Video essayist Jack Nugent, on his YouTube Channel Now You See It, refers to the film Schindler’s List (Universal, 1993) as “The story of the color red.” I’d like to consider this thought and how the Bible can be viewed in the same light.
In this Christmas week, as we see poinsettias at home and in the malls—if we’re brave enough to venture out—we ought to consider how red is used as a visual in the Bible, in much the same way it is used in this film (and others). If we comprehend its significance, we can better understand the season we’re now in.
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If you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, you know that it is filmed almost exclusively in black and white, not color. However, it is bookended by two scenes filmed in color.
These scenes include a Jewish family gathered for prayer and the lighting of two candles, as well as the epilogue, showing current-day Jews laying stones and a rose on Oskar Schindler’s grave, in Jerusalem. The film also includes two pivotal scenes where the color red represents a turning point in the heart of the businessman who would save nearly 1,200 Jewish lives, during World War II.
Spielberg makes conspicuous use of red in these middle scenes. It stands out in a predominately black and white film much more so than, say, the woman in red, in The Matrix; Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, in The Wizard of Oz; or the red doorknob in The Sixth Sense. It is not merely one color among many, as in these other films, but the only color to be seen, at this point in the film.
So, the director is obviously making a deliberate choice to use that color. In so doing, he demands his audience consider his use of it and its meaning.
As Jack Nugent says, “Schindler’s list perfectly embodies all the symbolic uses of red: its origins in fire and blood; the religious significance developed from pagan rituals, all the way to Christianity; and the harnessing of the color’s dual meaning”—i.e., that of life, passion, and love, as well as death, horror, and punishment. (See Nugent’s essay, “The Meaning of Red in Movies,” here).
When we see red in the middle of this mostly black and white film, it is attention-getting. It screams to us of what is happening: not in the visible world, but in the invisible heart of the man who would become savior to many.
We see red in the coat of a three-year-old girl, just as Oskar Schindler witnesses the liquidation of the Krakow, Poland ghetto. This is the point in the film where the Jews, already rounded up from within and around Krakow and placed into the ghetto, were forcibly removed from their homes to be murdered—either there, on the spot, or else in Auschwitz, after being loaded onto nearby cattle cars. Schindler sees the girl separating herself from the crowd; we see her re-entering an apartment building, and hiding under a bed.
This is also the point where Schindler—who may, up until this point, have viewed the Jews as a collective workforce—began to view them as a collection of individual lives worth saving. This journey toward understanding began, from Schindler’s point of view, as he lay perched above the city, on horseback, witnessing Krakow, Poland’s Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass, as it has come to be known, and took note of the girl in red.
Schindler’s journey ends when he later sees the lifeless body of the same girl being hauled away on a cart, to be burned along with many of her former family members and neighbors. There, she is no longer the representation of lives about to be extinguished. She has become the symbol of the lives that will be lost unless Schindler does more than merely employ them in his enamelware factory. This is why he is horrified, grief-stricken, as she is carted off toward the flames, right before his eyes.
As the film begins with red, the last color seen in the last burning candle on the Jewish family’s table, it concludes with red, as shown in the red rose placed on Oskar Schindler’s grave. If the color red were a thread pulled tight, it would be center-stitched into the blood-red heart of Schindler, in the scenes mentioned above, where the girl in the red coat is burned onto the conscience of the man who would save many from the Nazi holocaust.
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As Schinder’s List may be considered a story of the color red, so may the Word of God. Some consider this the Bible’s Scarlet thread.
In many instances, the Bible includes the color red as an important thematic element contained in the story of man’s fall and redemption. In this context, red is used to convey the same things seen in Schindler’s List: life, passion, and love, as well as death, horror, and punishment.
Judah and Tamar were to have twin sons. Zerah, about to be delivered, held out his hand but was brought back into the womb, to be replaced by his brother Perez. The momentary appearance of Zerah was marked by a scarlet thread tied to his wrist by his mother’s midwife, indicating he had been replaced by his twin brother Perez, the ancestor of Jesus (Matthew 1:3).
Scarlet is also mentioned as belonging to the temple, where the ritual sacrifices were made, and as belonging to the priests, those who performed the sacrifices. “You shall make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet yarns” (Exodus 26:1, ESV). “And they shall make the ephod [apron / breastplate] of gold, of blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and of fine twined linen, skillfully worked” (Exodus 28:6, ESV).
Before the Israelites took the city of Jericho, spies were sent in. They were later given refuge and safe passage out of the city through a window in Rahab’s house and let down the city wall by a scarlet thread. This was the same scarlet thread used to tell Joshua, when they reentered the land, that she hadn’t told the authorities they were there, earlier, and to remind her that she and her family would be kept safe from the invading Israeli army.
This red sign marked Rahab’s family safe from the death and destruction to come upon her family. It was a reminder of how the scarlet red markings on the doorposts of the Israelites had marked them safe from the death angel about to ravage Egypt, killing all of its firstborn.
The scarlet thread of Rahab extends back to the Exodus and beyond, all the way to the garden, where animals were sacrificed by God, covering the sin of Adam and Eve. It extends forward to God’s ultimate sacrifice, that of His Son, sent to redeem mankind. It includes the scarlet worn by Jesus’s uncle Zacharias, clothed in the same ephod of his ancestors, as he performed his priestly duties in the temple, the year that Jesus was born.
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This brings us back to where we had started: the Christmas story. As with the twins, Zerah and Perez, the Lord, whose arrival is heralded by “a multitude of the heavenly host” (Luke 2:13), does something similar. He ties a scarlet thread around the wrist of those willing to recognize that He is their substitute on the cross, for the punishment they deserve, even as Perez was substituted for Zerah.
As with Rahab, we had been prostituting ourselves with the ways of the world. But we are now rescued by the scarlet blood of the lamb, He who had been slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8). He who could not be sacrificed unless He was first born to a woman and placed in a manger (Luke 2: 7,12,16) extends the scarlet thread of Rahab toward us. He does so that we might be rescued, saved from the destruction that will ultimately come upon the world—much as it came upon Jericho, with every wall of separation torn down and every loved one who would be saved forever rescued from eternal devastation.
The scarlet thread is woven throughout the fabric of the Bible. It tells us how the love of God reaches out to the lost and rescues them, giving them life in place of death. It speaks of how God’s great passion redeems His people from death and the horrors of eternal punishment. It is seen in the garden, the lineage of Jesus, and the redemption of the gentiles. It is visible in the temple, the priests, the blood-loss coming from Mary in her delivery of Jesus, and in her Son’s death on the cross.
Oskar Schindler, a flawed and fallible man, rescued hundreds once he looked to the scarlet threads woven into a young girl’s coat, once he permitted her plight to work its way into his heart. Jesus, our perfect and infallible Savior, whose birth we remember this week, wants to take the plight of lost humanity and work it into our hearts this Christmas. He asks that we might comprehend the message of the Scarlet Thread and convey it to others, that they, too, might be rescued.
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Shall we, the rescued, not take the Scarlet Thread’s message, the Gospel, to those in desperate need of it, this season? Perhaps we need an epiphany, as Schindler had, when he saw the certain death facing the Jews and permitted his heart to be moved, so that he might rescue them.
If we haven’t had such a moment, we need to ask God to provide us one. The eternal lives of one or two, or perhaps hundreds, depends on such a moment being birthed within us.
*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.