In all great stories, there is a point where the hero and his or her friends make a costly choice. Contrary to the instinct for self-preservation, they take dangerous paths into the heart of darkness to destroy evil and save the world.
Something divine happened on our February 9 flight back to Colorado from the 2015 Basileia Alliance Convocation in Wales.
I packed in four action-adventure movies: Fury, The Equalizer, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Hercules.
Although binging on four movies in a row seated in a chair in the sky at 40,000 feet while flying over one of Earth’s oceans at 600 miles per hour between two continents is divinely amazing in its own way, that’s not what I’m talking about.
Fury, Equalizer, Guardians, and Hercules each have a remarkable “Secret Counsel” scene at a pivotal point in their respective story lines. It corresponds to Transfiguration Sunday, celebrated in this Year of Our Lord 2015 on February 15.
Providentially, I’m writing the first blog of this Secret Counsel series today, on the afternoon of Transfiguration Sunday 2015. I love it when this happens.
In all great stories, there is a point where the hero and his or her friends make a costly choice. Contrary to the instinct for self-preservation, they take dangerous paths into the heart of darkness to destroy evil and save the world. More precisely, this choice involves separating evil from what it has ruined to destroy the evil and restore all that evil has ruined. This twofold form of victory is ultimately embodied in the Christus Victor story.
We cultivate wisdom in the secret places of the world where heroes gather, not to be noticed, but to map dangerous paths of obedience into the heart of darkness, knowing the cost. We fear no evil, not even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death because in death we exhaust evil, putting death to death. (The Manifesto, Kingdom Superheroes.)
In Fury (2014 film), for example, the five-man crew of a Sherman tank in WWII, led by battled hardened Don “War Daddy” Collier, get cut off and isolated in enemy territory. After their tank (named Fury) is immobilized, the crew considers abandoning it and fleeing for their lives ahead of 300 German SS soldiers descending on their position. Collier determines to remain with the tank and fight but releases the rest of his crew to flee for their lives into the woods. However, though outnumbered and outgunned, each of the crew, one by one count the cost and also decide to stay and fight. A member of the crew, whose first name is––I’m not kidding––Boyd, quotes from Isaiah 6:8, “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me.’”
There are also similar “here-am-I-send-me” scenes in The Equalizer, Guardians of the Galaxy and Hercules.
Since the flight from London to Denver was only about 10 hours, I didn’t have time to squeeze in yet a fifth movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, that has one of my favorite “Secret Counsel” scenes of all time––the Council of Elrond. At the Council of Elrond, as I’ve written elsewhere, “Frodo chooses to carry the Ring to Mount Doom” just as Jesus––in His Transfiguration Sunday council meeting with Moses and Elijah––determined “to carry the cross to Mount Calvary.” (Epic Living, p. 39.)
I first ran across this mysterious, sacramental, covenantal concept of “secret counsel” in 1990. For the last 25 years, I’ve been on a quest to understand better and, through the Church, apply this wondrous idea to all areas of thought and life. One of the milestones in this quest came about just last year after ten years of work alongside my fellow Basileians. During Pascha (Easter) 2014, we published the first edition of The Constitution of Basileia, which expresses what the Lord has made known to us in the secret place of the Council of the Lord.
This phrase, “secret counsel” is an English translation of the Hebrew word sode, which appears in passages like Jeremiah 23:18, Amos 3:7 and Psalm 25:14. Most English translations of Jeremiah 23:18 render it as “counsel,” while many translations of the Amos passage say “secret.” English Bibles often translate sode in Psalm 25:14 as “friendship,” sometimes with a footnote saying, “Or the secret counsel.”
The Hebrew word sode means the same as the New Testament Greek word mysterion (“mystery”). It also means the same as the Latin word sacramentum (“sacrament”), which brings us full circle as to why translators of sode in Psalm 25:14 often render it as “friendship.”
Jesus says in John 15:15, while instituting the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, “ No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”
The Lord makes His “secret counsel” known to His friends in gatherings that may be pictured both metaphorically and literally as sitting together at a table. This is precisely what Jesus was doing with His disciples in John 15:15.
Keeping John 15:15 in mind, Psalm 25:14 takes on a fresh feel: “The friendship [or the secret counsel] of the Lord is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant.” The covenant is the pattern of authority by which worlds are made, and when the covenant is broken, unmade.
Through the various installments of this Secret Counsel blog, it is my desire that we enter into discussions as friends around the Table to explore the mystery of the kingdom together.
Sometimes, we might even talk about a movie or two…or four.
Boyd+
Transfiguration Sunday 2015
Boyd writes a new Secret Counsel blog every couple weeks. Click here to see the whole collection.