Fantastic Four

"A leper came to him, kneeled down, and begged him, saying 'If you wish, you can make me clean.' Moved with pity, he stretched forth his hand, touched him, and said to him, 'I do will it. Be made clean.'" Mark 1:40-41

Throughout the movie, Fantastic Four, my heart went out to the character of Ben Grimm (a.k.a. The Thing), the guy who is caught up in a solar wind and whose DNA subsequently makes his skin and internal organs turn to rock. When he transforms, his fiancee immediately rejects him, his friends are shocked at the sight of him, and the general public is terrified of him.

Ben is truly an 'untouchable.' True, the three other members of the Fantastic Four (Mr. Fantastic, The Human Tourch, and The Invisible Woman) are affected and changed, but not nearly to the sad degree of The Thing.

In another scene, Ben is sitting on a bridge, sadly contemplating his new, shocking appearance. This could easily be his own suicide scene, but in the midst of his sorrow, he becomes a hero; he saves the life of someone who is also contemplating suicide, he saves a truck driver from being blown up in his truck, and he pulls a fire truck from dropping off a bridge. In this scene, Ben finds that his deficiency is actually something that can help others.

This is the moral of the story of Fantastic Four: Like the lepers in the Scriptures, our God loves us and reaches out to us, no matter what we look like or what quirks we have, physically or personally. To God, our human appearance means nothing, for we are all beautiful in His eyes.

And we need to look at our quirks as gifts, rather than curses, from God. Ben Grimm may have sacrificed his human look in this movie, but his new form is a blessing to the lives he saved on that bridge in the movie. We need to use what we have, like The Thing who finds he would rather live life as a rock-covered man helping others than anything else.

Furthermore, if we want to be like Christ in the world, we must see others as God sees others. We must reach out to the 'untouchables' in our world every day, just as Christ reached out to those lepers on the streets of Galilee. Reaching out to them means talking with them, inviting them into our lives, and loving them as God loves them. The hero of Fantastic Four in this aspect is a blind woman who takes a chance on The Thing. This, I believe, is a challenge to all of us who do see: accept all God's people as God accepts all His people.