Just like the aunties in Arsenic and Lace, we want so badly to believe in the goodness of our hearts.
If I were to cast a reboot of the movie Arsenic and Old Lace, I would give Cary Grant’s lead role to Adam Sandler. The classic Halloween movie is a comedy, not a horror flick—though it’s more dark humor. I want to see Adam Sandler sit his two, sweet little old aunties down and explain to them that killing people has become a very bad habit, like Cary Grant did. My family loves this movie, and we rewatch it every year.
The movie is hilarious—adapted from a play that still is acted out in high schools and colleges across the country. The main character, Mortimer, goes to his childhood home to announce to his two dear aunts who raised him that he has eloped. But during his visit (on the way to his honeymoon), he finds out that the charitable old women have been using their home as a safe and comfortable boarding house for bachelor travelers to rest. If they find out these lonely men have no family or friends, the aunts poison them and then bury the men in their cellar.
The aunts viewed these “mercy” killings as a part of their Christian charity. They even asked the men religious questions first so they would know whether or not to use the Methodist or Anglican hymn book for the burial. They hoped to make the whole affair respectful and merciful to put these lonely men out of their misery. And they worked to ensure the men had a peaceful death, prayers over their burial, while surrounded by people (the aunts) who cared about them.
Poor Mortimer is mortified. He keeps pushing his wife off from leaving for the honeymoon as he tries to discretely explain to his dear, sweet aunts, that it’s actually very wrong to kill people. While he attempts to do this, Mortimer’s long lost, career criminal serial killer brother “Jonathan” shows up. The outcast of the family, he’s looking for a safe house to hide in while a doctor changes his face yet again, and while Jonathan and the doctor figure out how to dispose of the body from his most recent murder.
Mortimer and the aunties are terrified of Jonathan, as he has a long history of torturing them. But when this serial killer and his doctor try to bury a dead body in the cellar, they are gobsmacked to find it already full of men the aunts have killed.
The most hilarious moment of the comedy comes when the doctor counts and realizes that the aunties are more successful killers than Jonathan. Technically, they outrank him in the criminal world.
It’s funny how we think our intent changes our sin. The old ladies intended to show mercy. They thought they were doing good. They didn’t know any better. But when all was said and done, their trail of bodies was bigger than the sinner who knew exactly what he was doing.
“I didn’t mean to” is often the response I hear in our house, when someone in our family goes to another to tell them they’ve been offended or sinned against.
“It was an accident.”
“I didn’t know.”
In a court of law, intent matters as there are rankings of killings from first degree to manslaughter. Yet according to God’s law, even our good works are tainted with sin. In fact, our intent often blinds us from our sin. “Our intent was righteous—our heart was righteous! It’s the thought that counts,” we tell ourselves. This is our own self deception when we are dealing with a trail of bodies. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and Mark 7:20-23 talks about the evil that comes out of the heart.
Just like the aunties in Arsenic and Lace, we want so badly to believe in the goodness of our hearts. But really, the aunties’ sin was pride. It was believing they knew better. It was taking a life that didn’t belong to them. It was making decisions that were not theirs. But they didn’t see any of that. They just saw their righteousness.
They had more dead bodies in their cellar than their serial-killer nephew, Jonathan. This hilarious parable reveals the deadliness of good intentions.
Therapists spend hours, if not years, trying to explain to people that intent does not equal impact. For example, you may not have intended to hurt your kids, but the fact of the matter is, you hurt your kids. You can’t tell your kids “stop acting hurt because I intended to do good—it just went wrong.” Therapists try to bring patients from the reality of “it went wrong” to “it needs to be made right.”
We try to justify ourselves through the means of the ever-virtuous “intent.” Intent is the mind’s way of searching for some redemption, or some justification. Intent is often a liar. It covers the sins of pride and entitlement.
When we take a harder look at intent, we’ll find the “lesser sins” that we find tolerable, if not necessary sometimes to get the desired outcome that we’d prefer. For example, we had to lie, because otherwise they wouldn’t do what we needed them to do for a good thing to happen. Or, we were only making a prayer request, not gossiping. Any time we bend the law to fit our need for a “good thing,” we are attempting to do, we’ll find calculated manipulation, or the thoughtful way we hide what our actions so as to not upset anyone.
While the consequences and the impact of sin varies, the ugliness of sin does not. Sin is sin. Sin separates us from God. Sin pollutes our hearts. Sin deceives and hardens our hearts so it doesn’t feel deception (Hebrews 3:13).
And the solution to our sin is forgiveness. The reparation of our sin is the blood of Jesus. Playing down our sin is no different from playing down his sacrifice, or at the very least calling his sacrifice an overdramatic overreaction.
The cross was necessary because sin is real. Minimizing it with impact semantics is just skirting around the issue instead of facing it. Throughout Arsenic and Lace, you see character after character justify their sins to the extent that sanity and insanity get mixed up. To be sane is to see the truth, and everyone in that family saw the truth differently, and therefore had varied types of insanity. Mortimer is the one sane person in the movie who saw the truth, and ironically, knowing the truth made him feel crazy, whereas the insane people felt totally normal.
Sin is a liar. Sin deceives. The law feels “harsh” because it does not bend to our good intentions, it exposes our intentions as bad. It does not allow us to hide behind our sweet little old lady hearts. It exposes the sin as sin, and shows us our legitimate and sane need for a Savior. The road to heaven isn’t paved with good intentions, but is found in the saving work of Christ alone.
