Asgard is a People

“Asgard is not a place, it’s a people.”

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Later tonight, my housemates and I will be attending a local midnight screening of Avengers: Endgame.¹ A worthy offering, I think, for what will constitute my first ever midnight screening – as a consequence of which, I’m even more hyped than I might have been to go and see this film. And yet more coal was shovelled into the firebox of that hype train this Sunday just gone when I and the good friend I was staying with spent a happy few hours over ginger beer, popcorn, and fancy Easter eggs,² taking in Avengers: Infinity War (which she hadn’t seen) and, prior to that, Thor: Ragnarok (which I hadn’t). Beyond the fact that it made a lot of sense out of certain aspects of Infinity War, I liked Ragnarok a lot as a film in its own right: it was consistently funny, had a solid storyline, and offered a sizeable heap of blog fodder – though for the moment I’ll confine myself to the most obvious analogy only. Spoilers, needless to say, are ahead.

 

Thanks to the talented gaurav-salunkhe at newgrounds.com for this ace picture of Thor as in the arena scene in Ragnarok.

Asgard is not a place, it’s a people. So says Odin in Thor’s weird little dream-vision thing (Marvel sure is keen on major characters having moving encounters with their fathers in spaces that transcend normal barriers of life and death, isn’t it?); so says Heimdall in reassurance as Thor looks out on the destruction his choices have caused. The principle defined in this line was what made the film’s conclusion satisfactory, even triumphant, rather than sad and disappointing. For most of Ragnarok’s duration, the event denoted by that title was exactly what our hero was furiously striving to prevent, but by the conclusion, he had instead deliberately initiated that same event. Ragnarok, as per the Norse mythology from which this region of the Marvel universe draws much of its source material,³ is the prophesied destruction of Asgard at the hands of the fire-giant Surtr, and, since Thor is from Asgard and indeed prince of it, you can see why this is something he’d naturally be keen to avert. But then his long-lost older sister Hela shows up and starts killing people, and even if that’s really only to be expected given that she is goddess of death and all, it’s still clearly Not At All A Good Thing. The crucial fact about Hela is that she draws her power from Asgard-the-place; the longer she stays there, the stronger she gets. And Thor isn’t strong enough to defeat her or expel her, so the only way to be sure of neutralising the threat she poses to the Asgardians and indeed pretty much anyone else who gets in her way, is to bring about Ragnarok and have her go down with the ship, as it were. Asgard-the-place was always bound for destruction: the prophecies left that fact indisputable – but Asgard-the-people is a different matter altogether. Asgard-the-people can file onto a handy getaway spaceship and fly the heck out of there before it all goes down in flames. Asgard-the-people is rescued out of the cataclysm and lives on even as Asgard-the-place is brought to nothing just as it always inescapably would be.

The similarities between Marvel’s Asgard and the real world we inhabit may be reasonably few, but among them is that same inevitable trajectory towards total destruction. Everything that belongs to the present order of things is ultimately going down in flames – literally, as per 2 Peter 3:11: “the present heavens and earth are by the same word reserved for fire, kept unto the day of judgement and destruction of the ungodly people” – and will come to nothing so absolutely that it won’t even be remembered afterwards. “For I am creating new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind,” God declares towards the end of the book of Isaiah; and John sees that promise fulfilled in his vision of the things to come: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away.”⁴ The current world will be destroyed in fire: the prophecies of scripture leave that fact indisputable for anyone who claims to follow the Lord Jesus Christ to whom every page of those scriptures testifies. And in actual fact, we wouldn’t want it any other way, because the present order is held in the clutches of death and destruction as surely as Asgard-the-place was held in Hela’s clutches. Creation has been subjected to futility, writes Paul; it’s in slavery to corruption and groans in longing for freedom. If that freedom is to be obtained, the reign of sin and death has to be toppled just as was Hela’s reign. What is perishable must pass away so that death can die with it. And then will we reach the fullness of our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.⁵

Our adoption as sons; the redemption of our bodies – this is about us as people. Asgard is a people, not a place, and so too is the Church. My general policy when blogging is to try to use Church-with-a-capital-C only in this first sense, because goodness knows there’s a whole host of other senses in which the word might plausibly be construed, and employing that initial uppercase letter or not helps to make a distinction. A small-c church is a building; it’s a particular bit of a building, distinct from the hall where they serve the coffee and host children’s birthday parties; it’s a worship service at a particular time; it’s a denomination or an aggregation of denominations. A Christian talks of ‘my church’, of ‘a different church’, of ‘going to church’, of ‘changing churches’ – none of these are Church in the capital-C sense. The multiple senses of the word aren’t, in themselves, really a problem, mind you – not unless we allow such lowercase-c meanings to cloud the capital-C meaning from our focus. Lots of words have multiple related meanings, and it’s convenient enough to refer to Asgard-the-place as Asgard, but if you can’t tell the difference between Asgard-the-place and Asgard-the-people, you’re not going to be willing to let the place go down in flames and fly the heck out of there – which kind of leaves you going down in flames with it.

 

Down in flames.

The Church is a people. It’s not a people plus extras. It’s people that are going to be rescued out of the cataclysm at the end of the age – not buildings, not patterns of worship, not institutions or administrations or systems of governance. You didn’t catch the Asgardians hauling pieces of Asgard-the-place with them when they ran for the spaceship that would carry them safely away, and nor should you catch us clinging to any structure of church practice or policy or experience as if it belonged to the world to come and weren’t going to go down in flames with everything else. To refuse to let go of some aspect of the present order is to assign oneself to enduring its fated destruction along with it.

This means that we, as a community of believers, should be willing to give up resources and change habits and dissociate from institutions without so much as a backwards glance; and on the flipside, it means that we need to be devoted to helping one another work out the salvation we have been granted, because the Church is a people, not a place or a time or a system or anything else, and people, therefore, are what matter. People are what Christ died to rescue, and people are what we are called to pour our gifts and energy into serving and preserving. Anything else that we might dub ‘church’ can and must be unhesistantly chucked out of the figurative window for the sake of better serving and preserving those people.

And of course, the rescue we have received is far better than the one the Asgardians got: as we learn at the beginning of Infinity War, they escaped Ragnarok only to run straight into Thanos and his population-halving rampage, whereas we once rescued are permanently safe. The present order goes down in flames, yes, but the new heavens and earth that God creates is perfect and everlasting: “death shall be no longer; neither shall mourning, nor crying, nor pain be any longer; the former things have passed away” (that’s Revelation 21 again). The Church is a people, and that people is rescued out of the cataclysm and lives on, and on, and indeed on, forever and ever. Amen.

Footnotes

¹ Trailer to get you extra hyped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jNvJU52LvU. It’s all been leading up to this…

² Did you know there’s a thing called ruby chocolate now that’s made from a different kind of cocoa bean so that it’s naturally pink and tastes like berries? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/06/ruby-chocolate-barry-callebaut-instagram-foodies

³ Though, not going to lie, most of my knowledge of Norse mythology comes out of Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series: http://rickriordan.com/series/magnus-chase-and-the-gods-of-asgard/.

⁴ Bible Gateway links time; here’s the Isaiah, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+65&version=ESVUK, and the Revelation, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+21&version=ESVUK.

⁵ I’m riffing on a few verses from the middle of Romans 8 here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rom+8&version=ESVUK.