I’ve wanted to write about Logan ever since I watched it in theaters. Logan is my favorite type of superhero movie—the kind that focuses on the humanity and hardships of its hero, rather than on explosions and special effects. I also think there are a lot of interesting parallels to draw between the movie and our Christian lives. Hope you enjoy!

Logan’s central question is whether heroism—that is, courage, self-sacrifice, and the ideals heroes represent—can exist in a cruel and violent world. Logan uses its R-rating to hammer home just how brutal life as a hero can be. Normally, superhero movies are selective in what they show. They glamorize the excitement and glory of heroism while minimizing the costs. Logan, however, shows us everything. We see the full effects of Logan’s claws as they pierce, sever, and kill. We see the full aftermath of years of endless fighting. Most heroes have died. Those who are left suffer from crippling guilt and regret. They’ve grown old, given up, or gone crazy. The bleakness of Logan’s world startles and shakes us up. It makes us wonder: what hope is there for heroism if it’s this hard?

We meet Logan as a man who has given up on heroism. He lives a withdrawn life, working as a chauffeur, caring for Xavier, and otherwise avoiding every reminder of his past. We’ve seen characters like him before–the cynical old man–but it’s still jarring to see what Wolverine has become. Two things have happened to reduce Logan from brash fearless hero to this shell of himself.

The first is that he has lost hope. Heroes are expected to be beacons of hope. When all is lost, they step in and tells us everything will be okay. But Logan has watched friends die. He’s seen evil defeated countless times, only for it to appear again in a different form. He’s experienced too many disappointments to maintain hope, much less provide it for others.

Second and closely related, Logan has lost confidence in himself. He no longer believes in his abilities or his goodness. Externally, his body is breaking down. Internally, his resolve has left him, and he is racked by guilt from his violent past. In his mind, he is not strong enough to be a hero, and even if he were, he would be unworthy to be one.

The movie contrasts Logan’s cynical view of heroism with the picture put forth by comic books. The plot revolves around Logan delivering Laura, a young girl with identical claws to his, to a mutant safe haven called “Eden”. Eventually, however, Logan learns this Eden is based on coordinates from an old X-men comic book. Logan is understandably upset. He hates comic books. Not only are they untrue, they perpetuate the backbreaking expectations placed on heroes. More than that, they remind him of how far he’s fallen from who he once was and what he once believed.

In many ways, comic books are like the Biblical Eden. In them, good and evil are clearly divided, no one dies, and justice triumphs in the end. Logan, however, has experienced the fall. He has seen sin and suffering. For him, comic book heroes are a myth just like Eden. That kind of heroism never existed, and if it did, it’s gone and there’s no going back.

The movie sets up these two opposing views of heroism—Logan’s nihilism and comic book idealism– and places them on a collision course. Will Logan find Eden or barren wasteland when he reaches the comic book coordinates?  What he discovers will be the movie’s referendum on which understanding of heroism is true.

All the evidence points to Logan’s view being affirmed. Senseless violence and tragedy follow Logan and Laura every step of their journey. After each stop, they leave behind a bloody trail of fallen friends, innocent bystanders, and enemies. It seems inconceivable that a movie which has taken such pains to show the costs of heroism would resolve with a pat, happy ending.

But something surprising happens. Logan’s strength fails him in the final leg of the journey, and he awakens, to his amazement, in “Eden”. This Eden, of course, is not the paradise of the comic books. It offers only a temporary reprieve from the approaching danger. However, it is something instead of nothing and for Logan, that is earth shattering. He had resigned himself to believing that realized hope was for comic books, not real life. And yet, here he was. Against all odds, the comics had been right.

In Eden, Logan is greeted by a community of children, each with the same traumatic back story as Laura. These children solidify something Logan had been learning throughout his journey with Laura: namely, that even someone as broken as him can still be a hero. For so long, Logan thought his failures disqualified him from being a hero. But for Laura and the other children, they are the very things which make him their hero. The wounded don’t need or want a comic-book hero. They need someone who understands their pain and can say “Don’t be who they made you.” They need someone who can guide them through the guilt, fear, and shame because he’s wrestled with very same things himself.

Can heroism exist in a cruel and violent world? Prior to Eden, the answer seemed to be no. We had only been presented with two answers: either you cling to the ideals of comic book heroism despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or you abandon the idea of heroes all together. When the question is posed as a binary choice, the second option seems far more realistic, especially in the R-rated world of Logan. But in Eden, we’re given a third option, a middle way which has the honesty of Logan’s view with the hopefulness of comic books.

What is this middle way? It is a heroism restored by surprising grace. By grace I simply mean that Logan is helpless to restore himself and yet somehow is restored.  He is so exhausted and defeated that he must be carried into Eden, but once there, he stumbles on to the two things he needed most: hope and a chance for redemption. Hope, in that Eden should exist at all. Redemption, by finding the children are willing to accept, admire, and depend on him in spite of—indeed, because of–all his flaws.

Logan experiences what J.R.R. Tolkien calls the Eucatastrophe. He defines the term as:

“The good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” …It is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

Eden is Logan’s Eucatastrophe. The sudden unexpected turn to his story. There is no explanation given why there should something instead of nothing in Eden. Or why Logan should make it there with Laura and her friends instead of living out his weary life alone. But, for some reason, at his darkest moment when he had given up all hope, Logan finds everything he needed and never thought he would.

Logan’s experience in Eden changes him profoundly. On the surface, that change doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. There is no miraculous happy ending, at least in the traditional sense. The children are forced to flee as their pursuers descend upon  Eden. The last battle yields only the smallest of victories for Laura and her friends–another day of survival. Logan dies in obscurity with the world is just as violent as before; the outlook for mutants, just as bleak.

But Logan was never about a traditional comic book ending. It was about finding traces of heroism in the midst of pain, suffering, and sorrow. And as we watch Logan sprint and snarl and slash one last time, as we watch him die protecting those he has come to love, we catch the briefest glimpse through the dust and dirt, that heroism is alive and well.

Logan and the Weary Christian

We don’t have to look hard to find parallels between Logan’s journey and our own. As Christians, especially those of us who are leaders, we also strive for heroism. We seek to be people of character who serve others sacrificially and with courage. In doing so, we carry burdens, deal with expectations, fight battles, and struggle with our human limitations.

How many of us haven’t felt like Logan at some point?  We grow weary of doing good. We lose hope or doubt that God could love people like us. And so, like Logan, we withdraw. We become bitter and resentful. We begin viewing the Gospel like how Logan saw the X-men comic books—too simplistic for the realities of an uncaring world.

And yet, we too are restored by surprising grace. For us, there is no mystery where that grace comes from. It pours forth from the hand of a loving God. In his wisdom, he dismantles our comic-book expectations for the Christian life, which we’ve filled with visions of self-glory and adoration. And then, in his grace, he rebuild us from the ground up.

He revives our hope.  His means are often quiet and ordinary–an answered prayer when we had stopped believing he still heard us. A caring word from a friend when we had become convinced we were all alone. Unexpected fruitfulness when we had despaired of ever being useful. These evidences of grace might go unnoticed by everyone else, but they are monumental for us because they remind us we are loved by a sovereign and good God.

Not only that, he reminds us we have a role to play in his story. It is not the role we first expected. We imagined ourselves as Superman or Wonder Woman, confident and strong. Instead, God calls us to be like Logan. We are to be the wounded serving the wounded and carrying them to the One who heals. We are to serve amidst hardship and disappointment and show that God’s grace is sufficient for us. When we are weak, he is strong.

The Better Hero and the Better Eden

“When you read a comic book, the thing I’m always looking for is not the colorful clothes—I wear colorful clothes. It’s not the masks—people wear masks in sports and stuff. It’s the notion that at the worst moment of your life, someone will be there for you. Someone will rescue you from certain doom, the jaws of death, and utter disappointment. That’s what I’ve always loved about comic books.”

Recently I heard a pastor use this quote from a non-Christian  filmmaker to explain the popularity of superhero movies. Superhero movies, this pastor said, reflect our innate longing for someone to rescue us in our darkest moments.

At first, I wasn’t sure I agreed. It’s not that I don’t long for a savior. My problem is that most superhero movies don’t feel very realistic. The heroes are strong but also simplistic. I could imagine them saving me from a giant monster or a villain with apocalyptic powers, but not any of my darkest moments. My struggles are far more ordinary than the movies, but also far more resilient. When you defeat the big bad guy, he’s gone forever.  Loneliness, doubt, or hopelessness, however, return over and over again. Superheroes can provide a superficial rescue and happy ending. I long for something deeper.

Logan provides an interesting contrast to your average superhero movie. The internal battles of its main character resonate more deeply with the complexity of our own experiences. The darkness of its world is more like our own. Because of its realism, Logan better captures our longing for a savior. We want someone to save us from these kinds of struggles and this kind of world.

But Logan is not a savior figure. If anything, the movie uses him to deconstruct the idea of superheroes as saviors. Logan’s example tells us that though heroes have extraordinary abilities, they are still human. Over time, the expectations and burdens of being a savior overwhelms even the strongest of heroes. Logan is someone we identify with and maybe aspire to imitate, but not someone we look to to save us.

The problem we run in to, then, is that superhero movies with strong saviors aren’t realistic, and those that are realistic cannot give us strong saviors. We long for a Savior that is strong and who truly saves us from our darkest moments.

Isn’t that what we find uniquely in Jesus? Jesus is strong. He is God himself, the creator and sustainer of all things. When he is with us, we stand with complete confidence, even when everything around us gives way. If he is for us, who can be against? Jesus truly faced the deepest problems of our hearts and the darkest evil in our world. He entered in to our R-rated story, a story filled with injustice, disease, and violence, in which metal nails pierce and innocent men are condemned to death. On the cross, he bore our sins and tasted the sting of death. And in the greatest Eucatastrophe of all–the one to which all others point–he rose again victorious.

We follow our hero on the long road back to Eden. This Eden is not a return to the innocence lost at the fall. It is more poignant and profound than that. Jesus is leading us to an Eden where grace fully heals all that has gone wrong. As C.S. Lewis wrote, it is an Eden which “once obtained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory”. We see suffering and the collateral damage of sin and despair at how irreparable it all looks, but we’re headed to a place where all will be made right.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelations 21:4 ESV)