What Does Batman Know About Sin?

I think if Jesus lived today, he would have told less parables and made more short movies on his Macbook. Okay, that may be an overstatement but the point, I think, is true. Jesus was, in all likelihood, one heckuva story-teller. He usually communicated deep spiritual truth using average Joe kinds of people. Yet, sometimes his stories took fantastical and bizzare turns (see the Rich Man and Lazarus) to communicate that truth.

Stories are powerful, especially when filmmakers invest millions into making them as extraordinary as possible. But it can sometimes take a keen eye to glean a bit of truth from what often amounts to 90 minutes of explosions, violence, and love making.

Take the latest in the Batman saga, for example. In my humble opinion, the movie was such a smash hit (excuse the pun) because for the first time in any Superhero movie there wasn't this false dichotomy of Good vs. Evil. Many times in movies Evil is portrayed as Good's equal and opposite. Evil is sometimes cast as an alternative "kingdom" led my some genius bent on world domination. I submit to you that the evil Jesus talked about in the Bible was not of this brand. Nope, Jesus talked about an evil that was completely dependent on the good stuff that God already made. Sex is good (see previous post); adultery is bad. Desire is good; greed is bad. You get this idea that evil is a parasite. It thrives only on the destruction of the good stuff all around us. It isn't logical or coherent. It's chaos. Just like an apple that starts to rot, the "rot" isn't trying to turn the apple into something else. It doesn't have a strategy. It just destroys the apple until nothing's left.

The Dark Knight captures this perfectly. There's a scene in the movie where Joker just stole a whole warehouse of money. He's got $100 dollar bills stacked in a very neat 40ft high pyramid. A mobster is asking the Joker about his "plan" while henchmen are on top of the pyramid pouring liquid and watching it cascade all the way down.

"Plan!? There is no plan. I just want to see it all burn." The Joker flicks a match and a million dollars is instantly on fire.

That's evil. There is no plan. It's simply destruction. Sin, as we understand it, is simply destruction. It may look like a strategic way to get ahead but it ends the same way. The plan is burned up.

Earlier this morning, I read that fmr Senator and Presidential Candidate John Edwards admitted that the daughter of his mistress was in fact his. If pressed, I'm sure Edwards would agree, "Plan? There was no plan to my adultery." The "plan" could only end in destruction.