Cinema and Christmas

This has to be one of the best times of the year. It's Christmas, obviously, which is always exciting. Yesterday was my last day at the school, and now I turn my attention to finishing my shopping and visiting with family over the break. But it's also time for movies to receive nominations and trophies, starting recently with the Golden Globes. I enjoy watching movies, and I enjoy too seeing what movies (like my favorites) do well. I just saw Thank You For Smoking, which is incredible. I also read a post online by someone I went to school with, who makes a neat parallel between her favorite movie of the year, Superman Returns, and this holiday season. I think it's a unique connection between these two wonderful times of the year that has a nice message about what for me is to be the true focus:

"...Though they are a little overdone in the film, the parallels the writers and directors created between Superman and Jesus are part of the reason I got so much out of the film...

The parallels to Christ have always been there in Superman’s mythology. The father (Jor-El) sends his only son (Kal-El) to earth to help and look out for its people. Superman is pretty much a perfect being, without sin or selfishness. He’s more than just a man. He’s there to help and save the people of earth.

The movie Superman Returns brings the Christ parallels even more to the forefront... In order to save the people of earth, Superman has to be willing to sacrifice himself. In the process, he 'dies' (even falling to earth with his arms out to each side as if positioned on a cross), and rises from the dead (what is deemed a coma by the writers – maybe they thought they were being too obvious) about three days later.

Though I doubt they intended it, the writers of the movie do their best invocations of Christ in the smaller moments where they aren’t trying quite as hard. Superman has been gone for five years, and no one knows where. In her frustration, particularly about his failure to even say goodbye, Lois Lane has written a story called 'Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman,' and has even been awarded the Pulitzer for it. When she talks to Superman again for the first time since his return, she tells him, 'The world doesn’t need a savior, and neither do I.'

Of course, Lois is totally mistaken. In fact, if not for Superman saving her and several other reporters from certain death as their plane plummeted toward the Earth in the film’s first act, she would not be around to tell him she doesn’t need him. This makes me think of my own tendency to always want to do everything for myself. I HATE asking for help. I think most of us would probably agree that we’d prefer to keep it so that no one has to look out for us but ourselves, that we don’t need anyone to save us...

But what Lois finds out after her life is saved by Superman AGAIN, along with the lives of (as Lex Luthor brags) 'Billions!' of other people on earth, the world does need a savior. On one of the 'making of' documentaries on my Superman Returns DVD, one of the producers made a remark about the fact that the world really does need a savior; it needs a Superman.

Well, the good news, and what many of us are celebrating at this time of the year, is the fact that the world already has one. While we may be capable of taking care of ourselves in most ways, one thing we cannot do to save ourselves is to get ourselves right with God. Based on all the reading I’ve done in the last six years or so (science, history, Christian apologetics, and more), I have unflappable certainty that there is a God who created this world and that Christ was his son that he sent to earth because we were incapable of saving ourselves. Christ is perfect, Superman is pretty close, but the rest of us are not. The rules that God put in place when he made this world say that the punishment for sin is death. All of us, with our free will, are sinners in some way or another. Because God loves us so much, he built a 'loophole' into his own rules, sending His Son to earth to first show us the way to live and then to take the punishment for our sins in our place as he died on the cross. It sounds a lot like a story we would praise a writer for making up, but does it ever occur to us that maybe this is the reality that we model stories after, that we praise writers for invoking?

I think the reason that some people refuse to believe in Christ, or to give true consideration to whether or not Christians could be right in what they believe, is very similar to Lois’s declaration that she doesn’t need a savior. We don’t want to have to take help from anyone, admit we can’t take care of it all ourselves. But we’re all like Lois and the reporters on the plane or the window washer in the movie who fell off his scaffolding on the side of a skyscraper – we’re plummeting toward certain death... Only the death we’re plummeting toward concerns our afterlife rather than our life in this world (and since the former is eternal while the latter is more like eighty years on average, it’s pretty obvious where our focus should be)...

here’s to remaining focused on the reason we celebrate at this time of the year; the savior that the Superman producer says the world really needs has already come... Don’t deny the real Superman the opportunity to save you before you hit the ground and it’s too late."