NOTE: If you have not seen Captain Marvel yet, it might be best for you to avoid this piece. It has significant spoilers for the movie, which is fun and worth a watch.
A movie that’s stuck with me for a long time is Come Sunday, a Netflix film about preacher Carlton Pearson. I wrote about it here.
I referenced it the other day in conversation with a film critic about the movie First Reformed. In both movies, a preacher who’s done things the same way for a long time is challenged with a negative truth and is forced, either by rational thinking or a spiritual experience, to change what they believe.
In First Reformed, Ethan Hawke’s Rev. Ernst Toller is shaken by the suicide of a congregant’s husband. The man loses hope in the world, despite having a wife and a child on the way, due to growing climate change and impending environmental disaster. Toller pastors a small, traditional church that receives support from a megachurch led by Cedric the Entertainer’s Rev. Jeffers. Toller and Jeffers butt heads over how much the church should do about environmental change.
In Come Sunday, based on a true story, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Pearson sees a news report about the 1994 mass genocide in Rwanda and has what he deems to be a spiritual epiphany: there is no hell as commonly defined by the church. This puts him in direct conflict with the stated theology of his denomination’s elders and his spiritual mentor, Martin Sheen’s Oral Roberts.
Both of these films explore what happens when someone learns something new and it changes their world. Both also have a significant Christian/religious bent to them, which is probably why I like them.
But another movie, Captain Marvel, explores a similar theme, and while it doesn’t do it as well as Come Sunday or First Reformed, it makes you think about what it’s like to learn something new.
I won’t give the customary plot summary here because this part of the movie (SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!) comes in the second act.
Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel learns that the Kree race she has dedicated her life to — thanks to a plane crash, some brain-washing and super science — have misled her on the threat of the Skrulls, and that her people are the real villains. It shakes her world. All the while, she’s dealing with the fact that while she thinks she’s always been a Kree, she was actually an Earth-dwelling human for most of her life.
The movie does a half-decent job of exploring how these major shifts in thinking affect Carol. I think the filmmakers could have done more, but the theme is at least introduced, and I think it has a lot to tell us about living the Christian life.
The Bible is chock full of people who lived their entire lives thinking one thing and then changed in the blink of an eye when they got new information.
The disciples were just fishermen, doing their thing, when Jesus comes up and radically shifts their worldview and their profession. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” Jesus says to Simon Peter and Andrew in Matthew 4:19.
Saul was a Jew of Jews, zealous, imprisoning and killing Christians, when Jesus stopped him on the road to Damascus and changed his life. Eventually, his name was changed too, to Paul. He went from killing Christians to trying to recruit people to be Christians.
That’s a significant shift. We don’t know exactly how long it took Paul, Peter and Andrew to make that change in their minds. The Bible presents them as just changing their lives almost immediately. We do see that all of them have to take some time to adjust — Paul learns from the apostles for a time, and the disciples clearly didn’t get it for a long time.
When we become Christians, we make a similar shift, a similar change. We go from death to life, from condemned to saved. We learn a lot more about ourselves and who we were and who we are going to become.
Just like Carol Danvers, Carlton Pearson and Ernst Toller, our allegiances shift and we begin fighting and living life for a new purpose. That can be hard. Some of our friends and family will resist that change, wondering why in the world we’re investing in this new thing, thinking we’re losing our minds. Your brain has to create new ways of thinking due to this shift.
Clearly, this is a film trope that’s been around for a long time, but it’s a reflection of real life.
I want to end this reflection on Captain Marvel with this encouragement: there’s a good chance that, if you’re reading this, your mind is shifting on something. It’s part of life, and evolution is critical to humanity existing. If we didn’t change our thought processes and create telephones, vaccines, automobiles and more, we may not exist, or we’d still be like we were in the 1600s.
I believe your life of faith is the same way. Through reading man’s reflections on God and God’s words themselves in the Bible, we can learn wisdom and grow as Christians. By praying and seeking input and conversation with other Christians, we can change for the better to more reflect who Jesus is and what He wants for us.
But like Carol, Ernst and Carlton, we need to be open to it. I’m not writing this to pass judgment on their changes. But they set a good example for us to be open to being wrong and changing to reflect the reality around us.
Changing your mind isn’t an inherently bad thing. Sometimes, it can make the difference between following yourself and following Jesus. Give it a shot sometime.
By A Ransomed Soul 