Jesus, the First Hunger Games Competitor

Suggested Reading: John 15:9-17

Because the Hunger Games books were being read so widely by the students I worked with as a sub I decided to read them myself and then I saw the movie when it came out. I didn't expect the movie to be as good as the book and it probably wasn't but there were some scenes that were simply more powerful than the book. One of those scenes was when Prim, a little girl of 12, has her name drawn to compete to the death in the Hunger Games and her older sister Katniss, frightened beyond measure, volunteers as tribute to take her place. Katniss knows that she is likely to die, but cannot bear to see her little sister marched off to her death. So Katniss takes her place.

The scene was a very vivid picture for me of how Jesus laid his life down for us, taking our place and dying our death, so that we might be saved. Jesus volunteered as tribute for us that we might escape the terrors of the arena. Unlike Prim, though, we were not innocent and unworthy of death. We had earned those consequences with our sins, with our propensity to live life on our own terms, ignoring the commands of God and yet "God proved His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us!" (Romans 5:8, HCSB).

But saving us from the arena of death was not enough for Jesus because he left behind instructions for us to follow his example, instructing us to love each other like he loved us and specifically adding, "No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13, HCSB).   Jesus gave us these words and then he lived them out so that we might have the courage to do the same.

God has called each of us to lay down our lives for our friends. We may not be required to die. But we are all called to give up our lives, to set aside fulfilling our own wants and desires in order to ensure that those around us might live.  We are each called to step in and offer those about to die the respite from death that Jesus offers us through his own.

Jesus volunteered to die in our place and he wants us to lay down our lives so that others may live. Are you willing to volunteer as tribute because of Jesus' love for you? The greatest love that we can demonstrate is laying down our own lives for our friends.

Using The Hunger Games to Measure Ourselves

Suggested Reading: Titus 1:5-16

Not long ago, I read The Hunger Games novels because I was curious what all the fuss was about. I won't spoil the books, but I will offer one observation. Because of the kind of life she had lived and because of the circumstances in which the main character, Katniss, finds herself, she has a hard time trusting people. She lives in a cynical world and sees everything through a veil of skepticism and mistrust. Because of this, Katniss doesn't recognize true kindness when she sees it, at least in the beginning. She is always expecting an ulterior motive.

Katniss's blindness reminded me of a passage where Paul was writing to Titus about human nature. Paul wrote, "To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted" (Titus 1:15, HCSB). Paul's point here is that what we see in the world actually says more about us than it does about the world. If a person looks at the world and only sees calculation and manipulation, that observation says more about the experiences and mindset of the individual than it says about the reality of the world.

I know men who are so full of themselves that they see obvious acts of discouragement from women as invitations. I have also known women who feel so badly about themselves that it is impossible for them to look in the mirror and see beauty even if the rest of the world is blown away by them. What we see in the world around us is often much more instrumental in giving us a glimpse of ourselves than it is in helping us analyze the world. What is the old saying? "if everybody has a problem with you, everybody is probably not the problem"?

When we look at the people around us and everyone looks cynical, we are probably expecting cynicism because we are cynical ourselves. If we look around us and we feel like everyone is pretending, we are probably doing some pretending ourselves. On the other hand, if we are always seeing people being kind and considerate, that also says something about us.

Every now and then, it is good to step back and characterize the world so that we know where our own mind has been. If the whole world has a problem with us, there is a chance that the world is not the problem.