In Salem, Massachusetts, 1692, a single word could swallow up a person’s entire identity.

Witch.

Once someone was accused of witchcraft, that word explained everything else. What they said, what they did, what someone else thought they saw: all of it was interpreted through a rhetorical label, and one mere utterance became a nuclear verdict.

Nineteen people were hanged and another was pressed to death. People who were not witches died as witches, and the belief that they were helped the crowd sleep at night.

That’s not the same as holding someone accountable for real wrongdoing. Sometimes the accusation is false. Sometimes it’s true, but still doesn’t tell the whole story. Either way, isn’t it absurd how a single word can define an entire life?

I’ve noticed high-profile people being publicly disgraced lately. Their situations differ, but when I watch someone’s downfall, I find myself wondering what happened before the rest of us knew anything had happened. Not the headline, but the private decisions that came long before it. I can’t know what those were. I do know what temptation feels like, and temptation happens to all of us.

You know those moments when you feel like if you do one thing, or don’t do another, everything’s going to crumble? You’ll lose your career or your family, or you’ll regret everything. Maybe the consequences come twenty years from now. Or next week.

The struggle comes down to this: temptations present themselves as necessities.

We convince ourselves that something we want is something we need. If we don’t take the opportunity, pursue the person, or do whatever it is, we’ll lose relief, comfort, happiness. But sometimes we say no, and life goes on. The thing we couldn’t live without was something we could have lived without all along.

Yet we remain curious about those who fall from grace, and wonder: Where did he go wrong?

But the question assumes there was one moment that changed everything, one decision that ruined the course. Maybe there was. But surely there was something that came before it, right? An unspoken desire? Another wrong making the next one easier?

But which wrong exactly?

Wouldn’t we like to know? Though the answer is probably closer to home than we’d like to admit.

Imagine your life were a movie. The uncut, extended edition: every private thought, desire, and action, now cinema. Who would want others to watch it? The entire world? I wouldn’t.

Yet we seem to take pleasure in watching prominent people fall. Already distant through money, fame, or power, they become even more distant after a scandal, this time through our choices. We put them beneath us, morally speaking. We’re not like them. Maybe you’re not. But your entire life isn’t on display (at the moment).

Shouldn’t another person’s wrongdoing actually bring us closer to them, in a way? Not necessarily in trust, but in recognizing something honest about ourselves.

Social media makes things even stranger. Nowadays someone finds old writing, a screenshot, or a video. Someone makes an accusation, someone else offers an explanation, and strangers issue conclusions. Maybe something wrong happened. Maybe there’s more to it. Maybe both are true. An accusation becomes a category before the explanation finishes. The whole story might take an hour, but the label only needs one word.

It’s especially odd when Christians do this. We say God knows the heart, then talk about strangers as though we’ve watched their lives. We can take accusations seriously without pretending we know everything. Are we as interested in truth as we are in being right?

All have fallen short.

All have fallen.

All have.

All.

That doesn’t make all wrongs equal. I’m an attorney, and I believe in justice, punishment, and accountability. The victims matter. But wrongdoing doesn’t tell us everything about a person.

Wrongdoing can reduce someone to an object. And afterward, we can reduce the wrongdoer to a label: rapist, murderer, racist, cheater, pedophile, thief.

Those words sometimes name terrible things people have done. But we love labels because they make complicated people easier to process. Easier to handle. Easier to tear apart with rhetoric.

Once we have a label, we start looking for more wrongs to fit inside it. Which decision? Which desire? Which wrong? We keep looking for the right wrong in someone else, as though finding it will tell us who is right.

But a human label cannot reveal the human heart. 

Only God knows the full scale of the human heart. This is why Jesus doesn’t wait for a scandal to tell us hate and lust matter, too. He goes beneath conduct to the desires from which it springs. He knows what we’re hiding, even from ourselves.

So I have to bring the question back to myself: What am I really trying to avoid in this life? Doing wrong, or being known for it?

I wonder how often the lesson we take from another’s fall is: Don’t get caught. Edit the movie carefully enough and everyone will think you’re good.

But God has already seen your movie.

Back in Salem, they wanted to know which witch. The question was wrong before anyone answered it. They had already decided what to find.

We keep asking which wrong was worse, which thing we would never do. There are always more wrongs, more labels, and more witches to cast out.

Maybe we’re really looking for someone who is right, or trying to right ourselves.

If I find enough wrong in him, perhaps I can feel right about me. But another’s wrongdoing doesn’t make me righteous. It doesn’t make you righteous either. We can spend our lives identifying others’ wrongs without becoming right ourselves.

The God of the Bible did not stand at a safe distance from His fallen creatures. He came to them. He didn’t pretend our wrongs were right, or that those we hurt didn’t matter. He’s watched the whole movie, every hidden thought. And he still chose to come down to us.

At the cross, the Son of God who did no wrong was condemned for those who had. Jesus had every right to keep his distance, yet chose to come near.

Perhaps we should be less inclined to keep ours.