, it has remained with me more than some of the novels that replaced it in my affections.
Teaching it this year to my own Year 10 class (some things never change in the curriculum), I have been re-reading it these holidays and doing so has reawakened my old love. I have enjoyed rediscovering old favourite moments - Scout's first day of school, for instance, or the visceral tension of the courtroom scene - and encountering scenes of which I have no memory - the scene, for instance, in which Dill and Scout have to leave the courtroom and encounter Mr Dolphus Raymond, the local vagabond who pretends to be an alcoholic to explain why he prefers to live among the "negroes".
And then, of course, there's Atticus. I don't think twentieth-century literature created a greater hero than him. It was, after all, the century of anti-heroes, in which Literature preferred a Jay Gatsby or a Meursault to a genuinely good man. (Popular Fiction, Tim Keller notes, has the right idea about what makes a hero and a powerful story - heroes who actually accomplish something, in the teeth of almost certain defeat.) Atticus has integrity. He is wise and compassionate. He is full of grace and, surprisingly for a popular novel, an earnest Christian. And in the film he's acted by Gregory Peck. What's there not to love about the man?
But he's not Jesus. This might sound a bit obvious, but this is what I mean: there is something in me that is tempted to almost worship "good men" like Atticus, and all too often we do the same thing to Jesus. We want him to be a good moral teacher whom we can admire. We want him to make stirring courtroom speeches and stand up for good. But we don't want him to be God, and we don't want him to supplant our other earthly heroes. Now, I might save for another day the question of why we do this, but here are two brief reasons why Atticus is not the Messiah:
1) He cannot, in the end, change the human heart. There is a false perception among many in our world that with enough good, educated people challenging social perceptions, things will get gradually better and better. Well, no century saw more wide-spread democracy and education than the twentieth, and no century saw bloodier wars, and its successor - which, by the logic outlined before, should be better than the last - began with one of the worst acts of terrorism, followed by a horrible, protracted war designed to fix things. Atticus, and other good men, can inspire us, but they can't change us. History has shown that.
2) He can stand up for the defenceless and the oppressed, but he cannot defend the truly indefensible. Our hearts are stirred greatly by stories of injustice, and when Tom Robinson is found guilty something in us rises in vehement protest - and it should. Tom dies for a crime he very clearly did not commit. There is no justice in this. But we need to remember that, before a righteous God, we are all guilty of sins we would much rather hide from everyone, most of all a righteous God. If Atticus can't acquit the innocent, he most certainly can't acquit the irrefutably guilty. Only Jesus can do that.
And so I suspect that To Kill a Mockingbird will remain on my list of greatest novels for a long, long time. But for my heroes, for someone to lay down my life for, I'm banking on Jesus Christ, not Atticus.
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