Revenge, Biblical and Otherwise

Don Clark anchored TV news in Bakersfield, California for over twenty years. He now lives at the fence line of the great Tejon Ranch with his wife, Bettie, where he contemplates retirement but never seems to get it right and just keeps on working.

Following are remarks made by Don on Good Friday, March 27, 2010, at St. Paul’s Anglican Parish in Bakersfield.

Editor's Note: Here at "For What It's Worth," we blog about everything from male bonding to Iranian politics to why the Oscars are boring. The fact that we include a religious post does not support one religion over another any more than a film review supports one studio over another. But the blog's sub-title is "Bryce Zabel & Friends" and Don is long-time friend going back to working in Eugene TV together (sometime in the last century). And, of course, Don's topic of "revenge" seems, shall we say, kind of appropriate, given FWIW's virtual location in the center of Hollywood. So there.  :-)

 

Scripture commands, “Let those who speak, speak as if they uttered the oracles of God… And those who have ears, let them hear and heed what the Spirit is saying to the church.” Amen.

One of the great classics of imaginative literature--one I am sure most of you here have enjoyed many times both as originally written and as adapted in several motion pictures-- is the timeless tale by the French writer, Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.

It is the story of a great wrong done to an innocent man. It is the story of a great betrayal by a jealous friend -- a betrayal that resulted for the victim in the total loss of everything that make life good and of seemingly endless imprisonment and despair in a cold, stony dungeon on a desolate island prison.

But most of all, the story of The Count of Monte Cristo is the story of the most satisfying kind of revenge.

 

A strange friendship between the innocent man and a mysterious aging prisoner, coupled with an incredible escape, leads our victim to a vast treasure that gives him vast resources to lay exquisitely elaborate traps for all those who profited from his betrayal.

Dumas’ story gives us a delicious sense of justice done by deceiving the very people who deceived him and by inflicting upon them losses and suffering and humiliations as great or greater than the ones they inflicted upon him.