Superman

After an unintended blogging sabbatical, I'm back! Teaching pulled me down into the vortex. Suffice it to say, I love the place where God has called me, but it's been a rocky three months, and spring break was sorely needed. (People who roll their eyes at teachers for getting the summer and holidays off should try teaching for a while without a break.)

Anyway, after He let my brains settle back into my head for a few days, the Lord started speaking to me about aliens. I'm not talking about the Roswell kind. (We'll get to those in a minute.) I'm talking about this verse:

"...remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world" (Ephesians 2:12).

Paul was speaking to Gentiles, not Israelites. Before Christ, the Jews had at least known who God was. The Gentiles, however, had NO hope. All they had was a bunch of wooden idols, human sacrifice, empty philosophy, materialism, sin, and death--none of which, of course, present hope or purpose. And nobody had a personal, familiar relationship with God.

Paul goes on: "For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God" (v. 18-19).

Members of the household of God. Because of Jesus, both Jews and Gentiles can experience the beauty of becoming God's children.

I rarely watch movies, but I actually did watch the Superman movie with my family (the new one). It's going to sound silly, but this movie made me think about Jesus.

I think the writers of this comic were searching for a messianic story, and they didn't even know it. Before you roll your eyes, listen to the similarities in plot line. An alien baby from a powerful place appears in the home of two ordinary, blue-collar people. They raise him as their own, but before long, it becomes pretty evident that he has superpowers beyond humanity's abilities. When he is thirty-three (no joke, that was Clark Kent's age in the movie), he has a conversation with his real dad, and he must decide whether or not he is going to risk his life to save the human race.

Maybe Jesus' Father did not appear to Him as a hologram in an abandoned alien outpost in Antarctica, and Jesus probably smiled WAY more during his lifetime than the actor who played Superman. (I mean, haven't they heard of comic relief?) The Man of Steel's eyes are burning with x-ray vision, not the flames of the fire of God. So it's a stupid comparison, but watching the feelings and adaptations of the main character in Man of Steel kind of shocked me into realizing how Jesus must have felt on earth.  You see, at the end of the movie, Clark Kent decides to risk his life for humanity because he has lived with them. He is an alien, but he is also a farm boy from Kansas. He feels distant from most of humankind, yet he LOVES them.

As I watched the movie play out, I realized that Jesus probably had way more feelings wrapped up in humanity than I had thought. I mean, duh, He loves us, but I thought it was some kind of transcendent, pure, self-sacrificial God love. Which, of course, it was. However, Jesus was fully God AND fully man. And He had love toward humanity that was born in a human heart familiar with human experience.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:5-8).

Jesus could have decided not to die for us. But He had grown up with a front row seat to humanity's utter helplessness. He watched deception and sin eat people alive. Maybe He saw his childhood friends abused, neglected, or beaten. Likely, He walked past beggars and sick people on a regular basis. He probably watched family members die. He heard people fighting. He saw daily stress and depression. Maybe kids made fun of Him or beat Him up. As a God-man without sin, He surely felt alienated from humankind; as the son of a carpenter and a girl from Nazareth, He had a love for humanity that came from being one of us.

When He was obedient to death, even death on a cross, He wasn't just dying for an ideal. He was dying for actual human faces that He knew. He died and rose for the joy set before Him: millions and millions of people who would become found in the Father. He loved us with the powerful indwelling love of God through the Holy Spirit. Yet He also loved us because He had been held by a human mama. He had laughed with his friends over a fish fry. He had heard babies, even His own siblings, cry, and had probably seen some of them buried.

He knew our names. He knew just how depraved and messed-up we were, because He had seen everything first hand with his own eyes.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die--but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God (Romans 5:6-9).

Hardly any of us would be willing to give up our lives for even a really good person; yet Christ died for a whole bunch of people who were enslaved to sin. I have to think it was because He had lived among us, and though He had seen the absolute evil that humankind was capable of, He also saw the helpless tears of a people enslaved to evil, captive to the whims of Satan. He loved us because He was God, but He also loved us because He was our brother.

God gave up His only Son for a time, entrusting Him to the care of a regular, run-of-the-mill carpenter family from a small town that nothing good had ever come from. He traded His Son to us in exchange for us to become His children, too.

No doubt the Lord has great compassion for people. Compassion is one of His qualities. He invented it. But for some reason, He wanted to feel it in human skin. He wanted to touch it, to experience it, to let us know: "I'm with you."

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:15-16).

We can draw near to Him, confident of His mercy toward us. His mercy is not a sterile ideal. It is a visceral, living, breathing reality, as profound and personal as one man's blood dripping down a wooden cross.

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation (Romans 5:10-11).

If you have ever felt estranged, unwanted, outcast, remember this: you are not an alien anymore.

God Himself didn't come and live here with us simply so that He could die an antiseptic, legalistic death. He didn't rise again so that we could be labeled "saved" and carry on with the same lack of purpose and identity as before.  He could have done it that way. He could have simply made a business transaction with the devil, a ransom of power, a signed contract. But that would make us His prisoners-of-war and not His children.

It took being one of us to make us one with Him.  He died and He rose so that you could become a member of the household of God. That's intimacy.

Just as Mary held Jesus, your heavenly Father holds you. Receive His mercy today.