The enemy outnumber us a paltry three to one. Good odds for any Greek. This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny — and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine. Give thanks, men, to Leonidas and the brave three hundred — to victory.

I know it’s a comic book version of history, but I am irresistibly attracted to 300 — both Frank Miller’s graphic novel [i.e., comic book for “grown ups”] and the movie it inspired. Forget the poetic license (we don’t know why the shepherd Ephialtes betrayed the Spartans, we don’t know how King Leonidas’ wife supported his campaign back home, we don’t know if the doomed king made anybody like the above-quoted Delios return home to tell the tale and marshal support for the next campaign) — 300’s license is no greater than Braveheart’s. Forget the over-the-top visual and auditory reconstruction — yeah right, the Spartans fought with exposed six-pack abs and celebrated to heavy metal music while Zeus punished the Persian navy. The genre is Classics Illustrated on steroids — perhaps literally to judge from how buff this Leonidas and his Spartan warriors are.

The fact is: Europe came close to capitulating to Persian conquest in 480 B.C. — save for the time purchased and the example set by 300 brave Spartans (and others, to be sure) who perished in the shade of Persian arrows (a line Frank Miller takes directly from Herodotus) at Thermopylae. Fictional though the character is, and fictional though his lines are, Delios’ (and through him, Frank Miller’s) homage is apt.

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Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion,—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,—came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. (ch. 24)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter revolves around three sinners who respond to their sinfulness in wildly different ways and with wildly different results. The adulterous pastor Dimmesdale hides his sin, and nearly loses his soul in the process. The sinned against physician Chillingworth never forgives. Instead, he grows obsessively vengeful and finally becomes devil’s food. Hester Prynne owns her guilt, accepts the full consequences of her sin — and even goes the second mile, so to speak, by generously (if misguidedly) protecting the identity of both her paramour and her husband. In the end, she emerges with a quiet radiance about her. She becomes a magnet for others whom sin has left “wounded, wasted, wronged, and wretched,” especially women. She can comfort and counsel chiefly because of her crucible.

It was impossible for me to read The Scarlet Letter and not burn with Hawthorne’s anger at a world and a church that suffered the male pastor’s hypocrisy and the male physician’s duplicity at the sinful woman’s expense. Yet the world Hawthorne longs for in the future — one in which “the whole relation between man and woman” is established “on a surer ground of mutual happiness” — I find in the new creation Jesus came to inaugurate in the first place. How sad that it remains so elusive.

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What follows is the republication of a tribute I offered earlier this week at Common Grounds Online to my departed (too late in life) friend and mentor, Robert Webber. The blog is based, in part, on comments I offered this past June in a discussion at the Institute for Worship Studies.

A few — a very few — people you get to know in life are larger than life. The force of their character seems to enlarge a room when they walk into it. Of course, larger than life people can either be “black holes” that suck everything and everybody into themselves — you get smaller because they’re there. Or they can be “suns” that make everything and everybody else shine brighter — you get larger because they’re there.

Bob Webber was larger than life in the latter sense. He went on to glory this spring, and I’ve spent a lot of quiet time this summer parsing his passing. He made me shine brighter and feel larger, and I’ve been trying to understand why.

A lot of what made Webber an enlargingly large presence comes to light in the last book that was “in the pipeline” before he became ill, Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: Five Perspectives (Zondervan, 2007). (Happily, during his illness, Bob was able to write quite a bit, and so this is not the last book we will see.) I’d like to offer some observations (reader beware: this is not a review … so not only will you be spared any ending-spoiling revelations, you’ll also be spoiled any real plot analysis … suffice it to say, Webber assembles essays on theological concerns by “emergent” leaders, from right to left: Mark Driscoll, John Burke, Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, and Karen Ward).

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