“What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (The Holy Bible: English Standard Version, Ps. 8:4). Man is a very self-centered creature by nature, though such focus is arguably unwarranted, and his obsession with man betrays itself in all his doings. Shirley Jackson demonstrates this principle in her shocking short story The Lottery. Jackson, born on December 14, 1919 to Geraldine Jackson and Leslie Hardie (“Shirley Jackson”), was a social rebel. Although she grew up in a relatively upper-class environment, she objected to the that world as she saw it. This hostility was shown in her first published novel, The Road through the Wall. After marrying a man of whom her parents disapproved and moving from her home, she began writing short stories and publishing them in magazines. From this work came The Lottery, published in The New Yorker in 1948 (“Shirley Jackson”). The disagreeable story depicts a small, modern, rural village with your average benevolent people (Wagner-Martin), all of whom gather together one day out of the year for a mysterious ritual known as the lottery. In the end, a gruesome and savage part of the heart of the town manifests itself against its own (Jackson). Throughout the story, many threads are woven, but three appear most prominently. In Jackson’s The Lottery, the futility of man-centered existence is displayed in worthless sacrifice, limited horizontal relationships, and empty, even destructive, traditions, all apart from God, who ought to be center.
The first, most obvious element of man’s inadequacy in The Lottery is the horrendous and futile sacrifice of Tessie Hutchinson. While human sacrifice was a component of almost every culture at some time for many reasons (Knox), the people are scientifically advanced, as is evident in the existence of a bank, post office, school, city square, and tractors (Jackson 140-141). The combination of these constructs is unique to the modern age. They know of science, but for some reason they believe that the lottery will increase their corn crop, as an old man seemed to believe when he said, “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon’” (Jackson 143). Yet not only do they no longer need corn to survive (they have grocery stores, trade, and transportation), but they have huge amounts of other foods. Why, then, would they engage in such a barbaric practice as human sacrifice to ensure the harvest? It betrays a flaw in their own man-centered ideology. They know that they cannot force the crop to grow. So they appeal to some unnamed, bloodthirsty higher power, ignorant of the truth that “only God...gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:7). Instead of trusting in the Lord of all creation, they take matters into their own hands, hoping that by man’s efforts to please someone they will get what they want. They must do this because they fail to see that the sacrifice which appeases God has already been made in Jesus Christ, once and for all (Rom. 6:9-10). Their man-centered worldview, forsaking divine revelation, leads, ironically, to a savage waste of human life.
The sacrifice by people of The Lottery of one person for the collective good is the result of another flaw in their obsession with man, namely, the treatment of all relationships as purely horizontal. Horizontal relationships are those that involve equal men, while vertical relationships involve the transcendent, holy God. Ignoring the divine image in which man was created leads to rationalization in which the collective gives up one for their good. Their superstition teaches them that someone must die if they are to have a good crop (Jackson 143). Because they do not recognize that all men are created in the image of God and only He has authority over life and death, they think to themselves, “Let us ambush the innocent without reason; like Sheol let us swallow them alive, and whole, like those who go down to the pit; throw in your lot among us; we will all have one purse” (Prov. 1:12, 14). Therefore, they do not hesitate even for a moment to murder one of their own people (Jackson 145) for the pleasure of them all. Only with acknowledgment that God will judge man’s relationships vertically as well as horizontally might they honor each individual as God’s own. Strictly horizontal relationships are doomed to failure.
After the most obvious and the most horrific, the most painful result of purely horizontal relationships, and arguably the most important theme in The Lottery, is empty, destructive tradition. Once men have no regard for divine revelation and instead hold man as supreme, they will carry out the traditions of their elders without question. Indeed, this dangerous tendency is evident throughout The Lottery. For example, Jackson says, “Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones” (145). Old Man Warner clearly embodied man-centered ideology and its effects on tradition when he asserted, “There’s always been a lottery” (Jackson 143). Jesus knew of this tragedy when He accused the Pharisees of “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:9). It is inevitable; when man sees man as the ultimate, he will follow man’s tradition blindly, even to murder. While Jackson likely did not see anthropocentrism as the underlying cause, she certainly saw the evil of holding ignorantly to tradition.
Alas, if only man would leave himself and his traditions behind in the pursuit of God! God is the only One worthy of being the center of one’s universe, for “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Ps. 24:1) and “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8). In the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God’s wrath was appeased to His elect (2 Cor. 5:21), but He already gives rain to the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). A vertical relationship with Him gives all horizontal relationships meaning and dignity (Matt. 18:33; Eph. 4:32). In God all man-made traditions fall to nothing (Matt. 15:1-9). God is the solution to the futile man-centered world shown in The Lottery.
In conclusion, the horrors of The Lottery all find root in a worldview which is by man, for man. It is because of man’s limitations that they make worthless, murderous sacrifice, because of man’s strictly horizontal relationships that one will be betrayed by many, and because of man’s pride and ignorance he follows terrible traditions blindly. God is the solution to all of these things. When Shirley Jackson wrote The Lottery, she left in her wake a horrific tale of the failed traditions of antropocentrism.