End of the Spear

Some movies, in spite of their big budgets, deep pockets and all-star casts, can leave us as cold as Saturday-morning pancakes on Sunday night. The Phantom Menace or Troy come to mind.

Other movies rise above their tiny budgets, technical flaws and no-name casts. End of the Spear is one of these. It’s well-made, mostly well-acted and stacks up well, artistically, against the kind of films courted at Sundance and Telluride.

The movie won’t please all audiences, however. In spite of its visual artistry, outstanding lead performances and overall technical competency, it tells a true story that’s just hard to fathom.

In short, End of the Spear is the story of five missionaries who rather rashly make contact with a notoriously violent tribe in a remote Ecuador jungle. The five men are murdered. The next step is not reprisal, however. Instead, two women from the tribe come out of the jungle. And after befriending them, female family members—and children—of the slain men trek back into the jungle to live with the Waodani, love them and “convert” them. But the point of the story is not the evangelistic and proseletyzing project; in fact, there’s less preaching in this movie than in At Play in the Fields of the Lord or The Mission. The point of the story is that, given ample opportunity to take revenge, the son of one of the murdered men overcomes the very natural and human “eye for an eye” instinct. He and his father’s murderer, in fact, become fast friends, as the entire Waodani tribe abandons a settled social pattern of escalating reprisals in favor of a culture of forgiveness and peace.

This is not a perfect movie. In the interest of truthfulness, the screenplay presents us with so many characters that only a couple of them really become completely three-dimensional. We never really understand what makes these missionaries tick, for instance. And the cut-away editing of the story’s countless murders, while undoubtedly necessary to avoid an R rating, is mis-timed just enough that it calls attention to itself in a sometimes jarring way.

But these are quibbles. The biggest problem facing an audience when watching End of the Spear is likely to be unbelief—not lack of belief in the Christian religion, simply because half of the characters in the story are missionaries, but lack of belief in the story itself.

Like other powerful stories of reconciliation, social justice and repentance (such as Final Solution, Gandhi or even The Mission) End of the Spear is its own worst enemy because it dares to tell us that there really are people who are brave enough to put themselves wholly and submissively in the power of their enemies—not because their enemies are so powerful that there’s no choice, but because it’s the right thing to do. And like Final Solution, End of the Spear goes one step further by telling us that this kind of radical peacemaking does, in fact, have the power to transform enemies into friends, without the need for the “satisfaction” of justice.

So moviegoers of any stripe may well come away from End of the Spear simply shaking their heads and saying, “Well, clearly they took some liberties with this story, because such things just don’t happen. It isn’t realistic.” And this is just as likely with Christian audiences as any.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I, in my role as a pastor and teacher, have had devout, educated, faithful Christians insist that Jesus submitted to his enemies only because it was necessary, in the divine scheme of things, that he die. Without God’s demand for an atoning blood sacrifice, they argue, Jesus would have been in smackdown mode. Self defense, even lethal force, would have been the order of the day. They insist that, contrary to Jesus’ own teaching in The Sermon on the Mount, His behavior from Gethsamane to Golgotha was in no way intended to serve as an example for our own behavior in the “real world.”

But in the case of stories such as End of the Spear and Final Solution, and even Gandhi, radical and lasting moral change in the real world really is brought about by a radical commitment to non-violence. And the fact remains that these stories are true. These movies force us to deal with that truth.

We can either admit that our own rationalized, compromised and temporized ways of thinking are somehow defective, or we can dismiss these stories as mere fictionalizations or myths. The choice is up to us.

But these are stories that aren’t going away anytime soon. And some myths just happen to be true, powerfully so.