Wonder Woman, Passover, and the Good News
*”Why is tonight different than all other nights?’
- from the Haggadah, the Four Questions (Mah Nishtanah)
*”We were once slaves…This is because of what the Lord did for me…”
-father to his four sons, from the Haggadah
The Divine light, we are told, 'lighteneth every man'. We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great pagan teachers and myth-makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story--the theme of incarnation, death and re-birth. And the differences between the Pagan Christs (Balder, Osiris, etc.) and Pagan stories are all about someone dying and rising, either every year, or else nobody knows where and nobody knows when. The Christian story is about a historical personage whose execution can be dated pretty accurately, under a named Roman magistrate, and with whom the society that He founded is in a continuous relation down to the present day. It is not the difference between falsehood and truth. It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other.
CS Lewis, They Asked for a Paper.
“Haggadah” means telling and it is the text used during the Passover Seder to retell the story of God delivering the Hebrews from Egypt. Telling stories is essential to our humanity. Through story we empathize and know what cannot otherwise be known. But why bring Wonder Woman into something as sacred as Passover?
Passover has long been my favorite celebration. It takes place in the Spring, as the deadness of winter gives way to newness of life. It is a feast that weaves history from the exodus of the Hebrews enslaved to Egypt and its gods to the exodus of humanity enslaved to the powers/ gods of this world. It is story telling at it its finest: sights, sounds, smells, taste, touch- all five senses actively involved to pass our story from one generation to the next. There is plenty of food, laughter, and, sometimes, music. The pace is unhurried- this will take a while. The Passover gathers people together to spend a few hours remembering the stories of old and reminding one another that the busyness and loneliness of life will melt away like the winter, a new creation is born- even now. And it is a family.
Remembering the story, the Good News, is central to Passover. The night of the Passover must have been a terrible night for families anticipating the coming of the Angel. YHWH had already confronted the gods of Egypt in the first nine plagues and now He will finally circumcise (cut away) His people from these rebellious authorities. A lamb is slaughtered, a young and unblemished lamb. The head of the household spreads the blood over the doorway- whatever enters this home must pass through the blood. Death has no authority here. The pall of night descended and with full assurance that Death would come, they must’ve wondered- will this work? This is the Night of Watching, or Leil Shimurim. As screams rip through the curtain of the night, the children of YHWH wait.. and watch. Under the light of the full moon, the Hebrews leave in haste. Who is this God that rules over Death and all other gods? Who are these people that He should do this for them?
Their Deliverer had come. YHWH defeated the gods of Egypt and humbled Pharaoh (for now) and will lead His people to Sinai a month later for a wedding ceremony. Here His chosen will become His Beloved. The One God reigns over heaven and earth and all other gods/ powers therein. Every year, Nisan 15, on the full moon, the same full moon Moses looked up to, the same full moon Jesus looked to as He was being crushed under the strain of becoming the lamb, is the the same full moon we look up to each year at this time. We look and remember that time is somewhat cyclical, but it is linear. It is leading somewhere. This full moon reminds us that we live in the Now and the Not Yet. The Deliverer has entered our world and His Kingdom is breaking forth. But this will take a while. As green sprigs begin to emerge from a winter sleep, so to the surety of the King’s return is the death of the gods of this world and His life emerging in us- even now.
The Spirit is the guarantee. The Feast of First Fruits is three days after Passover. It is the dedication of spring fruits to the priests that God may make the rest of the harvest like these first fruits. Just as Jesus, like a seed of promise, was buried, He passed through Death and the Spirit blossomed through Him into new life. Resurrection life is the fruit and we are the offspring. YHWH will make the rest of the harvest like this first fruit. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead now gives life to our mortal bodies.
The Passover story, the Good News, is a story of a revolution. It is the liberation from enslavement to the adoption into a royal family. This story is retold in many different ways within the Arts. I was watching Wonder Woman with my family one night when I detected these echoes. The video clips tell the story. The god of war, Ares, seeks to destroy mankind by having them destroy one another. The Story of the Garden is unmistakable here. The snake seeks to corrupt mankind and have them destroy one another. In His mercy, YHWH exiles them from the Garden, but the curse has been activated. YHWH did not destroy them. Within the exile was a promise- one day your seed will crush the Serpent. One day, all will be made well once again. The Good News is that the insurrection of the snake is over. But it takes a while for free people to internalize freedom.
The Gospel has gradually been reinterpreted to mean an individual act of going to heaven when you die. This view emerged around the 18th century as best I can tell. The early Christians understood this differently. Paul describes it differently. The Gospel is heralding the New King and His Kingdom. The powers of darkness and of this world are stripped of their powers. Heaven and earth are reconciled in the Messiah. Liberated from the rule of war, violence, pride,…we are free to love as Jesus loved, to love as one family. As Wonder Woman told the fighting soldiers after she thought she had defeated Ares, “you don’t have to fight one another anymore; Ares is dead.”
Ares falls from the place of the gods, just as Lucifer fell. Interestingly, Ares tells Wonder Woman that he gives mankind the ideas for poisons and weapons and all that, but he does not make people use them. Is this any different than how the satan works? Also, Ares has a vision of paradise that is different than Zeus intended and he solicits Wonder Woman to help him achieve it. Jesus faced a similar proposition in the wilderness. But this is a world in which humanity, in all its weakness, is eliminated. However, YHWH is merciful. Not only does He intend to keep us, He intends to free us from the corrupting influence of the powers of this world. To do so, he must kill us, as Jesus was killed. We must pass over death. He must cut away (circumcise) our hearts. Therefore, receiving Jesus is not accepting a new set of rules or religious practices. To put on the Messiah is to be resurrected by the Spirit into a New Kingdom with new allegiances and a new way to be human.
The story of the Passover is the story that points to Jesus.
Hapi, Heket, Geb, Khepri, Hathor, Isis, Nut, Seth, and Ra were among the gods of Egypt confronted with the power of YHWH. Pharaoh was a god king, essentially a son of the gods (not unlike Caesar in Rome). His rebellion against the One True God, his refusal to give back to God what belonged to Him, would be the defining moment. The god’s child would die and, thereby, free the children of YHWH. Jesus would enter into a world of rebellion that also had forgotten what it meant to shema the One True God. Now, the son of the Living God will lay down his life, will become the blood on our doorposts. Death will pass over Him to free us- no longer slaves to fear, death, or the powers.
What parallels to you see in Ares and the Satan?
How do the stories of Wonder Woman, The Passover, and Good News overlap?
Why mess around with myth and scripture? Is there not a danger of reducing the biblical story to just another myth in the anthology of lore?
From “Dipping into Myth” on the official website of CS Lewis:
In much of his writing, Lewis is wanting us to be re-enchanted. The collection of essays by Lewis simply titled, On Stories is one gathering place. In it we get a fuller range of how and why stories engage us. For example his essay, “Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,” closes with an observation all of us experience inside Middle Earth and Narnia alike:
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’. The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it in any other way.
From The Letters of CS Lewis to Arthur Greeves:
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’. Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.
“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said”, CS Lewis:
“I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say. Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. As obligation to feel can freeze feelings. "
Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet :
“Our children... have a passionate need for the dimension of transcendence, mysticism, way-outness. We're not offering it to them legitimately. The tendency of the churches to be relevant and more-secular-than-thou does not answer our need for the transcendent.”
In other writings, Madeline L’Engle espoused the value of stripping away the coldness of very factual religion, with its absolute certainties and paucity of imagination. We do a disservice to our children and to us when we forget the Story in all its wonder. It is a story man has grasped for in other ways because the soul knows these myths must be true. We need them to be true. Man made up things in an effort to tell the Truth that God told using real things. Humanity has long detected the undercurrent of the pull of Truth. As JRR Tolkein would say, a myth is not untrue just because it is made up. It stirs within us the longing and imagination necessary to know the Truth. All we need is an awakened imagination to atune our hearts to the real in all its spectacular wonder, to fully comprehend the glory of the Messiah’s love for us.
In the Haggadah, the father tells the son unable to ask a question about the Passover, “this is because of what the Lord did for me.” The other sons ask about the rituals and and the wise son internalizes them, but the father owns the heart of the story. For him, it is personal. The Passover is a foretaste of the Good News. This is what Jesus did for me, for us. He left the safe paradise, entered the world of violence ruled by rebellious gods/ powers, and He dethroned them. Those who experience His death also receive His Life. We are no longer slaves. The dark powers of this age still have agency but they do not have a authority. The life of Jesus working in us looks like something. The Imago Dei of Philippians 2 speaks of Jesus and challenges us to allow the Holy Spirt to shape us in that very same image:
Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion. Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever, so that all created beings in heaven and on earth—even those long ago dead and buried—will bow in worship before this Jesus Christ, and call out in praise that he is the Master of all, to the glorious honor of God the Father.
Along our way, the Spirit reforms how we think and feel. It is not just our soul that is redeemed- it is our imagination as well.
So, on Passover, go outside, look up at the full moon that witnessed all these things from the very beginning. Now you are part of the creation story. The Messiah is part of you now and His Kingdom life, the New Creation, is abloom in you. Just as buds herald the arrival of Spring, our new way of being human heralds the New King.
Next year in Jerusalem!
