In the 1980’s, Mel Gibson rose to prominence in a series of films where he played a rootless drifter who ended up being a sacrificial sort of hero. In one of those movies, “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdone,” Tina Turner played an enigmatic wise woman named Auntie Em who sang a song called “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” Here were some people in some sort of gloomy dystopian world, but they did not want a hero to rescue them or restore their world to something approaching wholeness or normalacy. They were so accustomed to their broken-down world that they had little hope and vision of a better world to see, even though they knew the world that they were in was not home or even a good place, wondering if things were every going to change but not confident in the vague visions of love and a better life in the future. The chorus of the song reflects the lack of horizons on the part of the people of that fictional world: “We don’t need another hero. We don’t need to know the way home. All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome [1].” How sad it is to have one’s bar set so low.

This world is full of heroes, and comics and their adaptations show a whole suite of superheroes with massive superpowers as well as equally powerful enemies. Yet while good almost always prevails, the evil never goes away. The heroes that we have are never sufficient to get rid of the problems that we face in this world. The villains always come back, or new ones appear, and no one ever can rid the world of darkness no matter how noble they may try to be or how self-sacrificial. Likewise, the superheroes themselves are always flawed themselves, perhaps because no one can relate to a perfect hero in this fallen world where good is automatically viewed with mistrust because any level of good must be balanced by some horrible evil. This makes all decent and good people in this wicked world under an extreme degree of scrutiny even more so than would otherwise be the case.

Why can’t we relate to good heroes? Those who are Christians have in the pages of the Bible a genuine superhero in the best sense, the ultimate superhero. Most accounts of Jesus Christ show him as either a baby in a manger or as the sacrificial lamb giving His life for all mankind. Ironically enough, the Jews of Jesus’ time (and the disciples too) understood the superhero aspect of Jesus Christ as the Messiah far better than most believers do today. They wanted to be delivered from the corrupt priesthood and the rulership of heathen nations like the Romans. They were longing for deliverance in a physical way, of the kind that superheroes provide when faced against legions of enemies. The Jews of Jesus’ time were expecting the Lion of Judah delivering the Jews from their political mess, and when that did not happen there was a great deal of disappointment. Today we do not even think of Jesus Christ as a conquering king unless we are of the premillennialist persuasion. The rest of Christendom has no such idea of the biblical picture of Jesus Christ as a conquering hero at all.

And so in the absence of having a vision of a future hero who first sacrificed Himself to pay the price for our sins and who was Himself without spot or blemish, without any fatal flaw at all, we create heroes in our own image like the ancient heathens of old. In fact, some of the superheroes we create for ourselves, like Hercules or Thor, were in fact heathen demigods and gods that were once worshiped by a corrupt humanity. Such heroes that we can create out of our own imagination will never have the power it takes to make this world a better place, for their own flaws and weaknesses will only continue the legacy of weakness and darkness that is present in this world. Until we become better from the inside out, we will never make this world a better place than we have found it, for whatever problems we solve or stave off will only be balanced by some sort of evil or excess on the other side, leaving our gains to be undone or our weaknesses to create new evils for others to resolve in their own time. We already have the hero we need; we don’t need another hero. We just need to repent of our sins, reform our ways, and learn to be a bit more heroic in His image.

[1] http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/WE-DON%27T-NEED-ANOTHER-HERO-THUNDERDOME-lyrics-Tina-Turner/B639405FE74C5DF248256918002E909F