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Avatar’s Jake Sully
Jake Sully, the main character, is something of a lost person when he arrives at Pandora. He had lost his twin brother, and he talks like he’s open to anything new that might give his life meaning. Of course, the prospect of having a new body, even if only virtual, is attractive to a marine who has lost the use of his legs. Jake doesn’t know his purpose, so at the same time he’s helping the anthropologist understand and befriend the Pandorans, he’s also giving intel to the colonel for him to know when and how to strike the enemy. Jake is the ultimate double agent, although there is no attempt to fool the Pandorans who call Jake and the other virtual Pandorans “sleep-walkers.” Often our lives take odd, unnerving and faith-challenging turns, and we wonder what purpose we were intended for. In that sense, we’re like Jake who had to wait to see the purpose for the crippling he’d experienced. He had to go low before he could go high. Obviously, the “divine” dandelions that light upon Jake while he’s following the Pandoran woman through the jungle are the sign of some sort of calling upon Jake; the Pandoran woman recognizes that.
To add to the statement I made in Post 1 about Avatar, not only does Jake get persecuted and rejected, then come back in power to save the people whose body he had taken on, but he also dies in order to rise again in his permanent new Pandoran body. It’s not in the correct order to perfectly mirror Christ’s life, but the elements are there in any event.
The movie raises an important moral and biblical question: When do you turn against your own people? Jeremiah was called a traitor, and he did not go nearly as far as Jake. The prophet Jeremiah told the people of Israel that they should submit to Babylon, their pagan enemy. Babylon’s assertion of control was God’s own judgment upon them as His people. Jeremiah also told the Israelites who lived in Babylon to live, raise families, contribute to the society they lived in. This was serious medicine for the people accustomed to thinking of themselves as God’s chosen and at all other people as unclean.
Therefore, there is a basis for saying that one’s society should relent from pursuit of certain goals, even when it should submit to subjugation, but notice that Jeremiah, unlike Jake, did not take up arms against his own people. What is difficult is knowing when that has occurred. When does a society face God’s judgment such that countering political, even military, takeover by a foreign power is disobedience to God? The Christians in Rome had to face a similar question. Until the Emperor Constantine, Rome was in serious rebellion against God, but it was not a society that had covenanted with God, then defected, which was Israel’s condition. The Roman Christians lived, worked, served, even died for the society they lived in. When they were persecuted to death by the Roman authorities, they died for Christ, but in allowing themselves to be publicly humiliated, they were also dying for their society. They testified that they cared enough about God to die for Him, but they also testified that they cared enough about their society to be a witness to them of whom they should also obey.
Perhaps the appropriate tactic for a Christian to take in a modern society that has forsaken the God it once was in covenant with is some sort of combination of those two attitudes – a “prophetic” testimony to the society that it has forsaken the God it once served while also being willing to face persecution while trying to live and serve and testify of that God. What we cannot follow is a blind “my country right or wrong” attitude nor a Jake Sully “join the enemy and attack” attitude.
To be cont’d.