“There isn’t Jew or Gentile, servant or master, male or female; because, you—all of you—are one in Jesus the Anointed One” (Galatians 3.28).
Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Blade Runner tells the story of one Rick Deckard whose job is to hunt down a group androids who were part of an uprising on a colony world, and “retire” them, a euphemism for their destruction.
But we wouldn’t have much of a story if this was an easy task. Did I mention that the replicants—as the androids are called—are smarter and stronger than us flesh and blood humans? No wonder their inventor called them more human than human.
Which opens the door to thinking about just what makes someone, or something, human.
Paul, of course, wasn’t thinking androids when he wrote the lines above. Such things might well have been beyond his imagination. But his words would probably resonate rather well with the movie’s replicants: Roy, Zhora, Leon, and Pris.
At first pass, Paul’s words are about the egalitarianism of this new life Jesus has introduced into the world—one where neither status, birth, nor gender are determiners of status. They are directed at a world, like ours, that’s separated into categories that define who is valuable and who can participate in the life of the state. They were and are radical.
But these words become something more when taken in the context of Paul’s larger message, one even more radical than the elimination of categories or status. One that has to do with not only who is human, but what makes us human…or more than human.
In the film, the Blade Runners use a test to help determine who is and isn’t human. The test consists of a device that measures the eye in reaction to a list of questions being asked. Replicants, we’re told, don’t have the emotional range of humans. So the questions are…peculiar.
The sample of questions we hear during the film are disturbing—images of creatures suffering and scenarios of indifference—that leave you wondering at the type of reaction the devices are attempting to detect. Is it a response or the lack of one?
Paul’s categories—Jew, Gentile, male, female—are about more than religion, ancestry, or gender, they’re about who does and doesn’t count as fully human. These identifications describe who is and isn’t valuable, where one sits on the hierarchy of creation. We see it today in our discourse and how the little differences in nationality, belief, or affiliation influence who is and isn’t valuable. Whose “retirement” is tragedy and whose is benefit.
But Paul, following Jesus, is challenging us to think differently, to contemplate that maybe there is nothing that sets one life as more precious than another, and that every death is, in fact, a deep and terrible loss. He is daring us to imagine something that is beyond the typical human imagination, and dream as the One whose thoughts are not our thoughts.
It means, perhaps, seeing in ways we haven’t before, loving in ways we’ve not considered. It may even mean naming and treating all those we encounter as not just parties and alliances but as One who might tell us that we gave them water when they were thirsty.
Or, in other words, as if they were more human than human.
Jesus, all are precious to you and none outside your love, may I live as one who knows this is true, and treat everyone as if they were the image of you.