A Parable of Law In Need of Grace

The show Better Call Saul is a morality tale showing the goodness of the law and leaving us longing for grace.

Warning: major spoilers below. The show Better Call Saul may not be appropriate viewing for everyone. Please use discernment and listen to the Holy Spirit.

This week the series finale of Better Call Saul aired. It’s a television masterpiece. One review I read (NPR, I think) called the show a deeply conservative one. “Crime doesn’t pay,” is the theme of the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe. In a gripping and grim way, these tales tell us that morality matters, and so do relationships that cultivate virtue.

There is no hero in the Better Call Saul storyline. Every character is deeply flawed. Well, that’s not true, exactly. Nacho Varga—the cartel drug dealer—has an honorable dad, who is a good man. Howard Hamlin might be close to a good man, although definitely flawed. Others have noticed what I also have seen in this show: the story of Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman is the story of the prodigal son. Jimmy’s big brother, Chuck, is the law-keeping older brother and Jimmy is the prodigal younger one. It’s interesting to read Luke 15 with these characters in mind (aiming to read the stories of our world in light of the gospel as Lesslie Newbigin recommends).

In the parable both brothers receive their inheritances from their father (15:12). I’d never noticed this before, but Jesus says, “A man had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the estate I have coming to me.’ So he distributed the assets to them” (15:11-12). The pronoun “them” is indeed plural. Both brothers received their father’s riches. The younger famously spent it, wasted it and returned home. We might imagine that the older brother invested and saved his share.

Jimmy and Chuck are implicitly “heirs” of their father’s (and mother’s) prodigious intelligence and shrewdness. Both men are wildly talented and brilliant. Chuck is traditionally smart and disciplined, investing his gifting into building a legal career. Chuck the older brother loves the law. He reveres the law. Like the parabolic eldest brother who “never disobeyed” (15:29). Jimmy is slick and smooth-talking, a two-bit con-man, nicknamed “Slippin’ Jimmy” for his habit of faking slip-and-falls in order to collect a few bucks in damages. When Jimmy tells Chuck he’s become a lawyer, Chuck is distraught. He tells Jimmy, “The law is sacred.” For Chuck, Jimmy with a law license is “like a chimpanzee with a machine gun.” Jimmy the younger brother takes his intelligence and charm but spends them recklessly. Like the younger brother who “squandered his estate in foolish living” (15:13) and ends up wallowing with the pigs (15:15-16). Jimmy wastes his talents and finds himself in the figurative sewer, “a criminal lawyer” (as drug dealer Jesse Pinkman rightly says in Breaking Bad). The series ends with Jimmy in the literal dumpster, covered in slop, the precious diamonds he’d squirreled away lost into the bottom of the mess. He seems irredeemable.

But for Kim.

Kim Wexler is Jimmy’s love and partner in shenanigans. But she divorced Jimmy after she and Jimmy ruined Howard Hamlin’s life. Howard’s end came in blood pooling on Jimmy’s and Kim’s condo floor after cartel boss Lalo Salamanco shot a hole in Howard’s brain. It was too much for Kim. Jimmy begs her not to leave, and for the first time in six seasons, on screen he tells her he loves her. “I love you, too,” she says. This is the first time someone tells Jimmy in the show that he is loved. It’s clear he’s longing for love. But it’s tainted. “I love you, too,” Kim says, “But so what?” She tells him that when they’re together people get hurt. Kim’s departure pushes Jimmy over the edge, giving himself fully to sleazy, criminal activity.

The finale finds Jimmy once again wriggling off the hook. Looking at more than a century of incarceration for countless counts of racketeering, accessory to murder, and more, he negotiates his prison time down to seven years. Until he hears that Kim has already confessed to her role in Howard Hamlin’s death. Kim’s righteous act sparks Jimmy’s own confession, transforming him back from Saul Goodman into Jimmy McGill.

The parable’s younger brother comes to his senses, returning to his father, asking only for servitude (15:17-19). The father embraces him, and throws a party to welcome him home (15:20-24). While in prison, Jimmy gets a visit from his lawyer. It’s Kim. Like they had so many times before, they share a cigarette, burning in color amidst the black and white tint of the rest of the scene.

For the parallels with the parable of the prodigal son, though, Better Call Saul doesn’t find the same ending. While Kim in some ways plays the role of the father who embraces the younger son, she ultimately can’t give to Jimmy what Jimmy needs. He needs to confess. He needs to repent. But he also needs grace and forgiveness. Kim’s visit to him in prison is a sprinkle of grace. The problem is that Jimmy needs an ocean of grace.

Better Call Saul is a morality tale, a parable of the goodness of the law and the deadliness of transgression. The Scriptures affirm both things, the goodness of the law (Rom 7:12) and the deadliness of transgressing it. Here Chuck is right: the law is sacred. Here though is also the problem: the law can’t save. When Chuck loses the law, he ends his life. The law cuts both ways. It is sacred, but it’s edges are deadly sharp. Jimmy comes to at least respect the law, but the law can’t save him. The law can only put him in a jumpsuit and offer him a cigarette with Kim in a cinder-block box.

At the risk of being glib, maybe we could say that Jimmy needs Grace and not just Kim.