The Same Thing We Do Every Night, Pinky

Pinky:  Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?

Brain:   The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world.

Pinky and the Brain opening sequence (1995-1998)

 

I laughed so hard when I first saw this. The joke admittedly loses its flavour a little after one writes an entire blog post based on it.

The entire concept of this post is owed to the above meme. I would credit its creator if I knew who he or she was; as it is, I shall simply have to cast my gratitude into the digital ether and hope nobody sues me for copyright infringement.¹

Pinky and the Brain is one of a number of cartoons of which I only have any awareness because each enjoyed a brief stint as a feature of the after-school CBBC slot on BBC One during my childhood; other highly recommended examples of such cartoons include The Batman, as well as a great personal favourite of mine, W.I.T.C.H.² The premise of Pinky and the Brain, for those of you who, unlike myself, weren’t avid consumers of the whole gamut of analogue children’s broadcasting during the early noughties, is pretty well explained by the programme’s theme song:

They’re Pinky and the Brain.

One is a genius; the other’s insane.

They’re laboratory mice.

Their genes have been spliced.

They’re dinky; they’re Pinky and the Brain.

Before each night is done,

Their plan will be unfurled:

By the dawning of the sun,

They’ll take over the world.

They’re Pinky and the Brain.

Their twilight campaign

Is easy to explain:

To prove their mousey worth,

They’ll overthrow the earth.

They’re Pinky and the Brain.³

And so the plot of every episode revolves around our two rodenterous⁴ heroes making use of the hours of darkness during which the laboratory where they are kept as test subjects is deserted, to hatch some kind of ludicrously elaborate plan for world domination – or rather, the Brain, with determined seriousness, actually doing all the plan-hatching, while Pinky occupies himself with being generally daft and amusing.⁵ The Brain’s strategies have included everything from your standard clone army and various hypnotic devices, to luring the world’s population to a papier-mâché replica (and then taking over the now-abandoned real earth), creating the world’s most emotional film (and then taking over the world while everyone is too sad to stop him), and becoming head councillor at a summer camp for world leaders’ children.⁶

Predictably, however, Pinky and the Brain never actually do manage to take over the world. Like so many cartoons, the programme makes a point of always having everything revert back to normal by the end of the episode, meaning there is always some hitch or hindrance or unforeseen circumstance that brings all the Brain’s best-laid plans crashing down around his abnormally large ears. Granted, he never gives up; every episode begins, even before the theme tune, with a renewal of his commitment to his goal:

“Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?”

“The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world.”

Still, we the viewers know, even before the Brain reveals the particulars of today’s dastardly scheme, that said scheme is destined to fail. And that means that, much as I certainly derived a great deal of amusement from the above meme when it appeared on my Facebook newsfeed a while ago, it nevertheless takes on an oddly pessimistic quality upon second consideration. Is the Christian’s daily process of repenting and believing the gospel really so comparable to the Brain’s futile nocturnal endeavours?

I feel I should briefly mention that I don’t ask this question with the intention either of upholding the meme in question as an example of sound doctrine or condemning it as a shameful heresy according to the answer on which I end up settling. I get that the meme is just a meme and it’s funny and that’s the point of it. Still, that doesn’t prevent it from acting as a stimulus towards a discussion worth having, as I think this one is.

Significantly, the reason the Brain tries to take over the world every night is because he didn’t manage to take over it the previous night. If there was ever an occasion on which he actually pulled off one of his ridiculous plans and successfully took over the world, there would be no need to attempt to do so again the following night – unless he had, during the intervening day, been somehow completely usurped and deposited back at square one. Every night, the Brain attempts to gain the same ground; every night, he fails. That’s what necessitates the constant repetition of the same activity.

So what about our constant repetition of the same activity? Is the reason we repent and believe the gospel every day because we didn’t manage to do it successfully yesterday – or because we have, during the intervening period, lost what the process gained us and ended up back at square one? Are we, like the Brain, always trying and failing to gain the same ground?

Can one fail at repenting and believing the gospel?

It certainly feels like it sometimes. When I stare at my Bible for a goodly length of time, but my brain is occupying itself with anything other than pondering the precious truth it reveals; when I’ve forgotten all about the tear-inducingly convicting sermon I heard on Sunday by the time I wake up on Monday morning; when I know I’ve not been living the way God wants, but, even in prayer before him, can’t seem to generate any appropriate sort of horror or disgust at the fact at all, it certainly feels like it. I draw a session of attempted meditation to a close and think, well, that didn’t really achieve what I wanted it to. I’ll try again tomorrow. And maybe then it’ll work.

All of which just goes to show that I haven’t properly understood what repenting and believing the gospel is actually about.

The big way in which my repeated process of repenting and believing the gospel differs from the Brain’s repeated process of trying to take over the world, is that while the latter represents a striving towards a goal that has not yet been achieved, the former represents a response to a goal – my righteousness and ability to relate to God – that has already been achieved, not to mention permanently guaranteed. Jesus died and rose to establish that for me. Left to my own devices, I would indeed be even more firmly doomed to failure by my inherent sinfulness than the Brain is by the cyclical structure of the programme in which he features, but the entire point of the gospel is that I’m not left to my own devices.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. – Ephesians 2:1-6⁷

My sinfulness rendered me so helpless as to be genuinely (spiritually) dead, but God – not because I warranted it, but because his generosity goes beyond all expectation and reasonableness – made me alive, and has already seated me in heavenly glory as surely as he has seated Christ Jesus in whom my whole righteousness is found. And so the real way in which I fail at repenting and believing the gospel isn’t manifest in the kinds of distracted-from-the-Bible, forgetful-of-teaching, lacking-in-real-conviction scenarios I outlined above. These faults and shortcomings are predictable symptoms of the fact that my natural self has an all-consuming inclination towards rebellion against God. The real failure to repent and believe the gospel is when I try to induce my own mini-epiphanies at obscure portions of scripture, or to make myself more mindful of Sunday’s sermon by berating my own forgetfulness, or to persuade my own evil thoughts to discern and recoil at the very evil within them – all without recognising that it’s only God who can change me, in line with the righteousness he has already granted me, and asking for him to do so. It’s no good simply trying to repent and believe the gospel in a more effective manner, like the Brain hatching a new scheme; the gospel’s perfect effectiveness has already been guaranteed, and that certainly wasn’t achieved at my end of the process.

Without God, each of us is entirely helpless, and that’s why we need to be constantly renewing our reliance on him. We doom ourselves to failure only when we don’t recognise that, outside the righteousness given us in Christ, we’re doomed to failure. We need to be constantly repenting and believing the gospel not because we need to make constant fresh attempts to achieve a goal we haven’t yet reached, but because our goal has already been achieved on our behalf and we need to be constantly relying on him who achieved it.

Gee, what do you want to do tonight?

The same thing we do every night: repent and believe the gospel.

Footnotes

¹ I can at least say that I encountered the meme on the Reformed Humor Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reformedhumor/.

² Two series were made, both of which are available for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZCdw_RbiNA&list=PL7D52F46060974C55. That said, I did have some awareness of the W.I.T.C.H. universe before the cartoon appeared on CBBC through the associated magazine, whose major feature was a monthly instalment of the original Italian comic book on which the TV series was based. Some very kind people have archived many of the comics online: http://z8.invisionfree.com/WITCH_comics/index.php?showtopic=2.

³ Or if you’d like the full audiovisual experience, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBkT19uH2RQ.

⁴ Not, I confess, a real word – but I maintain that it, or some kind of equivalent, should be.

⁵ A particularly fun running joke is “Are you pondering what I’m pondering?”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-xrnIXQ3iQ.

⁶ As I found out from the relevant Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pinky_and_the_Brain_episodes. Hey, it was a long time ago that Pinky and the Brain was on BBC One; I might have been able to dredge up memories of a couple of plotlines, but nothing like a proper list of examples.

⁷ What a chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+2&version=ESVUK. The whole of the first few chapters of Ephesians is really just Paul passionately splurging brilliant doxology. It’s fun imagining his scribe trying to keep up.