The Gospel According to the Guardians
In case you missed this phenomenon, from 2000-2005 it was very popular to write books called The Gospel According to _______, where the blank was filled in with some pop culture reference. These books were usually evangelical, and they revealed how one might find the (evangelical) Christian gospel message hidden—or not so hidden—in various movies, TV shows, or books. A quick Amazon search yields hundreds of results for these titles, where you can explore the potential gospel messages of Star Wars, Pixar, Coco Chanel, Winnie the Pooh, or, in a more recent offering, Ted Lasso.
I haven’t read any of these books, and I’m not recommending them, but I have always enjoyed the exercise of reflecting on the religious or spiritual themes in shows and movies. (If you’re bored, you can check out some previous musings of this sort on the Harbor Blog for Encanto and Stranger Things. For better writing than mine, here is Kathryn Reklis’s excellent Screen Time column in the Christian Century).
This brings me to early this week, when I ventured out to a real live movie theater to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. I was not going in the hope of finding spiritual truth; I just wanted to watch a band of misfits work together to battle evil across the cosmos to the tune of some 70s and 80s jams. The team—Star-Lord, Rocket Raccoon, Drax, Mantis, Groot, and Nebula—and the soundtrack did not disappoint.
I was pleasantly surprised to also find some fascinating layers.
One key theme, one moral question
[SPOILERS AHEAD: if you’d like to live that spoiler-free life, turn back now!]
The theme of Guardians 3, I think it’s safe to say, is friendship (as with many of the Marvel team-up movies). The mantra “It’s good to have friends” is a centerpiece of the narrative, and while it seems like an obviously true platitude, it is used in powerful ways. When said in the midst of captivity, on the precipice of tragedy, those words are an act of resistance. It is good to have friends, even if the world is evil and even if those friends may be lost.
The movie’s focus on friendship foregrounds a central moral question: (to use a Hebrew Bible word) who deserves our hesed? That is, who deserves our ride-or-die friendship, the kind of love that causes us to show up for others and fight for justice?
The colorful crew of characters on screen offer us three different answers to this question. For “the High Evolutionary,” the movie’s villain, the answer is: those who are perfect. His quest is to create a race of peaceful and creative beings who can inhabit a utopia—and he will ruthlessly kill anyone who stands in his way, or even his creations who fall short of his vision of perfection.
It is not just the Evolutionary’s violence that is a problem: it’s his decision to only show mercy or love to those he deems perfect. This narrow scope of love and justice reminds me of the warped vision of Nazism… or of the Christian God in some theologies.
We receive two better answers to the question “Who deserves our hesed?” from, respectively, Gomorrah and the Guardians. (Brief aside to the MCU nerds: if you haven’t seen this movie, you might be confused because Gomorrah is a classic member of the team. But in this phase of the MCU, after the Thanos snap and the blip, we have only a different version of Gomorrah from an alternate past, one in which she has never been part of the Guardians. Weird stuff, I know.)
Gomorrah’s answer is that we show up for ourselves and our closest in-group. Better than the villain’s perspective, but not quite a satisfying moral vision. The Guardians, however, offer a more expansive approach: yes, you better believe we show up for our kin, but we also offer hesed to the forgotten, the oppressed, the vulnerable.
Is this a gospel?
The distinction between these two answers comes to light during a typical decision point in the movie’s third act. Gomorrah wants the crew to run for it while escape is still assured, but the Guardians decide they will stay and risk their lives to liberate a group of enslaved children. Rocket Raccoon, the movie’s central figure, stretches the team’s scope of compassion even further, leading a charge to also save animals from destruction.
Now, make no mistake, this movie does not track closely with Jesus’ story. It will not deliver us a Star-Lord who mimics the Lord, embracing nonviolent solidarity with the marginalized. No, the Star version wields guns throughout the film, and like all MCU flicks, there is fighting and gunfire throughout.
For all that, it still caused me to ask myself, “Who deserves my hesed?” And it pushed me toward a better answer than the one that I, like Gomorrah, tend to give.
