“The disciples said to him, ‘Where are we, here in the wilderness, going to get bread to fill up this great a crowd?’ Jesus replied, ‘How much bread do you have?'” (Matthew 15:33-34a)
Ghosts of Mars, released in August 2001, is the story of a team from the Martian security force sent to pick up a prisoner from a small mining town and bring him back for trial. If this sounds like plot from an old western, it’s because that’s what this is. Our team takes a train out into the frontier only to find a ghost town. Beyond the few in the town jail, including Desolation Williams who they’ve come to collect, there’s not a soul around. At least, it seems that way.
Turns out the residents of the town are, mostly, alive but…different. Seems somewhere up the line another town found a buried Martian structure. They, of course, opened the door on it and unleashed, you guessed it, the ghosts of Mars.
But these aren’t chain-rattling poltergeists. No, these ghosts possess humans, turning them into monsters that are quite upset someone’s invaded their world. Chaos, gunfire, and explosions ensue as the team and the prisoners wait for the train’s return.
While it’s not one of John Carpenter’s (who brought us The Thing we covered earlier this summer) best films, it’s a fun film. It didn’t do well with critics or the box office because it wasn’t what people expected. This isn’t, after all, a horror movie. It’s a play on a classic western trope with angry, violent natives and the peace officers who have to fight their way out of town.
In one scene, the few left alive are barricaded in the jail. One of them wonders why this is happening, what do these “ghosts” want. In reply, the leader of this band of survivors says that it’s about dominion. It’s about whose world this is: ours or theirs.
Because there aren’t enough planets just like there isn’t enough land, right? Because there’s not enough of anything, and if someone else has it, that means we don’t. So, it’s no wonder none of them can be left alive. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be enough.
Jesus had thoughts about this idea of enough. We see it in the feeding of the thousands with just a little bread and a couple of fish. We hear it in the story of the Good Samaritan. It’s even on display at the Wedding in Cana. Jesus, over and over, keeps exhibiting a world where there is enough. Enough for everyone.
Certainly, this can seem a little naive sometimes. After all, wasn’t that long ago stores were rationing out toilet paper. And our wounded climate is already endangering the supplies of foods that, today, spill off the shelves. Sometimes, there isn’t enough, right?
But this brings us around to what Jesus was always trying (and still is) to show us: that our perception isn’t the reality. It’s not the Reality of the Divine that, Jesus tells us, surrounds us—a way of seeing where there’s always enough; because, no one’s worried about someone having something they don’t.
I’m not saying that a change in the humans’ or the ghosts’ mindset might have prevented the violence and big explosions, but it is an interesting question about just how much pain, suffering, and, yes, violence can be circumvented by choosing to see the world in a new way, a way that Jesus thought was the real way of things.
One where nothing has to be taken from anyone else.
Jesus, help me act as if there is enough for everyone.