Iris and I are not movie people.
This is not a principled stand against cinema. It is simply a matter of priority. In the years since our daughter was born, life has arranged itself around the things that matter most to us — and somewhere in that arrangement, the theater quietly fell away. I could not tell you what is opening this summer, or which franchise has a new installment, or what the critics are currently debating. Our favorites — a small, well-loved catalog — come back around the holidays, familiar as old friends. That is enough.
If I watch anything new, it is almost always on a long-haul flight to or from the mission field: somewhere over the Atlantic or the Pacific, at thirty-five thousand feet, in the strange suspended hours between one world and another. Even that has become more rare. I find myself reaching more often for a book, or for the legal pad, or simply for the silence. The catalog of films I genuinely want to revisit is short, and I am not in a hurry to expand it.
But this is not a post about movies.
It is about something I noticed in them.
A while back, on one of those long flights home from the field, I watched a string of films in succession. They were different genres, different directors, different worlds. But as the hours accumulated and the credits rolled one after another, I was struck by something I could not unsee: the endings were all the same.
In every film I watched, the hero died.
Not ignobly. Not randomly. In each case, the protagonist — having arrived at the story’s fullest crisis, with everything at stake and no other option remaining — gave his life in an act of deliberate self-sacrifice to save others. The day was not won by strength or strategy or superior firepower. It was won by someone choosing to lay down their life so that others could live.
I sat with that for a long time somewhere over the ocean.
Hollywood is not a theological institution. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, in the business of proclaiming the Gospel. And yet here it was — in film after film, across genre and decade and budget — reaching instinctively, repeatedly, compulsively for the same story. The hero must die. The sacrifice must be real. The price must be paid by someone willing to pay it.
There is only one explanation for a pattern that persistent: it is not a storytelling convention. It is a memory.
Humanity has been groaning for this story since Genesis 3. We did not invent the savior figure. We inherited the need for one.
When the Serpent spoke to the woman in the garden, and the man listened, and the fruit was taken — something broke. Not just a rule. A relationship. The communion between Creator and creation, which had been the animating reality of human existence, was severed. And God, in the first act of what would become the longest love story in history, made a promise embedded in a curse:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” — Genesis 3:15 (ESV)
From that moment forward, the whole of human history has been oriented — consciously or not — toward that promised seed. The One who would come. The One who would absorb the bruise of the serpent in order to crush his head entirely. The One whose death would not be a defeat but the very mechanism of victory.
Paul names what the rest of us can only feel:
“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God… the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” — Romans 8:19–22 (ESV)
This is the ache that drives us to the theater. This is the hunger that screenwriters are feeding when they reach, again and again, for the story of the sacrificial hero. We have been built for restoration. We were made for communion with our Creator. And in the marrow of our collective imagination, we know — we have always known — that the road back runs through a death that is not our own.
Hollywood is not preaching the Gospel. But Hollywood is, without knowing it, speaking to the wound the Gospel was written to heal.
Not long ago, I came across the song Super Lover by the Birds of Chicago.
The refrain is arresting in its simplicity: We need a super love / Need a super lover. Band frontman JT Nero has described the song as a call to action during challenging times — an appeal for love that is, in his words, fierce, defiant, and brave.
Fierce. Defiant. Brave.
I read those three words and recognized them immediately. Not as a description of a sentiment or an aspiration, but as a portrait of a Person.
There is only one love in the history of the cosmos that qualifies as fierce enough to close the distance between a holy God and a broken humanity. Only one love defiant enough to walk into Death itself and refuse to stay there. Only one love brave enough to become what we are — flesh and bone and hunger and grief — in order to carry our sentence to its end and absorb it entirely.
The love of Christ is not a warm feeling. It is not optimism about the human condition. It is a fierce, deliberate, death-defying act of will — directed at people who, at the moment the act was committed, were entirely undeserving of it.
“But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” — Romans 5:8 (ESV)
We needed a Super Lover. And the Super Lover came.
There is a scene in John 2 that illuminates the nature of this love with particular force.
Jesus has just cleansed the Temple — overturning the tables of the money-changers, driving out those who had turned His Father’s house into a marketplace. It is one of the most vivid acts of authority in the Gospels. And the religious leaders who confront Him in the aftermath do something revealing: they do not dispute the righteousness of what He has done. They do not argue that the Temple was in good order, that the merchants were welcome, that the commerce was appropriate.
They question His authority.
“What sign do you show us for doing these things?” — John 2:18 (ESV)
In other words: By what right do You act here? Who authorized this?
Christ’s answer is among the most compressed and consequential statements in all of Scripture:
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” — John 2:19 (ESV)
John tells us plainly what the disciples only understood after the resurrection: He was speaking about the temple of His body (v. 21). The Temple they were standing in — forty-six years in the making — was not the subject of the promise. He was.
The authority by which Jesus cleansed the Temple was the same authority by which He would lay down His life and take it up again. He was not merely reforming a religious institution. He was announcing the terms of a new and final covenant: the old Temple, with its system of sacrifice and mediated access, was passing away. He Himself was the Temple — and His death and resurrection would tear the veil, collapse the distance, and restore what had been broken since the garden.
Commune with the Father. Through Me. When they destroy this body, and I rebuild it in three days, the way will be open.
This is the fierce love. This is the defiant act. This is the bravery the song reaches for and cannot quite name.
We are a groaning people. We were made for more than we currently possess — more than the fractured relationships, the quiet loneliness, the persistent sense that something essential has been lost and that no amount of achievement or accumulation or entertainment will restore it.
The movies know this. The songs know this. The human heart, bent as it is, still carries the shape of what it was made to hold — and it recognizes, instinctively, the outline of the One it was made for.
The groaning of creation is not a wound without a remedy. It is a longing with a name. The Super Lover has already come. He has already paid the price, rebuilt the Temple, and opened the way back to the Father. The question is not whether the remedy exists. The question is whether we will receive it.
Fierce enough to become us. Defiant enough to die for us. Brave enough to rise for us.
This is not a story Hollywood invented. It is the Story that invented Hollywood — and every other attempt the human imagination has ever made to tell itself why it aches the way it aches, and what it is still waiting for.
We need a super love. We have One.
In Christ,
Mathew
Beehive Global Collective
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27