Two things happened on Monday. One was that men came to deliver our new washing machine. And the other was that Stan Lee, the Father of Superheroes, passed away at 95.
I’m not comparing the gravity of these events, but bear with me…
Our washing machine lives in the cellar. But the washing machine men did not put the washing machine in the cellar. They put it in the kitchen. And the hour I spent manoeuvring it down the cellar steps is an hour of private grief I never want to relive, a cycle of struggle, despair, tears, rage and more struggle, marked by a yawning absence of superpowers.
And I mourned Stan Lee, because what I needed then was a superhero. Or rather, I needed to be a superhero, with the proportional strength of a spider; the ability to move metal with my mind; or just a really big hammer to smash something. I needed to be better.
I think it’s natural to aspire to be better, and we long to meet our heroes in the hope that something of their ‘betterness’ will rub off. It’s why we bid to train with Paula Radcliffe and Steve Cram, play golf with Lee Westwood and Graeme McDowell or talk cake with Mary Berry.
Even so, the brutal truth is that even that training won’t make most of us run a sub three-hour marathon. That golf won’t bring down our handicap. That conversation will not bake us a better sponge.
Christians follow Jesus for some of the same reasons we love our heroes: we hope and believe that he can save us, make us better. It’s what gods are for.
But the thing about Jesus, according to the Bible, is that he’s not just God. Christians also believe that he is fundamentally like us – a human person who knows all the frustrations and sheer, punishing, relentlessness that human life entails.
Now no one can aspire to be like a god. But we can aspire to be like another person, even a person like Jesus. And then we can train to be faster, develop our swing or attend to our soggy bottom. Or even just move a washing machine without swearing quite so much.
And I reckon that when we set our sights a little higher, then aspiration can become transformation. And then we are all capable of being superheroes.
This was the last Pause I did on Chris Evans’ show. He was fun to work with and always interesting to talk to.