Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus — The Exile Who Became a Blessing

What do you do with a guilt you cannot undo? That question has pursued every human being, and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus is one of antiquity's most searingly honest attempts to face it. The aged Oedipus—blind, polluted by unwitting patricide and incest, cast out from every city that ever knew his name—stumbles into a sacred grove at Colonus and begs for shelter. He has nothing to offer but his brokenness. You know something of that feeling. The weight of what cannot be undone, the hunger for a welcome you are not sure you deserve, and the fear that your pollution runs too deep for any sanctuary to hold are not ancient Greek problems; they are human problems. Sophocles named them with genius, but only one voice has answered them with authority. That voice did not speak from a sacred grove; it spoke from a cross and an empty tomb. This essay shows the difference—not to disparage a great poet, but to show why greatness is not enough and why the gospel is.

Literary Backgrounds: Greek and ANE Connections

Sophocles wrote for an audience living inside catastrophe. Athens had endured the Peloponnesian War, a brutal coup, and the humiliation of surrender. When the conspirators of 411 BC convened at Colonus—the very precinct of Poseidon where Oedipus seeks refuge—the setting crackled with political memory. Citizens would have recognized Colonus as a place of both civic betrayal and sacred shelter. Theseus' protection of the polluted wanderer amounted to a rebuke of every failure of Athenian ideals the audience had recently endured. Within the Greek tradition, the play draws on Aeschylus' Eumenides and Euripides' Suppliants. Reaching into the ancient Near East, the Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe traces an exile who finds honor in a foreign land, illuminating a universal anxiety about displacement that also surfaces in the Hebrew Bible’s cities of refuge and the protection placed on Cain. These connections are the fingerprints of common grace—the image of God pressing upward through every culture's instinct that the exile deserves a hearing. The Christian reading this is not watching paganism fumble toward biblical ideas but watching every nation groan for the answer only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has given.

Theological and Ethical Analysis

The play's central claim is that suffering, accepted rightly, becomes a source of blessing. Oedipus offers Theseus not wealth or armies but his own ruined body, insisting the gains from it are better than beauty. A man with nothing remaining presses his brokenness forward as a gift. This image stirs the Christian conscience because we worship a Savior who made the same offer on an infinitely more costly scale. However, the mechanism Sophocles provides is precisely where the gospel's superiority becomes unmistakable. Oedipus' guilt is never atoned for; it is absorbed by oracular decree and converted into civic utility. The pollution is accepted, not cleansed. The suffering earns no forgiveness, only function. The resolution depends on sacred bones quietly decomposing in secret soil—a local, impersonal transaction between a dead man and a city-state. There is no new birth here, no repentance, and no reconciliation. This is the result of every human system that tries to resolve guilt without substitutionary atonement: it arrives at function without forgiveness and a grave that protects a city but cannot raise the man inside it.

The Old Testament's Critique

The Old Testament critiques Sophocles' world at every point where it most needs correction. Where Oedipus seeks refuge in a grove defined by impersonal destiny, Mosaic law established cities of refuge grounded in Yahweh's personal command (Numbers 35; Deuteronomy 19). This is the difference between a universe run by fate and a universe governed by a Father who speaks. In Genesis 4, Yahweh himself places a mark of protection on Cain, rather than a sacred precinct conferring safety via geography. While Oedipus' suffering produces blessing through the power of his tomb, the Old Testament traces a far greater trajectory. God does not heroize guilt in death; He calls broken people to covenant faithfulness in life to bless every family on earth (Genesis 12). The Servant of Isaiah 53, who bears the iniquity of many and carries griefs not his own, is the answer to the question Oedipus raises but cannot resolve. The exile becomes a blessing because the LORD lays on Him the iniquity of us all.

The New Testament's Critique

The New Testament presses this further toward a specific Person. The motif of the outcast welcomed finds its ultimate expression in Jesus Christ, who welcomed the "unclean" not for civic leverage, but because He came to seek and save the lost. When Christ tells His disciples that welcoming the stranger is welcoming Him (Matthew 25:35), He reveals the incarnation—the truth that God became a refugee so that every exile would find a Father’s house. The paradox of physical blindness yielding spiritual insight finds resolution in John 9, where Jesus heals a man born blind and declares Himself the light of the world. Where Oedipus’ insight comes through tragic fate, the healed man’s comes through a personal encounter with Christ. Finally, the image of a polluted body becoming a posthumous blessing is answered at Calvary. The Son of God became a curse for us so that the blessing of Abraham might come to all nations through faith (Galatians 3:13-14), not through secret bones in Attic soil, but through a resurrection that left the tomb empty. Oedipus offers Athens a useful grave; Jesus Christ offers the world an empty one.

Benefits of Reading and Implications for Christian Belief

Why should a Christian read this play? The person who understands what Sophocles was reaching for will preach the gospel with greater urgency and counsel the suffering with greater tenderness. Basil of Caesarea urged young men to glean fruit from Greek poets, and Augustine used the failures of pagan tragedy to illuminate the superiority of divine providence. This play rewards discerning engagement. It deepens your feel for the ancient Mediterranean world that formed the backdrop of the New Testament, helping you understand why the proclamation of grace landed like a thunderclap. It trains you to sit with suffering rather than resolving it too quickly, making you a more faithful presence to those who desperately need someone to stay. It provides concrete imagery—a broken man offering his ruined body as a gift—that can open a door into the gospel for those who would never walk through a church door. You will not be drawn toward paganism but toward the deep gratitude of one who sees clearly what the world groped for in darkness.

Applying Oedipus at Colonus to Christian Life Today

The play ends with a sacred tomb and a fading oracle; Athens is left to manage as best it can with bones in the ground. But you are living on the resurrection side of history. The question this play presses on every Christian reader is: are you living like it? The risen Christ is not a protective spirit tethered to a patch of ground. He is seated at the right hand of the Father, interceding for every soul who has ever brought Him a guilt they could not undo. His invitation remains: come to Me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest. Read this play the way Paul engaged the Athenian poets in Acts 17—as a bridge into the conversation every human heart is having about guilt, fate, and homecoming. Use it to let the contrast do its work: hope in Christ does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured into our hearts. Oedipus had an oracle, two treacherous sons, and a grave. You have the living God, the atoning cross, and the promise that nothing can separate you from His love. Go tell someone who is still wandering in the dark that the grove they are searching for is a Person. He is already looking for them, and He will never turn them away.

Sophocles: Electra and the Cry for Justice

Picture a woman holding a small clay urn, pressing it against her body, weeping over what she believes are the cold ashes of the person she loved most in the world. She has no idea that the man standing in front of her, watching her grieve, is her living brother in disguise. By the end of this essay, that single scene from a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy will have changed the way you read Psalm 22 forever. Something in that image is already familiar to you, because you have held your own version of that urn — a grief you have carried so long it has started to feel like furniture. Perhaps you are not weeping openly. Perhaps you have simply gone quiet, stopped expecting anything to change, made your peace with the injustice of things. That quiet resignation is its own kind of urn. Every human culture across every century has wrestled with the same haunting questions: What do we do with the blood on our hands? Who will answer the cries of the suffering? And when does the cycle end? Sophocles gave those questions one of their most powerful dramatic expressions around 420 BCE, staging his Electra before thousands of Athenian citizens who were themselves living through plague, military disaster, and political collapse. The play follows Electra, daughter of the murdered King Agamemnon, who has spent years at the gates of the royal palace in Mycenae — grieving, accusing, refusing silence — while her mother Clytemnestra and her mother’s lover Aegisthus rule the house that is rightfully hers. What makes this tragedy more than a museum piece is that it traces the universal arc of a world without the living God: grief hardens into demand, demand calls for justice, and justice without covenant runs in circles until someone stops it by force. The Bible does not need Sophocles to make its case. But Sophocles, read under Scripture’s light, shows us how much the case matters.

Literary Backgrounds: A World Built on Curses, Oracles, and the Cry of the Dead

Sophocles did not invent this story. He inherited it from Homer’s Odyssey, where Agamemnon’s ghost recounts his own treacherous murder at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and from Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy staged just decades earlier. Those audiences came to the Theater of Dionysus already knowing the House of Atreus — the cannibal banquet of Thyestes, the dying curse of Myrtilus, the long shadow of the Trojan War stretched across everything. Sophocles built something new within that inheritance. Where Aeschylus drove toward the revenge, Sophocles built long, aching lament scenes that kept Electra’s grief at the center, slowing the drama so the weight of justice deferred could settle into the bones of the audience. Orestes, disguised as a foreign stranger, hands his sister a small urn and tells her it contains her brother’s ashes. She takes it into her arms. She feels its weight. She presses the cold clay against her chest and weeps, begging to be buried alongside it, calling it all that remains of the one person who could have saved her. In the hushed theater, thousands of Athenians listened to a woman say goodbye to hope. The cycle had no exit. Do you feel the weight of that? A woman weeping over ashes, and the living man she mourns standing right in front of her. That is every one of us before the gospel opens our eyes. You can find Electra’s world in every prestige drama that ends with a hollow victory — the villain defeated, the hero empty, the credits rolling over a silence that feels like it should have been filled with something more. Where is your urn? What have you been pressing to your chest, certain it contains only loss? Parallel traditions across the ancient Near East confirm that Sophocles was touching something universal: the Ugaritic Aqhat Epic shows a sister dressing as a soldier to avenge her murdered brother, and the Hittite Plague Prayers of Mursili II blame national catastrophe on unavenged royal bloodguilt. The cry of bloodguilt was not a Greek peculiarity. It was the anguish of a world that knew blood demanded an answer and had no better way to silence it. She wept over an empty urn. He walked out of an empty tomb. That is the whole difference.

Theological and Ethical Analysis: Justice Without Refuge, Grief Without Address

The central ethical engine of Electra is Apollo’s oracle. The god commands Orestes to return in disguise, spread false reports of his own death, and kill the usurpers. There is no debate, no appeal, and no limit on the avenger’s role. Apollo speaks and the wheels of fate turn. Electra stands as the embodiment of this world’s logic: honor demands blood, justice requires it, and those who refuse — like her pragmatic sister Chrysothemis — are complicit in shame. Sophocles saw as clearly as any human eye can see without revelation, and what he saw pointed, without knowing it, toward a light he could not yet find. Clytemnestra is killed offstage, her screams cutting through the palace walls. Aegisthus is led inside to face the same sword. The tyranny ends. But there is no peace, no forgiveness, and nothing in the play to prevent the same pattern erupting in the next generation. Now think about your own life. Think about how long you have carried a grief that had no proper address, a wrong that no human verdict has fully settled. Think about what it is costing you today — in your relationships, your peace, your freedom to love without reservation. A world without the resurrection is not merely incomplete. It is a world in which every urn stays cold forever, every lament dissolves into air, and every cry for justice echoes back unanswered until the last voice goes silent. Without the gospel’s answer, that cycle does not slow down. It gets heavier. The longer you carry it, the more it shapes who you are becoming.

The Old Testament Speaks: Regulated Justice, Cities of Refuge, and the Cry That Finds Its Father

When you place Sophocles’ Electra alongside the Old Testament, the contrast is not merely academic. It is the difference between a world with a way out and a world sealed shut. Numbers 35 and Deuteronomy 19 establish six cities of refuge precisely to interrupt the avenger’s cycle, distinguishing intentional murder from unintentional manslaughter and placing all judgment under Yahweh’s sovereign authority. The law made a distinction the avenger’s rage could not — between the hand that kills in hatred and the hand that kills by accident — because God himself makes that distinction. Grace is not the suspension of justice but its fulfillment. Think of those cities as a harbor in a storm: a place the pursued could physically run to, breathe, and be protected while justice was measured rather than seized. The author of Hebrews saw the deeper meaning of those cities when he wrote of “we who have fled for refuge” laying hold of the hope set before us (Hebrews 6:18) — and that refuge is ultimately Christ himself. Second Samuel 13 and 14 show what happens when covenant order collapses: Absalom’s revenge killing of Amnon for his sister Tamar’s rape leads not to justice but to civil war, a fractured dynasty, and a kingdom bleeding from its own wounds. The lament psalms — Psalms 13, 22, and 88 — show how the same grief that pours from Electra’s long speeches can be carried honestly to the one God who receives it. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1) is a cry Electra could have uttered word for word. The difference between her cry and the psalmist’s is not the depth of the anguish. It is the address. She cries into fate. He cries to a Father.

The New Testament Fulfillment: Where the Cycle Finally Ends and the Urn Proves Empty

None of the Old Testament’s trajectory reaches its destination until Jesus. What he accomplished is not merely emotional comfort but the precise doctrinal resolution that every human cry for justice requires. Christ became the propitiation for our sins — the wrath absorbed, the record cleared, the sentence served — so that God could be both just and the justifier of those who trust in him (Romans 3:25–26). God did not send his Son to end the cycle because he found it philosophically unsatisfying. He sent him because he loved every Electra who ever lived and could not bear to leave them weeping. He did not come for a doctrine. He came for you — for the specific grief you carried into this essay today. The apostle Paul quotes Deuteronomy’s “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Romans 12:19) in the context of commanding non-retaliation, because propitiation has permanently changed the moral landscape. Christ bore the guilt. Christ absorbed the retribution the whole House of Atreus could never contain. The cycle stops at the cross. Now watch what happens in Psalm 22. It opens in absolute desolation: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me?” The speaker is abandoned, mocked, surrounded, dying, with no answer in the opening verses — only the darkness pressing in. But then the psalm turns. It does not merely improve; it explodes into triumph: “They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn — for he has done it.” Those are the very words Jesus cried from the cross in his abandonment, and the very words the resurrection vindicated. The One forsaken was raised. The One mocked was exalted. The cry that seemed to dissolve into silence was answered from the empty tomb with a declaration that will never stop reverberating. The heart that has been pressing cold ashes to itself was made for something else entirely — made for the living God who meets grief not with silence but with resurrection.

Reading Electra with Open Eyes: The Fathers’ Wisdom and the Church’s Calling

You may be wondering whether a Greek tragedy is really worth a Christian’s time. That is a fair question, and the answer is not a simple yes. Tertullian warned that tragic spectacles inflame the passions, and Chrysostom urged his congregation to seek comfort in the Psalms and Gospels rather than in theatrical lament. Take that caution seriously. But Clement of Alexandria himself read Sophocles and used pagan texts as a foil to demonstrate the gospel’s superiority. The question is not whether to engage culture but how — always with Scripture as the standard that evaluates everything else. Christians who can hold a Greek tragedy in one hand and an open Bible in the other are doing some of the most important work the church can do in a secular age. Used rightly, this play trains three things: empathy for people trapped in cycles you now recognize by name; discernment to identify the emotional grammar of a secular world that still thinks like Electra without knowing it; and the courage to proclaim a better story with full conviction to people who have never heard it. The person who has brought their grief to the risen Christ does not carry it the same way afterward. The urn is still present, but it is no longer the center. If you are reading this in the middle of your own grief, know that the God who watched Electra weep is watching you — and he has not run out of answers.

Applying Electra to Christian Life: From the Theater to Your World This Week

Stop reading for a moment. Think about the person in your life who is still living in Electra’s world — still pressing a cold urn to their chest, still waiting for a justice that has not come, still trapped in a cycle they cannot name. What would it mean for them to hear what you have just read? The urn is despair. The empty tomb is the gate that opens out of it. And Christ is the one standing at that gate saying: your burden is gone. The person in your life who is still weeping over their own urn is waiting for someone who has been where Electra was and found the way out. That someone could be you. Here is how to start: read Psalm 22 immediately after reading the urn scene in the play. Feel the movement all the way from “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” to “They will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn — for he has done it.” Let that arc become the sermon you preach to yourself before you preach it to anyone else. When you bring this to your small group — and you will, because you now see something you cannot unsee — let the urn scene open the door and the empty tomb close it. A year from now, having lived inside that contrast, you will carry a gratitude for the resurrection deeper than anything you could have manufactured on your own.

If you have never brought your own grief, your own guilt, your own cry for justice to the God who answers — if you have been holding your urn and calling it your only option — there is something better, and it is available to you right now. Coming to Christ means turning away from every substitute answer and trusting the One who walked out of the tomb and said, “I am the resurrection and the life.” The gods of Greece could command revenge. Only the God of the gospel can make all things new. The reason the empty tomb answers the empty urn is not merely that it solves our problem. It is that it reveals the God whose glory is his inexhaustible commitment to redeem what sin has broken — and that God is more beautiful than anything Sophocles or anyone else has ever imagined.

Aeschylus: The Libation Bears: Blood, Guilt, and the Cry for Justice

Aeschylus composed the Libation Bearers around 458 BC as the second installment of his Oresteia trilogy, the only complete trilogy to survive from ancient Greek drama. The play takes up the story of Orestes, son of the murdered king Agamemnon, who returns from exile to avenge his father’s death at the hands of his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. With the sanction of Apollo’s oracle, Orestes carries out the killings, yet the very moment he does, he is seized by visions of the Furies and flees in madness. The play ends without resolution, only the spectacle of a man undone by the very act of justice he was commanded to perform. The title refers to the ritual libations poured at Agamemnon’s tomb, an act that opens the drama and sets its tone: the dead demand satisfaction, and the living cannot rest until blood answers blood.

The Literary World Behind the Play

Aeschylus did not invent the story of Orestes; he inherited it from a long tradition. Homer’s Odyssey references Orestes’ vengeance as a heroic model, and the Iliad sets the entire Trojan War backdrop that explains Agamemnon’s murder in the first place. Aeschylus transforms the heroic material, however, by pressing it into tragic shape and forcing questions that Homer largely avoids: what happens after the hero acts? What does divine sanction cost the soul? Pindar treated the Atreid myth in his odes, and Hesiod’s Theogony furnished the theological scaffolding of divine succession and cosmic justice on which Aeschylus builds. Later, Sophocles and Euripides each wrote their own Electra plays retelling the same events, with Sophocles emphasizing psychological grief and Euripides introducing irony and realistic doubt about divine justice. Aeschylus’ version is the most theologically ambitious: he uses the trilogy format to trace the evolution of justice itself, from blood feud to civic law. His Oresteia also connects to broader Mediterranean traditions. The Osiris myth from ancient Egypt presents a strikingly similar structure: Set murders Osiris, and the son Horus avenges him to restore order. Mesopotamian legal traditions, particularly the Code of Hammurabi, institutionalize retaliatory justice in ways that parallel the Oresteia’s movement from private vengeance toward civic arbitration. Hittite royal succession myths and Ugaritic demonology contain figures resembling the Furies. These parallels suggest that the deep human preoccupation with blood guilt, vengeance, and the need for some power to adjudicate between competing claims of justice was not uniquely Greek but arose across ancient civilizations.

The Theology and Ethics of the Play

At the center of Libation Bearers is a theological and moral knot that the play refuses to untie. Apollo commands Orestes to kill his mother. The Furies, ancient powers who enforce the blood bonds of kinship, will pursue any son who commits matricide. Obedience to one divine authority means transgression against another. This is not a momentary ethical dilemma but a structural feature of Greek polytheism: the gods conflict, and humanity is caught in the crossfire. Greek fate, or moira, operates as an impersonal, amoral force. Characters are not free moral agents making choices that flow from genuine responsibility before a personal God; they are figures moving along grooves cut by divine compulsion and inherited curse. The House of Atreus carries a generational doom that no individual can escape through repentance because the Greek gods do not offer that category of response. Guilt in this world manifests not as something that can be confessed and cleansed but as a pollution, a miasma, that drives its bearer to madness. This is a world of profound moral seriousness without moral hope.

The Old Testament’s Response

The Old Testament engages themes that run parallel to the Libation Bearers but redirects them entirely through its theology of a personal, sovereign, and merciful God. The lex talionis of Exodus 21 does mandate proportional justice, but its purpose was to limit vengeance, not license it, and Israel’s legal system provided institutions such as the cities of refuge in Numbers 35 to prevent the endless blood feuds that the Oresteia depicts. Deuteronomy 32:35 reserves ultimate vengeance for God himself, which means human beings are released from the crushing obligation Orestes carries. Generational consequences do appear in the Old Testament, as in Exodus 20:5, but Deuteronomy 30 holds out the prospect of repentance and covenant renewal as a genuine alternative to destruction. Where Orestes can only flee from guilt, David in Psalm 51 can confess it and receive cleansing. The Old Testament also speaks of blood guilt and pollution in categories similar to Greek miasma, but atonement through sacrifice addresses it rather than leaving it to fester. The Old Testament thus takes the same dark realities the play dramatizes and places them within a framework where resolution through divine mercy remains possible.

The New Testament’s Response

The New Testament brings the Old Testament’s trajectory to its culmination in ways that address the Libation Bearers with surgical precision. Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:38-44 directly confronts the logic of retributive justice that drives Orestes. “You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye,” Jesus says, before proposing a completely different way of being in the world. The parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18 makes plain that cycles of retaliation are broken not by superior force but by forgiveness. The cross is the New Testament’s ultimate answer to the question the Oresteia cannot resolve: how can blood guilt be absorbed without generating new guilt? Hebrews 9:14 declares that Christ’s blood purifies the conscience from dead works, addressing precisely the kind of moral torment that pursues Orestes. Paul in Galatians 3:13 states that Christ became a curse for us, bearing in his own person the accumulated weight of what the Greeks would have called pollution. The Furies find their answer not in acquittal by an Athenian jury, as in Eumenides, but in propitiation through the cross, described in Romans 3:25. Where Greek civic law in the final play of the Oresteia trilogy could manage the problem of blood guilt politically, the New Testament insists that the wound is deeper than any human institution can heal.

Implications for Christian Belief and Practice

The Libation Bearers has practical implications for Christian theology and ethics that extend well beyond the academy. Its depiction of vengeance cycles illuminates why Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:19 to leave vengeance to God is not naivety but wisdom. Every family, congregation, and nation that has watched conflicts perpetuate across generations is living out a version of the House of Atreus, and the Christian answer is not a better system of retaliation but the radical interruption of forgiveness. The play also warns against any theology that presents guilt as merely legal and external. Orestes’ madness is a portrait of a conscience that knows what it has done. The gospel’s promise is not only forensic justification but the cleansing of the conscience that Hebrews insists the blood of Christ achieves. Moreover, the play’s critique of polytheistic divine conflict should reinforce Christian confidence in the coherence of biblical monotheism. The God of Scripture does not send contradictory commands that trap his people between impossible obligations. His law and his mercy are unified in Christ.

Learning to Read the Greeks for the Glory of God

Christians have deep precedent for engaging pagan literature seriously. Augustine drew on classical learning, and Paul himself quoted Greek poets on Mars Hill in Acts 17. The Libation Bearers is, among other things, one of the most honest documents in Western literature about the human condition apart from grace. It depicts with unflinching clarity what existence looks like when justice is real but mercy is absent, when guilt accumulates without atonement, and when the gods themselves are at war. For the Christian reader, it is an extended meditation on why the gospel is not merely a religious preference but a rescue. To read it is to understand more deeply what Paul means when he says that the creation groans, and what was at stake when the Son of God absorbed the curse. Every Christian serious about understanding the world into which the New Testament was born, and the world in which we still preach, should read Aeschylus and feel the weight of what Christ has done.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Breach

The movie “Breach” was well made and Chris Cooper put on one of his best performances ever. It is based on the true events of the greatest security breach in American history. Robert Hanssen had been selling vital U.S. secrets to the Soviets and other enemies for nearly 25 years, causing untold damage to our national security and the lives of agents and informants around the world. The story centers around Hanssen’s capture, aided significantly by rookie FBI agent Eric O’Niell. O’Niell has been assigned to Hanssen as an aide in order to spy on him and help catch his boss in the act of passing on secret documents. O’Niell is a rookie with very little field experience and he must outwit the smartest and trickiest spy in U.S. history. The movie was edited superbly in order to maintain the tension even when the ultimate outcome is known.

Several things struck me as I watched this movie. First, it revealed how the public image of a man can be totally opposite of his private image. Hanssen was so good at projecting a righteous, loving and patriotic image, that O’Niell initially was so fooled that he actually admired Hanssen. This is a reminder that all men are fallen and hide behind masks, including ourselves. Integrity is living in such a way so that your public image is the same as your private image. Beware of power, because it often tempts you present an image that is not your true self, especially when your power is threatened.

Second, others will exploit your weaknesses in order to control you. The movie didn’t spell this out, but it is likely that Hanssen was turned by the Soviets not only by money but also because they exploited his sexually deviant behavior. Hanssen videotaped his sexual encounters with his wife and sold them to an internet site without his wife’s knowledge. The Soviets most likely threatened Hanssen with exposure if he didn’t cooperate with him. Men will do almost anything in order to keep their secret lives hidden lest their careers, families and social status be destroyed.

Third, O’Neill realized the price he would have to pay in order to become a successful FBI agent and chose not to pay that price. He saw how his assignment to spy on Hanssen nearly destroyed his marriage and decided that becoming an FBI agent cost too much. He also saw how the price the other agents had to pay to become successful and he realized that he wasn’t willing to give up the things that mattered the most to him. So after being an integral part of capturing the biggest spy in U.S. history, he had the integrity to walk away from fame and success in order to build a strong marriage with the woman he loved.

Forth, the movie clearly portrayed the guilt and shame that Hanssen had to deal with because of the choices he had made. While in public Hanssen put on a religious front that had everyone convinced he was a sincere, devout Catholic. He went to church every morning to pray, attended mass every week, and studied Catholic doctrine. Yet in the end Hanssen is tormented by guilt at confession, revealing the true inner struggle he was going through. The last scene in the movie powerfully shows O’Niell just about to enter the elevator until he sees Hanssen in it with a guard on each side. Hanssen is clearly dejected and beaten, and the movie ends as the elevator doors close as Hanssen asks O’Niell, “Please pray for me.” This is a powerful reminder that we need to pray for each other and to build strong, transparent relationships in order to help people escape their prison of guilt and find freedom from sin before it is too late.

Life Lessons 5

The fifth life lesson is Power. True power is the outward expression of our inner being. Position and wealth are not true power. Control is not true power. The more you try to control others the less you have real power over them. Only when you let go of what you can’t control, including other people, will you be able to exercise your true power.

Wealth and poverty are states of mind that affect the way you live. Power comes when you adopt an abundance mindset. A scarcity mindset causes you to think like a victim, disempowering you. When you realize that power comes from within, you can exercise your power in every situation.

Don’t give up your power to others. When you let other control you and force their opinions, desires, and ideas on you, you give up your power. But when you express your own ideas, desires, and opinions you exercise true power. When you try to make others happy, you give up your power and become codependent. Victims abdicate their power and refuse to take responsibility for themselves.

Don’t fall into the “More Trap”. If you think that more money, more things, more knowledge, or more of anything is needed for you to be happy, you are trapped because you will never have enough; you will always need a little bit more. But if you realize that you already have all that you need to be happy, then you will be able to get more of what you want and it will increase the happiness you already have. As long as you are waiting for “tomorrow” you will never be happy “today.” Gratitude is power because it frees from the “More Trap”. When you are thankful for what you already have, you are free to enjoy life.

Guilt and shame rob you of your power. Guilt is based on what you have done and shame is based on who you are. When you do wrong, you feel guilty. When you realize that you are a bad person, you feel shame. Often others force guilt and shame on us by the way they treat us and talk to us. False guilt and shame needs to be removed by the realization that we were not responsible for the things that others have done. But guilt is usually based on the wrong choices and actions we have made. The way to freedom is through forgiveness. We need to believe that God forgives us in Christ, who died for our sins, and he accepts us now as blameless and guiltless in his sight. The blood of Christ takes away our guilt and washes away our shame. This freedom is obtained by faith alone in Jesus Christ. When you experience God’s forgiveness in Christ then you will have true power.