I Must Face Him Alone: More on the Chosen-One Story

“Trust me, I’ve seen it a million times before: in the cold, dark night before the battle, when the steely fangs of evil are sharpened and poised to strike, the hero must go and face his greatest challenge alone.”

Bolt (2008)

So my housemates and I have been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. I know, I know, we’re over a decade late to the party, but that’s not stopping us from enjoying the ride one bit.¹ It’s a fantastic series of exactly the genre of wholesome fantasy cartoons – funny but more than funny, with a proper compelling plot and genuine drama and moving character development together with the witty scripting – whose increasing dearth in recent years I have been known to lament on this very blog.² My favourite character so far is Uncle Iroh, because even though he’s this famous and decorated Fire Nation general with phenomenal fighting skills, all he really wants to do is hang out drinking tea and playing board games. What a legend.

I say my favourite character so far because as I write this, we’ve only just reached the beginning of the third series, so there are probably plenty more characters to meet. In the first episode of the third series (spoilers, needless to say, ahead), protagonist Aang – the Avatar, the Chosen One, the one person able and destined to bring the four elements back into balance and peace to a war-torn world – wakes up from a coma, still severely injured from the epic showdown at the end of the previous series, and has a bit of a crisis to the effect that he can’t bear standing by while other people put life and limb on the line when the burden for saving the world is rightfully his and his alone. “I don’t want you or anyone else risking your lives to fix my mistakes,” he snaps at his friend Katara as she tries to comfort him. “I’ve always known that I would have to face the Fire Lord, but now, I know I need to do it alone.”

 

Here Aang is looking suitably Chosen-One-ish in the Avatar state, courtesy of the prodigious talents of ekajpalm at newgrounds.com, to whom go my thanks.

It’s a very recognisble traditional Chosen-One thought process, a trope surely almost as old as the Chosen-One narrative itself. I think my favourite articulation of the trope comes in Disney’s Bolt. Mittens the cat is trying to come up with a way of explaining to Rhino the hamster why their mutual friend, our eponymous canine hero, has left the group before they reached their intended destination. The trouble is, Rhino still thinks that Bolt really is the character he plays in a television programme all about him and his owner Penny working to combat the schemes of the villanous Dr. Calico – or as Bolt knows him, the Green-Eyed Man – using Bolt’s various superpowers. The real reason Bolt left is because he and Mittens had a fight over whether Penny actually cared about him or was just acting, but because Mittens has thus far been unable to make Rhino understand enough of the truth to explain that, she’s going to have to work within the lie instead. So, to Rhino’s rather forlorn, “Bolt left?”, she replies, “Yeah … but he, uh, instructed me to tell you that, um – he had to face the Green-Eyed Man alone.”

Mittens expects that to be the end of the matter, but Rhino surprises her by setting off to find Bolt. “But he doesn’t need us any more,” she objects. Rhino isn’t moved by that line of argument for a moment. “Trust me, I’ve seen it a million times before,” he tells her, and continues with all the dramatic excess of vocabulary and tone that makes him such a hilarious and likeable character. “In the cold, dark night before the battle, when the steely fangs of evil are sharpened and poised to strike, the hero must go and face his greatest challenge alone. But if Bolt’s taught me anything, it’s that you never abandon a friend in a time of need. When your teammate’s in trouble, you go. Whether they ask or not, you go. Not knowing if you’re coming back dead or alive … you go! Knowing how deep the shrapnel’s going to pierce your hide, you go.”³

And that’s often the conclusion of the I-Must-Face-Him-Alone crisis, isn’t it? The hero’s friends rush to his aid, ready, despite everything he’s said, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him against the enemy. That’s certainly what happens to Aang after he sets off secretly to face the Fire Lord alone in that first episode of Series Three. He decided it was a good idea to ride off on his air glider through a furious storm even though his injuries still hadn’t fully healed, and it was really no wonder that he had to be rescued by his friends after washing upon some random shoreline, and realised maybe he needed them after all.

Well, for the moment, anyway. Because I don’t know how The Last Airbender is going to end, but the fact remains that Aang is the Avatar. He’s the Chosen One. He has qualities that nobody else has, which make him equal to tasks nobody else is. There are some burdens his friends cannot bear for or even with him. Inevitably, there are going to be some things he must face alone.

And that’s a state of affairs that I think is particularly well articulated by the Doctor in the antepenultimate episode of the most recent series, when she’s trying to explain to Ryan and the rest of Team TARDIS what’s at stake if she lets Percy Shelley die in order to avoid giving an incredibly powerful information source to a Cyberman who will probably use it to wipe out humanity altogether at some future date: “One death, one ripple, and history will change in a blink. The future will not be the world you know. The world you came from, the world you were created in won’t exist, so neither will you. It’s not just his life at stake. It’s yours. You want to sacrifice yourself for this? You want me to sacrifice you? You want to call it? Do it now. All of you.” She’s met with silence – and here’s the crucial bit: “Yeah. ’Cause sometimes this team structure isn’t flat. It’s mountainous, with me at the summit, in the stratosphere, alone, left to choose.”⁴

The Doctor is the only one who’s able to make that call. Nobody else can see time like she can; nobody else can decide what ought to be sacrificed. And so she’s the one who has to decide, and bear the burden of her decision. Sometimes the team structure isn’t flat. Sometimes the matter at hand is simply too far out of the sidekicks’ league. Sometimes the Chosen One is confronted with the very thing she was chosen for, and nobody can share that destiny with her. Sometimes, in the cold, dark night before the battle, when the steely fangs of evil are sharpened and poised to strike, the hero must go and face his greatest challenge alone.

You can probably see roughly where I’m going with this.

It’s a bit out-there, but sometimes I think that if I were to write a Bible translation (not that I ever would; like, bro, just learn the languages), I’d translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (māshīach, comes out in English as Messiah) and Greek Χριστός (Khristós, comes out in English as Christ) as ‘Chosen One’. Because that’s a term we understand. As I don’t doubt you know, both of these words literally mean ‘anointed one’, and in the Biblical context, anointing someone – slopping some oil over him, basically – signified setting him apart for a special duty: the main people who get anointed in the Bible are priests and kings. A special duty; a task that one who hasn’t been anointed has no right to perform; a unique burden and destiny. Sounds like a Chosen One, right?

Indeed, I suspect the whole reason we as humans are so keen on Chosen-One stories in the first place is because it’s written somewhere in our subconscious souls that we need a Chosen One. We can’t save the world; we can’t fix its problems; we’ve been trying for millennia and it hasn’t worked yet. We need somebody to show up who can – someone set apart and endowed with the necessary qualities to make him equal to the task that nobody else is equal to. We need someone who’s able to bring peace to this fallen world. We need someone who’s equipped to stand at the summit, in the stratosphere, and make the decision, and bear the burden it entails.

 

The summit. Not quite the stratosphere.

We need a Chosen One, and that means we need someone who goes, in that darkest night of the story, to face the enemy we could never conquer, and who goes to face him alone.

I say ‘him’ – I’m kind of still in the metaphor there. What Jesus faced on our behalf was the just and due penalty for human sin, the full cup of the wrath of God against all the horrible things people do. He faced death for us, and as darkness covered the land at what should have been midday, he faced it alone. I mean, yeah, on the one level, all his closest friends, despite the fact that they’d all previously expressed firm intentions to rush to his aid and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the fight, even if they didn’t know whether they were coming back dead or alive⁵ – the way that, as we’ve seen, the Chosen One’s friends often tend to – all his closest friends actually abandoned him. But even if they hadn’t, there was never going to be a flat team structure when it came to the cross. Nobody could share that burden with Jesus: that was the whole point. He bore it because we couldn’t. He’s the Chosen One, and this is what he was chosen for.

But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

A spot of Hebrews 9 for you there.⁶ The point here is the contrast between normal high priests and Christ; bog-standard anointed ones and the Anointed One. They offered sacrifices of animals to deal with human impurity on a fleshly level, but only he was able to offer the sacrifice of himself to deal with human impurity on a spiritual level. Only he had the qualities required for that: only he was without blemish, and so sufficient as a sacrifice on behalf of the blemished, and so able to open the way into the heavenly Holy of Holies.

The place I want to land with this won’t be anywhere you haven’t been before, but I for one know I need constant reminders of it. If it was fundamentally necessary for Jesus to face the cross alone, then it is an act of madness, of gross self-aggrandisement, and of disdain for his sufferings, if we try to bear any of that burden for ourselves. And we sometimes try to do that in pretty subtle ways. For example, you ever approach God in prayer and think you have to spend a while at a distance berating yourself for your failures and feeling sufficiently sorry before you’re allowed to talk to him properly? Yeah, me too. But what that is, is behaving as if there’s something that me berating myself can do to secure God’s favour towards me, that Christ’s death and resurrection can’t. It’s trying to bear part of a Chosen-One burden that doesn’t belong to me, for the reason that I could never bear it. It’s elevating my own deeds at the expense of my Lord’s. As if he weren’t really the Chosen One, unique in his destiny, after all.

So think on that, brother or sister of mine: you’re not the Chosen One. You can’t do the Chosen-One things. You don’t have the necessary qualities for them; you’re not without blemish. But Jesus is, and does, and can, and has. He had to face the cup of God’s wrath alone, and he did. There is none left for you. It is not yours to share that burden. He bore it because you couldn’t. You can’t do anything he hasn’t already done to propitiate for your sins. I repeat: there is no wrath left for you.

We’ve all seen it a million times before: in the cold, dark night before the battle, when the steely fangs of evil are sharpened and poised to strike, the hero must go and face his greatest challenge alone. And so it was too for our Lord Jesus Christ. He faced God’s wrath alone, so that none of us who believe in him will ever have to face it at all. Don’t try to share that burden. It was, staggeringly enough, what he was chosen for.⁷

Footnotes

¹ If, by any chance, you too are a decade and a half late to the party, or are just fancy a recap, the programme’s whole run is available on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/70142405.

² I think the last time I mentioned it was in ‘Oaths’, under December 2019 in my blog archive.

³ Here’s the clip, plus extra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgZ5SSlgOg&list=PL4tadHw-sbDseHkk-2iEmzAEANu2ZdJqY&index=22&t=0s. Bolt is a superb film, so underrated.

⁴ You can’t have that clip, but here’s one from earlier in the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWZwCzeVLfc. Definitely a highlight of the series.

⁵ Look again at Matthew 26:35 and Mark 14:31; it wasn’t just Simon Peter who said that.

⁶ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=heb+9&version=ESVUK. I just gave you the ESV today because it’s late and I’m tired.

⁷ Oh, and before I go – thanks to Chrissie’s Transcripts Site, Drew’s Script-o-Rama, and Avatar Spirit for their helpful transcripts, much appreciated. And one final note regarding my title: I said, more on the chosen-one story, because I wrote about the chosen-one story before in ‘Porcupines, Sheep, and the Chosen-One Story’, under July 2017 in my blog archive.