2 When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan (Proverbs 29:2)
My favorite Christmas movie is Die Hard. The original. Not the mountain of sequels that came after. This classic cinematic dream of a movie is a standard for anyone interested in flawed leadership. The anti-hero, John Mcclane, is the quintessential every day man who struggles with the work/family balance. While he doesn’t fit the hero stereotype, he is a hero nonetheless. His moral compass might not point as North as a Captain America, but he still has a strong set of stubborn values. What is beautiful about our friend John is that he is not all that different than us. Perhaps his levels of sin and struggle are amped up in order to make the big screen story more appealing, but we can still relate to his wisecracks, bad day, and loosing his shoes. And he reminds us of good guys of Scripture.
In the Bible, we see heroes who are like us, not the chiseled cinematic standard we see at Redbox, but the flawed, broken, and fearful characters in a deeper story drowned by the grace of the only purely righteous one.
We must be careful when we see the “righteous” in the Bible not to think of the Hollywood hero that lacks many things that make an protagonist beautiful, but rather to think of our sweet Die Hard mercenary. In the Bible, there is only one “hero”- the rest of us live in His shadow. And while we are heroes nonetheless, we must remember that anything heroic we do is an endowment from God who lets us defuse the bomb and bring down the villain every once in awhile. Even the best of us are from time to time a heel who stumbles into grace. And this is a blessed thing. No longer is the pressure to save the world on our shoulders. We are freed from the Superman syndrome.
Today, be a hero. Be like John.
Matt simon blog 