Bad Messiah
Recently, I watched Dune: Part Two. It was a visual feast and a masterpiece of film. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Dune books were written by Frank Herbert, who is an atheist. And you can see it in the movies--there is a deep cynicism and hostility towards religion throughout the films. One of the main villains is the Bene Gesserit. They sound like the Jesuit order--this is not by accident. The Bene Gesserit is a shadowy, quasi-religious order of powerful women, who propagate a prophesy of a Messiah who would rise and liberate the Fremen from oppression. But as you watch the movies, you find out that the Bene Gesserit use this prophesy to manipulate and control the geo-politics of Dune. Not unreasonably, readers have seen the Dune novels as a rejection of the very idea of a Messiah. But I think Frank Herbert is expressing the deep heartache of a failed Messiah. There have been so many bad Messiahs in world history. There have been so many would-be Messiahs, who started out good, but ended up bad.
In the Dune novels, the Messiah-figure is Paul Atreides. Especially in Dune: Part One, he starts out as pure-hearted and noble, and you’re cheering him on as he fights against the evil Harkonnen. But as Paul rises to power, he becomes more and more twisted by vengeance and hatred. At first, he resists the temptation to use the unrestrained violence of religious zealotry, but eventually he gives in as circumstances become dire. So that by the yet-to-be-released third movie, which will be based on Frank Herbert’s second novel, Dune Messiah, Paul becomes a dark and evil ruler, who slaughters billions of people to maintain his power.
Jehu (bowing), as shown in the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, which is an important extra-biblical evidence for the biblical account.
When you read the biblical books of First and Second Kings, you have a series of heroic kings who start out well, full of promise and devotion to God, but eventually, they give into corruption, moral decay, and tyranny. This is the story of Solomon, Jeroboam, Joash, Hezekiah, and in particular, Jehu. Jehu is the only king in northern Israel who is explicitly anointed as king. He is literally a Messiah-figure--“Messiah” comes from the Hebrew word for “the anointed one.” At first, Jehu shows humility and pledges himself to obey God. But by the end of his reign, he becomes an idolator who ruthlessly crushes all rivals with indiscriminate violence.
What are all these stories telling us? King Jehu in the Bible, the Dune novels, Game of Thrones (Daenerys is a female-Messiah who turns evil in the end)--they all point to the universal human longing for a true and righteous Messiah, who will possess, both heroic strength to smash evil, and, at the same time, lowly weakness to rescue sinners. The claim of Christianity is that this paradoxical Messiah has come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He has come and will come again.
I recently preached on the life of King Jehu from 2 Kings 9-10. You can listen here: