Javert Redeemed?

(Trigger word warning: suicide.  Also, there be Les Mis spoilers in this post.  You have been warned.)

Like everybody else and their mother, I spent a day of my holiday vacation seeing Les Miserables at the theater.

As can be expected if you know me at all, I loved it.

(Full disclosure: Les Mis was the first musical I was involved in back in high school, as I played saxophone in the pit orchestra for Shawnee Mission South's production my junior year.  I reprised that gig my senior year when we put on Footlose.  I loved Les Mis then, too.)

Though plenty is lost in the book-to-musical transition (and how could it not, with Hugo's novel as long as it was...as my sister put it, "Victor sure didn't take any shortcuts"), the musical does stay pretty true to the novel itself, and I appreciated how the movie included a number of nods to the novel that were not, in fact, in the stage musical.

But one thing always gets me.

It's the finale, when "Do You Hear the People Sing" is reprised by almost the entire company.

I say "almost" because a few key players are missing.  Marius, Cosette, and the Thenardiers are still alive.

But Javert, who has died, is typically not portrayed as being present in the finale that is sung by the ghosts of Jean Valjean, Fantine, Eponine, Enjolras, and all those who were killed at the barricades.

I find that odd.

Why?

Because, if it isn't obvious by Valjean's lyrics in the finale ("forgive me all my trespasses and take me to your glory"), the presence of all the departed characters is meant to represent heaven.

Javert, the legalistic policeman who unflinchingly enforces the law to the letter, is not in heaven.

Yet, it is hard not to see his release of Jean Valjean and Marius as an act towards his own redemption, and a step away from the rigidity with which he administered justice in the past.

In essence, that moment that Jean Valjean is "born again" (for truly lack of a better term) as a result of witnessing the Bishop of Digne's kindness for him...I have to think that this was Javert's own such moment.

Had he lived.

There are two different reasons people have given me as to why Javert is not depicted in the finale--one is because he simply is the antagonist, but I think his release of Valjean puts to lie that theory.  He is capable of change, and of eventually acting morally even if it means breaking the law.  Perhaps that one act did not make up for a lifetime of Pharisee-esque legalism, and I am willing to admit that possibility.

But the other reason is far more sensitive--it is because Javert committed suicide, and suicide is traditionally treated as a sin in Christian teaching (though, interestingly enough, Moses, Elijah, and Jonah all asked God at one point to take their lives...following God is not always easy).

But the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church (and though I am not Catholic myself and do not agree with everything it says, I do still see Catholic moral teaching as relevant to contemporary Christianity) states that, among other things, anguish can diminish the moral responsibility of suicide. And Javert was nothing if not anguished when he made the terribly wrong decision to drown himself.

So if God judges us according to His mercy, as I believe from Scripture that He will, I confess that I left the film wondering why Javert was not present in heaven.

Because, in the end, my faith tells me that he just might be.

Yours in Christ,
Eric