Jesus... Superhero?

Who is your favourite superhero? Mine is the Batman. I like him because he represents an ordinary, all be it wealthy, human being whose tragedy has been turned into an altruistic set of actions for the benefit of the society he exists in. Rather than having invincible super-powers like Superman, he uses his intelligence, wealth, technology and his physical stamina in the pursuit of a vigilante style justice. In the Christopher Nolan re-boot of Batman, Bruce Wayne is prepared to accept the role of a scapegoat, in order to see the greater good.

 I can see a lot of parallels with this notion of a super hero in the way that some people view God. They see him as a supernatural being who intervenes in the affairs of man, in order to set our ways straight. God is supernatural… he is creator of the universe and has time in his hands. However, I don’t believe that God is in it for the quick fix. I have seen and heard of people whose situations have been miraculously transformed by the work of God in their lives. In my own life, I have encountered God through his filling of my soul by the Holy Spirit. I know that I owe God my life… he is the force for good in everything I think, say and do.

God works in my marriage, my skills as a father, my employment. God helps me appreciate what I have in my life, family, friends, social interactions… He fills that part of my soul that was designed to have relationship with my creator. I strongly believe that God’s hand in my life is the reason I am what I am today. HE completes me. Without God in my life I could have filled it with any amount of stuff that I think that I need like sex, material possessions, wealth, drugs, music, fashion, career… The list of things that could distract me from my relationship with God is endless.

In 2005, I was diagnosed with having a malignant melanoma on my shoulder blade. I went to the dermatology specialist in my lunch time from work who decided to remove it straight away under local anaesthetic and do a biopsy. I am clueless when it comes to medical illness so afterwards I went back to work! School was in the middle of an OFSTED inspection (UK government inspection), and I felt a duty to return. By the end of the day, the anaesthetic had worn off and I was not really in any fit state to have supervised the students!

As I got home and told my wife about the day and gave her the leaflet about what I had experienced, I could see in her face that I should have been worried. My wife is an occupational therapist who works in palliative care, so she knew the meaning of what I was telling her! I was ignorant of this and never felt at any time as though I should be worried, or even that I needed to. It may seem strange perhaps, but I knew that my supernatural God, father and friend, would not put me through more than I could bear.

The biopsy result came back positive so I had to undergo further surgery and 5 years of monitoring. I can remember my consultant in one of these sessions putting his sun tanned hand against my white skin, turning to the students who were observing him, and smiling as he said, ‘you can see from the contrast that this has not been induced by too much sun bathing!’ I know that my wife was really concerned about the medical prognosis as the proximity of the melanoma could have meant the cancer spreading into my lymphatic system and then I would have been in a far worse state. But I never gave it a thought… I sincerely believe that God gave me the ability to ignore what could have been an extremely tense and worrying time, by filling with me with his reassurance.

When people ask ‘Where is God?’ or state ‘There is no evidence for God!’ I tend to wonder what type of God they are seeking. Just like superhero’s have got different ‘powers’, what is it that people are looking for? As stated in last week’s blog, society has been doing a pretty good job at marginalising expressions of faith. As soon as people think about God, they always associate him with poor religious experiences, or judgemental attitudes that they have received from those whom they have encountered. Or they believe God is some kind of supernatural hero who has neglected his duties when you look at the state the world is in.

To some people, their experiences of life have no place for God. In the UK, schools do not sing hymns of have daily readings from any religious text. The student’s experiences of formal assemblies in school tend to be on the need for success in examinations or information on the personal, social, health or emotional emphasis that has been passed to schools due to the limited guidance found to be offered in the home. I believe that in our culture in the UK, many adults only encounter religious views through the media and through sound bite, rarely engaging with an experience of faith, and put off by the unknown.

It is therefore the Christian’s mission to live a life and express values that are appealing to our neighbours, families and friends. Paul tasks us with being able to give a reason for the hope we have within us. Some Christians are not very confident about doing this with their friends because of fear of rejection or indeed, in being unable to communicate what they believe in any joined-up way?

Belief in God can have different forms of expression which we can call our ‘theology’. People can interpret their theology in literal ways and express this as faith; a set of beliefs that govern the way we think and feel. There are different levels to our belief in what we know. It begins with our sense of who we believe God to be. God exist outside of time and space, but is also ever present. Christian’s believe that God is all knowing and has the power to intervene in our world. We believe that God intervenes in our world because he created it and loves it! Our experiences of God’s intervention in our lives builds our faith in who he is, and strengthens our hope for the things to come.

The question that is always asked is this: “If there are any remaining un-reached tribes in the world, would they recognise the existence of God in their world?” My answer has always been yes. The reason being, as mentioned in my last blog, is that I cannot believe in the randomness of the big-bang theory. I am more than prepared to accept that the events of the ‘big-bang’ are credible for the origins of the universe, but I am not at all convinced in the idea that in all probability, at some point in the process, the earth and the delicate interplay between the sun, the moon and the seasons of the world occurred out of a sense of chance that it could happen. I haven’t got any faith in the randomness of this type of science; whose theories of relativity or laws of probability make this is a conceivable option.

The way the world functions; its order expressed through plant species and their function in the different regions of the world; the hierarchy of marine, animal, bird and insect life is perfectly balanced until the introduction of man! If we were an evolved species reacting to our need to adapt to survive, we haven’t been a particularly good steward of our environmental responsibility or our animal welfare record? We have always taken the planet and all of its resources as expendable because we have mastery over it, rather than being evolved from it.  

I used to live a one hour drive to the Lake District in Cumbria. From my bedroom window I could look across the roof tops of Morecambe and straight across the bay with a view of the mountains. I used to enjoy cycling to Windermere and climb the nearest mountain to enjoy the view for my journey back across the bay from a different perspective.

I knew that I was sat in a glacial valley and that Lake Windermere was actually a residual creation of the melting ice. I can look for where the ice had frozen to the rock and wrenched it down the mountain causing glacial deposits, and the effects of weathering on the landscape. 





What I would be actually doing as I looked across at Morecambe Bay, was contemplating my existence in the grand scheme of things. I was quite a lonely child, even with three brothers, but the cycle and the subsequent climb connected me to the earth through the realisation that God was in control and had been for thousands of years. My response being to enjoy the sense of belonging… that the sense of well-being that I felt as I sat looking across the bay at my hometown, with all the problems that I experienced there, would fill me with a sense of Gods presence.

My choice then is in how I consider God’s hand at work in my life. Do I choose to believe? Am I persuaded enough by the physical observations I have made about my corner of the world to believe? So how do I then come to ‘know’ God once I am prepared to accept the reality of God and enter into a relationship with him? This is where cultures that have no ‘religious’ framework to organise their faith can develop odd practices. For example, those that worshipped the god Baal would sacrifice babies to gain his favour and protection!

For the Christian believer, why do we do what we do; how is our theology expressed in our faith and our actions?

I always wonder what religious ceremonies Abraham, Isaac and Jacob performed prior to Moses and the establishment of the Law? We know that the ancient near eastern practice was to offer a sacrifice of an animal, usually a lamb and that Adam's son Cain was aggrieved that God accepted his brother Abel’s first born lamb offering, over his own grain offering… (Genesis 4). What is clear however is that until God established a holy people; the nation or Israel; as a witness to reveal to the world his mission, he chose individuals like Abraham as the ancestor whose life and faith was to give glory to Yahweh. It must be assumed therefore that these people inherently understood what an appropriate act of worship was for their creator God. By studying their choices and reading about their lives, we can look for a pattern of faith that they understood to be true. As we read their stories, they reveal how God was at work in their lives, and that of the culture they encountered.

Today, we are not so much feeling-our-way to faith, but living in the same promise that God gave to Abraham and his descendants, through King David and right through to his descendent, Jesus. In Jesus we find the way, the truth and the life. God is no longer some distant supernatural deity, but is in fact a real person. In Jesus, the kingdom of God is revealed for all to see. His life was lived in fulfilment of all that had gone before, and all that is to come. His life stands out brightly as a radical who challenged the religious practice of the culture, and realigned it through his death with the desire of God.

Jesus came to re-set the tradition of faith by re-affirming what God had long since put in place. God established his people Israel as a holy nation and a royal priesthood. Through Moses, God establishes in the desert, the Tabernacle as a central place of worship. Later, the spirit of God rested directly in the centre of the nation, in the temple built by Solomon. When the people were true in their worship of Yahweh, his presence was with the people, they prospered, and they had peace. When the people turned away from true worship, Israel was left vulnerable to its enemies and the people were eventually exiled to Babylon; the temple destroyed; the hopes of the nation lost.

Although the temple was rebuilt and the people repatriated to Jerusalem, the people knew that the presence of Yahweh never really returned to temple worship. Jesus was born into a time where Israel was again occupied and ruled by a military government. Although the Pharisees and keepers of the law were allowed to have governance over religious matters, they were looking for the return of the king, the Messiah, to rid them of Roman rule. In Jesus we find that the penultimate act of God was being established.

Jesus said that he could destroy the temple, the place for the worship of Yahweh, and rebuild it in 3 days… This being a symbol of his death and resurrection clear to those who had studied Isaiah 53. The Jews existed for the very fulfilment of this promise of God, and yet after waiting between 400 to 500 years, they seemed to have forgotten how to recognise the coming of the Messiah when they heard the teaching of Jesus and witnessed what he did.

Jesus taught that our bodies are the living temples of the Holy Spirit, not bricks and mortar. That those who believe in him and confess their sin would not perish but have everlasting life…  Jesus came to bring the kingdom of God back into the centre of our worship and of our faith. In his wisdom, his teaching and his life, we can recognise the truth of God and recognise that as a descendent of Adam, we are all lost. We were once in Eden, but that promise is but a distant memory, forgotten by a busy materialistic life that we believe compensates us for the hardships we face in life but in the end, returns us to the dust from which we came.

In Jesus we can find rest for our souls and restoration. We can be made free from the drudgery of our earthly existence, and begin to live with a different perspective. Jesus elevates our world view beyond our introspection, and onto an eternal perspective, where we know that we are a new creation. No longer will we be reminded of our loneliness in the middle of the busyness of life, or the short term fulfilment that can seem so fleeting.

Jesus invites us to meet him in the middle of our modern lives to ask a simple question… Do you love me? If we love him, we will be willing to confess the failures of our self-centred nature, to the one who willingly sacrificed his own life for us! Jesus is big enough and capable of cleansing our souls… He is the Messiah, who comes to judge the living, and the dead. Jesus, who had no sin, enables those who believe in him to place our sin at the foot of his cross. We can say with confidence as the robber who hung next to Jesus said, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” and Jesus replies, “I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

As we meet with Jesus today, we enter into his judgement and his justice. By his act of love we are freed to live a holy life, free from our past. For in Jesus, the kingdom of God has arrived. But as Peter says, there are times when it will be hard. There will be times when we will be questioned for what we believe; persecuted even, for our faith. There will be times too, when we cannot understand why God can allow the death of a loved one, or that violence to continue…

All I know is that my God is real, he has always been faithful to me, and he is my everything… I encourage you to find out who Jesus is for yourself; read what he says in the Gospel story; speak to Christians about their faith; have fellowship with one another, and be a light shining brightly in your community. Let our lives reveal the fathers heart to the world he loves so much. Let us pray for a new move of the Holy Spirit so that we can have a fresh revelation of God in our world today.

God bless you.