For parts one and two, click here. They’re listed in reverse order, but they’re both there.
Let’s sum up what we have gone over so far:
- Like many dictatorships, Panem keeps the populace under its thumb by keeping people imprisoned within a false, small world…as symbolized by the Hunger Games, in which competitors are so pitted against one another that they forget who the real enemy is.
- Katniss Everdeen breaks through the false “world” of the games — and, symbolically, of Panem as well — by bringing down the force field that holds the arena together.
What follows is an explanation of how this calls to mind the great Christian meta-narrative:
At the very beginning of human history, we sold ourselves to the devil, who immediately began to exercise his tyranny over us. By making the spirit serve the flesh, the creature worship other creatures rather than the Creator, he closed us off from the spiritual world and enclosed us within a false world in which we are in all matters — temporal and religious — pitted against one another, all the while failing to realize who our real enemy is.
But conflict is not the only distraction we’ve had to endure. Like the tributes in “Catching Fire,” who try to help themselves by forming alliances within the parameters of the game, we have striven in various ways throughout the centuries (through government, charity, programs for personal transformation, etc.) to overcome our plight within the confines of the “small world” we have inherited. To be sure, many of these endeavors are good in and of themselves — but they can’t save us.
When Moses lifted up the bronze image of a snake on a pole in the desert (Numbers 21: 4-9), he foreshadowed the exposure of mankind’s real enemy. This foreshadowing was fulfilled by Christ on the Cross.
Like Katniss, Christ puts Himself up against the tree in order to attract lightning to Himself — the lightning of Divine Justice.
By the way, this should not be construed as a vengeful act on the part of a vindictive God. But here’s the thing: Sin causes a rupture in the Divine-human relationship. And therefore, as with a rupture in any relationship, it incurs a debt. The restoration of the relationship requires that the barrier that has been put in the way be removed.
Because sin is a “no” to the infinitely good God, it has infinite implications. Therefore, while we must do our part to be saved, God must — and did — act first.
Christ died in our place so that the devil’s claim against us could be removed. Here is how St. Irenaeus of Lyons put it in the second century:
And since the apostasy tyrannized over us unjustly, … the Word of God … did righteously turn against that apostasy, and redeem from it His own property, not by violent means, as the [apostasy] had obtained dominion over us at the beginning … but by means of persuasion, as became a God of counsel, who does not use violent means to obtain what He desires; so that neither should justice be infringed upon, nor the ancient handiwork of God go to destruction. (“Adversus Haereses,” V:i — bold added)
By dying and then rising from the dead, Christ opened up to us a whole new and immensely vast world, to which the world we know is as the mother’s womb is to the world into which we are born.
In this way the tyranny of the devil — along with all other tyrannies — is effectively overcome.
Keep this in mind when we return to the “Catching Fire” plot in part four.
Images from Wikipedia