The reviews of Jupiter Ascending have not been kind, and I suppose I can see why. I am second to none in gape-jawed amazement at The Matrix, with which the Wachowskis exploded onto the film scene, not only revolutionizing the way action sequences ever after would be filmed, but creating one of the most potent allegories of Christ’s redemptive work in recent memory. Though vast in interstellar scope, Jupiter Ascending shares none of The Matrix’s metaphysical or genre-shaping ambitions. Instead, it puts me in mind most of The Fifth Element, and if that silly science-fiction romp is the standard, then Jupiter Ascending is good (and notably clean) fun.
Royalty is a major theme in Jupiter Ascending: it turns out that the earthling Jupiter, the titular character, by pure accident is a genetic duplicate of a now-deceased intergalactic matriarch and vicious capitalist empire-builder. As such, she is by nature “Entitled,” i.e., royal. There’s a rather lovely scene (although, admittedly, somewhat preposterous) in which bees engage in a bit of synchronized swarming in recognition of her majestic status. (It appears bees have something of a sense for this sort of thing.) While this scene has been widely mocked on the interwebs, I thought it hit on what most people, around the world today and throughout time, have intuitively accepted as true: there are some people who are, to borrow from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, more equal than others. Take, for example, the popularity of Downton Abbey: hordes and hordes of Americans, reared on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, adore a story built on the odd conceit that some people are born to rule, and others to serve them.
In God’s providence, I saw Jupiter Ascending the day before I preached Mark 1:40-45, in which Jesus heals the unclean leper. The leper’s problem was not so much that he was diseased, but that he was ceremonially unclean, and thus unable to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 13-14) and prone to being shunned by those who wished to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 5:3). Under the Old Covenant system of worship, cleanliness and uncleanliness were a symptom of man’s alienation from God: all you had to do was interact with a person with a skin disease, and your inherent sinfulness would, as it were, bubble to the surface and make you unfit to enter the presence of the LORD God to offer up a sacrifice in worship.
It seems to me that (what seems to be) the native human instinct for respecting persons of royal birth is, in some way, a reflection of the Old Testament laws of purity and cleanliness. There are some people who are more holy, more clean, closer to God than others, and such persons must be respected: even if their personal character is not respectable, their status demands our reverence and awe.
In light of this, Mark 1:41 is shocking: “Moved with pity, [Jesus] stretched out his hand and touched him….” Leviticus 5:3, if not the rest of the Old Testament Law, is extraordinarily clear: to simply touch the unclean is to become unclean oneself. To push the double negative past the breaking point, Jesus not only is unafraid of becoming unclean, but bears a holiness so intrinsic and so powerful that he obliterates the category of uncleanness: he makes all things clean. He cannot be made unclean; instead, the power of sin is so conquered by his person that the unclean has no option but to become clean. “And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:42). Herein lies the immensity of Christ’s work on the Cross: because in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, even the ways in which human societies have intuitively ordered themselves since time immemorial are shown to be mere shadows and types, overturned and abolished in the person and work of our Savior.
(Here, then, lies the peculiarly Christocentric genius of the American experiment in republican self-government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” No royalist, enmeshed as she or he must be in the Old Covenant perspective on the world, could say such a thing.)
We respect royalty because we respect God: that is how we were made. Nonetheless, Christ’s work on the Cross destroys the royal conceit: there is no more clean or unclean, but in Christ all things have become new. “[T]hat is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19)
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