Of Siths and Jedis: The Devil's Path to Fatherhood

 I just watched Return of the Jedi with my kids the other day (believe it or not, they requested it), and something struck me that I guess I just never paid much attention to before. The Emperor (i.e., the devil figure in the movie) wants Luke to kill his father so that Luke can take his place. Now, that part I knew but didn't really ever connect it to the pattern we see in the devil's world of our own. This is the survival of the fittest, where the strong son now shows his right to rule by killing his father. It's a motif in most myths. The patriarchal deity is defeated in one way or another through strength and supplanted by his victorious son who now reigns as the supreme deity. The most familiar to us is Zeus who was an Olympian who defeated his father who was a Titan who defeated his father who was a primordial deity. Survival of the fittest is the pattern of the devil's fantasy because he so desires to murder his Father but cannot, so he places it into the heart of his religious myths in order to express his will. 

Unfortunately, this is the pattern of much of our world and not something merely contained in myth. Many a prince has supplanted their father. The one that comes to my immediate memory is that of Sennacherib's sons pushing a giant idol onto him and then slaying him because he did not name them as his successor. Some sons just do it because they cannot wait to rule by inheriting their fathers' fortunes. The Menendez brothers murdered their parents for a much smaller empire. 

Darwinism, and the atheisms to follow, have argued for a world where killing the strong is a necessity in order to take their place, so it makes sense in the devil's world that the only way to become a father, a true man, is to defeat the person who is father already. This is the devil's rite of passage. This sentiment can be heard in the echo of every rebellious teenage son who wants to rule himself and thinks that when he rules he will do a much better job than his father did.

Many people think that the devil had a big war in heaven with God, as though he tried to kill God, which is a true fiction of the medieval world. In reality, our world is that war. He cannot kill God but he can ingrain in all of God's fallen creatures the drive for the freedom that autonomy brings and allows to rule as one sees fit without the constraints of their father.

But this is not the nature of God's kingdom. The Son in God's kingdom seeks to glorify His Father, to exalt his rule, and in doing so, the Son is exalted to rule. The path to fatherhood, the path to power, is love and submission to the Father, the honor and expansion of the Father and His rule. Unlike the devil who desires that God's rule be blotted out as Zeus subjugated Chronos, the Son seeks to honor the Father; and thus, gains honor through it not by war but by love and a desire to continue what His Father began.

Indeed, God gives the very commandment that the Son obeys in love, to honor one's father. Hence, it is God's desire that fathers be honored and not slandered, established and not supplanted, expanded and not diminished. 

The path to fatherhood is the path to power but the power to do what? How one takes power is defined by what he thinks the power is for. If to honor one's father, the path will expose that. If to honor oneself, the path will bear that out as well.

The world has become filled with murderers because the devil is a murderer, and the first person to be murdered is the one on the throne to which we aspire. Indeed, our culture has all but wiped the father from the face of the earth; but the kingdom of God is not of this world and it is not of our fallenness. Whatever fathers God gives to us in life, and he will give us only a few, let us seek to honor and establish them rather than supplant them through selfish ambition because to honor them is to mimic the Son and to honor our true Father rather than the devil that we have allowed to take his place.

In the end, it is through honoring his father that Luke defeats the devilish emperor as it is through Christ's honoring His Father that allows Him to defeat the devil. If we are to pull the world toward God's kingdom, we must first and foremost understand this in our words and our deeds. Only then will we realize what path we are on and change course before being consumed by the darkside.