The Disorientating Nature of La La Land and Life

“City of stars, are you shining just for me?

City of stars, there’s so much that I can’t see.

Who knows? I felt it from the first embrace I shared with you

That now, our dreams - they’ve finally come true.”

La La Land (2016)

 

City lights.

Remember La La Land?¹ Oddly, although it absolutely cleaned up at the 2016 Oscars and seemingly everyone spent a couple of months raving about how amazing it was, I get the impression that it dropped off the radar at a near-vertical gradient subsequent to that. Indeed, I’ve barely heard anyone mention it since, except when I went to an evening screening of it at one of those big Christian holiday event thingbobbies this spring just gone.² When my older sister and I arrived back at our accommodation afterwards, our flatmates of course made polite enquiries as to whether we’d enjoyed the film.³ We looked at each other with furrowed brows. Like, it wasn’t terrible, but was it really worth all those Oscars? was the gist of our response. Then I added something to the effect that I felt I needed longer to ponder in order to decide whether I liked it; I hadn’t yet acquired a satisfactory sense of what I thought it was trying to do. What was the point it was making? What were the ideas it wanted me to buy into?

As a bit of a side note, I have come to realise that not everyone agrees with me that all films (and books and video games and every other kind of fiction) are trying to get their viewers (or readers or players or whatever) to buy into one particular set of ideas or another. But I for my part don’t believe it’s possible to tell a story in a way that doesn’t advocate certain notions about the nature and purpose of life, the universe, and everything, over against other ones. Consequently, I’d much rather be able to discern something of what the director or writer or creator wants me to buy into, and so to decide from an informed perspective the extent to which I actually want to buy into that, than to not be able to, and so render myself susceptible to starting to buy into it without particularly noticing or thinking through the relevant rationale. I don’t mean that there’s inevitably some ruthless agenda lurking behind every tiny element of a piece of storytelling, and that I take it upon myself to expose the conspiracies; I’m just trying, as ever, to watch watchfully.⁴ And to that principle, La La Land presented something of a challenge. It was a disorientating film. It defied my attempts to map and delineate it. It constantly confounded my expectations even as I readjusted them.

Still, a good deal of time and thought later, I think I might have grasped the thrust of it. I think disorientating the viewer and confounding her expectations is precisely what it’s designed to do: specifically, it deliberately falls short of every Hollywood trope it can get its hands on. In a market saturated with the same old rosy-glowing story - though beset by evil opposing forces, our heroes ultimately overcome every obstacle until everything they ever dreamed of, including each other, is theirs - it punches real-life disappointment through that shining bubble. The really key place I think this comes across - spoilers ahead - is during that dream-sequency bit right before the end of the film, that takes place while Mia and her husband watch Sebastian perform a piano piece in his jazz club.⁵ The dream sequence represents what was supposed to happen. When Mia first went to compliment Sebastian on his playing, he was supposed to stop and chat, instead of barging past her in a huff. When Mia took a gamble by staging her one-woman play at her personal expense, it was supposed to enjoy a full house and a standing ovation, instead of sparse applause from an even sparser audience. When the story ended, Mia and Sebastian were supposed to have stayed together despite everything stacked against them, instead of having broken up for the dull, pragmatic reason of allowing each to pursue his or her own career. I know, because every time, what really happened caught me by surprise, whereas the dream-sequence version felt, you know, right.

La La Land denounces La La Land as a mere la la land, if you catch my drift: it denounces Hollywood and everything Hollywood normally wants us to buy into as mere fantasy. In a properly delicious bit of generic playfulness, it’s a Hollywood musical, made in something close to the traditional style, that dedicates itself to dismantling everything Hollywood musicals have traditionally represented. In real life, the story doesn't tend to go the way you’d think it was supposed to if your life were a Hollywood musical. Sometimes you get a lucky break, sometimes you don’t, and that doesn’t come in a nice predictable story arc. Sometimes pouring your heart and soul into a project isn’t enough to persuade other people to believe in it. Often the paths available to you aren’t as clear cut as chasing your dream at any cost versus outright abandoning it. Often it turns out that you can only have some of the elements of the perfect happy ending you’d imagine for yourself.

 

Often life, unlike certain forms of cinema, does not turn out all rainbows and smiles.

The very neither-here-nor-there-ness of this set of ideas made it harder than usual to pin down as the fundamental point of the film. And, to move us into this week’s scriptural content, I think a similar thing is going on in the book of Qohelet, or Ecclesiastes.⁶ You read it and think, hang on, what are the ideas this wants me to buy into? If you’re looking at the epistle to the Romans or something, the argument is all nicely laid out in logical order, but Qohelet seems to chase dead ends and contradict itself and come out with some weird stuff that doesn’t feel as if it really belongs in a library dedicated to the glory of God, any more than an ending where the key couple aren’t together belongs in a Hollywood musical. It disorientates the reader and confounds her expectations, and you know what? I think that’s precisely what it’s designed to do. Very much like La La Land, the structure of the thing is a key part of how it makes the point that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you think they’re supposed to.

It’s good to be wise, says Qohelet. Things work out well for people who behave wisely. And we go, great, yes, that makes sense. But then he adds, mind you, the wise person and the fool both end up dead, just the same as one another; and you can be as wise as you like and still be forgotten after your time; and fools often seem to end up powerful, and it only takes a little foolishness to bring all the benefits of your wisdom crashing down; and anyway, nobody’s really wise, because nobody knows the future, and so we can all be caught unawares and left floundering by unexpected turns of events; and it’s impossible for anyone to really understand the world and how it works. All right, we frown, so wisdom is actually useless, then. And he replies, well, no, it’s still definitely a lot better than folly. And while we’re busy scratching our heads over that, he continues: it’s good to be righteous. Things work out well for people who fear God and do what’s right. And we go, great, yes, that definitely makes sense. But then he adds, mind you, the righteous person and the wicked both end up dead, just the same as one another…⁷

If you try to catch hold of one thread of thought in the book of Qohelet and follow it along, you end up tied in knots - and that’s really the whole point. The book is about the nature of life, the universe, and everything, and its conclusion is that life is disorientating and confounds our expectations. It makes you think it’s going to go one way, and then turns around and does something else instead.

This is actually all stupendously comforting, because it means that when we look at life, the universe, and everything, and see exactly the disorientating mess that Qohelet did, that’s not because we’re lacking the wisdom to discern a nice, neat story arc hidden somewhere under the chaos. Qohelet is most readily identified as Solomon,⁸ literally the wisest person ever if we don’t count Jesus, and yet his conclusion about life is that it’s impossible to truly make head or tail of it. We should be expecting that things won’t turn out the way we think they’re supposed to.

But the really good news is that the reason life seems like such a disorientating mess is because we can’t make head or tail of it, in that we can’t see the big picture. We can’t grasp the totality of the ginormous, impossibly elaborate story that God is telling through the whole of human history. It confounds us because we’re too tiny to get how all the individual elements of it work together. The way life disorientates us, then, isn’t a cause for despair, but for rejoicing, that we have a God great and mighty enough to purpose order out of all this seeming chaos.

La La Land is right that things often don’t work out the way we think they’re supposed to. But if we’re trusting a God whose wisdom to decide and power to ordain how the world works soar an infinity above ours, that fact need neither surprise us nor trouble us. The comfort of Ecclesiastes is that it doesn’t hold back in describing the chaos of life, the universe, and everything - and thereby it declares the full disorientating extent of it subject to the will and rule of almighty God.

Footnotes

¹ If not, here’s the opening scene to remind you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVVqlm8Fq3Y.

² Namely Word Alive, which takes place each spring at Pontins in Prestatyn: https://wordaliveevent.org/. It’s really good, but it’s probably already all booked up for next year because that’s what seems to happen, so my recommendation might be slightly pointless by now.

³ Another thing we did with our Word Alive flatmates was play a lot of Ticket to Ride, a stupendously fun board game first introduced to me by a dear friend maybe a month before that: https://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/en/usa.

⁴ This is a principle I explored in ‘The Art of Watching Watchfully’, which you can find under March 2017 in my blog archives if you’re mad enough to want to read more of my ramblings today.

⁵ I can’t find said scene on YouTube. Sorry.

⁶ Qohelet (קֹהֶלֶת) is the Hebrew title, Ecclesiastes (Ἐκκλησιαστής) the Greek translation of it: in both cases the book shares its title with the character who provides most of the narration. Often this character is called the Teacher in English; the Hebrew word occurs in no other book of the Bible, but it’s from the root קהל (qhl) meaning to assemble, so the idea behind the English translation is that this was someone who gathered a bunch of people to listen to what he had to say. The Greek word for ‘assembly’ is ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía), which in the New Testament is used in the specific sense of ‘church’ – so that’s why the title Ecclesiastes bears so strong a resemblance to words like ‘ecclesiastical’, ‘ecclesiology’, French église, and so forth.

⁷ The book circles round to these ideas repeatedly, so I won’t link to a particular part of it; you’ll get a better feel of what I’m getting at by giving the whole thing a skim: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&version=ESVUK.

⁸ Qohelet 1:1 identifies the author as ‘the son of David, king in Jerusalem’; verse 16 adds that he was wiser than anyone in Jerusalem before him; 2:7 adds that he had greater possessions than anyone in Jerusalem before him, and verse 9 of the same chapter that he was himself greater; 12:9 adds that he taught the people and wrote down collections of proverbs. Methinks ’tis Solomon.

Case-Law

Philip: I came to ask you for advice; this is my very first duel.

They don’t exactly cover this subject in boarding school.

Hamilton: Did your friends attempt to negotiate a peace?

Philip: He refused to apologise; we had to let the peace-talks cease.

Hamilton: Where is this happening?

Philip: Across the river, in Jersey.

Both: Everything is legal in New Jersey.

Hamilton (2015)

A while ago, my supervisor and I were for some reason having a conversation about duelling. The question posed was whether, if a person in today’s Britain was killed in a duel, in which he or she had consented to participate on the terms that it might result in death, and everybody involved was totally fine with that as an outcome because honour had been satisfied and all, would there be any premise for legal action against the other dueller?

A duel, perhaps.

Well, we didn’t know, but as fortune would have it, I know somebody I knew would know, or at least strongly anticipated would, and what do you know, when I asked her during the next phone conversation we had, she did indeed know. Apparently a person is not legally considered to be able to genuinely consent to injury beyond Actual Bodily Harm, so a person who killed someone else in a duel, or indeed injured him or her to a grievous degree, would be culpable for having done so.

Would it be murder? I queried; apparently that would depend on other factors. But duelling is legal? I asked; and yes, apparently it is, although it’s illegal to use weapons in a public place. So you could have a duel with weapons if you did it at home? I inferred; and yes, apparently you could, provided you had all the proper documentation for owning the weapons. Or you could have a duel in public if it was just hand-to-hand? I added; and yes, theoretically you could, although if you didn’t make it blooming clear that a duel’s what it was, you’d probably end up getting arrested anyway (tends to happen when you start beating someone to a pulp in the street, I guess). And if you injured your opponent, but not too badly, there’d be no legal ramifications? I asked. (I was asking in a purely abstract, theoretical way, of course, out of nothing more than pure curiosity, though I realise that by saying that I only make it sound as if I actually wasn’t; perhaps the fact that I’d doubtless be utterly flattened by pretty much anyone in any sort of duel one might conceive of, constitutes the best evidence that I wasn’t making these inquiries for any practical purpose at all.) At this point, my knowledgeable source decided to move into the colourful world of case-law for some potentially useful examples. In one case, she described, a woman was deemed capable of consenting to an injury imposed by her lover, because he had branded her with something symbolic of their relationship; because it was believed that the thing had been done to show love, the consent was deemed valid. In another case, she continued, a society of sado-masochists had been deemed incapable of consenting to the damage they had been inflicting on one another’s bodies, because it was done purely for the sake of causing the pain. So, whether an injury sustained in a duel was considered to have been validly consented to or not would probably depend on the precise reasons on whose account it was sustained.¹

There are a lot of laws in this country, but no matter how many laws you make, they can never cover absolutely every scenario that human imagination and circumstance might bring about. The laws as they’re written lay down some principles, but once you start dealing with specific, individual situations, you’re going to have to move beyond those principles alone, and attempt to form such additional substructures as most closely align with the values they espouse. Having other specific examples with which your own might be plausibly compared – case-law, in other words – will doubtless be a big help.

One thing I think Christians often forget about the Biblical Law is that it’s quite like that. It doesn’t tell you everything. It can’t cover absolutely every scenario that human imagination and circumstance might bring about. It lays down some principles, but once you start dealing with specific, individual situations, you’re going to have to move beyond those principles alone, and form such additional substructures as align most closely with the heart of God.

At this point you may be shifting uncomfortably. Isn’t that exactly what Jesus condemned the Pharisees for doing – laying on the burden of all these extra rules added to those actually revealed in the Torah?² Isn’t it true that the Bible tells us everything we need to know about life and godliness?³ Isn’t it vital that we maintain a principle of sola scriptura and don’t treat traditions and church literatures as if they were inspired as well?⁴

And yes, a hearty yes to all of those. But the thing is, O Legalism-Averse Reader, I bet you anything that, if you’ve been following Jesus for more than five minutes, you’ve already moved beyond the basic substance of scripture with respect to the behaviours you expect of yourself, due to nothing more than mere practical necessity. The Bible tells us to withdraw to our own space and pray, but it doesn’t specify how often, or for how long. It tells us to avoid sexual immorality, but it doesn’t specify which particular acts are reserved for the union of marriage. It tells us to give generously to our brothers and sisters in need, but it doesn’t specify how much of our income ought to go to that compared with how much we spend on frivolous treats for ourselves.⁵ In order to have an action plan for what you’re actually going to do about these commands, therefore, you’ve had to form additional substructures alongside the principles laid out in scripture.

Yes, you may protest, but righteous living isn’t about working out rules and limits and sticking to them, as if one could find righteousness in doing that instead of in Christ who alone lived the kind of life that God requires of his servants; it’s about where your heart is, about acting out of love for God and neighbour. And of course you’re right, of course it is, and if you think that’s incompatible with forming the additional substructures, you haven’t understood what I’m trying to say. One can’t avoid forming substructures of some sort, because the Bible doesn’t deal with every specific scenario you’re going to encounter in your day, and you have to have some way of deciding how to respond to these different scenarios. What you’re really advocating – and, I hasten to add, what I am too – is simply forming those substructures in such a way as to best reflect the heart of God as revealed in scripture, knowing that that, and not the substructures themselves, is the important thing.

What scripture gives us is principles, and sometimes also case-law. Case-law demonstrates the application of a principle in one specific scenario, so as to illustrate by analogy what it might look like to apply it in other scenarios. I think the idea that the rest of the commands in the book of Exodus are basically case-law for the Ten Commandments is a very helpful one. Consider, as a fairly random example, the laws about oxen goring people in Exodus 21: we have here, I think, some case-studies that, among other things, illustrate the application of the principle of ‘you shall not murder’:

When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall not be liable. But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.⁶

This is a Texas longhorn, apparently. Could probably do some serious goring if it wanted to.

All right, so murder is punishable by death, but what if somebody didn’t deliberately kill someone else; rather, his property was responsible for that person’s death? Well, it’s not the owner’s fault – unless he should have known this was likely to happen, in which case he’s liable for the usual penalty. And either way, the lethal piece of property should be disposed of so as to prevent the same thing happening again (indeed, as a side note, if you’ve been killing all the oxen that gore anybody, you should never have to deal with the problem of oxen that are ‘accustomed to gore’ anyway).

Do you see what I just did? I extrapolated back from the case-study to get a fuller grasp of what the principle entails, and so a better idea of how it might be applied in other scenarios. It’s very much like extrapolating back, in UK law, from the case-study of the branded woman, or the sado-masochists, to get a fuller grasp of the principle of to what degree it’s possible to consent to injury, and so a better idea of what might happen in the case of someone injured in a duel. The case-law isn’t just there for its own sake: it demonstrates how the principle works in practice.

If I might take another example from the Law, this time from Deuteronomy, because I think this matter is important:

If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbour’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offence punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbour, because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.⁷

So this is basically case-law for ‘you shall not commit adultery’. Let’s extrapolate back: the concern here, the thing that these specific case-studies show they think is important, is actually nothing less than the woman’s sexual consent. The whole city versus country thing is just a case-study illustration of circumstances that might demonstrate whether that consent was there. It clearly wouldn’t be inkeeping with the spirit of this law to execute a woman raped in a city because, although she cried out, nobody came to her aid; or because her attacker prevented her from crying out; or because she was just too scared to do so. Likewise, if it happened in the countryside but both parties consented, then both would be liable for the appropriate penalty. And furthermore, if a woman sexually assaulted a man, it wouldn’t align with what this law says to hold the man responsible.

Again, do you see what I’m doing? The words on the page give a couple of what-ifs; the reader’s job is to work out what they reveal about the principle behind them, and apply that principle in the case of other what-ifs. Adelphoi, let’s not let the long lists of laws in the Pentateuch bore us (because they seem to deal with such random, irrelevant scenarios) or scare us (because they sometimes, at first glance, seem to suggest crazy, immoral things like executing a woman because she was raped in a city); instead, let’s read them as case-law that sheds light on what obeying the greatest commandments of loving God and neighbour actually looks like in practice. Let’s read them as case-law that reveals the character of the Lawgiver – who, unlike the myriad humans who’ve helped put together the UK legal system over the years, is perfectly, wonderfully, awesomely just and good – and teaches us to love and serve him ever better.⁸

Footnotes

¹ I’ve written all this down purely from what I remember of our conversation, so I take full responsibility for any inaccuracies. If you want to know for absolutely certain what the law allows, best do your own research rather than taking my word for it.

² Good old Matthew 23 for that, of course: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+23&version=ESVUK. If you’d like more of my thoughts on Pharisees and legalism, I’m rather pleased with my post ‘I pharisee 2: Too Legit to Quit’, under ‘2016’ then ‘May’ in the box on the right.

³ The phrase is from 2 Peter 1:3, it turns out, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+23&version=ESVUK, though I think it came to my mind via Beautiful Eulogy’s ‘Symbols and Signs’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9SNpWFU4_w.

⁴ Do you want a really depressing example of people treating church literature as if it were inspired? I was told of a case recently where someone may end up being refused wine at communion because it’s technically specified in Church of England regulations that all communion wine has to contain alcohol. I kid you not; here’s the report on the matter: https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-12/non-alcoholic%20wine%20and%20gluten%20free%20bread.pdf. You know, this jazz makes me angry enough to have a duel with someone.

⁵ Try Matthew 6, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+6&version=ESVUK, 1 Corinthians 6, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+6&version=ESVUK, and 2 Corinthians 9, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+corinthians+9&version=ESVUK, because why not.

⁶ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ex+21&version=ESVUK. And of course you can just click back one chapter for the Ten Commandments.

⁷ Again, whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+22&version=ESVUK.

⁸ Just realised I wrote this entire post without specifying anywhere that, if we’re in Christ, we don’t need to worry about putting the entire contents of the Mosaic law into practice, only the principles of what God cares about that we learn from it. #notmycovenant

Fair Choice

“Maybe the gods found you for a reason. Maybe the ocean brought you to them because it saw someone worthy of being saved.”

Moana (2016)

Blurbs are a tricky business. Some good books have terrible blurbs, and vice versa. Some blurbs imply that a book belongs to one genre when it actually fits better in another. Some blurbs reveal too much, while others fail to tell one anything about the story at all.

And then, some blurbs are pretty much perfect, like this one, found on the back cover of Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall:

 

Mars. Well, not actually, but it looks cool and Mars-ish.

The fact that someone had decided I would be safer on Mars, where you could still only SORT OF breathe the air and SORT OF not get sunburned to death, was a sign that the war with the aliens was not going fantastically well.

I’d been worried I was about to be told that my mother’s spacefighter had been shot down, so when I found out that I was being evacuated to Mars, I was pretty calm.

And despite everything that happened to me and my friends afterwards, I’d do it all again, because until you’ve been shot at, pursued by terrifying aliens, taught maths by a laser-shooting robot goldfish and tried to save the galaxy, I don’t think you can say that you’ve really lived.

If the same thing happens to you, this is my advice: ALWAYS CARRY DUCT TAPE.

Well, you know, I read that and was sold straight away – and happily, the novel did meet my expectations. So call that a recommendation,¹ and, in a break from what I’d usually say at this point, do feel free to read this post before you get hold of the book: nothing I’m about to say constitutes a spoiler of any significance.

The first-person narrator whose dry and deadpan tone lends the blurb, and, indeed, the full story, such charm, is Alice, an English schoolgirl who finds herself being evacuated to Mars from Earth, as conditions there become ever more dangerous thanks to humanity’s ongoing war with a race of aliens called Morrors who’d quite like to nab themselves some more living space. Much as Mars is still only partway through being terraformed and made properly suitable for habitation, it seems that conditions on Earth could soon reach a point of being more hostile even than that, so humanity has decided to send some off its children off-planet to keep them comparatively out of harm’s way. Alice and her fellow evacuees are the lucky ones, the few chosen to be rescued from the anticipated doom.

And they were, indeed, chosen. After all, if you’re saving some but not all, you have to have some sort of method for deciding who sits in which category. The authorities of Alice’s world actually employed three. Some of the children, like Alice, were chosen because their parents were important or famous (Alice’s mum is one of Earth’s top fighter pilots); others, like Alice’s friend Josephine, were chosen because they scored especially highly on an intellectual test; and yet others, like her other friends Noel and Carl, were chosen by mere luck of the draw.

Pedigree, merit, or chance – that’s what stands between the rescued and the rejected. Alice can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t fair, that none of these methods is really fair, that everyone knows none of them is really fair – but what other option is there?

Pedigree. Merit. Chance.

I think Alice’s dissatisfaction with these options is completely justified. I think she’s right that none of them is really fair. Happily, when it comes to the greatest rescue that has ever been enacted, the authority behind that rescue wasn’t governed by any of them. Take a look at Romans 9:

But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said: “About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.” ²

Pedigree isn’t grounds for rescue from sin and death. Fleshly descent from Abraham doesn’t guarantee one a place in the kingdom. If that was the vital quality God was interested in, he could get it from stones. It doesn’t matter what your ancestors are or were like: what God makes of you isn’t affected by them in the slightest.³

 

These stones would do.

Romans 9 continues:

And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad – in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls – she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

Merit isn’t grounds for rescue from sin and death. God’s purpose of election logically precedes any human deed, good or bad: we are not saved because we are worthy of it. It was before the foundation of the world that God’s sons were chosen in Christ to be holy and blameless. The saved is precluded from claiming any credit for his or her salvation.⁴

I imagine this is all familiar ground so far. Huzzah, the great salvation is not limited by ancestral background; huzzah again, it’s not dependent on human deeds. But what about the third group of Mars evacuees, those selected by lottery? If being chosen for rescue doesn’t rest on any inherent quality of the chosen, surely the only remaining possibility is that it’s purely random?

I don’t think so. Let’s skip forward a few verses in Romans 9:

Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for dishonourable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory – even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

Randomness implies interchangeability. Think back to Alice and her friends: in Alice’s case, or Josephine’s, it would have been a problem if some other person had been swapped into her place, because that person wouldn’t have the particular qualities on account of which the selection had been made; but in the case of Carl and Noel, none of the higher-ups would have minded at all if they’d been given a couple of other kids instead. If you choose to select by chance, it must be because you don’t really mind either way; you don’t toss a coin unless you don’t have a preference.

God, by contrast, has deliberately prepared two different kinds of vessels: some of wrath and some of mercy. One of the former can’t be swapped in for one of the latter as if it made no difference. The Good Shepherd knows his sheep as thoroughly as he and his Father know each other, and he lays down his life for them, and no one can snatch them out of his hand. In fact, consider John 10 a moment longer:⁵ at one stage Jesus says that he has other sheep not of this sheepfold whom he must also bring; and then a few verses later, he tells the crowd that’s gathered around him that they don’t belong to his flock. The selection isn’t random. There are some who are definitively part of the flock, and the rest definitively aren’t.

Pedigree, merit, chance – none of them is really fair. The way God chooses those he adopts as sons is in a different category. And in this manner he makes known the riches of his glory. He displays the full extent of his grace, open to individuals of all people-groups; his mercy, in that salvation is bestowed on the utterly undeserving; and his covenant love and faithfulness, in that he will gather and shepherd his own flock, those specific individuals on whom he has chosen to set his favour, and no one will snatch them out of his hand. Redemption is a done deal, no returns, no exchanges, and God was the sole impetus behind every aspect of it.

Alice’s dissatisfaction with the criteria of pedigree, merit, and chance was justified, but it turns out that, when you factor in an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly righteous God, there’s a fourth option: God’s own sovereign choice.

Footnotes

¹ It’s out of stock on Hive (shocking!) so here it is on Scholastic instead: https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/products/94540.

² Keep it open; we’ll be coming back to it through the rest of the post: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+9&version=ESVUK.

³ On which points, consult Matthew 8:11-12, Matthew 3:9/Luke 3:8, and, ooh, let me see, try Ezekiel 18. That last point will probably produce a post of its own at some point: I am amazed at how many Christians seem to think that, in the Old Testament at least, God was to some extent on board with punishing children for their fathers’ misdeeds. Like, literally not at all, guys.

⁴ Check out Ephesians 1:3ff. I won’t tell you when to stop reading, because it’s Ephesians and you’re perfectly entitled to get carried away. Hopefully you’ll get as far as 2:9, because that’ll do as a reference for the last sentence of my paragraph.

⁵ Here it is for your perusal: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10&version=ESVUK.