I Volunteer as Tribute

Second Thoughts on Two Films

In 2023, a viral social media phenomenon revealed that men frequently think about the Roman Empire, shocking the women in their lives who rarely think about it. Some people have good reason to think about the Roman Empire; you might be an ancient historian or an actor in a Shakespearean play set in ancient Rome. Christians have an obvious reason, given the setting of the New Testament, the life of Jesus and the early church.

Although it is common to think that the Roman Empire fell with the sacking of Rome in 476AD, the Eastern Empire continued based out of Constantinople for around another thousand years; that’s not even mentioning the Holy Roman Empire, which set itself up in Europe during the Middle Ages and also lasted about a thousand years itself. It’s hard to get away from empires. My whole life has been lived in a country that came about due to the colonial expansion of an empire. I am currently writing in English, using the Latin alphabet, and in case you haven’t ever thought about it, yes, it is because of the Roman Empire.

As a child, my concerns were about an empire a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. For my children, there was also a dystopian future empire that maintained power over its subjects by making their children fight each other to the death in a reality TV show. The Hunger Games went quickly from a successful young adult novel into a Hollywood blockbuster film. Some people loved it, and some hated it, especially for the violence involving children. If you are trying to tell a story about the horrors that come when the elites of the empire live in luxury off the back of oppressing masses of hard-working, starving people, it does seem fitting that the story be told horrifically.

The Hunger Games films have a certain post-modern self-awareness built into them. As there is a television audience within the movie that watches the games and surrounding events, it can make it feel like there is a blurry line between the viewers in the story and the ones watching the movie. At one point, Woody Harrelson’s character is coaching the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, and he explains that the audience inside the story connected most strongly with her when she made the heroic move to volunteer as tribute when her younger sister’s name had been called to participate in the death games. It truly is an iconic scene, one that sets up the whole series. It seems to be one of those scenes that people may know about without ever having seen the movie, and it has, in some sense, taken on a life of its own outside the film.

A couple of years ago, while researching for a paper in a trinitarian theology class, I came across preacher-theologian Fleming Rutledge and her writing on the crucifixion of Jesus. In her book, Rutledge does an excellent job examining the various New Testament motifs related to Jesus's death and deals with some problematic ideas that have developed in certain theological circles. One of these was the aspect of “substitution”, and it was here that a reference to The Hunger Games and Katniss volunteering as tribute was made:

The universal appeal of the notion of substitution is illustrated by the immense pop­ularity of the book and movie series The Hunger Games. When a very young girl is chosen by lot to fight to the death, her big sister steps forward and volunteers to take her place. It is the simplest and most recognizable plot element imaginable; who can fail to understand it?¹

Indeed, there is no greater love than laying one’s life down for a friend, which makes for a great story. Self-sacrifice can be seen at the heart of many great tales, old and new. Consider the climatic moment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the culmination of over twenty films; it all came down to one man laying his life down on behalf of half the universe's population. That was a universe where the mightiest, strongest, and most powerful were the heroes, but the victory didn’t come by overpowering the enemy, at least not in the way we might have thought. Whilst Iron Man gave up his life that others might live, it would seem far-fetched to call that a case of substitution, as we find with Katniss Everdeen.

It makes sense why Katniss volunteered to replace her sister, but why did the imperialistic Capitol overlords accept such a situation? As far as I can tell, there is never an explicit reason given, although we could speculate about the spectacle that it adds to the reality TV drama. Perhaps we should pay attention to what it was that Katniss volunteered to be: a tribute. In this context, the children selected were intended to be periodic payments made by the districts to the ruling Capitol, payments in human lives. Maybe it didn’t really matter who, which is why they were chosen at random, as long as someone was offered up to die. I suggest it was intended to feel as merciless and heartless as it sounds. In this example, accepting substitution certainly had nothing to do with justice.

Shortly after reading Rutledge’s book, I re-watched a movie from my childhood where, again, substitution was the pivotal moment, but in this case, concepts of justice and appeasement were at play. The Last of the Mohicans is an epic historical drama from the early nineties starring Daniel Day-Lewis with amazing music and scenery. The film is set during wartime, but really, it is a movie centred on personal revenge, with a love triangle on the side. The film’s antagonist, Magua, is seeking revenge for his murdered family, so he is set on killing a British Army colonel as well as the colonel’s two daughters. Day-Lewis’ character and a British Army major spend most of the movie trying to protect the women and form the love triangle with the older sister. Whilst overall, it’s not generally considered a great movie, this one scene is a cinematic classic.

After Mangua has killed the colonel, he captures the major and the two daughters, taking the prisoners back to his tribe for a judgement from the tribal leader. It’s at this point that Day-Lewis’ character comes in, unarmed, seeking to plead for the lives of the prisoners. The tribal leader rules that the major be returned to the British to soften their hatred, the younger sister be given to heal Magua’s heart, and the older sister be burned alive for the murder of Magua’s children. Whilst Day-Lewis’ character is told he may leave in peace, he offers to be a substitute for the older sister. The major, who is acting as interpreter, instead tells the tribal leader to take his own life as the substitute, which is accepted, and he is burnt alive. Day-Lewis’s character shoots the major as an act of mercy before there is more killing and revenge.

The tribal leader thought his rulings would bring peace, but they did not. The judgements made were intended to make all the parties less angry whilst having some sense of logic and regard for honour. Neither of the men in love with the older sister could just let her die and thus were willing to offer themselves in her place. What makes this scene particularly powerful is the move that the army major makes in offering himself instead because, in effect, he was not only substituting himself for the woman he loved but also for the man he hated. Until this point in the movie, the director had done a fine job of making the man very unlikeable, but in one act, he becomes the story's true hero. However, it remains somewhat unclear why the tribal leader accepted the offer of substitution, other than it merely satisfying a desire for blood or some imagined levelling of justice scales.

Reflecting on these two films and their moving drama, I think some conclusions can be made. Indeed, it’s beautiful to stand in for someone else and take the consequences imposed by tyranny on them or even to accept and suffer the logical end of the other person’s mistakes instead of them. We cannot say the same thing about an empire that does not value human life as sacred or a justice system that would execute the innocent person instead of the guilty one. This is where the language of substitution as it relates to Jesus’ crucifixion can lead down a problematic path of disturbing ideas.

Jesus was indeed crucified as a substitute, and in particular, it was a penal substitution. Three violent rebels were guilty as charged by the Romans, and two of them were executed along with Jesus; one of them, Barabbas, was let go. Based on what Jesus said on the cross, it was one of the two that died with Jesus, who will be with him in paradise. It is a consistent message of the New Testament: for one to be saved by Jesus, one must also die with him.² In reality, we do not know what happened to the substituted Barabbas; he disappeared from the story. Jesus laid his life down voluntarily, and the ones who called for that innocent man to die instead of the guilty were asking for the worst kind of injustice, something that the early Christians considered murder.³ Although it is common for some modern Christians to believe that Jesus died on the cross as a punishment from the Father, taking the punishment that we deserve for our sins instead of us, we should keep in mind that this is a relatively new way of thinking about the crucifixion. Even Anselm, the eleventh-century bishop who established the idea of God requiring satisfaction for sin and that God could not simply forgive out of mercy, he himself wrote: “God the Father did not treat that man as you seem to suppose, nor put to death the innocent for the guilty.”⁴

In Jesus Christ, God is with us, laying his life down to save us, a beautiful demonstration of God’s love for humanity. But on the cross, the apparent realities of violence, injustice and death are not legitimated; rather, they are exposed and condemned as death is swallowed up by life. The problems of the world are not solved by committing murderous violence nor by an eye-for-eye retaliatory form of justice; at least, that’s what I learnt from a Clint Eastwood movie.

1. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 466. This quote is found in the footnotes.

2. There are too many examples of this to list exhaustively, but 2 Timothy 2:11 is possibly the clearest example. See also Romans 6:8, Galatians 2:20 and Colossians 2:12.

3. See Stephen's speech just before he is stoned (Acts 7:52).

4. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo. 8.