Martin & Jackie; Django & Quentin

The film director Quentin Tarantino is known for making good movies and known for making violent movies. Yes violent movies can be good. Tarantino knows how to pull that off. In telling his stories Tarantino likes to pay homage to past eras through the costumes, language and look of his movies.  Some of his more recent movies are even set in the past. But instead of being non-fiction, his historical movies give you the sense of how Tarantino would have liked to have seen history play out. For example, in Inglorious Bastards, Tarantino creates an armed and extremely dangerous elite fighting corp of Jews who are parachuted into Germany during World War II. Instead of watching the horrors of Jews suffering at the hands of the Nazis in his movie, we instead watch these soldiers giving the Nazis a taste of their own medicine. If only that could have happened in the 1940's. 

In his recent Academy Award nominated movie Django Unchained Tarantino goes further back into the past: two years before the Civil War. The slave Django is given the opportunity to work with a bounty hunter.  He gains his freedom and makes it his mission to track down and rescue his wife, who he hasn't seen in years and is being severely abused as a slave. In the movie Tarantino has Django march through the south (and southern salve owners) like Rambo on steroids. He fulfills, all by himself, the abolitionist John Brown's dream of a salve uprising in the south. If only that could have happened in the 1850's. 

I wonder how Tarantino would film a movie about Jesus. It would probably play out like many of the Jesus movies in the beginning, but the tide would turn in the Garden of Gethsemane  Not only would a Tarantino Jesus not tell Peter to put away his sword, he would probably have taken it from him to begin the revolution. Look out Pilate. It won't be Jesus hanging on the cross this time.  

Jesus models a truth that is different from Tarantino's truth. Tarantino reveals justice through violent pay back; the wicked getting their just desserts. Jesus models the Kingdom of God.  Jesus models the Sermon on the Mount: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."  Ultra-violence in the 1860's didn't come with a slave uprising, but did come with the Civil War... a war that did lead to the end of slavery but also a hundred years of Jim Crow. 

For as satisfying it might be to see Nazis and heartless slave owners getting their just desserts, real power and real change comes through love. Real change came when Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights protesters in the 1950's marched peacefully, even in the face of violence. Non-violent protest transformed into the riots of the late 1960's and the set back can still be felt in cities like Chicago today. 

What if Tarantino had made the current movie about the baseball player Jackie Robinson? It would have looked a whole lot different. Like King, Robinson responded to racist threats of violence with compassion, tolerance and love. He changed the world. 

If we are to model the life of Christ, taught to us in the Sermon on the Mount... If our conscience is to be the conscience of Christ, then we are called to boldly act with love and compassion. Yes, stand against injustice. Yes, stand with those who are oppressed. But do it prayerfully and with humility. Stand and let the light of Christ shine in your actions.