Star Wars Quick-Takes: The Phantom Menace- There's Always a Bigger Fish

As all recent media has made painfully clear, we just got a new Star Wars movie less than a month ago, (not that the movie was painful at all, just the excess of marketing). So, I thought it would be a good time to re-watch the Star Wars movies, and see what themes, what little snippets of truth, I could pull from them. I’m doing them in the in-universe chronological order, so that the newest film will be last, (don’t worry, I’ll steer clear of spoilers for The Force Awakens).

A couple of Jedi Knights go to negotiate with a corrupt trade union. This is routine stuff for them, evidently. They’ll just talk them out of the blockade they’ve got going, and be on their way. But what’s this? A Sith Lord? This situation is much more complicated than they thought. Anyways, it’s still not that complicated. They’ll just fight off Darth Maul and...oh drat, he has an evil Sith Master backing him up? Shouldn’t the Jedi Council have seen this coming?

“There’s always a bigger fish”, says wise Jedi Master Qui Gon Jinn, after he, his apprentice, and a clumsy Gungan are saved from a Goober fish by something higher up on the food chain. This statement seems to be a concise summary of the plot of The Phantom Menace. At this point in Star Wars universe history, the Jedi Council has become complacent in their knowledge of the force. Too many years away from the struggle of light against dark have blurred the lines for them, until they see a simple trade dispute where a Sith uprising is in the works.

This seems to be a problem in my life as a Christian sometimes as well. I know the force isn’t meant to represent the spiritual realm in a Biblical sense, but there are often good parallels if you dig. Sometimes, I become like the Jedi Council, and let mundane, everyday issues, like trade disputes and history essays, to cloud my view of the fight that is going on around me all the time. When all indicators point to a need for spiritual revival in my life, I brush it off as something merely physical, like a federation blockade, rather than what it really is, an attack from the Sith.

Now, I’m not saying we should go looking for a demon, (or Darth Maul), behind every bush, but I am saying that we can’t lose sight of the reality of our world. There is no real divide between the sacred and the secular. Both the ordinary and the extraordinary are happening around us all the time. So, let’s not forget about the “bigger fish”- the battle going on between good and evil, the light and the dark.

Let’s also not forget that we are on the side of the biggest “fish” of them all. In the end, the light will always win.

Keep on glowing in the dark,

Elora