Some CU-Chicago alums might remember “Faith Goes to the Movies” or “Cinema Sophia,” where we would watch popular movies together and discuss them from a Christian perspective. Though I have not studied a movie with others for some time, watching the Barbie movie last week has inspired a few comments.
The movie climaxes with a long speech by the mother from the real world about how impossible it is to do what everyone expects you to. She gives a long, long description of the burden of the law (which, in Galatians 3, Paul describes as a curse if you fail). But no one in the movie shared the good news from the next chapter of Galatians: that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son to be born of a woman, born under the law, that He might redeem those who were under the law.”
The movie shows Barbie and friends doing what they can to work out their differences . . . but in the end, they were still in a red pyramid world, where value was measured by how much control you have over others or they over you. In God’s economy, wealth is measured in control over oneself in order that we might be free to care for others (read the narrative of Jesus washing the apostles’ feet in John 13).
Maybe the Barbie movie is a great conversation starter that will allow others to voice their own anxieties, fears, and frustrations as invitations for us to share the love of Christ for them.