Meant to mock... perhaps it ends up poetic justice

The blogosphere has been abuzz with the jarring episode of the popular television show “Scandal” on ABC. The Nov. 19 episode took on Congressional efforts to de-fund Planned Parenthood and glorified main character Olivia Pope’s abortion to the tune of “Silent Night.”  “The episode was a sickening hour-long “advertisement for Planned Parenthood,” Alexa Moutevelis wrote for Newsbusters.

The Planned Parenthood abortion business ultimately praised the episode and actors on the show defended the decision to show the killing of an unborn baby in an abortion during the Christmas song.  ABC aired the primetime show in which an abortion took place while "Silent Night" played in the background. 

In the middle of the episode, viewers suddenly saw Olivia arrive at a medical office and then lie down on an operating table as a doctor began the procedure. There was no dialogue from Olivia - just the sound of “Silent Night” playing in the background, along with voice-over of Olivia’s father Rowan (Joe Morton) delivering this speech in another scene:  “Family is a burden … a pressure point, soft tissue, an illness, an antidote to greatness. You think you’re better off with people who rely on you, depend on you, but you’re wrong, because you will inevitably end up needing them, which makes you weak, pliable. Family doesn’t complete you. It destroys you.”

What is striking is that while the episode was designed to attack the Gospel and even to flaunt the pro-abortion stance, there was a kind of poetic justice to it all.  For that is exactly the point.  Christ did not come to pat us on our back for our erudition, our sophistication, our profound wisdom, or our advocacy of social justice.  Rather, He came exactly for our sins, the sins against ourselves, our nature, and our future that abortion represents.  The fact that our culture does not get it does not erase the profound truth that sin has turned us not simply against God but against ourselves and our very nature.

This Christmas we will hear voices throughout the world sing again "Silent Night" -- not as sentimental words of the season but as the witness of God who comes to us to rescue us not only from the devil and the sinful world but from our own sinful selves.  What was meant to mock has only heightened for the orthodox Christian the very core and center of the Gospel -- that Christ was born, lived, and died for sinners such as these.  There is a certain poetic justice in this.  Yes, it was awful and it was meant to make a mockery of Christian witness and truth but what they did not get was that Christmas is precisely for this -- Christ took flesh and was born to save us even from ourselves!  Pray that the Holy Spirit will help many to hear the witness, to see the contradiction, and to believe in Him who was born to save us.