A Hitch in Time

But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man. – John 2:24-25

I love most of the Hitchcock movies like The Birds, Vertigo and Rear Window.  I think it was Frenzy that I saw in a movie theater with a friend of mine.  We were thoroughly unsophisticated hillbilly kids, and it was about too much for us.  We agreed to not tell anybody we had seen it.  It was guilt by association.

A similar film from the ‘80s is The Hitcher with Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell.  I noticed I mentioned this movie in a post a couple of years ago, but we're expanding it a little here.  It’s like watching a copperhead in the weeds, repulsively fascinating.  If you are familiar with the plot, you know that Howell plays a youthful character named Jim Halsey who is delivering a “drive-away” Cadillac from Chicago to San Diego.  He makes the mistake of picking up Hauer’s ominous hitchhiker, John Ryder. 

First of all, there really aren’t any homosexual, homo-erotic undertones in the movies.  I’m not saying that couldn’t be read into it, as some have done, but I think it misses the much bigger point.  Ryder and Halsey -- one hauls and is the vehicle while the other rides and controls.  I can see how someone obsessed with sex or told, at some point, by a sex-obsessed person that it’s like catcher and pitcher might start thinking that.  Halsey and Ryder do get accused of being homosexual by a flagman on the road construction crew, but that is deliberate misdirection on Ryder’s part to defuse suspicion. 

Ryder is a psychotic but a very capable and, we might even say, supernaturally intelligent murderer.  He’s demonic.  He is able to follow Halsey undetected, appearing and disappearing at will.  The reason, so it seems, that he picks Halsey and puts him through so much torment is that he wants to be stopped.

It is almost as though Halsey and Ryder were the same person, a kind of Dr Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Gollum/Smeagol, split personality.  Halsey wants to do the right thing, tries over and over to turn himself in, to escape from the avalanche of evil that he has innocently been caught up in.  Every time, Ryder comes from out of nowhere to intervene and keep Halsey trapped in the ever-tightening spiral.  The movie is on Youtube if you don’t remember it or have never seen it and want to watch it.  Most of the gore is off-screen.  There are dead, bloodied bodies around and a lot of implied horror, but we don’t witness so much of it as we would in the more current slasher movies.

Halsey might understand what Paul was talking about:  … For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out …  I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil is right there with me … ( a little loosely from Romans 7:15-25).  

Every time we want to set things right, to rectify and put everything back the way it should be, something will come out of “nowhere” to upset and thwart our best-laid plans and good intentions.

Now my very exclusive coterie of readers, all four of you, I’m sure don’t have this problem.  For me, though, it’s not really out of “nowhere”.  I suspect that I know exactly where my hitcher is riding as well as his real identity.  I’d like to deny culpability for these sins, point the finger, and blame Ryder, and there’s no question that he needs to be stopped – to die.  But I’m the one who is responsible for stopping him. 

Near the end of The Hitcher, Ryder has been taken into custody by the Texas DPS and is being transported in chains to prison.  Halsey is riding with a DPS captain – who represents the Law.  Halsey says something like, “You’re not going to be able to hold him.”  The Law is good, but it is inadequate to deal with Ryder.  He can’t simply be imprisoned and confined.  We can’t pass off our obligation to the authority of the Law.  We brought him here.  We have to stop him.  In his better moments, in his brief moments of clarity before his nature reasserts itself, Ryder wants us to stop him.  He gives us opportunity after opportunity. 

So, Halsey, after setting the Law out by the side of the road (a mirror image of how the whole thing started) and taking the vehicle of the Law, turns around and goes after Ryder, catching up with the bus just as Ryder makes his escape.  With this last one-on-one confrontation, it is Halsey who goes free.

A Forked Process

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.  But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. – Galatians 5:16-18

As high and holy as the Law is, as perfect as it is as a revelation, the Spirit is higher and holier.  The Law is derived from the Spirit and not the other way around.  The Law is descriptive where the Spirit is creative.  A level does not lay a beam straight; it just lets you know when it is straight.  We are at liberty, not because we are lawbreakers, but because we embody the Law:  And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules (Ezekiel 36:26-27).

There are decisions we have to make, based on imperfect information.  We can pray as long and as hard as we like.  We may have peace about what we do, yet it may not work out as we expected.  These things happen because we live in a fallen world with fallen fellow travelers who sometimes make stupid choices.  On the other hand, I think I always know when I let the old man have his way.  It’s rare – so rare I can’t think of an example – where I genuinely thought my motive was purely spiritual, and it somehow violated God’s Law. 

I am generally skeptical when I or anyone says that he had no idea that operating out of the flesh would lead to a bad outcome.  Just as an example:  do you know how much trouble it is for two married people to commit adultery?  And it’s almost as tough for a single and a married person – at least if the married one doesn’t want to get caught.  It’s not like you can go out on the town or just meet indiscriminately.  You have to think about it, plan it, and work around roadblocks.  It's quite a lot of trouble.  I attribute my own record of fidelity at least as much to laziness as virtue.  So, when someone tells me that something “just happened”, I tend to think that person is fooling himself or herself and/or trying to fool me. 

We are or should be aware of the battle that goes on within us, the incessant warring of the flesh and spirit.  I do not ever remember that not being the case in my own life.  Sometimes it seems I have the situation under control, and sometimes I feel like the Bayonne Bleeder.  What round is this?  Perhaps for some who never heard or thoroughly rejected the Gospel a false peace may be possible -- so long as they stay on their side of a DMZ, which is probably why militant atheists are militant.  For the rest of us, only a surrender to the dominion of the Spirit offers us any hope for lasting tranquility and a satisfactory resolution to our internal conflict.  It doesn’t stop the old man from offering his opinions and telling us that we be fools for not letting him run things.  But the more we live under the Spirit and the more we listen to the voice of the new man, the more at home we become, for he is aligned with the Law, and things stay where we put them.