My middle school memory keeps rewinding the film our teacher showed one day of this disturbing short story by Shirley Jackson.
Everyone in a small town is assembling. Something important is about to happen. Like a human Farmer’s Almanac, one man quips, “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”
Happy-go-lucky Tessie Hutchinson arrives just in time for the lottery, as optimistic as a school girl at the bell before home room. Her buoyant mood seems oddly out of place in the somber gathering of townsfolk waiting for … who knows what?
Steve Cothran
It’s that “who knows what” palpable tension that grips us like a stone in each hand and undergirds Jackson’s unsettling tale of ordinary people submitting themselves to the unthinkable.
They not only insanely believe that human sacrifice will ensure their way of life, The Lottery is how they actively and passively participate in it, stoning poor Tessie to death by story’s end.
I remember, even as a middle schooler, being taken aback at the brutality and the absurdity, wondering what was wrong with these people who thought their ceremonial slaughter had to continue to “appease the gods.”
Linked to some fertility ritual, they imagined their worship guaranteed abundance and prosperity, but it was interwoven with fear that doom would befall the people if they didn’t “stick to the old ways.”
This god sounds very much like Moloch, mentioned in the Bible’s Old Testament, who is pacified with child sacrifice, and about whom God issues grave warnings to his people.
Warnings we ignore at our peril while we lay fresh death on the altar of the Second Amendment.
Of course, isn’t that part of Shirley Jackson’s challenge to us? We can see the insanity in these people blindly thinking they must continue on the same path they’ve always followed. After all, change is hard.
But grief is crushingly more so.
Just ask the families in Winder, Ga.
“Warnings we ignore at our peril while we lay fresh death on the altar of the Second Amendment.”
Or Uvalde. Or Sandy Hook. Or Parkland. Or Paducah … or … or …
Jesus warns us that “those who live by the sword, will die by the sword.”
That doesn’t mean we should go get a bigger, better sword. It means violence only begets more violence. Always.
Why else would Scripture call us to “beat your swords into plowshares and your spears into pruning hooks”? Why else would Jesus demand that his followers learn another way? To turn the other cheek?
Strange. I don’t hear anyone advocating Christian nationalism quoting these verses.
Dr. King’s words are still true: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
In NBC’s 1951 radio version of “The Lottery,” Ernest Kinoy inserted the final line: “Next year, maybe there won’t be a Lottery. It’s up to all of us. Chances are, there will be, though.”
Unless you are content to look at your portraits and select a family member — or two or three? — whom you are willing to lose to the plague of gun violence, I refuse to believe that.
Because it is up to all of us.
Scripture reminds us if we claim to be followers of Jesus, and we have the power to help someone but don’t help them, what good is our claim?
I don’t know Gov. Brian Kemp. But I have friends who are fine citizens and responsible gun owners, and they do know him personally. Bend his ear, and do it before another Georgia community is destroyed by gun violence.
Call him and urge him to hear the anguish of parents and children drowning out the whining of the gun lobby. Otherwise, who knows when The Lottery will choose you?
Steve Cothran is a native of Greenville, S.C., and holds degrees from Furman University, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Campbell Divinity School. He has served churches in Florida, North Carolina and Georgia, as well as six years in Kentucky where he and his wife, Nancy, were on the same staff together. He has written curriculum for Smyth & Helwys, CBF and d365, enjoys writing regular columns for the Newnan Times-Herald, and dreams of being the oldest cast member on Saturday Night Live. This column first appeared in the Times-Herald.