“Dear Evan Hansen” is a coming-of-age story that follows a socially awkward and anxious high school senior who struggles to fit in. Following a tragedy, Evan gets caught in a web of lies which forces him to choose between telling the truth (something he doesn’t do well) or allowing his lies to hurt the people he cares about. If he tells the truth, he’ll be able to stop the damage his lies have inflicted on the family of a recently deceased boy, Connor. If he continues on his path of deceit, he’ll live under the false guise of a hero as he romantically pursues Connor’s sister, Zoe. As the walls of the room start closing in on Evan, his often-distant working and single mother, Heidi, finally catches him red-handed. 

Evan’s Dad left the family when he was just a boy and has been absent ever since. It’s not hard at this point to put the pieces together and realize that Evan’s desire to be known stems back from never being accepted by his father. The focus now turns to Heidi, who explains the day Evan’s dad left through the song “So Big / So Small” by Rachel Bay Jones.

After recounting Evan’s final goodbye before his Dad left in his truck, Heidi readily admits her inability to be the parent she wanted to be. 

And the house felt so big, and I felt so small

The house felt so big, and I—

And I knew there would be moments that I’d miss

And I knew there would be space I couldn’t fill

And I knew I’d come up short a billion different ways

And I did

And I do

And I will

And yet, her steadfast love for her son hasn’t faded. She remembers her son asking her at a later point, “Is there another truck coming to our driveway? A truck that will take Mommy away?”

Even when her son has broken her trust through lies, deceit, and motives of selfish gain for his own comfort, Heidi reminds her son of who she is:

But like that February day

I will take your hand, squeeze it tightly and say

There’s not another truck in the driveway

Your mom isn’t going anywhere

Your mom is staying right here

…

No matter what

I’ll be here

…

When it all feels so big

‘Til it all feels so small

We’ve all become accustomed to a conditional love that says it will stick with us if we continue to behave, check the boxes, or not mess up past a certain point. Brokenness runs deeply in each of our personal and familial histories. It’s easy to feel like the rope of grace we have been given is either too short or too frail, eventually and inevitably snapping, leaving us ousted from the love and commitment we so desperately want and need.

For Evan, it was an actual father who left. For me, it was a broken friendship that left me feeling like a failure. Maybe for you, it was a spouse or significant other who abandoned you when you couldn’t hold up your end of the bargain. Or a friend group that gave you the cold shoulder when your utility ran its course. Whatever it is, we’re all afraid to be “on the outside looking in…” to reference another song from the soundtrack. 

In the story of the prodigal son, in Luke 15, we see the heart of Jesus towards us weak and weary sinners and outcasts. In the story, the son who had once comped his father’s money, spit in his face, and squandered it all on foolish and carnal gains, now returns in desperate hopes to beg for a place to sleep and be fed in his father’s house. He probably felt like his rope of grace had snapped long ago. But what happens next is nothing short of breathtaking:

It says: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.”

It’s hard to put into words just how radical this kind of love is. The directionality of this love, from father to son, could not be overturned by any amount of lies, deceit, and terrible life choices that the wayward son could concoct. Unlike the failed parent who leaves us and forsakes us, God, though he catches us red-handed time and time again as we blunder through this life, sings the song of the cross over us, reminding us that, with him, “There will never be another truck in the driveway. I love you simply because I love you, not based on what you’ve done or not done, but by my own sacrifice. Come inside, the party has already begun. And it will last forever.”

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Why include such a petty detail here at the apex of the story? Some argue it adds a layer of forthrightness to the scriptures that make it more believable. In other words, while religious texts often seek to paint their followers in a positive light, this one doesn’t hide from seeing people as people. 

Undoubtedly this type of honesty strengthens the trustworthiness of the text, but it still doesn’t answer the question of why it’s here – at such a pivotal moment in the story. There is an abundance of sights and sounds from the first Easter Sunday to choose from so why land on this offhanded, gloaty comparison?  

One possible answer can be stated in the form of a question: instead of reading these words as John bragging, what if we consider him to be confessing?  

John has a front-row seat to the most exciting moment in history and yet he’s still stuck thinking about himself. Imagine sitting courtside to watch Caitlin Clark break the NCAA all-time scoring record, but you don’t clap because you’re trapped in your own head considering the ways you’ve made better life choices than your sister…or how that dumb friend from high school’s salary is double your own…or how the emotional intelligence of your supervisor could possibly be that low… or on and on we go. The scores we keep may be petty, but their grip on our thought life is undeniable. 

And maybe that’s the point. John’s confession is one of many invitations from God heading into Good Friday and Easter. Our intuitions during Holy Week often include doing spiritual things to feel closer to God. John’s approach here is to show how the doorway to things above, that is, holy (literally set apart) activity is never what we expect because it’s upside down. God is not saying to step up or speed up, to moral high ground, but instead to step down from the ladder of our ideal versions of ourselves and back into reality – to look at who we actually are in the dark recesses of our own hearts. Holy Week is all about acknowledging the things we actually think about because here is where we find our great need for rescue.    

Jesus died on Good Friday to deliver us from our daily scorekeeping and petty comparisons. He passed us up in our race to self-deification and showed us the end of those things is only death, but he rose again to bring us into a new reality, never again to be marked by our place in relation to others. Freedom looks a lot like self-forgetfulness, and the surest way to forget about yourself is counterintuitive: confess the scores you keep and watch them lessen their grip because the last will be first. Jesus wasn’t in the tomb awarding John with a first-place ribbon. Our races don’t flatter him, he’s never at the finish lines we expect, because he’s already out there working to find us apart from our best efforts. 

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Good storytelling usually leaves us in a state of surprise — not just with a well-placed plot twist, but with which part of the plot gives us the most “feels” and which part we walk away ruminating about. Dune is an excellent example of this. 

The lore and world of Dune would take too long to summarize here, not to mention the intricacies of the story itself — maybe you’ve seen or read it? — from the traditions of Bene Gesserit witchcraft to the geopolitics of the spice trade to the biology of the sandworms. But I will say, visually, Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of Herbert’s sci-fi classic hit on all cylinders. At least for this fan.

One of the more endearing parts to me amid the relative darkness of the story is how undeservedly and almost stubbornly the main character, 15-year-old Paul Atreides, is loved by the big three father figures in his life. I say father figures because they even seem to surpass the love of his actual father, Leto, who often seems more concerned about pruning his heir than spending quality time with him. 

Their names are Thufir Hawat, Gurney Halleck, and Duncan Idaho, all of whom play significant roles in helping to protect and secure the Atreides’ house. They’re elite warriors, master assassins in their own right, yet they share such a surprisingly soft spot for the boy Paul. Thufir (who is a much more developed character in the book) calls himself “an old man who’s fond of [him],” and is constantly watching his back. The younger Halleck wants to play-wrestle with him and oscillates between that and the actual sparring meant to prepare him for battle. Duncan, portrayed by Jason Momoa, isn’t afraid to embrace him or playfully tease him, calls him “my boy,” and ultimately lays down his life for him. The moment when he touches Paul’s thin arm and says, “You’ve put on some weight!” to which Paul says “Really?” to which Duncan replies “No” was the only point that I audibly laughed while watching the movie.

They’re light, humorous, and admittedly passing moments in the story. You might be thinking, “What about the sandworms!” Yes, the sandworms are epic. But as is the case in a grand but otherwise loveless story (sandworms don’t love), these things stick out. They’re meant to. And what accentuates the love even more is the solemnity of their situation and the significant threats that await the family on Arrakis. Paul’s personal struggles and sins stand out as well: his inner messiah complexes and nightmares that plague him through life, which he sadly gives in to at the end of the book. This disillusionment with the savior figure leads us all the more to ask who we’re rooting for and who or what is going to bring resolution. But this is a welcome twist, not unlike the “heroes” of the Old Testament who have more flaws than strengths, and who give us glimpses of hope, but ultimately not from themselves.

Maybe in Dune’s case, the answer is staring at us right in the face, through the B-level characters who love from the shadows. In the midst of one of the crueler depictions of humanity that you’ll see anywhere in literature or film (the Harkonnens), and the drama of war and betrayal, I find that my hope is less for a universe that Paul can conquer, or even for Arrakis to transform into a tropical paradise, but instead for a world filled with a love like Hawat’s, Halleck’s, and Idaho’s.

There are a thousand other things going on in Dune. I’m not trying to “solve” this story by any stretch. Its complexity and how it breaks the mold is what makes it so intriguing. That said, it’s this love from outside of us, and from outside our bloodline, that I can’t shake. 

It reminds me of the Book of Ruth when Ruth decides to return with her mother-in-law Naomi to her homeland after both of their husbands die. Her promise of “Your people will be my people, and my God, your God” is one of the more well-known in this section of Scripture. It’s a bright spot in an otherwise dark time of biblical history “when the judges ruled” (Ruth 1:1) and all Harkonnen-hell was breaking loose pretty much all the time. But Ruth is a glimpse of love that was all too rare those days. 

At the end of the book, Naomi is told by her friends, “Your daughter-in-law, who loves you, is better to you than seven sons.” Now, there’s a plot twist. No offense to my or anyone else’s in-laws, but aren’t our kids even more valuable? Yet here the Bible operates on its own terms. The surprise left hook of a love coming from outside our bloodline, apart from us altogether, pushes the story forward to the one we could call the ultimate in-law, the friend who sticks closer than a brother (Prov 18:24), Jesus Christ, who would come to love us apart from what we have to give him, by dying for us. God’s grace is given, not sourced or earned. It’s a complete surprise, so we can’t take any credit or consider it a “family trait.”

And yet it’s what we need to quell the tide of the messiah complexes in our hearts, our tireless attempts at self-deifying and self-aggrandizing. We need a love that precedes it and stays faithful to us when we slip back into it. A love that doesn’t keep score and that simply loves us for who we are, even when we’re up to our eyeballs in the sands of sin, drunk on the spice of power, and seduced by the allure of thinking that we’re enough on our own.

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The miracle of seeing two brothers continue to work together professionally without breaking up or killing each other is almost as remarkable as watching a love song be created ex nihlio right in front of your eyes, like when they riff “I Wish I Was” from chicken scratch ideas on napkins to chords and production and onto the big stage. 

Hands down, however, my favorite part of the film is everything that surrounds and is behind the harrowing song: “No Hard Feelings.” The lyrics bring us listeners face to face with our mortality – inquiring about the possibility of being ready to die when our time comes: 

When my feet won’t walk another mile?

And my lips give their last kiss goodbye?

Will my hands be steady when I lay down my fears, my hopes, and my doubts?

The rings on my fingers, and the keys to my house

With no hard feelings?

But more than this, the face of death brings a sharp, visceral confrontation with all the jealousy, lust, and nasty inner-angst we experience most days that end in the letter “y”. We’re invited to see how little these feelings do for us besides keeping us afraid and cold, ignoring all we’ve been given to have and enjoy. From there, we’re taken to a place of wonder at the freeing possibility of laying all these down and encountering supernatural laughter, light, and love: 

When my body won’t hold me anymore

And it finally lets me free

Where will I go?

…

Will I join with the ocean blue?

Or run into a savior true?

And shake hands laughing

And walk through the night, straight to the light

Holding the love I’ve known in my life

And no hard feelings

The song is poetic and palpably moving. But what happens next in the film is profound. The room of producers and support staff congratulate and praise the song: “Home run, boys – beautiful song” they’re profusely told. But rather than smiling and receiving the high marks, the brothers have taken a visible toll with this song, as if power had somehow gone out from them. They almost look like they’re crawling over the finish line of a long week at work after playing this one song.

And it’s here that we’re given a front-row seat to what truly draws people together. “It’s weird to be congratulated on mining the soul,” the younger Avett says before his older brother describes the elephant in the room as the fact that this is the hit song of the album – the one that’s going to make the money: “It’s the best song because it’s taken the most sacrifice to make. It’s taken the most living to make. You’ve sacrificed deeply, and the evidence of that struggle came out in something beautiful.”

The brothers have taken a resolute look at the lives they’ve been given and brought out things that we’re all afraid to confront. The song cuts through all the haze of life’s perpetual shallowness and “hey how’s it goin?…fines”. It takes the presence of death to see how often we’re overwhelmed by hard feelings that divide and leave us empty and cold. 

And yet we’re drawn in. We play the record over and over. Why is this? Because whereas other people’s strengths often keep us at bay and pretending, weakness invites us in and allows us to open up to our own inadequacies and experiences of being trapped. When someone metaphorically bleeds in front of you, a doorway opens. We’re brought into something more than the daily lists and measurements that wear us out with hard feelings of jealousy and insecurity. 

In 2 Corinthians 4:10, we’re told we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus. It’s a strange thing to say and perhaps an even more strange way to live. But these two brothers singing folk songs are showing the beauty in this strange way of being. The death of Jesus, like this song, gets to the point and silences all that traps us because our trappings are draped on his shoulders as he is strung up on the tree. It’s in his death we see with clear eyes that there really is a Love that rests at the heart of the universe. A doorway opens in the wound in Christ’s side, his poured-out blood making a way for our insecurities and shame to be absorbed and destroyed in the shame that Jesus bore on the cross. It’s an Active Love that finds us and replaces our coldness and the very existence of enemies with friends. Because in the story of Jesus, we were the enemies, and he died to make space at his table for us. In him, we have no enemies…and no hard feelings. 

.

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But it’s this element of finding love particularly in small towns that’s got me thinking this year. I suppose, if you’d prefer, instead of Hallmark it could be Austenian images of Mr. Darcy traversing the countryside to court Elizabeth. My wife’s a big fan and we’ve watched our share of Austen films together. (Our daughter Jane’s name was inspired by one of the sisters in Pride and Prejudice.) But it’s hard to miss the pronounced theme in Austen’s novels of finding and experiencing love in the outskirts.

Well, you might be surprised to know that the Bible has a compatible view of love, and where to find it. But its story is anything but predictable. It goes against every bit of human intuition and appears (at least at first) in the unlikeliest of places. 

Nestled deep away in the middle of the Old Testament, in Song of Songs chapter 3, we meet a young woman who is in despair because she can’t find her fiancé. At wits’ end, she says, “I will rise and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I sought him [there] but found him not.” But then after she passes outside the city gate, past the watchmen on the wall, she finds him — in particular Darcy-fashion — coming up out of the wilderness toward her, his heart brimming with joy. A happy ending, to be sure, but a notable contrast between her distress and her relief, divided by a simple city wall.

Now, for us, as modern readers, often conditioned to reading the Bible more scientifically than artistically, this can all seem so arbitrary. Why does it matter where he was found, but that he was found? Well, fortunately for us, God isn’t like us. He’s a much more creative storyteller and always has his eyes on the smaller details, catching us off guard with things that confound human reasoning. 

The truth is, it matters greatly where the woman found her husband-to-be because when it comes to the Bible’s hometurf, different locations symbolize different theological realities. The Apostle Paul isn’t shy about this in Galatians 4 when he likens the physical city of Jerusalem (and the temple therein) with Mt. Sinai, and with the old, lawful covenant of “Do these things and then you will live” (Lev 18:5). The woman is a poetic picture of something beyond herself, as is the rural landscape she finds love in. She’s a picture of the bride of Christ finding Jesus outside of or apart from the trappings of the Law. 

This is also why Jesus was born in small-town Bethlehem, grew up in the Podunk town of Nazareth, ministered to the tiny villages of Galilee, and even more, why he died for us “outside the city gate,” as the author of Hebrews so helpfully reminds us.

The apostles are adamant about this. The prophets insisted on it — both where he would be born and where he would die — for the sake of a pure, undiluted gospel. Because, law and love don’t mix. The law demands something from us; it remembers past offenses. But love gives, and keeps no record of wrongs.

The New Testament is more “Quaint Christmas village” than we tend to think. It’s a village far outside the city limits of our work, hectic lives, responsibilities, moral accolades, and the high expectations that so many people place upon us and that we place upon ourselves. The gospel tells us — and the stories show us — that the law is behind us, not in front of us. So, with a sigh of relief, we can rest in the countryside of God’s grace, knowing that he was restless to come and love us to the uttermost — to find us, in fact — by coming all the way down to our hometown and dying on a cross in our place.

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Netflix’s Black Mirror borrows from this thematic tactic, but brilliantly versions it up for the 21st century audience. Creator Charlie Brooker presents tech-based stories that are so arresting and strangely believable that they cause viewers to look around as the credits roll with a creeping fear that they may actually already be living in the same world as the show. The aliens and talking dolls of The Twilight Zone are replaced by next-gen social media apps, terrifyingly sentient AI, and implantable computers. Suddenly the horror isn’t so far-fetched.

In fact, Black Mirror’s hiatus during the Covid years seemed like no hiatus at all, just a way to allow a real-life season of the show to take the stage. Paranoia, global disharmony, and humanity’s lack of control were played out in every corner of life. Twitter became awash with Black Mirror memes and attempts at (dark) humor. “This new season of Black Mirror is a little too close to home”, etc. As I mentioned before, the recurring theme of near-future technology betraying its users runs like a thread in every installment of the anthology series. In this way, the show highlights the worst-case scenarios of our present technological trajectories.

This viewpoint pushes back against a more rosy, humanistic view of the future. Those who prognosticate, saying, “With the right people in power and with new data and communication, we can solve all our problems” are proven fools in the world of Black Mirror. Maybe more technology in the hands of flawed people yields middling or even bad results. Or to borrow again from the forerunning Twilight Zone, maybe getting what you want is a curse.

Example: In an episode entitled The Entire History of You, people are offered a small implantable device that records all their experiences and saves them for later playback. A dashcam for your entire life, if you will. And of course, you can share these recordings with others. The central married couple enjoys using these devices to relive fond memories later on. But this enjoyment evaporates as the husband begins suspecting his wife has been dishonest with him. He obsessively combs through his recorded memories for evidence of infidelity and throws clips at his wife to demand explanations for tiny comments or glances. The entire affair boils over into violence and a dark ending for everyone. The technology that offered joy and shared recollection has instead given fuel to sin, jealousy, and unforgiveness.

Black Mirror is not what one would call a “feel-good show.” There is very little light in the universe of this program. And yet, I think God has embedded some brilliant truths here that teach us about the interplay between law and gospel.

Like near-future technology, the law of the Old Testament places the burden on humanity to save themselves. It tells us that with the right behavior, and with the right tools, we can elevate our station before God.

But here’s the thing: getting new running shoes doesn’t magically make you a runner. Getting a pricey new journal notebook doesn’t make you a better writer. Picking up a new Bible or devotional book doesn’t make you more pleasing to God. In fact, these things can soon become the tools that mock you for your failure if your measurement for success is high. The shoes don’t get used enough. The notebook keeps too many blank pages. And the Bible and devotional are not read enough. In these times, we feel worse, not better, when we realize that we’re still the same broken people as before even though we feel like we should be better now. Rather than save us, these endeavors humble us. They show us that our sin is still inside no matter what we try to do to extract it or purify it ourselves. We’re like the doomed Black Mirror characters, looking around in shock. Aren’t things supposed to be better? Why are they worse? We’ve advanced so far as a civilization and things are still so bad!? To paraphrase Paul in Romans 7, “Who will save us from this world of death?”

And that’s where the gospel rushes in, wiping off the black mirror that records and plays back our faults and helping us see through a crystal clear glass instead to something else, to someone else. The answer isn’t our reflection, it’s the windows of Jesus’ grace. Once we stop gazing at ourselves for help, we can see Jesus as the one who takes the burden off our shoulders, and even “forgets” our sin (Heb 8:12), at the cross. 

Jesus doesn’t offer us some tools and technology to pull ourselves out of the grave — none such tools exist today or ever will. Instead, Jesus himself pulls people out of graves with his own nail-pierced hands. His resurrection is ours when we believe. With the black mirror of the law, this is impossible. But with Jesus Christ, all things are possible.

Here in the 21st century, this gospel helps us navigate a confusing and increasingly bleak feeling culture. This gospel invites us to not rely on humanity quite so much. It invites us to let go a bit more, to be people of grace to those around us. It invites us to interact with the tools and personalities of the world without pouring our hopes into them. So when people let us down, when tech lets us down, when sinful people keep doing sinful things even with all the right data available to them, we can lean on Jesus. We can lean on our church. We can be not dismayed, but know that our Savior lives. The black mirror won’t save us. Jesus will. Always.

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I say ‘strange’ with a loving undertone, mostly because, unlike most holidays that people celebrate around the world, this particular holiday is meant to celebrate something that didn’t happen. It’s not for remembrance of independence, or gratitude for a certain person or people. It’s not for a great victory or celebration. Instead, it’s to remember a failure. 

If you aren’t familiar with the holiday, the gist is that back in 1605, a man named Robert Catesby and his co-conspirator Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the British Parliament (and by doing so, kill King James I in the process). The plan was to hide barrels of gunpowder in the basement of Parliament, and then blow them up when the king was in the building. Fawkes was caught a few hours before the plan was hatched, thus saving the king and the Parliament building that still stands today. The catalyst was religious freedom for Catholics in what was then a Protestant country. 

There is even a children’s rhyme that perhaps some of you know thanks to the movie V for Vendetta, which used its phrasing as part of its memorable dialogue:

Remember, Remember the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

The celebrations that happen on this day often include fireworks and huge bonfires that often have effigies of Guy Fawkes himself burning in the midst of it. Like I said, this holiday is … unique.

As I was making my chili and clearing my yard to make way for the bonfire, I began to think about another holiday that, similarly, is a celebration of a seemingly failed attempt to overthrow a government. I’m talking about Good Friday. To those living during the death of Jesus, it would have been anything but “good” – let alone something to celebrate. The promised king had died. And he died the gruesome death of a criminal no less. The man who they thought would free them from the bondage of Rome now lay mangled and lifeless in a tomb that wasn’t even his, hidden by a stone, as immovable as their own metaphorical chains. Fear would have been rampant, buoyed by unending despair. Where there once was hope, now lay death and emptiness. By any definition of the word, it had been a failure.

What they didn’t know was that the earth was about to loosen its grip on the God of the universe, the resurrected, perfected, and victorious God-Man Jesus Christ. What seemed to be a heart-wrenching failure was the unstoppable and emphatic final overthrow of death itself, brought on by the very death that sin tried to devour. Three days later, the stone gave way to the living Rock, who walked out of the grave and into our hearts, where he will stay until we are bodily united with him in life eternal. 

As I sat by our bonfire that night, I let these thoughts flicker in and out of my mind as I watched my family enjoy each other’s company. Thank God for the failure of Black Friday, for the scandal of the effigy of the Son of God himself amid the fires of judgment in our place, for without it, without Him, we would not have seen the sunrise on the victory of Easter morning. And so, I can let another rhyme bounce along in my thoughts as I refill my cup and laugh at my kids’ antics:

Remember, remember, the last great Passover,
Where true Life was hid by a stone.
Three days he did slumber,
Then out he did thunder,
Breaking our chains and our yoke!

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When we parent our kids, especially for those 18 years we have them in our homes, we take them through the whole story arc of redemptive history. In the beginning, when they are young, our care for them is very one-way. They are born into our families by grace, not by any choice of their own, and we love them unconditionally, even when they can’t sleep well, or when they’re sick, or when they fuss. When they get a little older, this kind of love continues, but we also start to teach them the difference between right and wrong and that there are consequences for their disobedience and sins. You could say that in some ways we become the voice of the law to them, with various forms of discipline, teaching, and instruction becoming more prominent. We don’t make this the main mantra of our home, though. Grace always wins the day when our kids are unable to obey or listen to us. Their sins grieve us, yet we remain their parents nonetheless, on their good days and bad days in equal measure. In this, we image the New Testament to them — how even in this “Old Testament” era of their lives, mercy is greater than sacrifice (Hos 6:6) and love is greater than law (Heb 10:5-10).

As they grow into their teenage years, discipline changes. Disobedience often becomes more frequent, and they might start to look like a prodigal, wanting to forge their own path. At the same time, we realize that our lawful words have less and less effect on them, and they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, regardless. We still give advice and warn them of the consequences of their actions, many times with tears. But, our parenting morphs into less badgering and more quiet encouragement, promising that we’ll always be there for them, come what may, even if their lives tailspin out of control.

When they turn 18 and leave our homes, that’s when things really change. No longer are we their guardian. No longer are they under any house rules. Even “obedience” language goes away. There are no “do’s and don’ts” or any law-like preclusions. No sticker charts or chore lists. Just love and freedom, like it was in the very beginning when they were infants. 

Galatians 3:23-26 says, “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”

Paul is saying that the law was like a guardian in the home until Christ came — like Vin Diesel in The Pacifier — but when Christ came the guardian was out of a job, similar to how adults are no longer under an in-home nanny or tutor, or under those kinds of parental roles anymore. We are children of God through faith alone, clothed with Christ, not the law.

So, as parents, our final word is the word of the father to the prodigal. In the face of his son’s waywardness, he is no longer judge or discipliner. He doesn’t hold his sin over his head like a mirror. He simply runs to him, embraces him, and says, “Let’s have a feast and celebrate!” And so the story goes, that, in Christ, God has the same kind of unconditional, new-testament posture toward us rebellious sinners. This is good news for parents and non-parents alike. To those who grew up in a loving home and those who didn’t. To moms and dads who hit home runs and those who are weighed down by their parenting failures. For God is the true Parent, and we are forever saved and defined by his matchless love, not by our works.

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I’m always struck by how these types of things are received in large, public venues. Of course, we clap and appreciate what these people have done. As we should. Especially the bone marrow donor! But there’s often a sense to which they poke back at us too. If we haven’t done what others are being recognized for, we might start to feel the tiniest bit of shame or guilt creep up within our hearts. Comparison games run amuck. And if we have done them, then we might wonder why we’re not out on centerfield ourselves, getting the same recognition.

Of course, there are more personalized, self-initiated, and therefore more devious forms of this, what we sometimes call virtue signaling, or simply wearing our acts of charity on our sleeves. Social media has exacerbated the problem to the moon and back. But whatever the source, it’s quite the predicament. If we’re honest, no matter who we are or what we’ve done, chances are we prefer our accomplishments to lean more public than private. And yet it doesn’t do a lot of good for us. The more we brandish our acts of righteousness, the worse versions of ourselves we tend to become.

This is why Jesus’s spin on all of this in Matthew 6 is so refreshing. And shocking. In it, he instructs his disciples and the listening crowds to not be like the hypocrites who give in order to be seen by others. He calls them “those who live out of the synagogue,” or the law-center of religious and social life. Instead — and this is the kicker — we shouldn’t let our left hands know what our right hands are doing so that our giving is done in secret (Matt 6:1-3).

At first glance, the teaching appears simple enough: check your arrogance at the door and let your acts of charity be done privately. And that is certainly the point. At least part of it. But, I’m just as interested in what Jesus says before the privacy clause, about our hands. Because, if you think about it, there’s more going on here than privacy toward others. There’s also a privacy toward self that Jesus desires. “I want your hands themselves to be oblivious to what’s going on,” he says. This type of ethical living is on another level, better yet, another planet. It supersedes the moral because the moral application to Matthew 6 would be to simply try harder at being private with our acts of generosity. But, that doesn’t cover the private-to-self dimension of what Jesus is actually going after. Again, he wants a type of self-forgetfulness that can only come when we’re not focusing on the good work itself. Because the instant we do, our left hand starts bragging to our right hand, and we start feeling a little better about ourselves on the basis of morality alone.

There’s a lot of grace in this for us. These big ethical markers (or seemingly so) of Jesus’s kingdom aren’t simply standalone ethics, they’re impossibilities — who can actually be that forgetful and blind-to-self apart from cutting off one of our hands entirely? See, these things lead us to focus on something other than our works, that is Christ crucified, the one whose left and right hands were stretched far apart and pinned to a bloody cross, and who gave to us the riches of his grace by dying in our place. 

Tim Keller calls this a “grace over goodness” way of living. When our attention is on how much we’ve been loved, we realize we don’t always have to know what we’re doing as Christians. We don’t even need to know what ‘good’ is (though we might). We certainly don’t need the recognition, because, again…what for? Instead, forgetting ourselves and remembering him, like a branch to a vine we trust Jesus will be the one to bear fruit in due time. And because it’s God we’re talking about, he will surely do it. Even better: if we’re in Christ, he already has.

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It’s nostalgic. It’s funny. It’s visually striking. The acting is superb. The music’s catchy. The interplay between the Barbie world and the real world is creatively portrayed, without being too cliche. In all, the movie has a lot going for it. It’s, just, fun.

But there was something that left us feeling hollow afterward. On our walk home, after a few minutes of internal processing and silence, my wife broke the ice: “I think it needed a love story.” “Mmm,” I agreed, “Tell me more.” She elaborated: “I just wanted to see some kind of sacrifice or deference, but it kept hitting a glass wall every time I thought it might go that way.” 

If you haven’t seen it, there are several moments in the movie where Ken declares his love for Barbie, only to be rejected with a “That’s really not what we need right now”-type sentiment. Even the God-figure (Barbie’s creator), after teasing us with a tear-inducing speech of “You’re perfect, in spite of your flaws, Barbie,” (the most powerful moment in the movie, in my opinion) quickly pivots to the “You can do anything you want” messaging that rounds out the rest of the film. It ends with the narrator holding out hope that Kens would rise up in status with Barbies in Barbieworld just like women would rise up in status with men in the real world. And it all just kind of…happened…without a shade of self-giving or sacrifice from any of the characters. It was as if the messaging itself was the main character more than Barbie, who just kind of dragged everyone along to the not-so-surprising conclusion.

Now, I realize that a love story in the Barbie movie in the year 2023 was never going to happen. But it’s interesting to consider why it couldn’t happen. Love requires sacrifice, which implies neediness. It’s built on the foundation of putting others first, which implies distinction. It often catches us by surprise, because the one who we think has some kind of priority suddenly desires to become lesser for the sake of the other. But all of this has a hard time living in a story where equality, independence, and self-aggrandizement wear the cape. It’s like a squishy ball when you press down on the center and the internal contents get pushed to the outside. Some themes just can’t co-exist; instead, one thing gets decentralized at the expense of the other. In this case, love.

It’s a somewhat surprising turn for director Greta Gerwig who isn’t aloof to sacrificial love in other works of hers like Little Women and Ladybird. But maybe that’s the point. We’re all a bit like her, trying (even unintentionally) to move on from love – to find ultimate meaning in the self rather than in the objective deference and sacrifice of another.

When it comes to the divine romance between Jesus and the Church, it’s predicated on the fact that the bride and the groom are different. We are not God, and he is not us. He’s the stronger party who willingly lays down his life for us, the weaker party. He puts us first, even scandalously, by becoming “just a Ken” in our place. For love to truly take root, someone needs to give, defer, and suffer. But, as it is, the clamoring for equality and extreme independence poisons the roots of romance, just like the law drives a wedge between God and people because it’s built more on posturing and work than receiving and grace.

Christianity isn’t a story about rising up to be like others, nor of a God who tells us we can accomplish whatever we put our minds to, but of a lover stooping down low and sacrificing himself for those he loves. Directionality is important, both in spirituality and storytelling. All it takes is a little bit of love to set things in the right direction (down, that is, not up). Not just in a marriage, but in all kinds of relationships, big or small — a love that considers others more important than yourself (Philippians 2:3), and a love that makes us okay standing in the shadows while others shine.

I like to think that if the story continued, maybe Ken and Barbie would come to see this. Barbie 2, anyone? But then again, without love, it would keep getting lost in all of the strivings for sameness. Thankfully, love comes from above not from within, so our hope is set not on getting this all figured out, but by fixing our gaze on a bloody cross where heaven kisses earth in a way that is undeniably self-effacing yet breathtakingly beautiful.

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