Happy 100th Birthday to The Great Gatsby!
Extra: My new column at RNS
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel was published 100 years ago today!
I wrote an essay in celebration, which you can read in its entirety here.
Here’s a snippet to whet your appetite:
It is easy for Christian readers who encounter the story to see Jay Gatsby and tsk tsk, thinking themselves immune (or precluded from) his particular sins.
But George Wilson offers a warning against a whole set of other temptations.
In the climactic moment of the novel, George turns to God — or thinks he does — when he cries out, “God sees everything.” Here Wilson and his neighbor face the horrific car accident scene of his wife’s death:
“I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window”— with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it — “and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’ ”
Realizing that Wilson is talking about the “god” of the billboard, his neighbor tries to correct, even comfort, him:
“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.
I was just talking about the false idea that God expects us to become self-sufficient. In reality, Jesus says to "take no thought for the morrow". We work, yes, because we were made to work, and so that, as Paul says, we can give to those in need. But we were never told to work in order to no longer have any needs.
“In the face of no god or a false god, there is, in the end, only the self.
“George Wilson’s illusion — the illusion that faith and tradition will save us — is just as false as Jay Gatsby’s illusion that he can create himself. Failing to realize that both of these are merely substitutes for the true, living God will see all hell break loose. “
😢🙏🏻