The Ugly Truth (as a Motive for Murder)

“Jake still won’t talk to me, and I miss him so much, it’s like I’ve been hollowed out by a nuclear blast and there’s nothing left but ashes fluttering inside brittle bones. I’ve send him dozens of texts that aren’t only unanswered; they’re unread. He unfriended me on Facebook and unfollowed me on Instagram and Snapchat. He’s pretending I don’t exist and I’m starting to think he’s right. If I’m not Jake’s girlfriend, who am I?”

Karen M. McManus, One Of Us Is Lying (2017)

So the premise of the novel is this: five assorted high-school stereotypes walk into detention one afternoon, and only four walk out alive. Investigators deem the death suspicious, and each of the four survivors has a disturbingly plausible motive. If you think it sounds like The Breakfast Club with added murder, great: that’s apparently exactly what Karen M. McManus was going for.¹ I won’t spoil the dénouement (which is pretty guessable anyway): what follows confines itself, assuming I remember rightly, to events revealed in the first few chapters.²

 

Added murder.

The four plausible motives stem from the fact that Simon, the unfortunate deceased, ran a gossip app that regularly disclosed devastatingly sensitive – and unfailingly accurate – details of the personal lives of his fellow students at Bayview High. Simon had drafted, but not yet published, a post dishing dirt on all four of those held in detention with him that afternoon. He was about to tell everyone that Bronwyn – the nerd, never broke a rule in her life, her heart set on upholding the family tradition of studying at Yale – had cheated on her Chemistry exams the previous year; he was about to tell everyone that Cooper – the jock, star baseball player, offers of university sports scholarships and contracts with minor-league teams flooding in from all sides – had enhanced his athletic performance using less-than-legitimate means; he was about to tell everyone that Addy – the homecoming princess, Little Miss Popular, permanently hanging off the arm of her equally popular long-term boyfriend Jake – had recently had a one-night stand with one of Jake’s good friends; and he was about to tell everyone that Nate – the delinquent, a criminal record under his belt already, one slip-up away from doing guaranteed jail-time – had been at his old habit of dealing drugs again.

Essentially, in each case, what’s at stake is the maintenance of some sort of façade of virtue. Bronwyn, Cooper, Addy, and Nate are all making themselves out to be better than they really are. Indeed, they have built entire identities on the foundation of people thinking they’re better than they really are. Check out my opening quotation, for instance: the narrator is Addy, at an absolute loss after Jake finds out about her betrayal. He’s pretending she doesn’t exist and she’s starting to think he’s right. She built her whole sense of who she was on the fact that Jake thought well of her, and now that he doesn’t, she can’t find anything left of herself except a figurative nuclear wasteland. Granted, murder is an awfully long way to go to keep a secret, but when there’s that much at stake … well, as I say, all four motives seem plausible enough. If you’re that heavily invested in the perpetuation of a falsehood about what you’re really like – if every hope you have is reliant on it – then anyone who’s poised to expose the ugly truth represents an incalculable threat.

And so someone plotted to kill Simon. And so the Pharisees plotted to kill Jesus.

It’s instructive, isn’t it, that Jesus identified the ‘leaven of the Pharisees’ as hypocrisy. According to Luke’s account of the gospel, he’d just been to a Pharisee’s house for a meal, and while he was there, pronounced a series of depreciatory ‘woes’ against said Pharisee and his faction. (So, extensively insulting your host at a dinner-party is one you can add to your list of technically legitimate What Would Jesus Do? options.) He cut through the Pharisees’ façade of virtue – their ritual washing before eating and so forth – and exposed the ugly truth about what they were really like: their greed and their neglect of justice and their love of human praise. At that point an expert in the Law cut in with a suggestion that Jesus was (inadvertently?) insulting his own group as well, to which Jesus rather hilariously responded with something that I’m pretty sure was to the effect of, Oh yes, now you mention it, that’s a very good point; I’ve been leaving you guys out: woe to you too! The scribes and Pharisees responded not by conceding that he might have a point, of course, but by stepping up their attempts to catch him saying something compromising, which was ultimately part of a plot to get him killed. The next thing Luke records Jesus as having said is: “Be on your guard against the leaven – which is hypocrisy – of the Pharisees. And nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known.”³

There’s a chapter division slap bang in the middle there, but don’t let that stop you taking it all together. Jesus identifies the Pharisees’ problem as hypocrisy, that is, that they made themselves out to be better than they really were. They were so heavily invested in perpetuating that falsehood about what they were like – that they were achieving righteousness through their own deeds – that they were ultimately prepared to plot the death of the man who threatened to expose the ugly truth (part of the ugly truth being, of course, how very hypocritical they were). Beyond identifying the hypocrisy, though, Jesus also warns his disciples to be on their guard against it; they’re certainly not immune from falling into committing the same evil. To do that, they need to hold fast to the knowledge that nothing concealed will remain concealed in perpetuity: every façade of virtue will be shattered eventually, hence why it’s no good trying to put such a façade up in the first place.

Being on our guard against hypocrisy means refusing to make ourselves out to be better than we really are. It means holding up our hands to the ugly truth our Lord tells us about what we’re like. It means refraining from building our identities around other people’s good opinions of us – as did Bronwyn and Cooper and Addy and Nate; and as did the Pharisees, who loved the respect they got from others in the form of greetings and best seats and so forth; and as I wish I could say I never do, but, let’s be real here, that would be just another slice of hypocrisy. I am, far too often, downright obsessed with trying to make people think well of me. And I hold my hands up to it. The only other option, after all, is to strive ever harder to perpetuate the falsehood that I’m better than that – a course of action that runs a severe risk of ending up wishing death on the one who threatens to expose the ugly truth. Not in quite so many words, perhaps, but given that everything God says and does is a direct result of who he is, to refuse to acknowledge what he says about me is, in essence, to wish that he didn’t exist as he does. Now there’s a sobering thought. God forgive me.

Here’s the good bit, though: whereas when Simon threatened to tear down his classmates’ façades of virtue, leaving them floundering and hopeless was basically the end of the plan, when Jesus tears down our façades of virtue, he offers us something much, much better to build our identities around: the actual virtue gifted us by his sacrifice on our behalf. Every sin, including hypocrisy, is forgiven at the cross. That being so, there’s no real terror any more in even our worst secrets being revealed. God has absolutely all the dirt on us – even about what goes on in the privacy of our own thoughts, which takes devastatingly sensitive to a whole new level – and yet he chooses to lay the blame on Jesus, the one human being who never made himself out to be better than he was (he kind of couldn’t have done, being literally perfect and all). God has absolutely all the dirt on us, and yet he chooses to think well of us. He chooses to love us with an infinite love. There is no new information that could be revealed that could cause him to change his mind on that.

So the best way to be on our guard against hypocrisy is to constantly remind ourselves that, before God who knows everything, there can be no façades of virtue, but that we don’t need any to guarantee his good opinion of us: Jesus already guaranteed that by exchanging our sinfulness for his very own righteousness. If we refuse to acknowledge the ugly truth about ourselves, we’ll end up functionally wishing him dead as the Pharisees did; but if we accept what he says about what we’re like, we can also accept his having willingly given himself up to death on our behalf, to transform the ugly truth into a thoroughly beautiful one: we who are in Christ are the very righteousness of God.

Footnotes

¹ As she confirmed in a comment on her Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/questions/844407-is-this-kind-of-like-a-retelling-of-the.

² It’s a pretty good read. Here it is on Hive if you’d like to get hold of it: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Karen-McManus/One-Of-Us-Is-Lying/20668158. Although I read it on the Libby app, recently introduced to me by a good friend to whom I am consequently most grateful: https://meet.libbyapp.com/. If you have a public library card and like the sound of being able to borrow ebooks and audiobooks for free, I unequivocally recommend Libby.

³ Here’s Luke 12: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+12&version=ESVUK. You’ll have to click back a chapter for the bit about the dinner-party.