All Stories Have Happy Endings ... Even Yours

When I was four years old, my parents took me to see the new Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back.  If you’ve seen the movie, you might question whether or not it was appropriate for a four-year-old and to that I would say such was the experience of every Generation X kid.  And, in our parents’ defense, movies that in hindsight maybe weren’t appropriate for little ones, were frequently marketed as kids’ movies.  (Return to Oz, I am talking about you).

So, I was four years old when I saw The Empire Strikes Back and here’s what I can tell you about the movie and my reaction, as a four-year-old.  At the end of the movie—spoiler alert—Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are engaged in an epic lightsaber fight.  Darth Vader gets the upper hand, literally, when he slices off Luke’s hand.

And when the arm didn’t gush blood, my parents taught me a new word, “cauterize,” explaining what the lightsaber had done to the wound. 

Following this, in some very awkward timing, Darth Vader invites Luke to join him.  Luke scoffs.  Why would he ever join Darth Vader, the man who killed his father?  To which Darth Vader responds that he didn’t kill Luke’s father—he, Darth Vader, is Luke’s father.

“Noooooooo!” Luke screams.

Let me cut to the chase here.  Luke is rescued by Leia and Lando Calrissian.  And off they fly away.

The heroes escape!  That’s great!  That’s how every movie should end, except that not all the heroes escape in The Empire Strikes Back.  Han Solo, the handsome, roguish space pirate, has been captured by a bounty hunter, named Boba Fett, and has been frozen, seemingly rather painfully and perhaps fatally, in carbonite. 

And so, when the lights came up in the movie theater and the credits began to roll, I was sobbing uncontrollably. 

This was not how stories were supposed to end.

Flash forward two years later, when my parents took me to see another science fiction movie—this time a Star Trek movie entitled The Wrath of Khan.  Spoiler alert, the movie ends with Spock, Captain Kirk’s best friend, sacrificing himself for the crew.

Spock dies.

The lights come up.  The credits roll and my now six-year-old self is sobbing uncontrollably.

Seriously, who writes stories where one of the main characters dies in the end?  At six years old, I was not yet reading Shakespearean tragedies.  If I had been, perhaps I wouldn’t be surprised by the darkness in stories.  And I wasn’t yet old enough to read books with dogs on the cover and learn that any book with a dog on the cover meant that dog was going to die. 

To my four and six-year-old selves, all stories should have happy endings.

Anything else was just wrong.

I am reminded of several stories in the Bible where people face devastating and very much unhappy endings … or so they think.  Jairus comes to Jesus to heal his daughter.  Mary and Martha send word to Jesus that their brother, Lazarus, is sick.  In the case of Jairus’ daughter, Jesus is delayed by the bleeding woman touching His cloak and, in that delay, Jairus’ daughter dies.  Jesus also arrives too late to save Lazarus.  By the time Jesus gets there, Lazarus has been dead and buried for days.

And Jairus and Mary and Martha, who put their faith in Jesus are left saying, “This isn’t what was supposed to happen.  He was supposed to heal them.  And now they are dead.”

And in today’s reading from Mark 15:1-11, Pilate is desperate to avoid condemning Jesus to death.  He decides to let the people choose.  Free Jesus or free Barabbas.  To Pilate it seems like an easy choice.  Barabbas was a bad, bad dude.  He was a killer.  What had Jesus done?

But to Pilate’s surprise and I imagine Barabbas’ too, the people choose to free Barabbas.

And Pilate, I’m sure, was left saying, “Well, this wasn’t supposed to happen.”  Now, Pilate is forced to sentence Jesus to death.

And not just Pilate, but I’m sure all of Jesus’ family and friends, His disciples, those He had healed on the road, all His followers, watched Jesus condemned to death—watched Him die and were left speechless and lost.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

But all three, Jairus’ daughter, Lazarus and Jesus experience the same mind-blowing miracle.  Jesus raises both Jairus’ daughter and Lazarus from the dead—the daughter perhaps minutes or hours after death, Lazarus days after his death—his body already in the tomb.  And Jesus too, days in the tomb, self-resurrects. 

Over the course of our own lives, we will all experience death, both in the literal sense and the more figurative sense, a divorce, a job loss, a move, an addiction, an illness and so on.  There will be times in our lives when we will find ourselves in a dark place, when we say, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” but the Good News is that with God, with Jesus, we may experience these deaths, but we can also experience resurrection, times when we can see the smallest pinprick of light in the darkness, and grab hold of it.  We climb out of the darkness and find purpose and meaning.  We find new life.

I doubt that any of us, after going through a particularly dark time, has referred to life on the other side of that darkness as a resurrection, but that is exactly what it is, because when we do move through those dark times—when we find the strength to do that, to move forward, that is the Holy Spirit working in us.  Who else but God could be responsible for a resurrection?

The interesting thing about science fiction movies like Star Wars and Star Trek and fantasy series like The Lord of the Rings and The Narnia series, even the comic book movies by Marvel and DC, the Avengers and Batman and Superman—they all have deaths and resurrections in them.

Why do you think that is?

Death and resurrection.  It speaks to us.  It would not speak so strongly to us, if we had not experienced it ourselves. 

In Return of the Jedi, the sequel to The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo’s friends free him, and he is restored to life.

In The Search for Spock, the sequel to The Wrath of Khan, Spock is resurrected in a way that doesn’t even try to be subtle in its biblical allusions.  Spock is brought back to life thanks to a bit of world terraforming-technology—a technology called the Genesis Device. 

So think today about the resurrections you have experienced in your own lives and how God was working in you to perform a miracle.

Amen.