Justice & Mercy

Fr. Robert Barron on True Grit. He makes some great points:

Finally, Mattie frees herself and shoots to death her father’s murderer, but the recoil on the gun is so strong that she is pushed into a snake pit, where she receives a bite on the hand. I’ll get back to the snake pit in a moment, but notice first what this canny fourteen year old girl’s lust for vengeance has wrought: eight dead men. She wanted only to bring her father’s killer to justice, but the single-mindedness of her pursuit conduced toward a disproportionate, even barbaric, result, something far beyond the requirements of justice. Her excessive and one-sided passion for righteousness kicked her into a den of snakes, and no one with a Biblical sensibility could miss the symbolic overtone of this kind of fall.

As she lies helpless and desperately injured, Mattie looks up and sees Rooster Cogburn lowering himself by rope to the bottom of the pit. He cuts into her wound and sucks out as much of the poison as he can and then he brings her back up, places her on a horse and commences a furious ride to the nearest doctor who is many miles away. When the horse gives way from sheer exhaustion beneath him, Rooster picks up Mattie in his arms and carries her through the night to the doctor’s home. Now Cogburn is a man of the law, and like Mattie, he was aiming to bring a killer to justice, but what these heroic actions on behalf of the girl reveal is that he more than that. His passion for justice is accompanied by, even surpassed, by his mercy, his graciousness, his willingness to give even when that giving was not, strictly speaking, owed.

Mattie's shooting of Chaney really surprised me. It was sudden and quickly over. What we really saw was the result of her act of vengeance. As Mattie said in the opening narration, “the only thing in life that’s free is the grace of God.” She paid for her actions and Chaney paid for his.