My wife Maria is (we hope) within weeks (days?) of delivering our baby, and was exhausted this weekend from the frenetic whirlwind that is our two four year old sons. So I gathered up Benjamin and Timothy and trekked off with my assistant Robbie Sagers to the cineplex to observe the number one film in America, “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.”
Benjamin loved the light sabers, and Timothy just loved the Sour Patch Kids movie candy. But the Gen X and Gen Y theologians mostly rolled our eyes at the pomo moralism and the saccharine dialogue (okay, we liked the fight scenes too).
The most noted piece of Zen Jedi dialogue is the line, “Only Siths deal in absolutes.” One can trace this back to George Lucas’s fascination with Eastern relativism and “following his bliss” with Joseph Campbell.
That is, however, if that were what George Lucas really believed.
Columnist Terry Mattingly, however, interfaces with broadcaster Dick Straub to demonstrate that Lucas isn’t quite as above good and evil distinctions as he might like to be. Mattingly points out that Lucas has revised, in most recent versions, the scene from the original film in which Han Solo shoots first at an enemy.
In the updated scene, Solo is no longer a cold-blooded killer but simply defending himself.
It seems that Solo, unlike Johnny Cash, wouldn’t shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. But why not? If there are no moral absolutes, only the need for “balance” between the light and dark sides of the force, then why should the filmmaker concern himself with the moral plight of his hero?
It is because George Lucas cannot escape the moral cosmos designed by the Logos of God. As the apostle Paul points out:
For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on the hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus (Rom 2:14-16).
It seems that the conscience cannot be escaped, even in a galaxy far, far away.
