Superman, Kanye West and Jesus

I have a good buddy who got kind of upset the other day when he saw the preview for Superman. In that 30-second preview, the voiceover said the following words.

"Even though you have been raised as a human being, you are not one of them. They could be a great people…they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son.”

You can see the trailer here

That language is deliberate, he blogged, and it rubbed him the wrong way. Johnny Gill in reverse, I guess.

His reasons made sense to me, and although I haven't had the chance to talk to him about it yet, I would say that I didn't get that same feeling. My first thought was "Wow, another way to work Jesus into the mix." Just like the Spiderman movies had a lot of spiritual language and issues that pastors everywhere could draw out and talk about, Superman's probably going to have the same thing. And this summer, our church is doing a "SuperHero" theme, which is about heroes in the OT, so that'll make for good social inertia. Plus, if you're going to compare someone to Jesus Christ, Superman is a good pick. I can see the Messianic themes there. And if my son grows up making slight connections between Superman and Jesus, then I'm okay with that.

What I'm not okay with - and this is something that kind of really does rub me the wrong way - is people thinking that Kanye West is Jesus. In the newest edition of Rolling Stone, Kanye West is done up and posed to look like Jesus Christ.



The story about it is here.

The AP Wires say that the strangest tangent of the Rolling Stone story, however, is when West says he's addicted to pornography. He remembers first seeing his father's Playboy magazine when he was 5 years old.

"Right then," West says, laughing, "it was like, `Houston, we have a problem.'"

Yeah. That's JUST like Jesus.