Today superheroes rate when they get their own movie and it seems like more and more of our summer blockbusters are made from old comic book characters. But today Hollywood is giving us characters that have intense inner struggles – who are tortured by their strength and who aren’t really sure what to do with their powers. Think of the Incredible Hulk. He may ‘do good,’ but when he goes green he is an really destructive force. Tony Stark is an engineering genius who can craft incredible things out of metal but when weapons his company creates go to help insurgents up to no good, he figures out how to become Iron Man and how to use his skills in other ways. He confronts his dark side.
Or think of Bruce Wayne – Batman – a brooding superhero. The series of movies that feature him have gotten progressively darker in recent years. Last year in “The Dark Knight” Bruce Wayne, the millionaire businessman who moonlights as a crime fighter, is confronted with a villain who only wants to bring chaos into the world. Despite all of his gadgets and strengths, he seems helpless to stop the bombings and terror attacks of this enemy. He thinks of himself as the good guy but he is tempted to become evil himself in order to stop the Joker.
Heath Ledger played the Joker and he was very convincing. At one point he is facing off with Batman and he denies that there is any good at all in the world. He talks about the people of the city and he says, “You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these...these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.”[i]
Batman holds on to his convictions, though, even when he finds that the one man he felt had integrity, the District Attorney, is shown to have fallen himself. In the end he takes the blame for others’ wrongdoing on himself because he thinks they need a clear hero – “a hero with a face” as Bruce Wayne puts it. At the end of the movie a child sees what Batman is doing and asks his father, who is Batman’s friend, why the former superhero is now being ostracized by the city. “He didn’t do anything wrong,” he says.
The father, a policeman, Lt. Gordon, says he had to run, “Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.”[ii]
Now there are many ways to look at this. You can look at Batman as a kind of stand-in for all the messy ways we look at the use of power in the contemporary world. Maybe Batman is the United States, struggling to understand how to use its military and economic might in a world that seems bent on chaos. “Maybe,” the movie is saying, “we have to compromise some of our heroic image of ourselves in order to do what needs to be done to combat forces that are truly evil.”
Maybe the Joker has a point and the world is fatally compromised. That’s biblical. Psalm 53 verses 2 and 3 says, “God looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.” So perhaps the message of the movie is that in a world that is flawed, it’s not a question of being morally pure, it’s a matter of being willing to get down in the dirt and play the world’s game.
That might be one way to look at what God was doing in Jesus, too. I mean, after all, there is God looking out at a world in which there is so much fallenness, so much brokenness, so much evil and what is God going to do? It’s not like God doesn’t have superhero powers. Omnipotence? That’s a pretty awesome superhero power to have. Omniscience – the ability to know everything there is to know? Omnipresence? You put ‘omni-‘ in front of it and God’s got it.
So God could have sent Jesus down to be the superhero God. He could have been faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. But that’s not how we think of Jesus, is it? Jesus was not superhuman, he was fully human. Oh, there were some remarkable features to this man. We have stories of Jesus healing and walking on water, feeding the 5,000 and turning water into wine. But the thing that makes Jesus most remarkable is not that he could do stuff we can’t do. The most amazing thing is that he became just like we are. Bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.
Did he do this to play the Joker’s game? To get down in the dirt and play rough with the world on its own terms? To expose the fact that God was really not that good after all? That the God of Israel in the end was just like all those Greek and Roman gods who treated humans like their playthings and who really just wanted to get their own way?
No, he didn’t. Given every opportunity to wipe the world out, to teach sinners a lesson about messing with an omnipotent God, to give up on his people, to leave them for dead…Jesus didn’t do any of those things. Instead he came armed with the most unexpected weapon of all – the most underappreciated superhero power there is. Jesus came because God so loved the world. It’s love that changes the equation.
“But,” you might say, “Look where that got him. It got him a cross. It got him whipped and stripped and hung. It got him crucified. Doesn’t that just prove the Joker’s point? The world knows how to treat a good man. It kills him.”
Maybe that’s the point if your whole orientation toward life is formed by the world that welcomes love with a cross. But if you have thrown in with Jesus, another world emerges. If your values are not of this world, everything gets turned upside down.
All of this is on display in the court of Pilate, the Roman governor who was the one who was given the case of Jesus of Nazareth. Pilate was a man of this world, a leader of this world. He was someone who knew power and knew how to use it. He was being worn down by the troublesome territories of the Jews, with their one, true God and their restlessness – always threatening to rise up in rebellion.
So when the local religious leaders brought him a wandering teacher who had shown up in Jerusalem, he thought he’d get right to the point. “You are the king of the Jews.”
Pilate was probably expecting it to go one of two ways. Either the man would shoot back. “Yes, I am, and you’re going down, Pilate!”, in which case he would expose himself as a rebel leader, or he would become defensive and deny that he was any threat to the Empire. But Jesus answered as if he were the one doing the interrogating: “Are you calling me the king of the Jews because you believe that or have others said that about me?” Jesus sounds like he really wants to know what Pilate believes about him…as if it Pilate’s soul is the one at stake here.
“I’m not a Jew, am I?” Pilate replies. It’s a way of saying, “Look, I don’t have a horse in this race. Whatever happens to you is no skin off my back. Your people brought you here and they are the one’s clamoring for your death. What did you do?”
Jesus answers and again it’s like he’s the one who is conducting this interview. “My kingdom is not of this world. If I had a kingdom in this world – if I were getting down and dirty to play the games you are playing – my servants would be fighting you in the streets. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
Where is Jesus’ kingdom? It is beyond, above, around, within. He’s not going to settle for a stake in a backwater Palestinian state. He’s after something much bigger. He’s after a kingdom that has already been claimed, already imagined, already established since before before.
You don’t become the king of this kingdom by force. You can’t even see it if you train yourself in the ways of this world. It is always lying just beyond beyond. Philippians tells us that “Jesus, even though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” [Philippians 2:5-11]
This is the way Jesus became the king. Not with an army. Not by the sword. But by emptying himself to become like a slave. By living among the least and the lost. By accepting a cross. By dying there.
For this Jesus has been ridiculed and despised. For this Christians have been tortured and mocked. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche scorned Christianity as a religion of weakness and said that it was a philosophy that held individuals and nations back from greatness because it restrained them with the idea that the meek will inherit the earth. What possible good could there be in following this kind of king?
I’m going to have Thanksgiving with my family this week. We’ve got 10 folks coming from as far away as Oklahoma to be here. We’re going to sit around the table and give thanks for what God has blessed us with and we’re going to eat turkey and watch football and tell stories.
But whenever we get together, just beyond the veil of the visible is the most powerful person I have known in my life. She never had much. She never wanted much. She lived her whole life in pretty slim circumstances. But my grandma had something that was so potent that not even death could extinguish it. My grandma had love.
It was the “stop whatever you’re doing and receive the person in front of you” kind of love. It was the “always have food for them” kind of love. It was the “I believe in your best self” kind of love. It was the “I’ll never stop loving you” kind of love. It’s the kind of love God has for the world kind of love.
That’s the kind of king who’s conquering the world. That’s the kind of king who followed up the vacated cross with the empty tomb. That’s the kind of king who wants you and me to be a different kind of people with a different set of values. People who look ahead to a day when God’s kingdom will come and Christ will come again to reign in glory. People who shape their lives in this world not by what the world tells them to do, but by the values of the world to come.
So what are you going to do differently? Who do you know that needs to know that the world they think is crushing them has no claim on their allegiance? How can we show those who are weighted down by sin and sick to death with disease and who are faltering under a load of cares and miseries that a new day is coming and, in fact, it’s already here? Because wherever there are followers of Jesus doing what Jesus did, the kingdom is breaking in. They’re not superheroes. But then again – neither is Jesus. He’s just the mild-mannered king of the universe claiming the earth by taking up his cross. Thanks be to God.
John 18:33-37
Then Pilate entered again the praetarium and summoned Jesus and said to him, “You are the king of the Jews.”
Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own of did others say this to you about me?”
Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own people and the high priests handed you over to me. What did you do?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world my servants would be fighting in order that I not be handed over to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.”
Then Pilate said to him, “So then you are a king.”
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world – that I might bear witness to truth. Everyone whose being is from truth hears my voice.”
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