Superheroes
Superheroes were born in the United States. I’m not talking
about the characters themselves, but the mythology of superheroes. The stories
of Batman, Spiderman, Superman, and many more originated in the minds of 20th-century
American comic artists. Their stories quickly captured the imagination of their
American audience. Today they dominate at the box office, regularly grossing
over $1 billion per movie,[1]
suggesting that they tap deeply into our culture’s psyche. They resonate with
us in a profound way. They certainly resonated with me as a four and
five-year-old, when I would ask my mom or my brother to design various
superhero badges or emblems for me, so that I could tape them onto my chest and
then pretend to save the world. Because saving the world is what superheroes do.
But before a superhero saves the world, he must be motivated to save the world. This is why a crucial part of the superhero myth is the origin story, the explanation of not only how they got their superpowers but more importantly why they use them the way they do. At the heart of many superheroes’ stories is an experience of death and often violence. Bruce Wayne grows up to become Batman after witnessing the murder of his parents. Peter Parker learns to channel his spidey-powers toward fighting crime as Spiderman after his beloved uncle is murdered on the street. Clark Kent becomes Superman after the death of his adoptive parents prompts some soul-searching, and he decides to fight against whatever might cause the needless deaths of others.
All of this is to say, for a superhero, saving the world is simply an extension of an intensely personal quest to fight back against what has hurt him. A superhero fights bad guys because, first, he has suffered or seen the suffering of others at the hands of bad guys. At the heart of things, this is what a superhero is. Someone who fights bad guys. Someone who fights back.
Sinners: See Outcasts
Today’s scripture is a familiar scene for many of us. An anonymous woman, who is simply identified by Luke as being a “sinner,” scandalizes a Pharisee’s home when she bathes Jesus’ feet in her tears. The Pharisee has probably already heard enough about Jesus to suspect that something like this might happen. After all, last week we read that some of the Pharisees were calling Jesus “a drunkard and a glutton, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners” (7:34). But now that the Pharisee is seeing it with his own eyes, he loses whatever respect he had for Jesus. “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner” (7:39).
In the index of one of his books, biblical scholar Marcus Borg lists the word “sinners,” but instead of a corresponding page number there is a reference instead that reads “See outcasts.” Which is a helpful reminder that “sinner” is not just a moral category, not in Jesus’ day nor in our own. “Sinner” is more broadly a social category. A sinner is a part of “them,” not a part of “us.” A sinner is a “mess,” not someone who “has it together.” A “sinner” has no conscience, unlike us who do. A “sinner” is a “bad guy,” whereas we are “good guys.” A “sinner” is an outcast.
We may not actually use the word “sinner” out loud. After all, a spiritual person shouldn’t fling words like this around so judgmentally. But even so, it may get thought in our heads and felt in our hearts. It is human to divide the world into us and them, right and wrong, good and bad.
And it’s precisely here where the gospel pierces my soul and perhaps pierces yours. How do I treat a person whom I identify as a “sinner,” or “bad guy”? Like the Pharisee, I might do nothing at all outwardly other than give a slight frown of disapproval. I might keep my thoughts to myself, thoughts such as, “What’s that person doing here? They don’t belong.” In other words, my response is to separate myself from them. I exclude them, mentally if not physically. I want them out, elsewhere, not here. They are outcasts. I have nothing to do with them.
The Difference
Between Superheroes and God’s Kingdom
I wonder if it’s more than coincidence that this same thinking is baked into our superhero mythology. What does a superhero do with bad guys? He eliminates them. Either mortally or physically by confining them and removing them to the separate space of a prison.
To be clear, I think that much of what resonates with our culture from the superhero myth is quite noble. The superhero myth teaches us that meaning can be found in death and loss. It inspires us to stand up for the weak and the helpless, even against all odds. It enlists us in the struggle for justice.
But…and this but is the very difference between our world and God’s kingdom…but the superhero myth sees the problem as “bad guys” and the solution as redemptive force or violence. A superhero fights the bad guys. And eliminates them.
The Origin of a
Christ-Follower
What does Jesus do? Jesus loves the so-called “bad guy” or “bad woman.” He loves the sinner. He makes it a point to welcome them at tables, to break bread with them, to show them God’s love and forgiveness. And their response? Jesus explains the woman’s scandalous behavior: “Hence she has shown great love” (7:47).
I think here of the early Christ-followers who wrote about God’s transformative love, who said that how God treats us, becomes the way we treat others. “We love because [God] first loved us” (1 John 4:19). “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you” (Rom 15:7). This is what we see in the gospels, in our scripture today, where the “sinner” or “bad woman” or outcast who receives God’s love then overflows with love of her own. “Hence she has shown great love” (7:47).
If the origin story of superheroes is that they suffer loss and violence and thus decide to fight the bad guys, then the origin story of Christ-followers is the inverse. It begins not with loss but a gift. And it ends not with fighting but with kinship and connection. They receive love and decide to live in love. They do not fight the bad guys to eliminate them. They love them into the family, just as they have been loved into the family.
Loved People Love
People
One of the invitations that I hear in today’s scripture is to identify with the sinful woman. If I want to live in great love, as she does, then I must first open myself up to receive God’s great love. Which is to say, I am invited to recognize my own wounds and sinfulness and need. I am invited to recognize that good and bad, or sinful and upright, are not distinctions that divide one group of people from another, but rather are distinctions that run down the center of every heart. I am invited to recognize that in God’s eyes there is not “us” and “them,” but only God’s children, who belong to each other and to God.
The Jesuit priest Greg Boyle, who helped found Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention and rehabilitation program in Los Angeles, shares the two principles that orient the program: everybody is unshakably good, and we belong to each other. Sometimes, he says, he is asked: does he believe “every vexing complex social dilemma would disappear if we embrace” these two principles? His response is clear and simple: “Yes, I do.”[2] He puts it another way: “God doesn’t share in our moral outrage”—at bad guys or sinners. Moral outrage feels good but it actually gets in the way of love. God only sees woundedness and “invites us into [the healing of] kinship and connection.”[3]
God leaves us with a lot of details to parse out. I can already hear my inner superhero saying, “That’s all well and good, but how do you love a man carrying a gun, or a person intent on doing harm?” I don’t know that I have an immediate answer to that. All I know—from the example of Jesus, in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell—is that moral outrage and force will never bring us together into God’s family. It will only ever separate us, as it did when Simon the Pharisee looked with disdain on the woman in his home, as it does when people look with resentment or outrage upon others. The only thing that will bring us together into God’s family is God’s transformative love. Loved people love people.
There are a lot of details to parse out, but the foundational truth in Jesus is clear to me, and it’s opposite from what I learned from superheroes. The problem is not “bad guys” but forgetting or doubting that we are all beloved children of God. And the solution is not fighting but living in the great love we have received. And so the world is not saved through a righteous war between good guys and bad guys. It is saved through a table where all are loved into God’s family. It is saved through a love that redeems each and every one of us into the child of God that we are.
Prayer
Whose great love is the source and center
Of all things—
Soften our hearts
To know others as kindred who belong to us,
To know wrongdoing as woundedness,
To know your love as the power to heal and restore.
Inspire us to show others
The great love you have shown us.
In Christ, who came to save: Amen.
[1] See https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/creative-types/super-hero,
accessed February 17, 2025.
[2]
“Belonging Gone Right with Father Greg Boyle,” interview at Oregon Humanities, https://oregonhumanities.org/rll/podcast/episode/belonging-gone-right/,
accessed February 17, 2024.
[3] “Father Greg Boyle: Moral outrage can feel good. But it does nothing to heal our divided world,” interview at America: The Jesuit Review, https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/09/19/greg-boyle-homeboy-industries-241462?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA2cu9BhBhEiwAft6IxDg3J-mULYqH33D7Z6dt4L10XAoqVpDNEy75zQ1WiRGrTwHGBje2TBoCWOkQAvD_BwE, accessed February 17, 2025.
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