*Spoilers for Star Wars: A New Hope and maybe the Empire Strikes Back (depending on how pedantic you are)*
I am a massive Star Wars geek and my obsession began with watching A New Hope. My mum picked up the original trilogy on video from a charity shop and I began watching what are now my favourite films. For a series whose religious influences is Buddhist thinking, they have a number of interesting ideas which we can examine through different ethical and religious lenses. I'd recommended the Gospel According to Star Wars by John C. McDowell if you are interested in this, it is a great book which manages to make a history of the Clone Wars sit happily beside Aristotle's philosophy. I am planning a lot of posts on Star Wars, but I thought I would start at the beginning with a scene that when I first watched it immediately reminded me of a passage in the Bible.
When I first watched this scene I was reminded of the famous Bible verse in 2 Corinthians 5:7 'we live by faith, not by sight ' or 'we walk by faith, not by sight' (depending on your translation). As Obi Wan encourages Luke to trust the Force over his own eyesight and technology so Paul in the Bible promotes to us trusting God over our own capacities. Now likening the Force to God doesn't really work, the Force isn't a sentient being but the general idea of trusting something beyond our own senses works. To stretch the metaphor a bit, as Luke used the higher power of the Force to live so we should focus on and trust God in how we live our lives.
Here is the wider passage from 2 Corinthians, because context is always key,
'Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.' (2 Corinthians 5:6-10)
To be honest, it's been while since I read this passage in its entirety and whilst I think that Paul was talking about trusting God it is also about how our faith in God transforms our lives. We ought to live our entire lives as followers of Jesus, this might not be easy but I do think that it is what this passage is calling us to. Paul often makes the distinction between the flesh and the spirit, how we live if we don't know Jesus and then how we should live if we do. We aren't just atoms walking around but people of God who are called to live as children of light. To quote the wise Yoda 'luminous beings are we, not this crude matter', we can choose whether to focus purely on the here and now or to live transformed by Jesus. So this idea of living by faith, not sight, is that we should live as who God created us to be.
Luke's focus on the Force over his targeting computer being an analogy for our relationship with God kinda falls down here because Luke's higher power isn't sentient or relational but our God is. We don't just follow God because it is the right thing to do but because we are in a genuine relationship with Him. Paul says that 'we make it our goal to please him [Jesus]', this is because in any good relationship you want to please the other person. I had a friend who cracked his knuckles but after I told him that I didn't like this he stopped. In the same way we want to respect God, especially because His knowledge and understanding is so above our own that He surely knows what is better to do.
The idea of when we choose to not follow God is also something which we can't really find parallels about in Star Wars. Sure you have fallible heroes and redemption arcs (which I will definitely be doing future posts about) but the lack of a relationship paradigm makes talking about forgiveness kind of pointless. Why would you even need forgiveness from a force of nature? But Jesus knows that we are going to fail in following him, we are all works in progress but every time we stubble can still go back to God. We may not always live as luminous beings but that is who we are. We can always choose to live like that, even if we have hidden all of our light under sin, that muck can always be washed off.
Thanks for reading this, enjoy the rest of your day and may the force be with you :-)
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