Home	Our Hope
Bible Study		September 17, 2025
Guilt and Thunderbolts

Introduction

The opening scene for the movie brings up the question that the movie will be addressing.

The speaker is a trained assassin who has killed many people. In this clip, she describes a feeling of emptiness and of falling. Later she will say that the cause is the number of people she has killed. Even later, the movie will talk about all of the psychological "rooms", where each room involves something that was done that makes the person feel guilty.

The focus of the movie is: What to do about guilt? The characters talk about pushing it down inside of them, which really means not thinking about it. They also talk about a "void" by which they mean all these "rooms" and the interconnectedness of them. They also talk about falling into this "void," by which they mean being consumed by it, with their thoughts being stuck going from room to room endlessly.

The movie scrupulously avoids using the word "guilt." To say that word would be too much like having a Judeo-Christian worldview. If they said "guilt," the solution would be forgiveness. Still, it's easy to see what the topic is without using the words.

The movie does use the word "regret". The line is, "Dad, I have too much regret." The speaker is the same character as in the video above. She really means guilt, but regret is the same thing as guilt in normal usage, when referring to a decision you made. The perspective is a little different. Guilt looks at self in terms of accountability; Regret looks at consequences. You feel bad about what you did and the effects it had on others. I think most people would agree that the sting of accountability is worse because regret is the view of a distant observer.

I found a definition of both words in an article in Psychology Today. The author is creating a new definition that is at odds with normal usage. She is doing this in order to explain something, but new definitions for words only cause confusion … and perhaps regret. The difference between the two words is too small to matter.

Solution

The movie offers no real solution. In fact I found it difficult to see what they were proposing as the solution. These were what I found:

• Don't fight it (it always wins)
  • This is a truism - a statement so obviously true that there is no point in saying it. Who is the person who has never felt guilt for something they did and found that it keeps coming back? No matter how they try to rationalize, justify, or excuse what was done, it keeps coming back to mind. If you try to fill your life with things to keep yourself too busy for it, guilt finds a way to slip the knife in. If you try to think only happy thoughts and only have happy experiences, guilt finds an empty moment. It's like it has a life of its own.
    - That brings up an odd question. If you think you are in control of yourself, why can't you control that?
• Have good people around you
  • I don't see how this could help, and personal experience says that it doesn't help. This idea seems to be an attempt to fill a life with only good thoughts and distract them so that guilt never gets a chance. So, it's really just another way of fighting it, which never works.
• Do good things
  • The basis for this idea seems to be penance - the idea that you can make up for the bad things you've done by doing some good things. This, at least, is an attempt to atone for the wrong that was done, a different approach. Experience says that this also does not work.
    - The Bible gives us the reason why. A sin creates an injury that cannot be healed by a human being. It's like trying to "un-ring" a bell. Aside from that fatal flaw in that idea, there is the problem of how many good things must be done to make up for a bad thing. A points system would be necessary, but no one knows the exchange rates. That's because God doesn't see sin as good weighed against evil. Therefore an infinite number of good deeds would still not be enough to make up for stealing a pencil from your employer.
• Get a job that doesn't require you to do evil
  • This idea for a solution is, obviously, specific to people whose employment requires them to do evil. That would include prostitutes, Russian-trained super-assassins, and some used-car salespeople. Most of us, however, do not fit in that class. That leaves us with no solution.
    - While "don't do evil" is a valid personal goal, and might be a catchy slogan, it doesn't offer a solution to the guilt from things already done. Even if we never did another evil thing again, that guilt would still be waiting for a chance to poke us.
    - This is the choice for the Thunderbolts. They change from assassins to "public-facing" heroes who only kill "evil" people.

Memory

If penance could atone for evil, we would still have a conscience and the memory of what was done. The conscience uses the memory to show us evil. That's the source of guilt.

Even for Christians, the conscience performs its role. Though we are forgiven and the atonement has been made, the conscience brings memories to mind of events we regret. This is human existence.

If we deal with it as Christians should, all we need to do is to realize it is covered and dealt with. Then we can put that memory back in the box and move on. I know … easier said than done. Here is where the difference between guilt and regret matters. We can move from the personal fire of guilt to looking back on it from a distance.

There is a time coming when complete atonement will be made. At that time, we will be changed, and guilt will be gone.

Conclusion

I didn't watch this movie with the intent of finding Christian teaching hidden within it. Past Marvel movies have been, at best, a mixed bag of good and bad morals. The words in the opening scene were deeper than I expected and caught my attention. Most people probably heard, "blah, blah, blah", saw a woman step off the edge of a tall building, and then the action started.

I found it interesting that a Disney movie would delve into a topic when they would have had to have known they didn't have an answer for it. What do we do about guilt? The question can't just be for Russian-trained super-assassins who are on an assignment. It is a question for everyone all the time, on the job or off the job. But they offered their audience no workable solution.

Maybe I'm expecting too much of their audience, but guilt is a reality in people's lives, and some people really wrestle with it. This can be an opportunity to teach them why they can't control those flashes of guilt, what the conscience is, why it was built into us, and how to deal with it.