Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Gravitas
Over at CGO. Les Newsom reflected on audience reactions to The Dark Knight. As I have said before, this is no ordinary super-hero movie. Newsom sums it up this way:
Is that truly hopeful? Well, indeed it is for Christ's victory is complete, but the path to victory is difficult and fraught with pain. In his post Newsom is reflecting on the current generation, a generation that finds the Joker "awesome" and says:
For a very long time we have been selling salvation, but we have neglected to point out hat salvation is very different from "happily every after." My heart grieves for the 1000's of souls the church has sold salvation that have walked away from it because what they got was something very different from what they thought they were buying. How much enmity towards the church exists becasue of this very phenomena?
And I always come back to the fact that we tend to do such a poor job of representing what the gospel truly offers becasue we refuse to face it ourselves. We hide from the difficulties, we pretend like they don't exist. We look at the cross and say "Cool!" when we should be seeking to join Christ on it.
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Remember how the line goes, “Madness is like gravity.” The terror is in the inability to stop the evil that will come upon you if you believe in something, anything, to save you. Recall Agent Smith in The Matrix standing over a head-locked Neo as they wait on the tracks for the racing subway, “Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson?” he growls. “That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death.”And offers hope here:
True (and little wonder) that Christian sermons first centered on the resurrection as the demonstrative proof to that evil-beaten generation that they could have tangible hope even while staring in the face of the Joker. But I don’t want to race there too quickly before I feel what The Dark Knight is saying, because it is saying something that is quite true if there is no resurrection. That is, there is an undefeatable inevitability that omni-intends your misery. If you haven’t tasted it yet, you will.Interesting, isn't it? Our hope lies AFTER evil (madness?) has appeared to have its way. C.S. Lewis called it deep magic, Aslan HAD to die. Scripture comes to mind:
Gal 2:20 - "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the {life} which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.In order to share in the hope that Christ offers, we must join him on the cross.
Is that truly hopeful? Well, indeed it is for Christ's victory is complete, but the path to victory is difficult and fraught with pain. In his post Newsom is reflecting on the current generation, a generation that finds the Joker "awesome" and says:
For a generation like that, it occurs to me that, though absolutely true, it will not do for Christians to simply tell this culture about a hero who really will overcome evil in the world. Why? Because even in the Christian story, the answer is not expressed that tidily.I would argue it has never been right to teach such a tidy version of the gospel. We cannot be resurrected unless we are crucified.
For a very long time we have been selling salvation, but we have neglected to point out hat salvation is very different from "happily every after." My heart grieves for the 1000's of souls the church has sold salvation that have walked away from it because what they got was something very different from what they thought they were buying. How much enmity towards the church exists becasue of this very phenomena?
And I always come back to the fact that we tend to do such a poor job of representing what the gospel truly offers becasue we refuse to face it ourselves. We hide from the difficulties, we pretend like they don't exist. We look at the cross and say "Cool!" when we should be seeking to join Christ on it.
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