The Sign of Jonah – Superhero Sunday

Nope. This isn’t going to be a Sherlock Holmes The Sign of the Four (or Three, for you BBC fans). Sorry.

Tony Stark: JARVIS, have you heard the tale of Jonah?

Jarvis: I wouldn’t consider him a role model.

[Iron Man flies through a Leviathan]

-The Avengers

Have you heard of the sign of Jonah? In Matthew 12:40, Jesus says: “For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.”

Jesus was predicting his death and resurrection, and relating it back to Jonah. He was telling the Pharisees that this would be the sign that he would give them. (Matthew 12:38-39)

Jesus predicted his death and his resurrection. Don’t harden your heart like the Pharisees did. Believe.

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Is He Dead Or Not?

Caution: There may be a few spoilers in this post, or, if you’re like Sherlock Holmes, you could deduce spoilers from things I say in this post. Just sayin’.

Have you ever noticed that it’s impossible to believe that people are actually dead in superhero movies?

I’ll admit that the same problem occurs in other movies, too, and in books fairly often. Or is that just my imagination? It’s not.

Sherlock Holmes, for example. He “died” in the books, and he “died” on the BBC Sherlock show (Which I have not watched, but I know quite a bit about thanks to a few friends. *wink* And a past post I reblogged.)

And then, of course, there’s all those minor characters in the superhero movies that supposedly die but don’t. Sometimes main characters, too, like Captain America, although we know that something’s up from the beginning of the movie. You can almost never believe that people are actually dead in those movies.

But you know what’s cool? That’s happened in real life before, too! All those people that are raised from the dead, like Lazarus. (We don’t know the names of most of them.) But the best coming-back-to-life episode? Jesus.

Unlike in superhero movies, Jesus really died. And then he came back to life. He conquered our sin by suffering the worst death the Romans could invent, and then he rose again, conquering death itself. He love us that much.