Rise of the Slightly Rubbish Guardians

“It is our job to protect the children of the world. For as long as they believe in us, we will guard them with our lives.”

Rise of the Guardians (2012)

How has Dreamworks Animation managed it? The studio behind such exceptional motion pictures as The Prince of Egypt, Shrek, and – a film which for some time enjoyed the status of being my absolute favourite – How to Train Your Dragon, has proved unable to persuade me, an unabashed fan of all things animated, to pay money to see any of their original-story releases (i.e. not including the sequel to HtTYD) for nearly the whole of the past five years. Trailers for such titles as Turbo, Home, and The Boss Baby have left me altogether uninspired to take a trip to the cinema.¹ It probably doesn’t help that the last original-story release from the studio that I did see, Rise of the Guardians, was … well, it was all right. Nothing special.

The moon that constitutes Dreamworks Animation’s company logo appears in Rise of the Guardians practically as a character, which is entertainingly meta.

Rise of the Guardians is a dissonant, sprawling, hyperactive sort of a film featuring a coalition of childhood myths – Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and our protagonist Jack Frost – who collaborate in defence of the joyous, carefree nature of childhood against the newly-intensified fear-inducing activities of the Bogeyman, otherwise known as Pitch Black. Our heroes possess, between them, a wealth of highly powerful magic, so one wouldn’t have thought, perhaps, that one solitary adversary would present all that much of a threat, but the trouble is that the Guardians’ power has one fundamental weakness: it depends entirely on children believing in them.

Pitch’s strategy, therefore, is to sabotage the Guardians’ efforts to carry out those activities by which they make their existence known to children: he kidnaps all the Tooth Fairy’s subordinates so that they can no longer flit round collecting children’s teeth, he destroys the Easter bunny’s stock of painted eggs so that children attending Easter egg hunts are uniformly disappointed – and every time a child stops believing in a Guardian, said Guardian is weakened. So Tooth’s feathers begin to moult, and the Bunny is reduced from the size of an adult human to that of an ordinary rabbit.

The big final showdown of the film sees our variously dilapidated heroes confront Pitch in a darkened suburban street. Beside them are a young boy called Jamie and a collection of his friends, whose help the Guardians have enlisted along the way.²

“You think a few children can help you?” Pitch mocks, backdropped by an army of shadowy nightmares. “Against this?”

Father Christmas attempts to lift his staff against Pitch, but stumbles. Jamie gasps, anxious, but Jack Frost and the Easter Bunny are quick to reassure him. “We’ll protect you, mate,” asserts the latter, rather incongruously in view of his puny size.

“Aw, you’ll protect them?” echoes Pitch. “But who’ll protect you?”

Nobody seems to have an answer, until we see a new resolve in Jamie’s eyes and he steps forward: “I will.” The other children soon follow his lead until there is a whole line of them standing in front of the Guardians.

Pitch, unperturbed, sends a stream of nightmares straight at them – but when Jamie thrusts out a hand against the nightmares, they turn into the golden good-dream sand of the Sandman, familiar to us from earlier in the film. The process continues and soon all the Guardians are looking a lot more like their usual selves, upon which they start employing the full force of their magical abilities against Pitch until he is defeated. The fact isn’t made totally clear, but I think we have to assume that when the golden sand goes whizzing all over the sky, it’s also causing numerous children to have dreams of such a sort that they start believing in the Guardians again, thereby empowering the Guardians to fulfil their duty of protecting those children from Pitch.

 

And this is probably about what you’d get if Father Christmas and the Sandman were for some reason conflated into one character...

In short, the Guardians are just as reliant on the children they are sworn to protect as the children are on them. This, indeed, forms the heart of the film’s storyline. And in this way, although the Guardians’ purpose, as stated in my opening quotation, may sound terribly grand and assertive, the gist of it turns out not to be ‘so long as the children of the world are young and naïve and vulnerable enough to have need of us, we will guard them with our lives’ so much as ‘we are literally entirely dependent on the children of the world believing in us in order to be able to exercise any of our powers of protection over them’. Which being so, is it even the Guardians who are really doing the protecting? Or are they arguably just a convenient external agency by means of which the children are, after all, able to protect themselves? One might, perhaps, characterise the relationship between the Guardians and the children as a mutually beneficial partnership, or even as a contract of service: the currency of belief buys the service of protection. In any case, it’s with the children, and their ability to choose to believe or not to, that the real power in the equation rests. All of which surely renders these supposedly mighty protectors called the Guardians a bit … well, a bit rubbish, frankly, doesn’t it?

So it’s a very good thing that in the real world, we have a protector whose ability to do what he does has absolutely nothing to do with how many people believe in him. God’s relationship with his people is altogether different from the Guardians’ with the children: it is not a mutually beneficial partnership, because there’s no contribution we for our part could offer God that he might possibly lack without us. He is the self-sufficient source of everything that is, the eternal Trinity, the uncaused cause, satisfied in himself before anything else existed, necessarily greater than all of it, and with absolute power over every atom. How could the Creator of all lack anything, such that he would be dependent on his creation to provide it? Such a thing would defy all logic.

And for this reason, it’s not on to approach God as if our belief in him, or any practical manifestation thereof, could function as currency, in the same way that the children’s belief in the Guardians does. The following is from Psalm 50:

Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you;

your burnt offerings are continually before me.

I will not accept a bull from your house

or goats from your folds.

For every beast of the forest is mine,

the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know all the birds of the hills,

and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,

for the world and its fullness are mine.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls

or drink the blood of goats?³

Of course, we don’t make animal sacrifices under the new covenant with Christ, but that was what obedience to God’s commands looked like according to the covenant with Israel as laid out in Torah, and so the same point applies now to any kind of obedience we undertake with the expectation that we are somehow doing God a favour, or presenting a bargaining chip, when in actual fact everything belongs to him already. In fact, it strikes me as even more ludicrous to have this kind of attitude about a prayer or a Bible-reading session or a morally sound decision or the mere reality of belief that underlies all such things, than about a blood sacrifice. After all, blood sacrifice was and remains the necessary means by which a holy God’s relationship with unholy humans is established; these other things are actually privileges bought by the establishment of that relationship – in our case, perfectly and permanently through Christ’s death and resurrection. And yet I know I am guilty of getting it in my head – vaguely, subtly, so that it’s hard to acknowledge and reject the fact – that deigning to access such privileges represents my giving God something he lacks. How mad is that? And how utterly arrogant? Granted, it is of course true that God wants and desires and asks obedience of his people, but the key thing to realise is that this is because he has chosen to achieve his purpose of increasing his own glory through us, not because we have something he needs in order to achieve that purpose. Indeed, Psalm 50 continues:

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,

and perform your vows to the Most High,

and call upon me in the day of trouble;

I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

The way we glorify God is when he delivers us. He asks of us thanksgiving, which by definition is an acknowledgement of our dependence on him rather than the meeting of a need that he has. When the children in Rise of the Guardians make a point of the fact that they believe in the Guardians, far from testifying to the greatness of the latter, it exposes that the former are the ones who really hold the cards; and likewise, if we think that our belief in God or the obedience that follows therefrom is fulfilling his needs, we don’t glorify him, but only fashion a false glory for ourselves. We reduce him – to a greater or lesser extent – to a convenient external agency whereby a power that really belongs to us might be exercised. If, on the other hand, we recognise that we have nothing to offer, that all we can do is give thanks for good and cry out for deliverance from evil, we witness with great clarity to the absoluteness of God’s power, the willing generosity of his grace, that he is the only Saviour, needed by all, needing none – and a much better guardian than anyone else could ever be.

Footnotes

¹ Although actually I just read the description for The Boss Baby on the Dreamworks website, http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/film/, and the mention of the words ‘unreliable narrator’ has already caused me to think it might be worth a look after all…

² Some kind human has uploaded the scene to YouTube – in HD, indeed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-rBH4qSF0w.

³ I’m a big fan of this one right now: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+50&version=ESVUK.

Three Words I Suggest the Church Should Use More Discerningly

“Don’t need no priest; don’t need no pew.

You are my religion; my religion is you.

I don’t need no other purpose; you give me a reason.

Ain’t their business what I want to believe in.

You are my priest; you are my truth.

You are my religion; my religion is you.”

Skillet, ‘My Religion’, Rise (2013)

 

An altar not altogether dissimilar to the one in the church my parents took me to when I was a teenager. Look, it even has that funny little rail you kneel at to receive communion.

1) Priest

What this word means is a person who mediates between humans and God. The priest is the representative of humans in God’s presence and the conduit whereby that relationship is enabled to exist. This is a role whose necessity makes perfect sense when one considers that God is entirely, perfectly, superlatively holy, and humans are distinctly, um, not. To stand before God as a sinner is representative of a death sentence. So, under his covenant with Israel, God ordained that there should be a specific group within the nation who might act as priests, offering sacrifices to God so that the people’s sins might be covered over and forgiven, thus enabling unholy humans to have a relationship with a holy God.¹

Then along comes the new covenant with Christ, and because he’s awfully good at multi-roling, he becomes both the ultimate priest and the ultimate sacrifice offered. Through his blood spilled on our behalf we are made holy such that we might be able to stand in God’s presence, and indeed that we might become dwelling-places of the very Spirit of God – and Christ is the sole mediator of the covenant in his blood, the sole representative we require in God’s presence, the sole channel through which our relationship with God is enabled. The letter to the Hebrews is very big on these kinds of ideas; I’ll give you a quick snapshot, but do go and have a more thorough peruse:

This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant. The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues for ever. Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.²

So we should stop using the word to refer to the guy who stands at the front in a clerical collar and delivers the sermon. That guy is a preacher or a teacher or a pastor maybe, but definitely not a priest: the Church only has one priest, and his name is Jesus the Christ. To call anyone on earth a priest is to claim that we need an intermediary other than Jesus to enable our relationship with God, which frankly pours scorn on what Jesus has actually achieved for us and also grossly exaggerates the importance of whichever individual is being entitled ‘priest’.

2) Altar

What this word means is a piece of furniture on which sacrifices are offered. Again looking at God’s covenant with Israel, there was a big square acacia-wood one with horns on it in the tabernacle and later the Temple.³

So we should stop using the word to refer to a piece of furniture on which bread and wine are placed for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. No sacrifice is taking place when that happens; Jesus’ one sacrifice of himself was sufficient to deal with absolutely all the sins of God’s people, past, present, and future. The following from just a few verses after that chunk of Hebrews I quoted above:

[Jesus] has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of  the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.

Jesus told his disciples to take bread and wine in remembrance of him;⁴ this event is a memorial of his once-for-all, 100%-sufficient, never-to-be-repeated sacrifice. To have it take place around an ‘altar’, a venue for sacrifice, rather implies that it’s an actual sacrifice all by itself. And to suggest that we need to conduct extra sacrifices of our own, reruns of Jesus’ sacrifice, is to express a horribly diminished view of what that sacrifice actually achieved. If we need a name for the piece of furniture on which we put the bread and wine, well, ‘table’ would seem a perfectly adequate one.

 

Ew, common cup. Is there an actual reason why people do communion like that, or is it just to save on washing up?

3) Worship

What this word means is, in the words of Romans 12:1, the presentation of our bodies, by the mercies of God, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.⁵ I hasten to add, in light of what I just said about altars, that such presentation doesn’t constitute an extra sacrifice of such a kind as to secure our relationship with God; Paul has spent the past eleven chapters of his letter explaining in no uncertain terms that none of us can do anything to secure that relationship, and that such a thing is only possible through Jesus. A normal sacrifice has to die in order to achieve its purpose, as Jesus did; we, by contrast, are called to be living sacrifices. That means giving over every part of our lives in obedience to the God by whose mercies we have already been made holy.

So we should stop using the word to refer to music. Singing songs to praise God and encourage one another may be one component of our obedience to God – the Bible does tell us to do it, after all⁶ – but it’s nothing even remotely close to the whole thing. Likewise, the person who leads the musical component of a church service isn’t the ‘worship leader’ or ‘worship pastor’; he’s the music director, or she’s the lead guitarist, or whatever the most appropriate term may be in the circumstances. And when somebody announces the musical component of the service by saying that we’re going to spend some time worshipping God now – well, weren’t we already doing that? Aren’t we supposed to be doing that all the time? Calling music ‘worship’ places excessive importance on it as a means by which we glorify God, and pushes other – arguably more significant, if likely less glamorous – means out of the picture.

So those are three of the most prominent grudges I bear against bits of vocabulary that get blithely chucked around in Christian contexts. If you have any of your own to add, well, there’s such a thing as a comments box…

Footnotes

¹ The priests were to be Aaron and his descendants, first consecrated for the purpose in Exodus 28: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+28&version=ESVUK. Of course, only four chapters later Aaron the High Priest was telling everybody to worship a golden calf. Thank God that under the new covenant our High Priest is Jesus.

² That bit’s from Chapter 7, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+7&version=ESVUK, but there’s lots on the same theme in the rest of the book as well.

³ Compare the start of Exodus 27, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+27&version=ESVUK, with the start of Exodus 38, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+38&version=ESVUK. Sterling job, Bezalel.

⁴ As Luke records: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+22&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Whole chapter, so you can check I’ve got it right: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+12&version=ESVUK.

⁶ In Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16, to be precise.

A Case for Good Wednesday

Automated system:    Please state when you would like the package redelivered.

Miranda:                      Tuesday.

Automated system:    Did you say [suddenly changing voice] Monday?

Miranda:                      No, who are you?

Automated system:    I’m sorry, we couldn’t identify.

Miranda:                      Tuesday.

Automated system.    I’m sorry. Did you say [changing voice again] Thursday?

Miranda:                      Tuesday. Tuesday. I mean, I literally can’t make it any clearer.

Miranda S2 E6, ‘The Perfect Christmas’ (2010)

 

Calendar, from the Latin Kalends, the name for the first day of the month. Thanks to Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net.

The below is by no means an original theory. Indeed, if I were to present it, or anything similar, as such, I hope that I would be promptly inundated with gentle but firm rebukes that I oughtn’t to think so highly of my own scriptural headcanons considering that all truth pertaining to following God in the present age has already been revealed. On which note, I in seriousness implore you, O Dear and Precious Reader, if you think that I am in any post talking a load of rubbish and that you know better, please don’t allow me to drift onwards in my sorry ignorance; tell me. Granted, it may be that I genuinely completely disagree with you, but equally it may be that I end up being entirely persuaded by your alternative viewpoint, and even thrilled to have such a compelling new set of colours to nail to my metaphorical mast. The latter situation was what occurred when the argument with which this post is concerned was first explained to me, hence my enthusiasm to share said argument with the world (or at least those very few of its inhabitants who enjoy perusing my weekly ramblings), an argument that one might suggest is particularly appropriate for a post published during Easter weekend. For the case I am making is this: Jesus was not crucified on a Friday, but on a Wednesday. I shall now present the evidence.

First, have a peer at Matthew 12:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”¹

Skip ahead several chapters and it becomes obvious that what Jesus is predicting here is the time he will spend buried – ‘in the heart of the earth’ – between his death and resurrection. This, he states, will consist of three days and three nights. So let’s do some counting. The women went to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week (i.e. Sunday) – while it was still dark, John specifies, and I’m quite sure we could spend an entertaining afternoon poring over grammars of Greek and debating how to reconcile the varying time-phrases used by each gospel writer, but the point is that they rocked up at the very start of the day and Jesus had already been raised.² So he must have been raised during Saturday night. Counting backwards, then, that gives us Saturday day, Friday night, Friday day, Thursday night, Thursday day, Wednesday night – and that’s the requisite three days and three nights during which Jesus was ‘in the heart of the earth’, meaning he died and was buried on a Wednesday. I mean, that’s just maths, right? And so if we’re going to affirm that when Jesus said something, he meant it, Good Friday is simply a non-starter.

Now, I’m entirely aware that some people would argue to the contrary, claiming that, in ancient Jewish thought, any part of a day or a night could be counted as a whole day and night, and so, in view of the fact that a day was considered to begin when it got dark, Jesus was crucified on a Friday, entombed for a short chunk of that Friday before Shabbat began at sunset, then remained in the tomb for the whole of Saturday and a decent proportion of Sunday, albeit all of it nocturnal – three days and nights. Such an argument is not entirely without justification: a subscriber to it might cite, for instance, the third section of the ninth chapter of Tractate Shabbat in the Talmud Yerushalmi (a collection of various levels of scriptural commentary compiled in Jerusalem), wherein is a gemara that includes the following statement: “Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah says a day and a night are a period of time, and a part of a period of time is as its whole.”³

Personally, though, I don’t really buy that. For a start, I don’t see that there is sufficient evidence to consider this part-of-a-day-as-its-whole idea as representing a turn of phrase so well established and ubiquitous that we can reassess the meaning of Jesus’ words according to it, because frankly, any approach to Jesus’ words that bustles in declaring that he didn’t literally mean what it very much looks as if he meant, on the grounds of Historical Context and Common Idiom and so forth, makes me immediately suspicious. That isn’t to say that I think the conclusions of such an approach must necessarily be wrong, but they will have to work quite hard to convince me. More to the point, however, it seems highly questionable that a period of less than forty-eight hours would have satisfied the Jewish belief that a corpse couldn’t be considered a hundred per cent dead for a full three days after death. Consider this from Genesis Rabba (‘big Genesis’, basically an exegetical commentary on Genesis) 100:7: “Bar Kappara says the whole strength belonging to mourning is not, except on the third (day); for three days, the soul hovers(?) over the grave; there is hope that it is going to return.”⁴ Or, in very similar terms, from Leviticus Rabba (guess) 18:1: “All of three days the soul flies over the body; there is hope that it is going to return to it.”⁵ All of three days, note. And this tradition wasn’t just groundless superstition, either. This from the beginning of the eighth chapter of a minor tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (a collection of various levels of scriptural commentary compiled in, you guessed it, Babylon) called Ebel Rabbati, also known as Semahoth: “During three days before the interment, experts repair to the cemetery and examine the dead whether they are really dead … It happened that one of the dead was examined (and found alive), and he lived twenty-five years after that; and to another one, that he begat five children before he died.”⁶

In other words, if a corpse got up and started walking about before this three-day deadline, that was totally plausible and with precedent, if a tad unusual. If a corpse got up and started walking about before this three-day deadline, the general consensus would have been that it was never actually a true corpse at all.

And so, if there was even the slightest suspicion that Jesus’ body hadn’t lain there lifeless for the full three days, there would have been ready-made grounds for denying something as utterly unbelievable as a true resurrection. Jesus’ soul was just spending the standard length of time flitting about over its old home, and was coincidentally one of the few that managed to find its way back there. There would have been no need for the chief priests to have made up implausible stories about Jesus’ disciples stealing his body from a sealed and guarded tomb;⁷ they could have claimed, totally credibly, that Jesus had never been totally dead in the first place.

Speaking of the sealed tomb, by the way, do note that Joseph of Arimathea rolled the stone across the entrance, but didn’t seal it, because he was observing the three-day liminal period before Jesus was considered properly dead. The chief priests and Pharisees were the ones who sealed it, because they were determined that Jesus was going to stay in that tomb whatever happened.⁸ (That worked out well for them, didn’t it?)

All right, I’ve made my case. Why exactly does it matter? Well, aside from the sheer peace of mind that comes from a satisfactory explanation of Jesus’ sign-of-Jonah prediction, it matters because it matters that Jesus really was a hundred per cent dead – otherwise, there can have been no real resurrection. And if there was no resurrection, then we, adelphoi, have nothing. There is no precedent for our own transition from death to life. Our faith is futile and we are still in our sins,⁹ because our spirits have not been made alive and we have no prospect of living beyond physical death. The Christian life is a lot of trouble for nothing and we might as well all pack up and go home.

But because Jesus really was dead, it is demonstrated that God can and will bring genuine life in place of genuine death. Because he took the full extent of the punishment, namely death, that we deserved, we can be confident that we will share in his reward of neverending life. Because he who has life in himself became subject to death, he broke its power over us forever. Because he descended to the dead, he opened up the way for all the faithful to enter the presence of God. Because he really died, we are able to really live.

And so a Good Wednesday it really was.

Footnotes

¹ Whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+12&version=ESVUK.

² You’re looking at Matthew 28, Mark 16 (if you’re a Trinitarian), Luke 24, and John 20. Why not kick off with the Matthew? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+28&version=ESVUK.

³ My own translation; I accessed the original text here: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/b/r/r2109.htm.

⁴ Again, my own (fairly clunky) translation, which is why there’s that question mark hanging out after the verb, because I just can’t figure out which verb it is, though my working theory is some kind of third-person feminine (to agree with ‘soul’) imperfect from an irregular root with a bet and an aleph in it. So I just translated it as something similar to the equivalent word in the next quotation. I am sorry I couldn’t do a better job, but at the same time I don’t think this one uncertainty impinges much on my overall point. You can get the text here, https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.100?lang=bi, if by any chance you fancy a go a besting my translation.

⁵ There is, with this quotation as well as the last, potentially plenty more of relevance either side of the short phrase given, but I just took what I needed and left. Again, original text available here: https://www.sefaria.org/Vayikra_Rabbah.18?lang=bi.

⁶ Someone had already translated this one, much to my joy and relief: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/minor-tractate-ebel-rabbati-chapter-8.

⁷ As they are recorded to have done in Matthew 28 (link in footnote 2).

⁸ Check out the end of Matthew 27: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+27&version=ESVUK.

⁹ I here reference 1 Corinthians 15, which is one of my favourite chapters ever: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESVUK.