As I look back over the totality of these 7 devotionals based on the movie “We Were Soldiers”, I wanted to go back to something I said in the very first sentence of the very first one – and then elaborate on it a little more than I did at the time. I guess to make my own Alpha and Omega statement. I started this series of devotionals saying, The movie “We Were Soldiers” starring Mel Gibson is one of my favorite movies, and at the same time one of the hardest to watch.
I want to revisit that one of the hardest to watch statement. We hear stories that our grandpas tell about the war…if they ever talk about it at all. We see stories on the news. We read stories on the internet. We read the books. But grandpa always leaves out the grossest parts. And books are easy to put back on the shelf. Like I did with We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, I closed the cover and gave it back to my father-in-law. “No thanks, that’s making me too uncomfortable to keep reading it. Oh, I know you were there and lived, but it’s makes me uneasy and depresses me to read about it.” So we close the book, and we change the channel, and we walk away. Clear our minds of the disturbing things we were reading. But the thing with reading is that if we want to get through a bad part and get on with the story, we can gloss it over. Skim it and hit the highlights. Like driving by a really bad car crash without looking, we can see enough to get the general idea of the bad stuff that happened but not get a good enough look to make us squirm about it later.
With movies, you can’t skim. You can hold your hands over your eyes and peak through your fingers if you want to, but movies show us things we can’t unsee. We forget words…the specific words that make us the most uncomfortable will be forgotten by tomorrow. But seeing men suffering the atrocities of war in graphic realism can’t be unseen. And I don’t mean the overly-done, artificially-excessive special effects that we see in some movies like the Matrix. I’m saying it’s really hard to forget unsettling realism like we saw in the beach storming scene in “Saving Private Ryan” and some of the napalm scenes in “We Were Soldiers” and the whole movie “The Passion of the Christ.”
Yup, I said unsettling like the whole movie “The Passion of the Christ”. I’ve only seen it twice. More like once and a half. I went to see in the theater, and later recorded it when it was on one of the movie channels on some “Free Preview” weekend, where I saw part of it then while I was putting that recording on DVD. Why is it unsettling? Because it’s very easy to be clinical and distanced and even supernatural about it and say things like “Jesus died for my sin,” and “Jesus died for you” and go along with my happy, Christian life. Because He’s God and He rose from the grave, so everything’s all good, and there’s nothing here that makes me uncomfortable – but when it comes to seeing him beaten by the Roman soldiers and the skin ripped from His bones as He was being scourged…and seeing the nails driven into Him and then lifted into the air on that cross…seeing the crowd taunt and tease Him as He hung on that cross being tortured to death. If you’ll pardon me saying so, it makes it all just a little too…human.
For me, anyway, far too often I have this “Superman” mentality about Jesus on the cross. “Nothing hurts Him, He’s Superman!” But He wasn’t some comic book superman on that cross…He was just man. Dying a cruel, tortured death. God come to earth to live out the law and be sacrificed to fulfill that law. To accomplish perfection. And when we talk in the Christian Code, if you will, like I said before it’s all nice and detached and almost cliché. And I can cheat a little more on my submission to God. And I can get a little more liberal in my “Oh that’s covered by Grace, so I’m ok” interpretations on justifying my actions. And I can feel a little more comfortable treating my fellow man like they’re not worth my time or my trouble or even a second glance when it’s superman up there on that cross.
But when the 100% God is also 100% man – and I can see that with my own two eyes. And I see His blood. And I see His pain. And I see His suffering. And I see what He went through for me…and it’s not in that “hands over my eyes peaking through my fingers way” that I usually try to look at that part, I’m convicted. When I see those images on that screen of the very real torture and very real crucifixion that Jesus went through, I see myself standing in front of a mirror…but instead of my face, I see the culmination of every sin I’ve ever committed. When I see those images on the screen, and Jesus’ death becomes, not just a story in the Bible that we tell our kids, but when the images on the screen make it seem “real” for the first time – I see every bad thing that I know about me. It’s magnified, and I see it more clearly than I’ve ever seen anything about myself. I’m convicted, I’m stung, I’m guilty, I’m ashamed, I’m unholy, I’m unworthy, I’m a sinner, I’m dirty, I’m a liar, I’m greedy, I’m selfish, I’m hateful, I’m unforgiving, I’m …I’m the one hammering the nails into His hands and His feet. It’s all my fault, and I’m the worst of everything I ever was.
Listen for the Whisper that tells you…yeah, you’re every bit of all of that. And He did it anyway, because He loves you that much. And, Hallelujah, because He did…you’re none of that anymore!
~Dwayne
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