She has emerald green skin. She has a pointy black hat and a demented cackle. She strikes fear into the hearts of all who encounter her. She is, of course, the Wicked Witch of the West, famously vanquished by the little girl from Kansas who proves herself a deft hand with a pail of water. Ding, dong, the witch is dead, the Munchkins rejoice, the land is liberated, and Dorothy returns to Aunt Em.
So runs L. Frank Baum’s marvellous story, published in 1900, turned into an unforgettable film in 1939, a story that might have endured for ever as a testament to the power of innocent goodness over malevolent evil. Might have so endured - had it not been for Gregory Maguire.
In his novel, and in Wicked, the show that it inspired, Maguire gives the Witch a name. She is Elphaba, and she is born with a physical abnormality. She is green, and so she is repellent to her family, indeed to all who see her. Intellectual, awkward, and prickly, she is sent away to college, where she becomes a passionate advocate for others who, like her, cannot conform. The animals of Oz have always walked on their hind legs and talked as humans talk; they have even lectured and taught in college. Change is in the air, however, and these freedoms are under attack. Before her very eyes her beloved Professor Dillamond, a historian, aesthete, and goat, is dragged away and, bleating piteously, banned from teaching and condemned to walk on all fours.
Elphaba is confident that the wonderful Wizard of Oz will share her horror. Yet when she finally meets him she discovers that he has in fact orchestrated the pogrom. The great Oz is utterly corrupt. Spotting Elphaba’s intellect and innate gift of magic, he invites her to join him. She declines and declares war on him, but with enviable spin-doctoring skill he points to her greenness, brands her the Wicked Witch of the West, and condemns her as the enemy of Oz. The stage is set for the twister that brings the little wooden house crashing down into the land of the Munchkins. The yellow brick road beckons…
Many parallels have ben drawn in our tradition between the sacrifices offered on the altars of Jerusalem and the sacrifice offered by Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem. These parallels are at first compelling and not unhelpful. In both, precious lives are given and precious blood is spilt in the belief that what is offered will be acceptable, indeed pleasing to God. Yet to push the analogy too far is to ignore the prophetic witness of the Hebrew Bible to the effect that, whatever cultic requirements ancient Israelite society may have, her God is not interested in the blood of goats and pigeons. ‘I hate, I despise your festivals,’ he says to Amos, ‘and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’. The God of Israel, into whose hands Jesus entrusts his spirit, does not need blood. The community that sends Jesus to the cross does. The Roman state, the Jewish hierarchs, the baying mob, the human race, you and I, do.
Wicked turns the story of little Dorothy’s valour into a story people caught up in furious wrath against a small group and against an individual. The weak Wizard of Oz is revealed to Elphaba as distinctly un-wonderful. He cowers behind a pyrotechnic display calculated to impress the gullible. He unites his people and props up his authority by finding enemies for them to hate: first the animals, and, when she refuses to join him, the Wicked Witch. Thus Maguire exposes for us a seam that runs through every human civilization that has ever existed. Time and again, we define ourselves in opposition to others, over against others, distinct from others. Time and again those others are to be feared and hated. The Pope has recently written to his fellow bishops in rather rueful terms, ‘At times one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate. And should someone dare to approach them – in this case the Pope – he too loses any right to tolerance; he too can be treated hatefully, without misgiving’. This very week demonstrators in our streets will burn effigies of the high-earning bankers who they demonize; this very week those of us who are too polite to burn anything will demonize those same demonstrators.
The book of Leviticus sets out for ancient Israel a formal mechanism for containing this wrath and hate, for ridding the people of it, a mechanism that has given its name to us in perpetuity. The priest lays his hands on the head of a goat chosen by lot, and confesses over it all the people’s transgressions, putting them onto the unfortunate beast, which is then despatched into the wilderness. Israel’s sin is borne away by the scapegoat and the community is temporarily cleansed of its anger. Elphaba becomes a scapegoat for the insecure wrath of Oz; Sir Fred Goodwin for the generation which believes itself unfairly treated. And on the cross we see the ultimate scapegoat, the one who is despised and rejected, the one against whom the fickle crowds turns, the one who positions himself in the path of humankind’s wrathful, fearful, hateful juggernaut, the one takes upon himself the whole weight of human anger, human failure and human sin. In going to the cross Jesus reveals sacrifice as killing; in going to the cross Jesus reveals the sentence passed upon him for what it is: not a holy and righteous act but the judicial murder of an innocent; in going to the cross Jesus reveals our rage against the other and contempt for the other for what it is: not justified indignation or enlightened self-interest but rage and contempt. Yet in going to the cross Jesus disarms rage and contempt. He lays aside his life as he lays aside his robes in the upper room, and in bread and wine he gives his life away as a gift to be shared.
David Ford and Daniel Hardy some years ago identified the Church’s big problem as its inability to cope with the abundance of God. They were right. Too often we behave as though the grace of God was like Lego bricks, something that we have to scrabble after in the dirt, something that comes only in tiny pieces. If I grab some of it then you can’t finish your house; if you do, I can’t finish my tractor. You become my scapegoat, or I become yours: ordained women, gay people, lone parents, conservative evangelicals, Forward in Faith, paedophiles, noisy children, 10 o’clockers: all are still in some quarter the subject of Christian rage and Christian contempt masquerading as Christian principle. Yet as Desmond Tutu reminds us, Jesus does not say ‘when I am lifted up I will draw some people to myself’ He says ‘when I am lifted up I will draw all people to myself’. All, all, all’.
There can be no us and them in the Church; there can only be us. I am because you are; not, I am because I am not you. We are one people, redeemed and set free, eyes opened to the terrible power of wrath and hate, one people sharing the life that was laid down and was raised, the life of Christ, the last sacrifice of them all. Ding, dong, the Witch is dead. In a few moments a bell will ring here, calling us not to exult in a death but to share in a life, a life freely given, a life that is for all eternity. For ‘as many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’. To him be the glory, now and for ever. Amen.
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