Ask a group to name a hero, and depending on the age of your audience, you’ll get responses ranging from nurses and firemen to Shaq and SpiderMan. Adults tend to define heroes as people who serve the public in specific ways like keeping us safe, keeping us healthy. Young people define them usually by their celebrity status, athletic ability or entertainment value. Some would say moms are heroes because they “do it all,” or that teachers deserve the moniker because they shape future generations. The uber-religious ones will tell you that Jesus is their super-hero.
Did you know that Jesus has heroes too?
Jesus gives us His basic expectations in Matthew 22:36-40, where He explains the greatest commandment and the second, which, when followed, make the rest of the Mosaic commandments unnecessary. He simplified the entire code of law that the Jewish leaders beat to death in the name of Jehovah, while making the point that obedience without love is meaningless. Later in the New Testament, James ups the ante so to speak, and we learn God’s standards for what a hero looks like. James 1:27 - “Pure and undefiled religion before our God and Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
In our culture
I believe God would expand this to cover the modern epidemics of absentee spouses and parents, even though they are living. Caring for the neglected, abandoned, and rejected - that is what makes you a hero in God’s eyes. When you represent Christ to someone who is destitute and hopeless, you are the best kind of hero - the kind that brings love and hope where there was none. The kind that gives the Living Water to the thirsty. The folks who become Jesus’ heroes go above and beyond His basic command to love their neighbor; they take it to the next level.
The second part of James 1:27 can be harder to live up to in order to really own hero status from God’s perspective. How do we keep ourselves “unstained” by the world? Our culture sloshes its filth indiscriminately, and just walking through our everyday lives we can’t help but be affected by it. Those who manage to maintain their purity of body, heart and mind in spite of culture do so by being so desperately in love with Jesus that culture’s grime slides right off. Nothing sticks. They take Jesus’ command to love God to the next level.
It’s easy to see why someone who does these things becomes Jesus’ hero. Of course He’s going to be nuts about anyone who loves Him that passionately, and who represents Him that genuinely on the earth.
I challenge you to read and apply James chapter one to your life. If you start with the basics you find in Matthew 22, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” you’ll find the rest becomes easier, but it will never feel natural. You will battle with your flesh and with the world at every step. You’ll even battle with other believers if you truly become a passionate lover of God, because they will feel inadequate when their lukewarmness is exposed by the light of your flame. Pursuing God to this degree and persevering will require super-hero faith, and as you go, God will give it to you.
jesus' heroes