The Art of Watching Watchfully

“I can’t see the point in the theatre – all that sex and violence. I get enough of that at home, except for the sex, of course.”

Blackadder the Third E4, ‘Sense and Senility’ (1983)

 

Hey kid, you know how bad it is for your eyes to be so close to the screen, right? Not that I can talk.

I hazard that it has likely already reached your attention, O Culturally-Informed Reader, that the talented folks at Disney this week made a certain announcement pertaining to a certain decision about character portrayal in a certain upcoming live-action remake of a certain beloved animated classic.¹ (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you might like to check out a couple of the hyperlinks in the footnote below, but equally, it probably won’t impinge too greatly on your understanding of what follows, because) I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to use a particular reaction that some people have apparently had to it as a launchpad for a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages. Check me out with my bang-up-to-date references.

Basically, what’s going down is that some Christians have apparently decided to boycott the upcoming Beauty and the Beast remake because it is going to feature Disney’s first openly gay character and love scene. I’m not going to explain here why I think that this boycotting decision specifically is a bad idea: for that I’d point you to an excellent article written by some guy called Luke that presented itself for inspection on my Facebook newsfeed earlier today.² Rather, I intend to highlight what I see as the logical unsoundness or even the sheer oddity in a Christian adopting a position of this type. I’ll kick off by borrowing a paragraph from the aforementioned Luke:

Think about it this way. If you choose not to see the film or stop your children from seeing it, that is your prerogative. But you should ask yourself, would I do the same for a film in which pre-marital heterosexual sex is shown (or implied)? Rather than the turn-off-the-tv [sic] approach that Christians can be guilty of, perhaps we should see the movie with our children then have an honest conversation about the scene in question, if necessary?

And I’m thinking, well, yeah. I mean, duh, right? And once you’ve asked the question as to why fictional portrayals of one particular type of sexual sin and not others should warrant a boycott, there’s no good reason not to ask a further question as to why fictional portrayals of one particular type of sin, namely sexual, and not others should warrant a boycott. The logical conclusion, surely, is to avoid consuming any media that depicts any sin at all. The slight snag with that approach is that sin features fairly heavily in things like, ooh, let me see, the Bible – and one can’t very well boycott that in the name of upholding Christian values, now can one? Indeed, the Bible is relentless in providing lurid details of exactly how vile and depraved humans can be. I dare you to read straight through the book of Judges in one sitting; by the time you get to the bit where some guy is busy cutting up the corpse of his girlfriend who died as a result of being gang-raped by a bunch of guys who were actually interested in her boyfriend until he physically forced her out of the door and into their clutches,³ the entire catalogue of every wrong that has ever been portrayed in a Disney film is going to look like very small potatoes indeed. The Bible has to be explicit about sin in order to expose to us what we’re really like and how desperately we need to be forgiven and sanctified.

 

Look, it hasn’t even got an ‘explicit content’ warning. Outrageous.

So it’s a non-starter to boycott all portrayals of sin. Next possibility: if the Bible only describes sin in order to condemn it, might we take that as the precedent, the base measure? Should we boycott any media that depicts sin in a favourable light? Well, this option leaves us the Bible, granted, but I honestly don’t think it leaves us anything else. Even fiction, or non-fiction, firmly intended and carefully crafted to be as God-honouring as possible is still going to bear the effects of human fallibility. Even media that is utterly saturated in a Biblical worldview is not going to have the perfection of perspective that the word of God does, and that means it is going to stray, subtly or less subtly, towards excusing or even elevating certain sins.

But we’d be mad to cheat ourselves out of all media that isn’t divinely infallible – do bear in mind that this includes sermons and Bible commentaries and books pertaining to matters of Christian living as well as, you know, absolutely everything else – and so we’d be sure to allow ourselves access to some of it, and that means we’d be obliged to start drawing lines, and that means we’d have to make decisions about where those lines ought to be drawn, and all of a sudden we thus find ourselves in a situation not actually all that different from where we are right now. How much favourable portrayal of sin is allowed before something becomes boycott-worthy?

On top of that, how does one tell for sure whether sin is being portrayed favourably or not? Granted, sometimes it’s pretty obvious, but other times it’s difficult to tell what the creator of the media is actually trying to get at, and it’s highly likely that not everyone will agree on the matter. It’s not as if we can let some Grand Authority on Boycott-Worthiness sit around watching TV all day and issuing official Christian policy on which items of media sit on which side of the line – human fallibility in judging what constitutes correctly condemnatory portrayal of sin was, after all, what landed us in this mess in the first place – so we’re going to have to watch and read and listen for ourselves and exercise our own powers of discernment on whether this material is sufficiently God-honouring to be worthy of our attention.

And look where we’ve landed.

Earlier this year, I decided that a fun way to spend a few minutes might be to fill in a survey issued by Desiring God about habits of media consumption among Christians.⁴ A lot of it was about pretty straightforward fact: in an average week, how many hours do you spend watching films (um, four maybe, if I watch two films?), watching TV shows (oh help, it varies hugely – maybe three?), watching live sport (oh good, an easy one: none whatsoever), and so on, but there were some deeper questions of belief and policy too. One of the questions asked me to characterise my general approach to deciding what media to consume: do I watch pretty much anything without giving the matter much thought; do I exercise heavy-handed censorship upon what I watch, but allow myself to become unrestrictedly absorbed in the little media to which I allow myself access; do I watch pretty much anything, but endeavour to exercise Biblically-informed criticism upon it as I do…?

Some of the other questions I pondered for a good while, but not this one: the last option chimed so absolutely with my own media-consumption policy that I could quite happily click on it immediately. And again, I was struck with a sense that this was just obvious. Like, sorry, isn’t that what all Christians do? But in actual fact, it’s not very fair of me to adopt such an attitude, because it’s only within the past few years that what I now see as the necessity of this policy has become a meaningful feature of my life. I’d consider a major turning point in this area to have been a seminar I once attended on a student church week away that advocated approaching media with a determination to ‘watch watchfully’.

We’re already established that if we’re going to allow ourselves to encounter any media at all, we’re going to find ourselves encountering media that denigrates virtue and promotes sin. The best way to respond to this, I believe, is to be very, very conscious of the fact. And yes, that means being aware of specific examples of this or that sin being presented positively, and that that is a Bad Thing, but more importantly, it means taking careful notice of how the broader worldview to which the piece of fiction in front of you subscribes compares to a Biblical one. If it’s not immediately obvious, think it over. What, according to this bit of media, is really important? What is the nature of good, of evil, of life, of humanity, of the universe? How do we find out? And then, when you talk about the media in question, talk about these things too. Have those honest conversations. Understand where culture is coming from and be able to analyse and dismantle that position as appropriate. I’m not saying that having read or heard or seen such-and-such a cultural phenomenon is a prerequisite for being able to preach the gospel in a way that makes sense to our society: the gospel is quite uninhibited by such things, thank you very much. But doesn’t it make more sense, if we’re going to be consuming media anyway, to make a point of knowing how to compare and contrast what media says to what God says, as much where that divergence is wide as where it is apparently less wide, than to construct a necessarily fairly arbitrary list of sins we refuse to see portrayed and so obscure the true message of the gospel behind a catalogue of moral impositions?

 

I of course mean ‘worldview’ in a rather more figurative sense than this quite beautiful image would imply.

If some item of content in a piece of media offends my sensibilities sufficiently that I would boycott the film as a result, that really just proves that that kind of content really isn’t what I need to worry about in terms of my media consumption. What I need to worry about are the lies woven so deeply into my culture that fiction usually just takes them for granted and constructs its storylines round them; what I need to worry about is the possibility that, weaned from birth onto the norms of my society, I might start doing the exact same thing.

A final note before I conclude: if you’ve read my post ‘Conversations with my Internal Nymphomaniac’,⁵ or spoken to me about this topic, you may know that I have a policy of trying to avoid media that includes explicit sex scenes. I do not consider such a policy inconsistent with the argument made above; in actual fact, I’d consider it a component of my watching watchfully. Part of being watchful is being watchful of oneself, of one’s own sins, and of which things are likely to cause one to be tempted. Sex scenes are one example among many; if you realise, say, that certain kinds of lifestyle programmes tend to prompt you to covetousness of a certain kind of lifestyle, or that ‘just one more episode’ is starting to become an idolatrous compulsion, then deciding to avoid particular media as a result seems to me an entirely reasonable response. The key thing is that there is active exercise of discernment going on.

In short, then, I’d encourage us all to worry less about what we watch, and more about how we watch it. I’d encourage us all to watch consciously, critically, watchfully. I love fiction, and I try to evaluate it from a Biblical perspective, and that’s kind of what this blog is all about – which being so, I suppose this post has been, in some sense at least, a justification of my methodology. I really do hope that the kinds of things I tend to ramble about in my cosy little corner of the Internet constitute a halfway-decent example of what watching watchfully looks like, and I really do hope that that might prove in some way vaguely useful to those humans who are kind enough to spend their time reading to the end of posts like this one.

Footnotes 

¹ The BBC will probably do as well as anyone for giving you the particulars: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39125727/beauty-and-the-beast-to-feature-disneys-first-gay-character-and-love-scene. 

² Here it is: https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/Christians-should-think-twice-before-boycotting-Disney-s-gay-Beauty-and-the-Beast. 

³ It’s a massively grim story, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=judges+19&version=ESVUK, but it’s not exactly exceptional. What about 2 Kings 16, where a woman tries to file a lawsuit against another woman for breaking a pact they had to alternately kill and eat each other’s children, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+6&version=ESVUK? Or the numerous mentions of people sacrificing their own children to foreign gods in fire? Humans are horrific. I accept no dissent. 

⁴ The survey is closed now – results will presumably materialise at some stage – but do check out Desiring God if you’re not already familiar with it; these guys post a lot of good stuff: http://www.desiringgod.org/. 

⁵ Under ‘2016’ then ‘April’ in the box on the right. It’s my second-most-viewed post after ‘Dear Future Husband (Assuming You Exist)’, which would appear to say rather a lot about the interests of my delightful readers.

Genuinely Generous

Victor:        I want ... toupée, please.
Wallace:     Oh, grand. We accept cheque or cash. 

Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

OK, here’s something I don’t get: why is everyone always so reluctant to allow anyone else to pay for anything for him or her?

How long, I wonder, before the £20 note too is superseded by a new plastic version...

A few examples may be helpful here. On one occasion, for instance, I was representing the church I attend at a Church Search event run by my university’s Evangelical Christian Union;¹ because our service starts a bit later than those of most other churches represented, we went for coffee beforehand, and I thought that, being the evident senior party relative to the couple of freshers I was with, it would be appropriate for me to pay for everyone’s drinks. I mean, first year is a bamboozling and moderately terrifying experience, and I thought a little gesture of caring on my part thrown into that context wouldn’t go amiss. How wrong I was. One of the girls was so determined to pay me back that she declared an intention to stand proffering the correct change for her beverage choice (and obstructing the progress of the queue as she did so) for as long as it took until I accepted it. Under such circumstances, I saw no viable option but to yield, and reluctantly pocketed the cash. Similarly, a friend of mine stated her inability to attend a planned group Christmas dinner out last year for financial reasons; I thought it was ridiculous that she should be absent on account of such an easily solvable problem, and messaged her privately to express my willingness to pay for her meal. Again, flat-out refusal – gratitude, but flat-out refusal. And so she missed the dinner.

It’s not as if I’m the only one, either. Upon my narrating such anecdotes as the above to my older sister, she reciprocated with a number of similar ones: friends who have agreed to attend a group meal out but only had drinks because food is too expensive; friends who have offered to pay for a group meal out and been immediately shouted down from all directions, acceptance of the offer being painted as totally out of the question. One of my housemates tells some rather amusing tales of a determination to pay for a meal so passionate on two sides that while one person surreptitiously sneaked up to the bar to pay, the other quietly slipped the pertinent amount of cash into the handbag she had left at the table. I don’t doubt that you have your own stories to similar effect. Perhaps you don’t even think of them as at all worthy of comment: certainly the attitude illustrated can’t be considered abnormal, pervasive as it is. But I don’t think it’s a problem because it’s not normal; I think it’s a problem because it is.

Surely, if someone offers to pay for something for someone – to avoid unwieldy vagueness, shall we say that Pam is offering to pay for Sam’s sandwich² – the polite thing for Sam to do, namely the thing that implies the highest opinion of Pam, or that affords her the most credit, is to assume that she has counted her armies before going to war,³ as it were, and is entirely capable of paying for his sandwich without either jeopardising her personal finances or allowing herself to be embittered by a feeling of being owed something. Surely the polite thing to do is to assume that Pam is genuinely generous, rather than that she is expecting to be repaid in whatever fashion at some point in the future. And yet, based on conversations I’ve had, a if not the major factor behind Sam’s reluctance to pay is probably that he doesn’t want to feel as if he owes Pam something.

While the desire to be rid of outstanding debts is an entirely commendable one – “owe no one anything, except to love each other”⁴ – Sam is missing the point. Unless Pam has made it clear that what she is offering is a loan rather than a gift, Sam will owe her nothing if she pays for his sandwich. She would not have offered to pay for it if she didn’t want to. She is trying to do something kind for him, something appreciative, something loving and Christlike, in however small a way (and to be fair, unless the sandwich includes gold leaf among its ingredients⁵ or is the size of Surrey, it probably is a pretty small way). I really tend to feel that to shout her down without even entertaining the possibility of letting her pay is a little contemptuous of all that. On top of that, suppose that Pam were offering to pay for Cam’s sandwich as well as Sam’s;⁶ Sam’s refusal sets a precedent, so that Cam may well now feel like a bit of a sponger if she, by contrast, accepts Pam’s offer. Thus Sam subtly impugns Cam’s character as well as Pam’s. Now, I don’t deny that there could well be circumstances in which it would be right for Sam not to let Pam pay – if he knew that she had already got herself into serious financial trouble through reckless generosity, say – but these would be exceptional. Most of the time, for Sam to be so absolutely adamant that Pam should not pay for the sandwich shows a privileging of his own pride over her generosity.
 

Not quite the size of Surrey, but definitely very well stuffed. Mmm, pulled pork.

Pride, indeed, may well be the real heart of the issue here. Sam, I surmise, though he may not realise it in terms quite so explicit, probably sees his ability to pay for his own sandwich as a marker of his being a worthwhile member of society. To let Pam pay for it – unless he is going to pay for her sandwich at some later date and so essentially end up paying for his own after all – would carry connotations of him not always being able to do things for himself; it would strike a blow at his subconscious belief that he is a self-sufficient island dependent on nobody else; it would colour him in some sense weak. And Sam can’t be having that. He would rather prop up the illusion of his own self-sufficiency – and the pride that rests on it – than allow Pam a chance to be generous.

But here’s the newsflash: we’re not supposed to be self-sufficient. Check out Romans 12. Here is one of the occasions whereon Paul sketches that metaphor he’s so fond of about the Church being like a body with many differently-functioning parts: 

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.⁷ 

So the ability to contribute financially to the benefit of the people of God is here listed (emphasis mine, of course) as a gift, like teaching or encouragement or leadership. If we’re not embarrassed to benefit from our fellow-believers’ exercise of these other kinds of gifts – and I feel sure we all recognise that it would be downright silly, not to mention spiritually damaging, to try to get by without input from anyone else on such fronts – then why should we be embarrassed to benefit from our fellow-believers’ exercise of their gift of generosity? If God has blessed Pam with the gift of material wealth, doesn’t it represent something of a rejection of his design for the Church if Sam flatly refuses to allow her to contribute to his needs? Doesn’t it suggest that he is still labouring under the illusion that his wealth is his own and Pam’s hers, rather than recognising that all of it is a gift from God, which he has apportioned, like all gifts, so that it might be used in service of his kingdom and his people?

Furthermore, if Sam can’t bring himself to accept even the gift of a sandwich from a fellow-believer, how is it that he nonetheless finds himself able to accept the uniquely, phenomenally, astoundingly generous gift God gave when he offered up his Son to secure the salvation of sinners? How far does he really understand that gift, its enormity, and the utter impossibility of ever earning it back?

My rejection of the principle of reciprocity,⁸ just to be clear, is not an assertion that we should be willing to accept generosity without ever being generous ourselves. It is abundantly clear that God calls us to be generous.⁹ On the contrary, what I’m exhorting is that we make space for others to exercise that gift as well as exercising it ourselves. And indeed, adelphoi,¹⁰ I do exhort you: let’s distinguish ourselves from the world in this matter. Let’s reject the sin of pride and the illusion of self-sufficiency and embrace the fact that God designed the Church to be interdependent. Let’s provide the opportunity for one another to demonstrate the gift of generosity according to the measure in which it is apportioned to each, and so to show the love that Jesus tells us is the hallmark of those who follow him.

And, for crying out loud, let’s allow Pam to pay for the sandwich.

Footnotes 

¹ A fab bunch of people: https://www.exeterecu.com/. 

² All nouns lifted from the finale song of an episode of Words and Pictures Plus that I was particularly fond of as a child (I genuinely loved educational programming; apparently I was a nerd even from the cradle, so to speak). A few episodes of the programme (though not, it appears, the pertinent one) have been archived on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp_ZgqEPmCM&list=PLGmSa8H8FofZcsdQlk2D68U2YkxrmQh9b, if, for some mad reason, you want to see what it was like. The lyrics of the aforementioned song, as I recall them, went something like this: “Spreading on the butter – Sam likes ham. / Spreading on the butter – Pam likes jam. / I like cheese; it’s just the way I am. / Let’s make a Sam ham Pam jam sandwich.” 

³ I here allude to Luke 14:31, but don’t read too much into it. 

⁴ That’s Romans 13:8. 

⁵ That said, there’s an absolutely excellent milkshake bar in my city where one can buy a ‘Millionaire’s Milkshake’, including 23-carat gold-leaf flakes sprinkled on top, for a mere £12.99, http://www.shakeaway.com/index.php/menu/main-menu, so maybe a gold-leaf sandwich wouldn’t actually be that expensive, although it would seem ludicrously decadent on principle anyway. 

⁶ Admittedly, no Cam features in the sandwich song mentioned above, but I needed another character and, you know, it rhymed. 

⁷ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+12&version=ESVUK. 

⁸ I also had a bit of a go about this in ‘The Present Situation’, under ‘2015’, then ‘December’ in the box on the right. 

⁹ And just because I can’t bring myself to assert that without backing it up at all, I’ll chuck Deuteronomy 15:7-8, Proverbs 19:17, and 1 John 3:17 at you, but honestly that hardly scratches the surface. 

¹⁰ A useful term of address for one’s fellow-believers, I think: using a transliteration rather than a translation of the Greek spares one both the apparent androcentrism of ‘brothers’ and the unwieldy lengthiness of ‘brothers and sisters’. Shall we try to instigate a trend, or am I just being pretentious again?

Thoughts on Doctor Strange 5: Life Wins

Dormammu:     Then you will spend eternity dying.

Dr Strange:       Yeah. But everyone on earth will live.

Doctor Strange (2016)

“What’s the opposite of eternal life?” asked my GCSE Religious Studies teacher one lesson.

Ever pedantically logical, I hazarded: “Eternal death?”

It was the right answer, apparently, though the concept sat slightly oddly with me. I could see how life could go on happening forever, but I envisioned death as a delimitable process, a finite moment, a singular event. I envisioned it as the transition: you’re alive, and then you die, and then…

And then someone buys cut flowers for your funeral - alive, but not for much longer. Does that strike anyone else as a bit odd?

Well, that’s where the underdeveloped thanatology of my proto-Christian teenage self¹ hit a bit of a snag: then what?

Death, the Bible makes clear, is more than a transition or a singular event. Death is the apt punishment for those who mutiny against the immaculate rule of the all-perfect, all-powerful God (“the wages of sin is death”²) – and that punishment is exacted eternally:

“…the Lord Jesus [will be] revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…”

That’s from the first chapter of Paul’s second letter to his fellow-believers in the city of Thessalonica.³ Or, to similar effect, compare the following chunks of Matthew (25:41, 46) and Revelation (20:10, 14-15):⁴

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’ … and these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

“And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever … then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”

Emphasis mine, of course – just to highlight that eternal punishment in the lake of fire is very explicitly identified as death. The transition is really not the point here; the death we should be worried about is the endless one that happens afterwards: “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!” (Luke 12:4-5).⁵

If I seem to be going a tad overboard with the references, I hasten to assure you that I’m selecting mere snippets of vast swathes of the Bible that are given over to discussing these matters of death and punishment. Jesus talked about them a lot⁶ – and yet we his followers shrink from the topic like cockroaches from light. Obviously there’s an extent to which that’s understandable – the notion is the very opposite of a pleasant one⁷ – but I tend to feel that there must be something a tad awry if it’s easier to find an exploration of the concept of eternal death in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than in the sum of mainstream Christian media and conversation.

The final showdown of Doctor Strange consists of our eponymous hero taking an endless time-loop created using the infinity stone he purloined from the library at Kamar-Taj into the Dark Dimension, where there is no time, and whence the evil Dormammu is busy embarking upon destroying the planet (so far he’s basically managed a street or two, but he seems to be warming to his theme).

Dr Strange actually makes the time-loop round his wrist, where one might, under other circumstances, wear a watch, which I think was quite a fun cinematic choice.

“Dormammu!” announces Dr Strange. “I’ve come to bargain.”

“You’ve come to die,” Dormammu corrects him, and kills him.

But, seconds later, Dr Strange is back: “Dormammu! I’ve come to bargain.”

Dormammu, perplexed, wonders whether this is some kind of illusion. Dr Strange assures him it’s real, he, in return, remarks his approval of the fact, and proceeds to kill our hero again.

Dr Strange reappears again: “Dormammu! I’ve come to bargain.”

It emerges that the time-loop means Dr Strange will just keep on coming back however many times Dormammu kills him, as the protagonist explains: “This is how things are now: you and me, trapped in this moment, endlessly … I can lose, again, and again, and again, and again, forever, and that makes you my prisoner.” Dormammu points out that this means he will spend eternity dying – suffering endlessly. His reply is to the effect that it will be worth it to save the lives of the inhabitants of the earth. We the viewers are treated to a number of subsequent restarts of the time-loop; a housemate and fellow-cinemagoer of mine remarked that we got something of a taste of the utter frustration that eventually causes Dormammu to surrender and agree to let the earth go.⁸ But in truth, we only had to put up with a couple of minutes of that jazz, and it wasn’t as if we were experiencing the kind of pain Dr Strange would have been as he was repeatedly murdered.

The scene got me thinking about eternal death, how utterly grim and horrific and hopeless a prospect it is, nothing to look forward to but more of the same suffering. It also persuaded me of Dr Strange’s character development, because the arrogant, success-obsessed neurosurgeon we met at the start of the film would never have given himself over to a fate like that for the sake of saving other people.

But that said, Dr Strange had a couple of pretty compelling reasons why it wouldn’t be so bad for him to trap himself in an endless time-loop of being killed by Dormammu. First off, he wasn’t actually planning to be there for eternity if he could help it: his intention, as he made very clear, was to bargain with Dormammu for the release of the whole earth, including himself; granted, there was a possibility the plan would fail, but he was obviously very much hoping it wouldn’t. Second, he only really had one other option, and that was to let Dormammu destroy the world, in which case he’d basically end up enduring an eternity of unpleasantness anyway; the only difference would be that so would the rest of the planet. So I’ll admit that Dr Strange’s choice was relatively self-sacrificially heroic – and I do love a bit of self-sacrificial heroism at the climax of a good story, so thumbs up, Marvel – but it’s absolutely nothing to write home about compared to a certain other act of self-sacrificial heroism that you were probably anticipating I was going to mention at some point.

Jesus might only have been on the cross for three hours, and dead for three days, but what he went through equated to an eternity of suffering. It has to have done: the chunks of Scripture I quoted above make it clear enough that eternal death and destruction is the just and appropriate punishment that faces those who disobey God, and so if it’s true that Jesus took the entire extent of that punishment upon himself, such that our debts are paid in full as soon as we place our trust in him,⁹ then he can have endured nothing less than the equivalent of eternal death. Unlike in the case of Dr Strange, such suffering wasn’t a possible consequence supposing the plan went wrong: it was the plan. And unlike in the case of Dr Strange, nothing at all untoward would have happened to Jesus had he opted, entirely reasonably, not to go through with that plan; at absolutely any point in the proceedings, he could have summoned a huge army of angels,¹⁰ had them exact just retribution on those who would dare to so maltreat the Son of God, and resumed his place in heaven, in the endless love and joy and peace of the Godhead. But he didn’t. He chose to go through all the horrors of eternal death so that evil people like you and I, O Helplessly Sinful Reader, might be spared them – and instead enter into eternal life.

Thus he who has life in himself was subject to the full extent of what death is capable of. And as a result, he drained death to the dregs; he exhausted every ounce of its resources. How could that which is the wages of sin ultimately triumph over the sinless? And even though death threw everything it had at Jesus, how could it overcome the very source of eternal life? Jesus wasn’t just our substitute, but the victor over our oppressor, and if we are on his side, then we share in his victory. At the very heart of God’s salvation plan, in the Lord Jesus Christ and in him alone, death is defeated. Life wins.

Footnotes

¹ What I mean by this phrase is that I’m not at all sure whether I was really trusting Jesus at that point in my life or not, but the point is I am doing now, and since that means God planned my salvation since before the foundation of the cosmos (Ephesians 1:4), it really doesn’t matter in the slightest at which exact moment of my life the fact first became manifest. Fancy some Adam4d insight on the subject? Of course you do: http://adam4d.com/what-that-means/.

² That’s from the end of Romans 6: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+6&version=ESVUK. I’ve never quite understood why the ostensibly plural noun takes a singular verb here – the original Greek, incidentally, has no verb at all – but there you go.

³ I had to rip the syntax apart a bit to trim the quotation down to a manageable length, so do check out the whole chapter for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+thess+1&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Here’s the Matthew, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+25&version=ESVUK, and the Revelation, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+20&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Last Bible Gateway link for today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+12&version=ESVUK.

⁶ A lot of people seem to chuck around the assertion that Jesus spoke about hell more than he did about heaven, but whether or not that’s true depends very heavily on what one is or is not prepared to count as a reference to one or the other. In any case, Jesus did mention eternal punishment on pretty frequent occasions – I’ll give a few more very explicit examples (there are lots more less explicit allusions) from Matthew to give a sense of density: try 5:29-30; 13:40-41; and 18:8-9 – and the point is that we should be taking everything he said as true and valuable, regardless of whether or not he talked about other things more often.

⁷ There aren’t (at least in my experience) a lot of songs that deal with how much it hurts to know that there are people you love that are, as things stand, set to face eternal punishment, which is a great shame, because it’s exactly the kind of emotional millstone that merits being set to music. Here’s one of the few, a favourite of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ku4jFaYlHE.

⁸ Ooh look, a high-quality clip of the scene in question, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3lA6abQprM; my thanks to the kind human who uploaded it.

⁹ Which he did, by the way. “Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace … all we like sheep have gone astray … and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5-6) and “there is no more condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) and “God made [us] alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us” (Colossians 2:13-14) and, oh, I don’t know, the entire Bible, basically.

¹⁰ More than twelve legions, to be precise (Matthew 26:53). A legion at this stage consisted of 10 cohorts of 500 men each (or thereabouts), so twelve legions would mean some 60,000 soldiers. To put this in perspective, there were only about twenty-five legions in the entire Roman Empire at this point. In other words, Jesus was saying he could appeal to his Father and immediately obtain access to a heavenly army consisting of half the entire military might of the most formidable martial power the world had ever seen. He could have – but he didn’t.