Reading Sermon: The Green Mile

“I’m sorry for what I am.”

How many times have we ever uttered that phrase?  Not just sorry for an action, or inaction.  Having to feel the need to apologize for the crime of existence.  But Stephen King’s The Green Mile details the last days of John Coffey, a man who seemed to step into life just at the end of it.

Easter is here.  Today He dies for the sins of others.  The idea of a Messiah is one that is bandied about many times over in modern literature.  Superman is an obvious Messianic figure, coming down from the heavens to save us all.  Gandalf the Grey becoming Gandalf the White after descending into the depths of a hellish underworld.  But Gandalf and Superman have something that John Coffey never had: true love.

We imagine Jesus Christ as a beloved revolutionary in Roman times.  Riding into Jerusalem on a donkey whilst palms are laid before his feet.  Hosannas are sung in his name: “Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”  The only despicable people that could ever disparage the Son of God are those leaders.  That den of vipers who only desired power and security, conspiring to kill our Savior.  This is a simple narrative, but it is not the entire case.

The people turned on Jesus of Nazareth.  Pontius Pilate gave the people the chance to save Him, and instead they saved Barabas, a convicted criminal who seems to exist simply to deny Christ a chance at earthly freedom.  All of Jerusalem was there to watch Christ stumble up to Golgotha.  He carried His own cross, bleeding from a crown of thorns as the crowd screamed his name.

Imagine that screaming.  Just a week ago it had been “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”  Now no one will defend him as he carries his own death up the hill.  Those who loved Him, those who would have followed this Savior anywhere He chose, would only take the care to make sure he was truly dead and gone.

John Coffey never had to deal with such love.  A man that stepped into the wrong place, he was a being of love and pain.  Cursed with an ability to take away pain and bring it into himself, Coffey saved by inflicting pain upon himself.  The miracles we can attribute to Coffey is healing a urinary infection, curing a malignant brain tumor, and even a mouse that had just been crushed to death.  His power seems to be limitless.  Unfortunately, Coffey could not save the Detterick girls.

King does distinguish in this point between the Messiah and Coffey.  The two Detterick girls had been killed for hours, and Coffey had been unable to cure such destruction.  Christ, however, had been able to raise Lazarus from death three days after the death.  He had been able to save Himself, rising again on the third day on what we now call Easter.  In this way we can more accurately describe John Coffey not as a Savior, or a Son of God, but as a healer, healing as Elijah or Peter in the name of God.  However unknowingly he does so.
Throughout The Green Mile, John Coffey has no idea where this power comes from.  “I fixed it, didn’t I, boss?”  In fact Paul Newcombe, the warden of the death row and the recipient of Coffey’s first recorded miracle, debates the Christian value of such a statement.  Coffey doesn’t describe the healing as the work of God or Christ.  Peter described his healings (Acts 3:8-16) as the work of Christ in the Book of Acts.  If Coffey were truly a servant of God, how then would he ascribe such power to himself?

To be frank, it is because Coffey is a simple man.  He cannot read, can barely write, cannot even tie his shoelaces.  John Coffey believes that this power comes from himself, stems from within, because he has no evidence to the contrary.  He is not a prophet, speaking the Word of God as he communes with Him.  Coffey is a man wandering the South, trying to live a life that is without pain.  A desire that goes unfulfilled.

Coffey most exemplifies a Christ-like figure in his death.  His warden and guards, who are the closest things to disciples to John Coffey, ask him what to do.  How can they kill this man, this beautiful Being of God, and not be damned forever?  Paul Newcombe believes himself to be as a Roman Centurion, has a vision of John Coffey spread on a cross as Newcombe condemns him to death.  And Newcombe does indeed kill him, but cannot understand why he has to do it.  Then Coffey lets him know that he wants to die.

Did Christ want to die, at the end?  Did He look out over a world that despised Him, and wish for himself?  Some peace, a final rest in His Father’s house?  We know that He asked for the “cup of suffering” to be taken from Him at Gethsemane (Luke 22:42-44).  Did God grant His wish?  Just as Coffey asks for rest, did Christ desire an end?  In this, we shall never know the answer.  We can never know the thoughts of God, or even those of a literary character as John Coffey.

What we can examine are two lives that were committed to the healing of a torn world.  Christ’s miracles resonate today, and His teachings form the foundation of a life that extends past morals and beyond life itself.  John Coffey exemplified a man who tried, despite all that was against him.  His race, his build, his idiocy, he still tried to do good.  In the end, they both were executed.  As Coffey states, “they kill each other with love.”

May we never have to experience such loss.  May we look to God Above and thank him for a life where love has extended us past any such pain, to glimpse His face in wonder.

Amen.