Eye of Vengeance & Vengeance
The Lord is sovereign over all law and morality, and therefore is alone at merit to enact justice [Deuteronomy 32:35-43, Proverbs 25:21-22, 1 Thessalonians 4:6-8.] Nonetheless, humanity innately desires to unseat Christ from His righteous throne and try to take full sovereignty over circumstance; we seek to seat ourselves as our own christs and decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil. Perhaps the most well-known and stereotypical example of this is in taking revenge. Revenge is the act of putting one's purpose and motivation into returning one's injury to the inflictor. In the hands of the fallen, and even the believers remain fallen until the restoration after the body fails, it is vindictive, malicious, and spiteful.
Mike begins his story in Eye of Vengeance in a similar way. Mike is not personally wronged by the actions of any of the people he kills, but rather feels that the government has failed the people – Mike among them – in the way they handle those who have committed especially violent and despicable crime. We open the novel on Mike right as he kills one such person, Steve Ferris. Ferris raped and killed two children. His first trial was ruled as too sensational, and he was being moved on account of a second trial when Mike killed him. Though the story opens on Mike, the main antagonist of this novel, we don't learn much about him until later on. He kills people with long-range small arms because that was his job in the police, and his job in the military after that. Mike is quite haunted by his past. He was a Marine for six years and a SWAT officer for ten. In SWAT, he was hampered quite hard by the press for a job he was involved in, catching and engaging a gunfight with illegal firearms dealers in Florida. His best friend was on his SWAT team, Marcus Collie. When Collie died in a barricaded-man call, Mike never really recovered nor was able to feel close to anyone afterwards. Some time later, Mike is called back to war when the War on Terrorism begins. Mike struggles with these last years the most. He is unable to justify anything he did during that time. Mike views his entire life as a progression from enacting true justice to enacting something like justice to eschewing justice altogether. He helped liberate Kuwait from an oppressive regime and stopped criminals from harming others. In his time in SWAT, however, he didn’t always so directly enact justice. In Iraq, there was no justifying anything done, no certainty that one was doing the right thing. In killing Ferris, and later another similar criminal, Mike feels like he is returning to his pure starting place, using consideration and talent to bring justice to perpetrators. The author narrates,
"Redman knew he should rationalize it. In war innocent people get killed for the greater good. But he was sick of not knowing. Yeah, he was a trained killer, but the difference was that back at home, working for SWAT, you acted on intelligence. You knew who you were killing: Bad Guys. When he got back home, he would always know. When he got back, there wouldn't be any questions. Those who deserved to die were the ones who were going to die.&[1]
Mike, of course, has merely hit the final stage of his regression in life – not only eschewing justice from his own life, but attempting to take it away from the world around him as well. He seeks revenge, revenge for others who he assumes has been wronged by the judicial system, and by proxy revenge for those who made his job seem nonsensical.
Mike usually feels alone, but there is one man he feels he can connect with; cleaning his gun after killing Ferris, the author narrates Mike's thoughts: “He [Mike] wondered if Nick Mullins would get the assignment, if the only journalist he trusted would get it right, would understand."[2] Nick Mullins is the protagonist of the novel. Mike feels Nick has the same sense for justice, and he is actually correct. Nick is a reporter for a news company in Florida. Nick originally loved his job and engrossed himself in it. By the time of the novel, though, Nick is less engrossed and more consumed. He had a falling out with his family, and two days later he is called to report on a wreck, which turns out to involve his family and have killed his wife and one of his daughters. He, like Mike, feels that the powers that be have failed to properly enact justice. On account of this, he stalks the man who hit his wife, Robert Walker. "He [Nick] wanted to scream in the man's [Walker's] face that his lousy eighteen-month sentence meant nothing. Nothing! The manslaughter conviction was a sham. It had been a homicide, and Walker knew it!"[3] Nick recalls when he more overtly stalked Walker; now he hides and watches Walker clock in to his job, hoping to see him drinking, breaking court orders, for Walker been drunk-driving when he hit Nick's wife. As Walker tells Nick, Walker has served his time. Justice has been served, more or less. Nick does not want justice. Nick wants revenge. Nick also feels disillusioned by his job. The digital epoch coming means everything he does at his job is logged and recorded by his supervisors. The ability to publish on the web means his department is rushing to publish stories as fast as possible, causing crushing deadlines. Sensationalism is rampant, and Nick's slower, methodical methods that he honed in his job before the internet are seen as obsolete by his superiors. The family stress adds to his job stress, and so Nick blames Walker for these changes as well.
Nick learns, however, that revenge is not a good thing to want. Foremost, it takes time away from his remaining daughter, Carly. After the accident, Nick promised her to make time for her and be a better father, so that he wouldn't fall out like he had previously. His real desires, however, consume him and take him away from his wants. He lets the accident envelop him and feeds his rage towards Walker. He keeps putting more time in at work and less time in for Carly. When Nick is put to write on Ferris's death, he is inadvertently helped with his issues when he has to contact the mother of the children Ferris killed for comments, Margaria Cotton. Cotton has forgiven Ferris already. She knows what it is like to want revenge and what revenge really means, beyond the want for fairness. Cotton has also been keeping up with Nick's writings, and she has noticed Nick's deterioration:
"'I watched the paper to see when you got back to your job. I have seen your stories now and compared them with before. And if you don't mind me saying so, sir. . .you changed,' she [Cotton] said without taking her eyes off him. 'The pain changed you.'
"'Compassion,' she said. 'I believe you are losin' that, Mr. Mullins. And I believe that would be a terrible thing in the end, sir.'"[4]
It takes Nick most of the rest of the novel to realize this, but the revenge killings, the hateful comments people make to him in support of the revenge killings, the deterioration of his job, and his visible failure with his daughter all compel Nick to change.
Mike does not change. Mike stays isolated for the majority of the novel, as he is doing illegal things and does not wish to be caught – plus, his war scars have made it very difficult for Mike to return to civilian life. Nothing in Mike reprieves his mindset. He feels no guilt nor shame for his actions, lets no point of reference interfere with his mindset. Mike only contacts the one person who he thinks will understand, Nick. He sets up a rendezvous with him so that he can thank Nick for inspiring him and connect with someone similar. Mike wants to tell Nick that he plans to kill Walker on Nick's behalf. Thankfully, by the time this happens, Nick has already realized the fault of seething so much. In fact, when Redman says “One more, Mr. Mullins. . . you're owed,"[5] Nick doesn't recognize what Mike is talking about. A detective has to point it out to him. When Mike calls Nick later, Nick says in the frantic end to the call, "Hey, don't put this on me, Mike. I'm not out for retribution."[6] The novel ends for Nick with realizing the error is ways, desperately fighting alongside the detective mentioned earlier to save Walker's life. The novel ends for Mike with him turning inward to his own beliefs and shooting Nick in the leg when confronted with the better alternative, and when Nick barely disrupts Mike's shooting and saves Walker.
Nick learns to forgive his inflictors, while Mike never does. Nick never has to go to Walker to tell him he's forgiven him; forgiveness has little to do with Walker at all. Forgiveness requires nothing of the culprit and everything of one's self; it is a shifting of one's attitude towards that which glorifies Christ and away from what glorifies man. This is because revenge, and many sins, are foremost painful to Christ and after this painful to the self. Revenge was killing Nick. It would have been much more difficult for Mike to forgive and move on – Mike has no family, no support group, no life even – but Mike is still called to forgive those who have wronged him and shift his attitude towards rebuilding his own life and away from tearing other people's lives down. Mike is not excused from this because his circumstances make it more difficult than it was for Nick. No one is exempt from the call to follow Christ; everyone is commanded to follow, no matter how difficult it is for some. We must never hold grudges, but we must forgive those who wrong us, for the sake of glorifying the Lord and for the sake of our own bodies.