Hero Worship

     Next Tuesday is Cesar Chavez’s birthday, an event that is typically celebrated with great fanfare in many western states where Chavez was active as an iconic organizer of farm laborers in the 1960s and 70s. It will be a very different commemoration this year.

     That’s because of the allegations raised this month by Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmworkers union, that Chavez raped her in 1966 and sexually abused two teenage girls in the 1970s. These accusations have been devastating for farmworkers, Mexican Americans, and others across American society who have long looked to Chavez as a hero on a par with Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement. I myself, while I am not as familiar with Chavez’s work as I am with King’s, have always held him in esteem as a champion of justice to be emulated.

     These disturbing revelations have set me to thinking about the phenomenon of hero worship and the theological doctrine of sin. A core teaching of the Christian faith is that all people are tainted by a proclivity to sin and disobedience. Whether you believe we are stained by original sin from the cradle or you hold that each person is responsible for choosing sin for themselves, if you are a Christian you most likely understand that sin and the subsequent alienation from God that sin causes are the central predicaments of human life and the theological explanation for Jesus’s atoning death on the cross. Sin touches all of us. As Paul writes in Romans 3:23, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

     But we also have a tendency to elevate those we admire to hero status, placing them on a pedestal of moral excellence approaching idolatry, and when we find that the universal problem of sin that plagues us also plagued them, our disappointment and disillusionment can be acute. Cesar Chavez Day celebrations all across the southwestern US have been canceled or reprogrammed, murals featuring Chavez have been painted over, and an enormous amount of soul-searching is going on among those who see their hero toppled from his pedestal. A lot of people are having their faith in humanity violently shaken. If a great man like Cesar Chavez could have such devastating secrets, they reason, is there any hope for us mere mortals?

     What we cannot forget in situations such as these is that everyone we admire is also a mere mortal, as subject as we are to the deviousness and tragedy of sin. King was serially unfaithful to his wife Coretta. An unconscionable number of Roman Catholic priests were guilty of sexual abuse of children. High-profile preachers, politicians, and other leaders have been guilty of graft, embezzlement, and accepting bribes. Although no allegations have been made against him, we can be confident that even Fred Rogers was subject to the influence of sin (and he would be the first to acknowledge it, too). When it comes to sin, we’re all in the same boat, and that boat is sinking.

     Thank God for Jesus! Alone among human beings, our faith tells us, Jesus was free from the taint of sin. Various theories of the atonement hinge on that article of faith: because he himself was sinless he could step in to save us from the sin that victimizes us. However we interpret these mysteries, of one thing we can surely be confident—Jesus is the one hero who will never let us down. He is the only hero truly worthy of our worship.