God's avatar
Editorial
by Everett J. ThomasPrint Article Email to a Friend
God's good news has been shared in hundreds of different cultures for thousands of years. Each time, the message borrows something indigenous to those cultures to make the truth clear.
The record-breaking movie Avatar can be useful in sharing the gospel with a non-Christian, if we think of Jesus as God's avatar who lived on this planet 2,000 years ago.
For those who have not seen the movie, here's a quick summary: A rapacious company maintains a military-style base on another planet in order to mine a mineral far more valuable than anything on earth. But the primary location of this mineral is beneath the colony where some of the planet’s inhabitants live. In order to infiltrate the colony, the company makes avatars of some employees. These avatars look like the 10-foot natives and can breath the air that is poisonous to earthlings. The main character is sent, via his avatar, into the colony to spy on them. Predictably, he falls in love and ends up switching sides.
But the main character in Avatar is not a Christ figure. The reason for the death and resurrection in the movie is revenge—a direct contrast to the way God came among us in Jesus. In the movie, the main character chooses to leave his paraplegic earthling body and transfer his soul to a perfect avatar body so he can help destroy the enemy.
But the movie can introduce nonbelievers to something central to the biblical story. Webster's dictionary defines an avatar as "an incarnation in human form."
The avatar principle has been around a long time: An attorney in a courtroom personifies a defendant who may be absent. A proxy carries a vote belonging to someone not able to attend the meeting.
In Matthew 21, the vineyard owner sends first some servants and then his son to confront the wicked tenants. During the Lenten and Easter seasons, the notion of Jesus as God’s avatar is central to the elements in Holy Week.
"I am in the Father and the Father is in me,"Jesus says in John 14:11.
Jesus is God in the flesh. The ultimate manifestation of Jesus' humanness was that he died a human death. This death represents the depth of God’s love for us.
"The whole wonder of the incarnation," Mary Ellen Meyer says in her letter to the editor, "is that our God, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, was willing to limit that power at a particular time and place within a human being."
This is what Christians remember during these seasons of the church year. Some make Lenten sacrifices as a way to connect with this self-limiting love. Some fast from Good Friday until Easter Sunday morning to commemorate Jesus's death.
In our culture, a popular movie can be a temporary vehicle to contrast with the assurance in John 3:17: God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
The God of perfect love chose to let himself be killed in order to redeem our sinfulness and transform the human community. He did this as Jesus, incarnated in the same human flesh we know.
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The church Father's worked long and hard to help articulate an understanding of the incarnation that avoids making Jesus anything less than 100% human. God the Son was not something "other than" human inhabiting a human form, like the main character in Avatar. Jesus is both 100% human and 100% God while only being 1 person. The similarities are interesting and may serve as a spring board into some other conversations, but the mystery that is the incarnation cannot be adequately explained by the pattern in Avatar. What I did find compelling were the missiological implications of the movie. Becoming like the other in order to reach the other is a strong message of the movie. They also do an excellent job of showing how incarnational missiology can become manipulative and can be used to do great harm.
My husband and I were just now having a Bible Study on the thought "Christ in you" as seen in Colossians 1:21-27. "the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord's people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." We are God's Avatars now that our Savior, Jesus, redeemed us and gave us the Holy Spirit. See 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: "...your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you..."