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.

How to Kill Death

“Hey! Listen! Hey, pal! Hey, will you look at me? All right, OK – if you eat her, you’ve got to eat the rest of us, ’cause we’re a combo pack!”

Final Space S2 E3, ‘The Grand Surrender’ (2019)

So how do you kill death?

Tricky, huh. While you give that one a ponder, let me tell you about a Netflix animated comedy space opera called Final Space.¹ I wasn’t really sure whether I was going to like it when I started watching, because it’s very silly and over-the-top in an adult-humour kind of way and that sort of thing often wears out on me quite quickly, but the thing that rescues Final Space is that it’s over-the-top about everything. The programme very much hinges on the personality of its protagonist, Gary Goodspeed, who just throws himself into absolutely everything he does with this kind of reckless wholeheartedness. One moment, he’s making a heartfelt speech about his love of cookies, the next, an equally heartfelt speech about why he’ll never abandon his friends. The way that silly and serious come so thick and fast after one another keeps the silliness from spiralling into total vacuosity, while granting a peculiar kind of access to the seriousness, sparing it the recoil-worthy cringeiness that often comes with earnest emotion. Gary’s nothing-by-halves temperament superficially seems kind of annoying, but get enough episodes in and you start to realise he’s actually this incredibly brave, loyal, and relentlessly selfless person. In a way, it’s as if the series is designed to take the viewer on the same journey as Gary’s love interest Quinn as she slowly starts to fall for him.

 

Big thanks to R062 at newgrounds.com for the epic fanart; massive credit is especially due for portraying Gary in a really different art style to the programme itself, but still so that he and even the precise scene are totally recognisable.

The third episode of the second series takes Gary and his friends (he usually calls them the Team Squad) to a planet called Serepentis, the homeworld of one of them, Ash. The people of Serepentis worship a giant snake thing called Werthrent, and it’s considered an honour to be chosen to get eaten by him. That was actually the fate that Ash was destined for herself, once upon a time. She escaped. Her sister Harp, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky.

Werthrent has something the Team Squad needs – a dimensional key; I won’t confuse things by going into why they’re trying to collect the keys, but suffice it to say that it’s kind of the whole overarching plot of the series – so they march up to his lair and yell insults until he comes out to confront them. Ash demands that Werthrent return Harp to her, or else she’ll flay him with her cool dark-fire powers; Werthrent makes the genius alternative suggestion that he just eat Ash too. But Gary – who has a plan, or at least the beginning of one – persuades Werthrent, as per my opening quotation, to eat the entire rest of the Team Squad too. (I’m not sure he took that much persuading, to be fair.)

How do you kill death? Still got that one ticking over on the back burner?

Upon arriving in Werthrent’s insides, the Team Squad find that all the people he’s eaten over the years are still there, although they’re in pretty bad shape: think zombies, basically. Ash sets off to look for Harp. The others set off to look for the dimensional key. It’s in Werthrent’s heart, and when they rip it out, his insides start to fall apart. Everything’s collapsing, everything’s on fire, and Ash finds Harp just in time to discover that she too has been zombified and can’t really be considered a person any more, before the flames devour her. But Ash and the Team Squad escape the inferno and watch as Werthrent’s body disintegrates completely before them.

How do you kill death? The same way you kill a giant evil alien snake, apparently: from the inside.

“Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite and opened its mouth beyond measure, and the nobility of Jerusalem and her multitude will go down, her revellers and he who exults in her.” – Isaiah 5:14

“Three things are never satisfied; four never say, Enough: Sheol, the barren womb, the land never satisfied with water, and the fire that never says, Enough.” – Proverbs 30:16

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.” – Ecclesiastes 9:10

Sheol is the Hebrew term for the place where people go where they die. And, like Werthrent, it likes devouring people. It’s always hungry for more. In fact, Sheol is so insatiable that it ends up nomming everybody sooner or later. This isn’t what you’d call a desirable state of affairs – certainly not from our point of view, anyway – since it doesn’t sound like the inside of Sheol is a very fun place to be: as far as I can tell, the Old Testament basically describes it as a deep, dark pit where there’s nothing to do.²

But then along comes Jesus. And the way he confronts death and Sheol is kind of the same way the Team Squad confronted Werthrent; he gets himself eaten like everybody else. Now, there’s obviously a heck of a lot more going on at the cross than merely Jesus making his trip to the inside of Sheol via the only valid route, but since no blog post is ever going to be able to address the magnificence of every aspect of the single greatest thing that has ever happened ever, you’ll excuse me for narrowing my focus. Jesus got eaten by Sheol. And once he was on the inside, he had a couple of things on his to-do list.

First off, like Ash, he was there to rescue someone – or rather many someones – he cared about, who’d already been eaten. “For it was for this that the gospel was preached also to dead people,” wrote the apostle Peter in the fourth chapter of his first letter, “so that while on the one hand they might be judged – after the manner of human beings – in flesh, they might on the other hand live in spirit, after the manner of God.”³ In the Old Testament, everybody goes to Sheol, namely is judged in flesh, after the manner of children of Adam born dead in sin – there’s no question of any alternative – and yet we know that those who have had faith in God throughout history have a share in the world to come.⁴ This is how. Jesus went and preached the gospel to the faithful dead, and when they believed it, they were made alive in spirit, exactly the same way the rest of us were when we believed it. And if you’re alive in spirit, you’ve got no business being in Sheol: Sheol’s for dead people. If you’re alive in spirit, after the manner of God, you can be with him where he is.

So while Ash wasn’t able to rescue Harp from Werthrent, Jesus rescued a whole host of captives from Sheol and led them up to heaven with him. But consider what that meant: Jesus went right into the heart of dead-people-land and made people alive. “You killed the Author of life,” Peter preached in Acts 3, “whom God raised from the dead.” Well, of course he did. You can’t have the Author of life hanging out in Sheol. The whole point of Sheol is to accommodate dead people. How can it possibly apply its usual processes to a person who has life in himself and gives of that life to whom he will?⁵ And then, off the back of that – well, what kind of a defeat is it for Sheol, what kind of a fatal blow to its very essence, if its whole job is to be the ultimate repository of the inevitably dead, and then this guy shows up who not only gets out of there with his own everlasting life secure, but takes a whole bunch of formerly dead folks with him?

 

Repository of dead. Too amusingly appropriate a stock photo not to adorn this post with.

Jesus killed death from the inside. He broke it. He struck a fatal blow to what made it function. If you will, he ripped out its heart and triggered its destruction. Admittedly, upon that happening, Sheol didn’t disintegrate quite as immediately as Werthrent did, but one day, just like him, it’s going to meet its end in flames, as we know from Revelation 20: “Then Death and Hades [which is Greek for Sheol, to be clear] were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire.” How about that, huh: at the end of the age, death gets chucked into an even more ultimate version of death – one from which there isn’t any chance of rescue. But not, of course, before Jesus victory-marched right out of there with a parade of all the chosen saints whose deaths had preceded his resurrection.

So now, following that, it’s no longer the case that Sheol, sooner or later, gobbles everybody up to spend forever in its deep, dark insides. If you’re alive in spirit, you’ve got no business being in Sheol, because Sheol’s for dead people. Your fleshly body’ll end up dead, sure, but who cares? The spiritual body you’ll get in its place will be way better,⁶ and, being alive after the manner of God, you’ll get to be with him where he is.

And that’s made possible because Jesus himself died. Because he entered Sheol, he was able to strike the fatal blow against it from the inside. He took life into the heart of death and unleashed it. How do you kill death? Turns out you kill it with life.

The Team Squad’s victory over Werthrent was pretty good – they did destroy him from the inside – but it would have been even better if they’d been able to rescue Harp and maybe some of the other zombies who’d been eaten by him too. When Jesus won his victory over death, by contrast, he didn’t only destroy it from the inside; he rescued everybody who will believe in him. The Author of life died in order that death might die – in order that death might die, and in order that we who were once dead in spirit might live.

Footnotes

¹ Or you could just go and watch it for yourself: https://www.netflix.com/title/80174479.

² There’s actually a bit more nuance to it than that, but I already talked about that in my post ‘What the Hell’ (under June 2019 in my blog archive if you’re interested), so I won’t go over it all again here.

³ I’m generally using the ESV this post because I’m lazy, but I translated that one myself, basically because I feel as if the ESV’s rendering of νεκροῖς as ‘to those who are dead’, while not wrong, is trying a bit too hard to imply that they weren’t dead when it was preached to them. νεκροῖς, I should clarify, just means ‘to dead people’.

⁴ Try Hebrews 11, for instance.

⁵ I here allude to John 5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+5&version=ESVUK. While you’re there, take a look at verses 25-29. Reckon any of that jazz pertains to what I’ve been chatting about in this post? I’m too tired to reach a conclusion on that right now.

⁶ Just check out 1 Corinthians 15: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+15&version=ESVUK.