Let’s talk about The Last Jedi and The Bible. Yeah, really.

Out of all the ongoing stories and multi-layered sagas that have been dreamt up in the last century, Star Wars has indisputably generated the most most memorable and universally well-known iconography and imagery. /

The imagery of Star Wars is so iconic in 2020 that simply showing grey, triangular ships onscreen immediately makes the audience hum The Imperial March. Blue lightsabers make us think of heroes. Twin suns make us think of Tatooine. Breathing sounds make us think of Darth Vader.

One of the most hotly-debated aspects of The Last Jedi is the way Rian Johnson’s screenplay takes familiar, nostalgic Star Wars imagery (complete with already-established expectations) and subverts that imagery to create new meaning. Everybody knows TLJ “subverts expectations.”

There are many examples of this subversion in TLJ; at the start, Luke Skywalker is living in exile in a marshy swamp and Rey is supposedly coming to learn from him. All the familiar imagery tells us Master Luke is going to mirror Master Yoda, training Rey like a wise mentor.

When Rey gets to Ahch-To, we're shown that Luke has crashed his X-Wing in the swampy water on the island. Naturally, given Star Wars tropes, we expect that he'll eventually lift it out of the water with The Force and fly to help his friends. But things don’t go the way we think.

In the middle, Finn and Rose infiltrate a Star Destroyer in bad-guy uniforms (familiar) to accomplish a (very familiar) Star Wars task and (you guessed it) turn off a thing so that the heroes can get away. But this time? The plan fails. That’s not how Star Wars is supposed to go.

Of course, this parallel imagery comes to a head in the 3rd act, where we watch Kylo and Rey enter the Sinister Throne Room, the "Emperor" shows Rey that her friends are heading into a trap, and the two of them eventually unite to kill him, exactly like in Return of The Jedi.

Only, it’s *not* like in Return of The Jedi. Kylo Ren does not redeem or sacrifice himself like Vader did. Rey and her friends *are* almost entirely wiped out by The First Order, barely making it out alive. Luke Skywalker dies. This is not what was supposed to happen at all.

So, I’m sure you’re aware of all this. We’ve been having the “subverting expectations” debate for years. Yeah, it’s been actual years now.

But here’s the twist: using familiar mythic imagery to challenge the audience with something unexpected? That’s not just a Star Wars thing.

The Bible, though it was written by myriad authors across 2000 years, is *full* of consistently recurring motifs and imagery - and not just recurring imagery, but developing imagery. Some examples? Trees. Wine. Oceans. Mountaintops. Lions. Lambs. Shepherds. Kings. Gardens. Bread.

For first-century Jews, The Torah - which Christians call The Old Testament - was basically like the Original Star Wars Trilogy times a million. In the same way we know the symbolic meaning of TIE Fighters and binary sunsets, they knew the meaning of lambs, floods and prophecies.

Though Star Wars only became reflexive about its own established imagery in the last decade, The Torah (or The Old Testament) is both reflexive and subversive from page one, with Genesis using mythic tropes of the ancient world to show how this God is different from all others.

The subversion in The Torah begins in Genesis. At the time of writing, every creation myth in the known world involved some kind of struggle or violence between multiple deities that led to the creation of the universe. Genesis? One God. And He’s loving, relational, creative.

The subversion continues: Genesis follows the ancient storytelling pattern of a massive flood that changed the world as we know it. Only this time, the reason for the flood is not divine randomness or petty arguments between deities. It’s that humans are...not great.

Let’s fast-forward to the middle of Genesis. God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and Abraham says “well, okay, I guess it do be like that sometimes.”

He’s not a great dad - but child sacrifices to appease the gods were not uncommon among pagan tribes at the time.

But, in another piece of divine “subversion of expectations,” God stays Abraham’s hand and freely provides an innocent animal to go in the child’s place. This is a line in the sand. Unlike other gods and other tribes, Yahweh is not about child sacrifices. That’s not His thing.

Genesis, it has often been remarked, echoes many common patterns of creation myths - but if the patterns feel familiar, the reasons feel surprising and unfamiliar. The difference is that the character of the God in Genesis is wildly different from the gods in any other narrative.

CS Lewis saw these mythical parallels as echoes of truth: “We mustn’t be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We mustn’t be nervous about parallels with ‘Pagan Christs’: [if it is true,] they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.”

There are many, many, many other subversive moments in the OT; for one, it has been observed that the history of Moses and the story of Ten Plagues of Egypt both use familiar Egyptian imagery to comment on the inferiority of the Egyptian gods and myths.

Alas, for now, let’s jump back to Star Wars. Remember how The Force Awakens was full of familiar Star Wars iconography and nostalgia? Remember how it connected with audiences initially because it basically gave them everything they'd been asking for?

The Force Awakens was so aware of classic Star Wars imagery that JJ Abrams crafted a sort-of comfort food from tropes we all know. Giant planet-killer weapon. Plucky hero on a desert planet. Deep-voiced villain in a mask. Lost droid. Reveals about parentage. The whole shabang.

The Force Awakens works because Star Wars has, over the years, accrued enough viewers for classic Star Wars imagery to become universally-known.

What I’m saying here, once again, is that when Jesus arrived, The Torah was like Star Wars for Israel. Everyone knew the stories.

By the time Jesus showed up in first-century Jerusalem, the Jewish population knew The Torah back to front - including the prophecies about the coming savior, the new-and-improved King David, who they believed would overthrow Rome and establish a more powerful and holy empire.

At first glance, Jesus' life plays like Torah comfort food. It’s like The Force Awakens. Jesus arrives in Bethlehem, just like King David. He’s born of a virgin and his adopted father is from the tribe of Judah, just like the prophecies in Isaiah said.

There’s a king who wants to kill all the Jewish babies, just like in Exodus. Jesus wanders for 40 days in the desert, calms the ocean, and gives the law from a mountaintop, just like Moses. If you were looking at it from the outside, you might say it’s “messiah wish-fulfillment.”

But here’s where I guess I’ll have to say it: Jesus is kinda like The Last Jedi. Wouldn't ya know it, he's a subversive king. Literally, I guess?? The dude checks every box; he fulfills every prophecy about the coming Messiah and yet he fulfills them in crazy and surprising ways.

Although people expected the Messiah to arrive in Bethlehem, they did not expect him to be born in a barn without any dignity or regality - and they did not expect him to be noticed first by pagan sorcerers and young shepherds, completely overlooked by actual religious leaders.

Although people expected the Messiah to be born of a virgin and come from the tribe of Judah, they definitely did not expect him to grow up in the lowly Nazareth as the son of a simple carpenter. Not did they expect him to wait until he was in his 30s to make his identity known.

Although people expected the Messiah to be like the "New Moses" or the "New King David", they did not expect him to actually contradict and challenge the teachings of Moses, and totally reverse King David's notion of temples and holiness too.

Absolutely *nobody* expected the Messiah to appear as a traveling teacher with disciples composed of tax collectors and fishermen. Nor did they expect him to confront the self-righteous religious hierarchy more aggressively than the Roman occupiers they assumed he would destroy.

Nobody expected the Messiah to spend most of his time defending and healing people accused of breaking the religious rules - or to break the rules himself. No one expected the Messiah to be convicted of religious blasphemy and executed by the Romans he was supposed to annihilate.

The way Jesus “subverts expectations” still feels relevant today. Every time we think we can put God in a box, every time we think we know what God is supposed to do for us, She does something surprising and radically compassionate. Subversive.

The subversiveness of Jesus is also one of the greatest testaments to the reality of his claims. If you were trying to invent a story about some Messiah who fulfills all the prophecies, you might write something like The Force Awakens. Comfort food. But Jesus is The Last Jedi.

The religious people in The Gospels are the people Jesus critiques most harshly. The people who think they know what God is about. The people who think they're more righteous than others. The people who expect God to destroy their opposition. They're the ones who need to change.

If you ask me why I dig The Bible so much, it’s not because of the doctrine or the rules or even the supposed explanations for sin. It’s because it’s a great story, written across 2000 years, and it still feels relevant and coherent and dimensional and surprising. It feels real.

Just like Star Wars, I love the way the motifs and icons and symbols in The Bible gain meaning as time passes. I love the way the imagery throughout the entire story points to Jesus from the start. But more than anything, I love the way it challenges our expectations every time.

The Star Wars sequel trilogy was written by just *two* writer/directors over the course of 4 years, and yet somehow it feels disjointed and messy. The Bible was written by 40 authors over *thousands* of years and it feels more coherent than the sequel trilogy. Isn’t that insane?

But hey, maybe this whole thread is just another way for me to make the boldest statement of them all: Rian Johnson is the God of Cinema.