“We love because he first loved us.”
– 1 John 4:19
In one of Spider-Man: No Way Home’s better jokes, Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker asks Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker if he is going into battle dressed as a “cool youth pastor.” The irony is that No Way Home is one of the worst Spider-Man movies in part because it is one of the ones where Spider-Man acts least like a pastor: at its conclusion, he uses technology to “cure” his enemies, as if moral and spiritual problems can be fixed by applying science to them. In contrast, one of the reasons I (to my own surprise) loved this summer’s new Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day, is that it continues a tradition of the best Spider-Man films:1 the climax hinges on Spider-Man acting in a way that resonates with pastoral ministry more than typical super-heroics.
All three of the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movies starring Tobey Maguire climax with a superpowered fight between Peter and a villain, but the conversation that follows the fight is far more dramatically important than the fight itself, and puts Peter in a more or less pastor- or priest-like position:
At the end of Spider-Man, Norman Osborn reveals to Peter that he is the Green Goblin, and asks Peter not to tell his son, Harry (who is also Peter’s best friend). Peter honors Norman’s request and keeps the secret, at great personal cost to his relationship with Harry. One might think of the confessional seal: a priest who hears a confession has a duty not to reveal the penitent’s sin to anyone else.
At the end of Spider-Man 2, Peter reminds Otto Octavius of his true self and helps him to break free of the corrupting influence of his mechanical tentacles (which are external manifestations of compulsive patterns of thought and behavior within Otto). This is, essentially, a comic book variation on a kind of conversation that pastoral ministers have all the time while trying to free people from sin and vice and remind them of their true identity as God’s beloved children.
At the end of Spider-Man 3, Peter once again hears a confession, this time from the penitent Sandman – and on this occasion, he also offers forgiveness, which frees the Sandman from his burden of guilt.
These films repeatedly show Spider-Man acting as an agent of moral and emotional healing, and this gives them a spiritual weight that superhero movies do not often achieve. This angle was largely if not entirely lacking from Tom Holland’s previous outings as the character, but Brand New Day leans into it beautifully.
At the end of Brand New Day, Peter confronts the telepath Jean Grey, who is lashing out in destructive anger because she feels lonely and isolated by her mutant powers, which caused her mother to abandon her, and because this isolation is compounded by grief over the unjust abduction and murder of her sister Sara. The film is constructed such that Jean’s situation closely mirrors Peter’s. Peter is also experiencing “mutations” that – together with his grief over the murder of his mother figure Aunt May and the loss of his relationships with his best friend Ned and girlfriend MJ – cause him to feel isolated and alone.
The film’s resolution of the conflict between Jean and Peter is, I think, striking and powerful: Peter allows Jean to enter his mind with her telepathic powers and share his experience of a remembered conversation where Aunt May reminded him of her unconditional love for him. Jean is thus healed on several levels at once. A girl whose mother abandoned her because she was “different” vicariously receives love from a motherly figure who embraces her child’s “different”-ness. And, because Peter is willing to share his own experience of loneliness and isolation, he and Jean both leave the encounter less alone than they were before.
The first time I saw this sequence in Brand New Day, my brain hopped almost immediately to a passage from Catholic minister Henri Nouwen’s The Wounded Healer that has been hanging on my wall for the last three years:
The beginning and end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others. Thinking about martyrdom can be an escape unless we realize that real martyrdom means a witness that starts with the willingness to cry with those who cry, laugh with those who laugh, and to make our own painful and joyful experiences available as sources of clarification and understanding. (emphasis mine)
Who can save a child from a burning house without taking the risk of being hurt by the flames? Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in their own heart and even losing their precious peace of mind? In short, “Who can take away suffering without entering it?”
It is an illusion to think that a person can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. Our lives are filled with examples telling us that leadership requires understanding, and understanding requires sharing. So long as we define leadership in terms of preventing or establishing precedents, or in terms of being responsible for some kind of abstract “general good,” we have forgotten that no God can save us except a suffering God, and that no one can lead others except the one who is crushed by their sins.2
Brand New Day ends not with Spider-Man using his superpowers to defeat an enemy, but with Peter Parker “[making his] own painful and joyful experiences available as sources of clarification and understanding” and sharing the unconditional love he has received with another. That is the vocation of the Christian minister in a nutshell: to share with others the love with which Christ first loved us.
At the time of this writing, Brand New Day is my fourth favorite Spider-Man movie after the Raimi trilogy, which is in a class of its own. Apologies to the Spider-Verse fans!
It would be utterly speculative to suggest that Cretton had this passage in mind when making the film, but neither does it seem entirely implausible. Although I have not found any recent interviews in which he makes reference to his faith, Cretton was raised as a Christian homeschooler and attended Point Loma Nazarene University. (I first encountered him as a featured speaker at the faith-based BIOLA Media Conference in 2013, alongside future fellow Marvel director Ryan Coogler!) Moreover, Cretton spent two years working at a facility for troubled, at-risk teenagers, an experience which formed the basis for his breakout film Short Term 12. Nouwen spent the last years of his life ministering to a community of people with developmental disabilities. It is not hard to imagine that Cretton is familiar with Nouwen’s work, or that The Wounded Healer is a book he might have read.