“Venus and Mars and Percy Jackson?”

There is a movie out right now called “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” which has the teenage son of a Greek god and human mother on a quest to save the world. Well, it is very entertaining, but entertaining fiction, to be sure. I have been fascinated since childhood by the ancient stories of the Mediterranean people trying to make sense of the world before Christianity arrived with its answers. And that reminded me that we have two subsequent months that honor Greek/Roman ideals – love and war: Venus and Mars. You might even remember that several years ago there was a series of books about “Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus.” I actually think we humans are all probably from both Mars and Venus.
Last month was the big Love festival of Valentine’s Day, and Love moved through the culture – music, movies, money. The goddess of Love, called Venus by the Romans or Aphrodite by the Greeks, ruled the nations’ attention. We will shortly be entering March (named for the Roman God Mars, called Ares by the Greeks -- the god of war). Are we similarly dominated by war? There is a war, a couple of wars, half a world away, often called to mind only when we hear of soldiers who are wounded or killed in action or civilians caught in the combat crossfire. And we are still in the middle of Lent when we remember the war that is internal for many of us, a war that the Apostle Paul noted: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Roman 7:19)

This two-fold, Love-War, Good-Evil, are realities indeed for human life. We do not need a modern half-god, half-man like Percy Jackson to solve the problem. And the Greeks and Romans though instructive do not solve things for us. So, we have a good Lutheran concept that recognizes “Simul justus et peccator” – simultaneously saint and sinner – the very human nature we share, the very human nature that the true God, true Man, Jesus Christ solved for us, a solution we ponder in the Christian faith which has made its way beyond the Mediterranean to Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas – that is, to us!

So, we draw close to the end of the Lenten season in March (this month of warfare) and we look forward to the Easter promise, when Divine Love erupts from the tomb in April! “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7: 24b,25)