What Happens When The Main Character Dies

It’s weird where inspiration comes from sometimes. So I was scrolling through instagram andI saw a clip on the making of the final episode of season one of Game of Thrones, where Ned Stark dies. You don’t do this in storytelling, you don’t kill the main character. What will bring your audience back if you kill the person they’ve connected to more than anyone else. What will draw your audience when the hero is gone.

So it got me thinking, how did the disciples feel when the hero died? How must it have shaken them when Jesus died?

Whenever we talk about the crucifixion we focus on the sacrifice, the power of the sacrifice, we turn our focus to the selflessness of Christ to lay His life down for all of us, despite our sins and unworthiness. We look at it from the spiritual perspective which is powerful and essential, but let’s stop and talk a look at the reality of it all.

The disciples have dropped everything in the life and spent the last 3 years following Jesus. They’ve left family, careers, finances, dropped it all to follow Christ. And it’s all been worth it, they’ve held on to HIs every word and seen HIm perform unimaginable miracles, give them wisdom and insight, He has been equipping them. One day He sits them all down and say’s I’m gonna be betrayed, I’ll be crucified, then I’ll rise again, really all they hear is , ‘So I’m gonna die.’ They are like hell no, Peter is like, that doesn’t fit the plan, you don’t have to die.

And then it starts to unfold itself, and their life shatters so quickly. You’ve hinged all your hope on this guy and you see HIm dragged off like a common criminal, He is insulted and mocked, jeered at, even by the criminals beside Him on the crosss. This person, they all looked up to is being made to look like nothing. Fear sets in, they are all scared of being arrested and killed and don’t want to even be associated with Him, Peter who said he’d never deny Him, goes on to deny Jesus three times.

Jesus prophecied it all, how He’d be betrayed, how He’d die, but in the light of the moment all that is forgotten, all hope seems lost and it feels like the last 3 years were wasted.

What do you do when the very thing you cringed all you hope on is gone. It didn’t take Peter long to get back on the boat and start fishing. The disciples, couldn’t stay and watch Him die, it only talk of the women that stayed through the cross.

We’ve all been there, where you keep pushing the goal post of your faith, till you see to run out of string, everything that seemed indicative of hope has gone, how do you keep believing. When Mary ran tot tell the disciples she’d seen Jesus resurrected it say they were weeping, distraught. The act of grace, Jesus had performed by dying for them, must have seemed like an act of surrender.

But THIS is what we hold onto, what seemed like the end was only the beginning! What seemed like the last option was really the birthing of eternal hope. The things of God often run contradictory to the things of the world, what seemed like death was really releasing life. Often the thing that looks like you last hope being lost opens you to see just how much more there is in the places you’ve never looked.