I’ve always loved Superman. The power. The speed. The whole “good fighting evil” thing. Growing up, the story offered me the perfect combination of inspiration and escapism.
In primary school, I regularly held the unenviable rank of being the shortest kid in the class. Thankfully, I always had great friends and good teachers, but being an undersized refugee in a nation besotted with sport, strength and skill wasn’t the best recipe for self-confidence. One of my coping mechanisms was to imagine that I was Superman. He had just the right amount of what I thought would make me whole – height, strength, speed, popularity and, of course, the ability to fly.
As time passed, my heroes got less super but more relevant. Less famous but more encouraging. Less glittering but more relatable. My parents, grandparents and friends (well, some of them). My old playground longings for extraordinary strength came – it turned out – from ordinary people in my life. Real life demanded that abstract fantasy be supplemented with something more concrete, more personal, more resonant.
The need for relatability in our heroes is not lost on the writers of fiction. Superman was a refugee. Catwoman is a plane-crash survivor. Iron Man was a prisoner of war. Spider-Man was an orphan. Superheroes’ backstories are replete with suffering and survival. Adversity helps us identify with them. Our celebrity real-life heroes bear similar scars. Nelson Mandela’s 27 years in prison. Helen Keller’s physical impairments. Barack Obama overcoming the loss of his father. The path from heroism to human hearts often runs through the gauntlet of struggle.
Joseph Campbell, the 20th-century scholar of comparative mythology, suggested that our interest in heroes is a clue to our spiritual nature, striking chords with latent human needs. The desire for comfort amid suffering. The yearning for strength in struggle. Ultimately, the longing for rescue. But there’s a difference between chiming with our needs and meeting them. When a firefighter saves someone, it’s easy to see them as a hero. But when a firefighter saves my family, he becomes my rescuer. In the act of saving, he becomes something more than a hero. He becomes a saviour.
The sociologist John Carroll notes that while the ancient Greeks honed the archetype of the hero with warriors like Homer’s Achilles, it was Jesus who introduced the paradigm of the saviour. Heroes epitomise greatness. Saviours embody goodness. Carroll goes on to conclude that when goodness coincides with heroism, there are often traces of Jesus. From Mother Teresa to Harry Potter, it’s easy to see where he’s coming from.
Over time, my fascination with greatness has been gradually overtaken by desire for something else. Goodness. Greatness might light up our screens, but it’s goodness that lights up our hearts.
In his dialogue The Apology, Plato speculates on what humankind would do with someone who had lived the completely good, wise and virtuous life. His conclusion was that it would be too much truth and goodness for us to take. Our discombobulation would lead us to kill him. We can’t handle the truth.
Four hundred years later, a short boat ride across the Mediterranean from Plato’s Athens, the Easter story unfolded. Jesus, we’re told – like Superman – began life as a refugee. He went on to perform miracles, love indiscriminately, revolutionise moral reasoning and model sacrifice, all in ways that changed lives and shook empires. He was murdered – not for being a hero, but for claiming to be a saviour. Three days later he rose from the dead.
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Whatever one’s beliefs, the Easter story melds some of humankind’s most powerful motifs, resonant myths and deepest needs. Greatness and goodness. Sacrifice and rescue. Heroes and saviours. Crazy? Far-fetched? Implausible? Perhaps. And yet at a time when the popular imagination is captured so readily by glittering hero narratives – in movies, music and mythology - this old story about a man on a cross remains worthy of our attention, whatever our beliefs might be.
Max Jeganathan is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. He arrived in Australia as a refugee in the 1980s. He has worked as a lawyer and as a policy adviser in the Rudd-Gillard governments