Captain Marvel lives with an incredible power inside her. Though restrained and constrained, as she comes to understand her identity, she unleashes the power in its full potential. Her journey to discovery is a parable for the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians.
Power restrained
In the opening sequences of the film, we see Captain Marvel as a Kree warrior known as Vers. As she trains with Yon Rogg, he admonishes her to keep her power under control. She even has an implant installed by her society to keep from using her powers to their full potential, to the point of not being able to use them at all. They tell her they gave her the powers and they can take them away. This is a lie.
Many churches downplay or ignore the Holy Spirit as a part of daily life. They try to restrain the power of the Holy Spirit. Like Captain Marvel, we’re told to not get too emotional or radical. The moving and gifts of the Spirit were something for the early days of the Church alone.
Francis Chan in Forgotten God says it this way, “My hope and prayer for you, the reader, is that church people don’t try to normalize you. What I mean is that we often try to calm people down who are just too passionate or too sacrificial and radical.”
Later, he says, “as a church, we tend to do this [calming down] to people who are passionate and bold. We mellow them out. Deaden them to the work that Spirit is doing in them.”
Power constrained
The film follows Vers and her Starforce team on their mission to rescue a Kree spy. Their enemy, the shape shifting Skrull, impersonate the spy, deceiving Vers and capturing her. She awakes on a Skrull ship. They have bound her hands in a metal casing, preventing her from using her powers. Even after escaping, she can’t remove the casings right away and has to fend off her attackers the best she can. Eventually, her power overcomes the bonds, and she uses her powers to destroy the Skrull ship.
Like Captain Marvel, Christians have an enemy out to deceive them. He can even appear as a friend and know the codes. When we fall for the enemy’s schemes, we choose our will over God’s. This disconnects us from our source of power. I want to be clear that God’s love for us hasn’t changed. We don’t lose our power, but something inhibits it. Captain Marvel still had her power, you can see it glowing under the casings. We’ve chosen, for a time, to live in our own power. When we admit our mistake and seek God’s forgiveness, He is faithful and just to forgive us (1 John 1:9). The Spirit overcomes the deception. The bonds drop away and we walk in our power once more.
Power unleashed
Throughout the film, Vers struggles with her identity. She finds clues to her former life on earth. Little by little, she comes to understand both herself and the greater conflict. Imprisoned during the film’s climax, she embraces her true name, Carol Danvers. She breaks the restraints her society put on her, and she realizes her true power. Not only can she shoot photon beams from her hands, she can fly.
Christians also have an incredible power inside of us in the person of the Holy Spirit. When we embrace our true names, our true identity as the children of God, we can unleash this power. Chan uses an analogy of a caterpillar and butterfly.
I want to live so that I am truly submitted to the Spirit’s leading on a daily basis. Christ said its better for us that the Spirit came and I want to live like that is true. I don’t want to keep crawling when I have the ability to fly.
The world is not moved by love or actions that are of human creation. And the church is now empowered to live differently from any other gathering of people without the Holy Spirit. But when believers live in the power of the Spirit, the evidence in their lives is supernatural. The church cannot help but be different, and the world cannot help but notice.
The church becomes irrelevant when it becomes purely a human creation. We are not all we were made to be when everything in our lives and churches can be explained apart from the work and presence of the Spirit of God.
The Holy Spirit won’t let us fly through space or shoot lasers from our fists as cool as those things would be. Instead, the Holy Spirit empowers us to forgive when it hurts, to hope when its hopeless, to give with uncommon generosity, to treat others with gentleness, and to experience peace and joy in difficult circumstances. Those sounds like cool super powers. We live not a better life but an unexplainable one.