lion rebel

I never had a hero as I was growing up – Ken Griffey Jr. came close and I was enamored with Gary Payton for a handful of years. It must have been because I realised that I would never be a superstar athlete that they never reached “hero” status for me. If you grew up as I did, surveys through emails were all the rage, and the question that seemed to be the bane of my existence was of course, “Who’s your hero?” I never had an answer, but my friends who didn’t go to church always answered something exotic or super cool: Princess Diana or Brad Pitt. Then all my church friends would of course answer, “Jesus!” Either crowd made me feel inadequate because everyone seemed to have someone whom they adored. One of my best friend’s obsession with a hero culminated in the purchase of a Superman suit for Halloween. Before this he got his hands on the complete set of the Superman Movies and watched them all in one day, butt glued to the couch and eyes locked on the TV. I always admired his intense love for heroes because it sparked an excitement and a childlike giddiness every time a new movie would come out. He loved these characters because they provided hope.
The beauty of heroes is that they’re different for everyone because everyone finds something else attractive about a person that inspires a “hero sensation.” Your hero could be Tom Selleck for his profound performances in Magnum PI or in one of those made for TV movies he did or maybe it’s Mother Theresa for the incredible life she lived. Of course, your hero could very well be the person of Jesus for his role as Savior in your life.
Turning to Truth, especially in the Psalms I continually find David expressing an incredible view of God that I’d never known. “God is already in action – Sword honed on his whetstone, bow strung, arrow on the string, lethal weapons in hand, each arrow a flaming missile.” [Psalm 7] It’s just one example, but hear the description and how that correlates with the heros of old we’ve dreamed up: Lancelot and Arthur, Butch and the Sundance Kid – the list goes on and on because of our great love for being saved.
In that correlation we discover that though Jesus is the greatest hero we could ever have, a mighty warrior and fighter for our souls, we replace him with people whose image we glorify in extravagant proportions. For me, it begs the question, ‘Why is it that we displace the greatest savior in all of history?’ Really we’re just clinging to fantasy-life characters that were created in the image of what God has done. We fall in love with Super Man, not because he can fly and shoot red beams out of his eyes, but because he saves people in peril.
I believe we displace Jesus as our hero so often because what he saves us from is a world we can’t see or really fathom. We don’t understand this place because we’re so wrapped up in the one we can see, smell, taste, touch and hear. We are obsessed with flesh – a lust of body and physicality. And it’s not hard to see why: we’re made of flesh, we interact through flesh; flesh is what immediately surrounds us at all moments. The naïve would blame God because he made us this way, but they would be missing the key ingredient that gives us life: the breath of God which made us living beings [Genesis 2]. Our physical form came from dirt, but our life comes from God – who, coincidentally, came in a physical form as Jesus. To “be” suggests nothing physical; it is simply existing.
If we are to restore the placement of Jesus as hero, as savior, we must turn to the spiritual existence of our lives. We must turn our backs on ourselves, on our physical idolatry and turn to the intangible presence of God in us, that very breath that he caused to rise up within us giving us life. To continue along the course of establishing physical heroes in our life other than Christ is foolishness, a bewitching of our souls. Turn, go and “be”, friends.