If you woke up and the world had been transformed into a super-nerd dystopia where a demigod-Patton Oswalt forced you to choose only the best superhero to preserve from 100 years of American comics, you would choose Superman.
Sure, the more educated nerd-palate prefers a hero who is less of a boy-scout. (Batman is my pick.) After all, Superman is a little goody-goody. He ALWAYS does the right thing. He has the most complete set of powers: flight, x-ray vision, super strength, etc. He’s invincible, except for the whole kryptonite thing.
You would not tell demigod-Patton Oswalt that the ideal superhero for cultural preservation was Jesus Christ. Being honest, Jesus is actually a terrible superhero. Even if you give him the whole walking-on-water and miraculous healing thing, that doesn’t give you much to work with when Lex Luthor decides to blow up the sun or Darkseid starts a zombie apocalypse. Apart from the Ascension, Jesus can’t even fly. So there’s nothing he can do about the whole exploding sun fiasco. And re: the zombie apocalypse? Can he go around healing the zombies? No, no no. That’s not going to help. They will make more zombies. Someone has to stop Luthor and Darkseid. Someone needs to strap them to a meteor and toss them out into space. At least in the comic books, that will solve the problem.
Even if you narrow your scope to Biblical heroes Jesus isn’t the coolest from a nerd’s point of view. Sampson is probably the best biblical hero. He’s at least got super strength. I could see David having a spin-off giant killing mini-series that would connect with the right demographic. But Jesus never kills any giants. He doesn’t bust open heads with a donkey’s jaw-bone. When he gets the chance to do something big in front of a crowd, he just makes lunch. I guess he could open a catering business but that’s not going to stop invading hoards of Philistines.
Most Christians are familiar with the Messianic expectation of the Hebrew people. It’s not that the Messiah for God’s people wasn’t supposed to be awesome. He was. Before Jesus showed up people were anticipating someone who could single-handedly take down the Roman empire. The Messiah was supposed to be “bad ass.”
The problem is, Jesus is not “bad ass.”
Jesus, according to Paul (in a totally anti-climatic origin story), gave up his cool powers and humbled himself to the position of a slave. Not even a cool “Django Unchained” slave. A plain old slave with nothing. No place to sleep. No power. All Jesus had was complete dependence upon God the Father.
And dependence is a terrible super power.
Dependence will get you killed
Dependence will get you killed. In fact, it did get Jesus killed. And here is another way Jesus fails both the Superhero and the Messiah test. Good heroes in both American comic books and Jewish folk stories do not get killed … at least not without taking a bunch of bad guys with them. But Jesus didn’t take down a single Roman on his way to the cross. He fixed one guy’s ear. So he’s like “-1” on the killing bad guys score board.
But the expectations were still there. When Peter, James, John and the rest woke up that Saturday morning after Jesus died they must have felt like Superman died. And not just because Jesus was literally dead. But because he didn’t turn out to have any power. He never even tried to fight back.
We know the story well. Sunday morning the grave was empty. And as the day wore on, Jesus himself appeared. He was alive again. Not in a cheap marketing we-killed-the-hero-to-get-readership “death of Superman” way. He was alive in a way no one had ever been alive before. Alive in a broke-the-chains-of-sin-and-death way. Alive in a way that gives life to the world. Alive not to himself but to God. Alive in a fullness of dependence upon the greatest power the world has ever known, the love of God the Father. The love that through Christ the Word created and sustains the cosmos. The love that knew our suffering, that endured hatred and scorn and even death so that nothing, neither a zombie plague nor an exploding sun, neither an alien invasion nor a death ray could separate us from God.
And that is fantastic news. Superman might be able to save the world over and over again, but we will never be Superman. His glory is everything we are not. He makes for a great comic hero, but a weak role model.
But we can be like Jesus. It is promised that we will be like Jesus. We can learn to be totally dependent upon the love of our Father God. We can live the life of the resurrection now, and in the future. Jesus has given us a new way to be alive. And that new alive starts the minute we decide to not be like Superman anymore, rushing from one collapsing part of our universe to the other to maintain stability and order with our own strength, and become completely dependent upon the love of God.
Hanging on to Superman
But we love our superheroes. Not so deep down, we want Jesus to be like Superman. We want it badly because we know that as Christ is, we shall be, and we want to be like Superman. We are much more comfortable being a member of God’s rescue mission to the world like some sort of theological Justice League than we are being a broken people who grow not in power but in desperation for Jesus.
Those of us who preach and teach can easily slip into making Jesus a superhero. We want to give our congregations practical suggestions for navigating the zombie apocalypse of their spiritual lives. We want to tell them about the spiritual disciplines as if they are sanctified super powers for defeating the world, the flesh and the Devil. Sometimes we do this out of a sense of love and sometimes we do this because we want people to depend on us more. Being honest, when it comes to Christian ministry, we’d rather be Superman than Jesus.
We perpetuate the myth of the Christian superhero every time we become convinced that the world, my friends, my church, or my country need saving again and I’m the one who can do it. We reinforce the myth of our own superpowers when we tell people that the key to saving the world is not God’s unpredictable and mysterious love through weakness, but three foolproof steps that anyone can take.
And this will always fail. Giving people anything but deeper dependence upon Jesus will create pride masked with holy intention. It will create hard hearts, boldly advancing the gospel of strength, power, and empty morality. It will mutate us until we cannot receive the love of the Father.
We need to be ok with being bad superheroes … and great followers of Jesus. We need to grow daily in our desperation for the “weak” savior Jesus and teach others to do the same. We need to remember that we aren’t following Superman in trying to save the world; we are following Jesus in learning how to depend on God more and more.
In doing this, I think we’ll find that Christ’s weakness is stronger than we think, and that even though he is not the hero we deserve, he’s the hero that we deeply need.
Lane Severson blogs at The Guilty Conscience. He is involved in lay leadership at Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, IL. He spends the rest of his time changing the diapers of his five children with his wife.
