Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi began with the traditional “opening scroll” setting up the story about to unfold, accompanied as always by the powerful overture of maestro John Williams. This time around, the opening scroll talks about the dire circumstances of the Rebels against the First Order, the post-Darth Vader bad guys. The last film in the series left heaviness with the death of a key character and a great deal of loss.
Yet, the narrator holds out that good word that “a spark of hope” will rekindle the fortunes of the downtrodden. A return of Luke Skywalker might be the ignition that the future needs!
Throughout the new Star Wars’ film, characters keep talking about hope: its absence and its abundance. They face difficult situations and great threats, yet even in the depths of loss, the characters find something greater. When Luke is found, he is a hermit, living where he would prefer not to be found and resigned that he had failed. For someone thought to be “the” spark of hope, he is just as down and dejected as those who are on the front lines. What will it take?
For Star Wars, it’s the Force, a somewhat mystical power that solves all manner of plot devices (while creating no end of plot holes, if you talk to the particularly faithful fan base! So the Force is a great human idea, not really anything approaching God’s way of being with us in the world).
As a Christian believer in the midst of Advent, I could feel an even greater hope stirring within, as pop culture often reflects the glimmerings of what the Gospel reveals in full: despite the world doing its worst, Christ brings us into an abiding, lasting hope and way of living our lives faithfully, boldly and without any fears. Luke’s Gospel shows us the true power in the world, one that has no patience for Empire, nor a desire to be anything like whatever humans could conjure up alone.
No wonder we believers have such great joy in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as the hope given has raised up the persecuted, the marginalized and the forgotten, just as surely as Mary’s great song, aka the Magnificat.
At Christmas Eve, we turn from the lead-up to the great Nativity stories themselves. Boldly, we hear this word: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors”, is the message of the angels. As for the earthly powers that be, those who see the world as their plaything, it is a word that they would not want to hear, even if the angels showed up in the halls of power rather than the meadows out in a remote place. The ministry of Christ is one that takes each person seriously as God’s beloved, worthy of worth, able to be the glory of God, fully alive, as an early Christian theologian would put it. A spark of divine hope, indeed!
But how does the believer live in the here and now, where the powers that be would frankly find such talk annoying as it is sort of hard to keep an empire running when the glory is directed elsewhere to a much higher authority (i.e. God who is neither Caesar nor one of many). The Roman Empire plastered every wall with their promise of “Pax Romana”, but any cursory study of Jesus’ day reveals that it was rarely and holistically for every person. (Indeed, Rome was the original Empire that strikes back!) Comparatively, the angels above sing of peace meant for the good of all, not just a politicized commodity that you can control at your whim or to your advantage.
Thus, that baby in a manger is a contrary word to the world very content to keep to its own devices and vices alike. No matter where you flip through the pages of the gospels, Christ in the manger, Christ and his parables, Christ on the cross, Christ and the empty tomb, all are stories of unexpected twists that God alone brings to the plot of life and the status quo we have come to expect or to which we have resigned ourselves.
We seek a lot of things in life, sometimes because we want the perfect moment, the right path, or the charmed life. Christ lays flat all these things, asking us to look at the unlikely, the unadorned, and see there in its vulnerable humility all the power and glory in the most hidden of places. Sin can be found frequently in the world’s glittering appeal, yet in the midst of the world came the Word made flesh, nestled into the swaddling clothes that constrain a baby, and by choice, God’s Son come to be with us, Emmanuel.
That manger may not look like much, but if you look more intently, you will see the very glory of God shining forth as the cattle low, the shepherd bustle in from the hinterlands, and Mary and Joseph marveling at this wee babe born in Bethlehem, destined for Golgotha and here to redeem the world.
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