Korean Drama and Jesus

This title makes me chuckle. Last night Esther and I finished watching a Korean love story. First of all I should admit, I was slow in being drawn into the story. I missed most of the first few episodes because it seemed terribly uninteresting. However, somewhere along the line, I found myself transfixed and unequivocally invested in the story.

I would very much like to recap the entire story here. However, that would take a series of blogs, and in that case you might as well just watch the show. Let me suffice it to say: two friends, a young girl and a boy grow up together in meager circumstances in rural Korea. She needs heart surgery, if she has any chance of living. The boy’s father is a scoundrel and steals the money for her surgery. The mother of the girl then searches for the boy’s father in Seoul that she might recover the money for her daughter’s surgery. In the process, the mother is hit by a car and dies. To make matters worse, the boy’s father abandons him. The young boy cares dearly for the young girl, but he doesn’t know what to do because they are penniless. He attempts to steal a lady’s purse, but he is immediately caught. As it turns out, he looks strikingly similar to a wealthy couple’s recently deceased son. The wife is suicidal after losing her son, so the husband tells the young boy that he will pay for the young girl’s surgery if he, the young boy, agrees to become their son. The young boy agrees, but they take him away before he is able to find out if the surgery was a success. They tell him the young girl died during the surgery. However, fifteen years later, he discovers that she didn’t die at all. The story continues with a feeble seed of hope.

I do not want to diminish the magnitude of laying down one’s life for another – “no one demonstrates greater love than this.” Dickens captures this notion well in A Tale of Two Cities. In fact, I imagine that there are many stories that have utilized the notion of dying for the sake of another. However, I think there is something to be said about living a whole life of sacrifice, and I do not mean merely being subservient in rhetoric and disposition. I mean trading in one’s own life and identity that another might live, like the young boy trading in all that he was that the young girl might have a chance at life. For me this was the most striking aspect of the story: that the young boy would give his whole life over to strangers that the young girl might have some hope of life.

Before I go a step further, let it be said that I do not go about baptizing movies and TV shows, and I do not like pretending that this and that movie have biblical analogs (many people have done that with The Lord of the Rings, which to my understanding is in direct conflict with Tolkien).

That said, after finishing the show last night, I found myself naturally wandering into the land of the Gospels. The Son came and dwelt among us as Jesus of Nazareth. I am fully aware of the many Christological heresies that would ensnare me, if I were to draw direct parallels between the young boy in the Korean drama and Jesus. I have no intention of attempting to draw consistent parallels between the Gospels and the Korean drama as a whole. But in a sense, the Son sacrificially traded in his identity that humanity might be drawn into life, perhaps similar to the young boy allowing himself to be essentially kidnapped that the young girl might have the life-saving surgery. When we think of the Son’s sacrifice, we often think of Jesus’ death, but I think we would do well to take heed of Jesus’ earthly life as a whole that we might then be drawn into the Son’s overwhelming and rather incomprehensible life-long sacrifice.

I wonder if this might also shed light on Christian life.