Something No Hero Will Ever Defeat

“I am not the god of war, Diana; I am the god of truth.”

Wonder Woman (2017)

The story goes something like this…

Long ago, the supreme divine being created humans. At first these humans were good and honest and peaceful, but then along came an agent of evil who persuaded them to do wrong, whenceforth humanity descended into an abyss of relentless chaos, bloodshed, and cruelty. Happily, the supreme divine being had an heir who was born on earth and would become, having grown up, the conqueror of the evil with which humanity had been corrupted.

Yep, that’s right, I’m insinuating that we can read the protagonist of the new Wonder Woman film¹ as a bit of a Christ figure: just chuck either Zeus, Ares, and Diana Prince, or God, the serpent, and Jesus into the appropriate places in the above narrative, and there you go. I did, however, have to be rather vague in that last sentence about the precise nature of the evil that the divine heir was destined to conquer, because that, I’d say, is the matter in which Diana, like all Christ-types, falls woefully short of the real thing. (Spoilers ahead. Count yourself warned.)

Thanks to Blue-Hat-Creature at newgrounds.com for the gorgeous fanart.

The situation as Diana understands it for the better part of Wonder Woman is that humans only behave cruelly towards one another because they are under the influence of Ares, the god of war. The mission she determines to undertake in order to stop the Great War she has just found out is happening, therefore, is to kill Ares. Get rid of the source of the evil influence that causes people to harm one another, and boom! It’ll all be sunshine and rainbows. Problem solved.

The trouble is that things don’t work out quite as Diana anticipates. She sticks a sword in the guy she’s absolutely confident is Ares, and nothing changes. The war is still raging. Plans that will keep it raging longer are still being put into place: specifically, a new chemical weapon devised by a very sinister lady called Isabel Maru for use by the Germans is still being loaded into planes for removal to the Front. No soldier has surfaced, blinking, from the stupor of Ares’ influence, and laid down his weapons. Chaos and bloodshed and cruelty march relentlessly on. It’s as if Diana hadn’t done anything; clearly, she hasn’t dealt with the source of humanity’s tendency towards evil after all.

Unsurprisingly, she has a bit of a crisis over this. Humans aren’t, after all, helpless thralls of Ares, but responsible for their own evil actions, responsible for the war that is causing them so much suffering; her faith that they were, at heart, ultimately good has been shattered. Even Steve Trevor, the American spy who’s been the companion and facilitator of her mission – and, more recently, her romantic interest – admits that although Diana at least is free of blame for all the chaos and bloodshed and cruelty, maybe there’s an extent to which he isn’t. A distraught Diana tells him that her mother was right to say the world didn’t deserve her; he replies that maybe it’s not about ‘deserve’. Maybe it’s more a case of whether one wants the war and all the accompanying suffering to end, regardless of the fact that humans brought it all on their own heads.

Diana isn’t convinced, but then the real Ares shows up (turns out she was wrong about the other guy, but he was horrid enough that we the viewers still feel fine about him having been stabbed to death). This, he tells Diana, was what he knew all along: humans are, at the end of the day, essentially bad. They were already of such a nature as to tend towards chaos and bloodshed and cruelty before he said a word to them: all he did was expose what they were really like. Even now, he might offer them the tidbits of information and inspiration they need to devise new instruments of pain and death – like Isabel Maru’s new weaponised gas – but he never instructs them to use them: they come to that decision all by themselves. And hence, he claims, he isn’t the god of war, but the god of truth. He doesn’t foster the evil of the human disposition, but merely brings it to light.

And so Diana can kill Ares all she likes – as she indeed does, the real one this time – but the darkness present in every human is, in her own words, “something no hero will ever defeat.” An impressive superhero she might be, but she’s not much cop as a solution to the problem of human evil.

I once heard a Bible-overview sermon series that, on its whistle-stop tour of the Old Testament, characterised the foretold Messiah primarily as the ‘serpent-crusher’ of Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The trouble with that principle is that the serpent’s role in the corruption of humanity according to the Bible was no more fundamental than Ares’ role in the corruption of humanity according to Wonder Woman. The serpent never even instructed the woman to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree; he only told her something appealing about what would happen if she did, like Ares standing behind the shoulder of Isabel Maru hinting that this particular chemical combination might achieve something like that effect. It was of the woman’s own accord that she ate, and then of the man’s own accord that he did likewise. They already had that tendency towards disobedience; the serpent just offered them an opportunity to reveal as much, so that it was all chaos and bloodshed and cruelty from there on.² And so merely crushing the serpent would have no more effect on the depravity of real humanity than killing Ares had on the depravity of the fictional humanity of Wonder Woman.³

The good news is Jesus’ mission wasn’t merely to do away with the agent who revealed the human capacity for evil, as Diana’s turned out to be, but rather to do away with the human capacity for evil altogether. “And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,” Paul wrote to the believers in Christ living at Colossae.⁴ We were, as are all humans, alienated and hostile and evil in our very nature, but by Jesus’ real, human, bodily death for us we have been made holy and blameless and above reproach in our very nature, so that we might be reconciled to God who is in his very nature holy and blameless and above reproach. This was not a mere serpent-crushing, the defeat of some external agent, but a vital transformation of what we as humans are fundamentally like. Jesus, responsible for none of the chaos and bloodshed and cruelty rife in a world that didn’t deserve him, took the blame for all of it, not because humans deserved peace but because he wanted to grant us it anyway, and now remakes all those who believe as much after the perfection of his own likeness.

Diana said the darkness in the human heart was something no hero would ever defeat. Thank God she was wrong.

Footnotes

¹ It’s seriously good. You should see it. Here’s a trailer if you need further persuasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeZ8X5FKl78.

² I’m getting all this out of Genesis 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+3&version=ESVUK. Do have a look, or you won’t know whether my conclusions are totally unreasonable.

³ I explored some similar ideas in a post about Merlin, called ‘Nice People’, which is under ‘January’ in the box on the right, if haply you fancy a look at all.

⁴ Check out the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=col+1&version=ESVUK.