Superheroes

Sunday’s gospel story of the Transfiguration has always been a bit of an enigma to me.  I get that Moses and Elijah appearing with Jesus represented the law and the prophets, and that Jesus fulfills all the prophecy and embodies God’s law.  Jesus appears transfigured, as if arisen after His resurrection, and God’s voice identifies Him as His Son, but what other insights might we glean from this episode?  Then it struck me.  God said, “This is my beloved Son… listen to Him.”

Of course there are many things Jesus said, that we should listen to, but perhaps one of the most important is what He said to Pilot just before being condemned to death: “I have been born and come into this world for this reason - to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  (John 18: 37)  The truth Jesus testified to is embodied in His life and His words.  He certainly fulfilled scriptural prophecy, and He expanded on “the law,” as I mentioned in my blog 2 weeks ago.  Jesus explained that not only is adultery a sin, so is lust, and that rather than ‘an eye for an eye,’ we should turn the other cheek, and that we must love even our enemies.  This is the higher standard of Christianity.  This is the perfection Jesus calls us to, so that we may be more like our heavenly Father.

These are the truths of our Christian faith, but we live in a world where truth is considered to be subjective, to the point that each person can make up their own idea about what’s true and what’s not; what’s sinful and what isn’t; what’s good and what’s evil.  As I’ve been writing about this past month, the whole point of liberalism is to liberate people from the constraints of the objective moral truth.  Many people have come to believe that we’ve moved now from the Age of Pisces (the age of Christianity) to the Age of Aquarius, where the so-called new cosmology replaces religion.  This new form of liberal religion holds that rather than a single God who created the universe, the universe itself is God in which every bit of matter is part of God.  In this scheme of things, human beings are no different than any other life form, albeit more complicated.  According to the new cosmology, there are no moral absolutes, only the on-going evolution of all matter such that we have outgrown the old superstitions and morality of the past.  This new worldview holds that personal freedom is more important than personal responsibility.  The right to express ourselves sexually is considered more important than adhering to the antiquated ideas of marriage, monogamy, and sexual continence.  The most important value of this new cosmology seems to be tolerance of others, as long as no one gets hurt, and no ones’ freedoms are impinged.

In his Apostolic Letter, The Light of Faith, Pope Francis wrote, “Today more than ever we need to be reminded of this bond between faith and truth, given the crisis of truth in our age.”   As Christians we must first acknowledge and advocate the existence of truth itself.  Listening to Jesus, we know that truth exists, and can be known by reason and by faith.  For too many people, truth has simply become another word for opinion.   This is what is meant by “moral relativism,” your truth and mine can be quite different and each of us is entitled to make up our own truths.  But the thing is, following our own ideas about good and evil, thinking it is enough just to be a good person, falls short for one simple reason:  We are human.  We all want things that appeal to our senses, whether they are good for us or not.  We quickly rationalize that things are good if they feel good, and no one gets hurt.  But we are called to be better than this, we are called by God to be His sons and daughters and to become perfect as He is perfect.  We accomplish this through self-sacrifice, and most importantly by acknowledging the moral truths God has revealed to us through scripture and Jesus Himself.   Jesus exemplified this for us, perfect as He is, by sacrificing Himself for our salvation.

By acknowledging and adhering to the truth, the real truth, we transform or transfigure ourselves in the image of God.  Of course we will never be perfect, and we certainly cannot accomplish this on our own.  It is only by the grace of God that we can transform our lives and become more Christ like, and of course only by the saving grace of Jesus that we can become sharers in the divine life of God. 

On a lighter note, this talk about transfiguration and transformation reminds me of the stories and movies about superheroes.  In the old comic books, the slogan for the Justice League of America was, “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”  Many of the superheroes are ordinary people who are transformed in some way to become “super.”   Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, Steve Rogers and Tony Stark where just normal people before they were transformed into Spiderman, Batman, Captain America and Iron Man.   These superheroes all struggle to do the right thing, and although Tony Stark is a bit of a playboy, they all fight for the higher truth of good in order to overcome evil. 

Watching the movies, we identify with the hero, face dilemmas with him, struggle to make the right choices, and in doing so, grow a little in virtue with him.  This is what I like about the superhero movies, they are adventures in life and they depict the struggle of good and evil, acknowledging that evil does indeed exist, and we are all called to resist and overcome it.  This is a basic truth about life.  The superheroes fight for truth and justice, just as Jesus did.  In every superhero movie, the hero has to make sacrifices, whether in his personal life, or in the process of fighting evil.  So too, each of us are called to make sacrifices in order to lead a heroic life, struggling to increase in virtue while pursuing objective moral truth in order to overcome evil. 

Modern society often mocks Christianity as naïve, boring, or superstitious, but it takes courage to stand up for the truth, and to call attention to the fallacies of the liberal secular agenda in which there is no objective morality.  As Christians, we know that our love is part of a greater love, a Love that created us and reveals Himself to us in salvation history and in the life of Jesus, who Himself suffered for our redemption.  The bible itself is not just a book of rules, or proofs of our doctrine, but rather the stories of heroes of faith who followed the call of God, endured great hardships, and made great sacrifices in their journey to the Promised Land.  Jesus of course is the foremost of these, the culmination and embodiment of God’s law and His Love.  He calls us to be transformed, just as He was transfigured by the power and grace of God.  This is the path to holiness, to fulfillment, and to perfection, that can only be traveled by leading a heroic life of faithfulness to God’s Truth.