In just over 7 days … 3 hours and 20 minutes (not that anyone’s counting…) I will have the (hopefully) great joy of watching Avenger’s: Endgame; the thrilling conclusion to last Year’s Avenger’s Infinity War (which if you haven’t seen yet !!Spoiler Alert!! – I will be talking about it in this article!!)
I don’t think there has ever been a movie more hotly anticipated than Endgame – I was walking through Melbourne Central the other day and all I’ll say is that I wasn’t the only one gawking at the giant poster hung up for the movie!
The Hype is very real, and understandably so. The stakes have been set very high: Our Heroes have been brutally Vanquished, half of them have been turned into literal dust, and The Villain Thanos is proud and boastful of the victory he has achieved; in one of the trailers, he even says “The Work is done, I won.”
Yet Fans (the polite word for Nerds like me :P) know that something else is up. Thanos only has this victory because Dr Strange gave him the Time Stone (the essential thing he needed for Victory) to save Tony Stark’s Life. Why? Why did he do this?
When Stark asked this question of Dr Strange, his response was “We’re in the Endgame now…there was no other way”.
What he is saying is that there was no other way to Defeat Thanos, except to give him the Time Stone – effectively sacrificing it – and let Thanos have the temporary Victory, in order to ensure his full and final Defeat.
And I love that this movie comes out just after Easter. Because in a way, Easter is kind of like God’s own Endgame.
When Jesus came to Earth as the Messiah that God had promised his people for thousands of years, the one that was going to save his People and establish his Eternal Kingdom, you can imagine his disciples surprise when this happened:
“From then on Jesus, began to tell his disciples plainly that it was necessary for him to go to Jerusalem, and that he would suffer many terrible things at the hands of the elders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He would be killed, but on the third day he would be raised from the dead.” (Matthew 16:21, NLT)
Jesus’s disciple Peter did not take this news too well:
But Peter took him aside and began to reprimand him for saying such things. “Heaven forbid, Lord,” he said. “This will never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:22, NLT)
If I may draw a rough Analogy here, this is like the moment in Avengers Infinity War when Tony Stark asks why on Earth Dr Strange would give Thanos the time stone? Isn’t giving Thanos the time stone a bad thing? Don’t they loose?
In the Bible, Peter is also confused over what he is told must happen. Why must Jesus Die? For what purpose must he be handed over to the religious leaders and killed? Isn’t that a bad thing?
It’s not just a question that Peter asks: Every year I hear objections to Good Friday along the lines of “Why’s it called Good Friday if Jesus died? What’s so good about that?”
Essentially, the “Goodness” of Good Friday is this: even though the entirety of Humanity had sinned and turned their backs on God (Romans 3:9-12), and Sin had broken and condemned us all (Romans 5:12+15), God was not content to leave us this way.
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8, NIV)
Even though we became his enemies by sinning against Him, God made us his friends, and even adopted us as his own children (Romans 8:15-17) by sending Christ to die for our sins and raising Him back to life on the Third day. Even though we turned our backs on Him, and our Sin had broken the once wonderful relationship between Us and God, through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, God repaired the broken relationship – reconciling us to him – and redeeming us from our Sinful way of life to make us something completely new:
This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. (2 Corinthians 5:17-19, NLT)
So, while we wait to find out why Dr Strange gave up the Time Stone to Thanos, we can celebrate Good Friday and God’s own Endgame: giving up his own Son to die on the cross (and then raise him back to life!) in order to repair the broken relationship between us and God, to draw us into a relationship with Him and redeem us from the broken state our Sin has left us in.
This is a very brief article, designed to be easy to Read. To go more in depth into the reasons why Jesus died on the Cross at Easter, I highly recommend reading John Piper’s Book “50 Reasons why Jesus came to die”.
SkyLightz 