My first reflection on Raiders of the Lost Ark was this, in my faraway teenage years: This is an awesome movie! There is nothing to compare it to. My current reflection on Raiders of the Lost Ark: This is an awesome movie! It can only be compared to the stories of the Patriarchs in the Bible.
While it is not true of all of Indiana Jones’s exploits, his adventures in Raiders share the same story arc as those of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This story arc has an exterior and an interior side to it. The exterior is this: God gives man adventure, man attempts adventure, God accomplishes the adventure. But that’s not all; there is an adventure that God sets man to accomplish, an intimate and also more important adventure. This adventure is conversion.
Consider Abraham. He is called by God to leave his land and go to a place that God will give him and his descendants. He obeys God’s command. He actually reaches the promised land early in the journey, but he does not take possession. He undergoes many challenges, some of which he overcomes, some of which God overcomes for him.
Among the former is his swashbuckling night raid (Gen. 14), where he defeats Chodorlahomor, king of the Elamites, in order to rescue his nephew Lot.
Meanwhile, there are the scenes in which God succeeds, such as rescuing Abraham and his wife from dishonor due to Abraham playing the coward. There are the places where Abraham manfully attempts, but where God must intervene in a dramatic way, such as in the sacrifice of Isaac or in the finding of a wife for Isaac. (And here let me, a young father, insert a question for you older fathers: is it true, as it is starting to seem to me, that nothing requires more effort, and nothing reveals more helplessness, than a father raising and providing for children?) Still, all of Abraham’s great actions, save one, do nothing toward accomplishing his global adventure: to become the father of many peoples.
Again and again, God must step in with miracles to complete Abraham’s adventure. He said that Abraham would have descendants, and he accomplishes the miracle of the conception of Isaac. He said that Sarah would be the mother, so he faithfully keeps Sarah away from the embrace of anyone else, even of kings, Amorite and Egyptian. Abraham’s line will fail if Isaac dies, so God is sure to preserve Isaac from all threats, even from the ones that seem to come from God himself. (Balancing the unbearable sorrow Abraham is forced to endure for days, there is the quality of a massive joke about the episode of the sacrifice of Isaac; it is like Martin Chuzzlewit or the movie Anger Management, where a sinister world under sinister management is revealed in the end, by a triumphant turn of tables, to be world in which we should all be happy as privileged oldest sons.)
It might seem a little disingenuous of God that he offers an adventure that he knows it will require his own infinite power to complete, except for the fact that God never tells Abraham he will accomplish it. It is a gift from God for Abraham to walk in as best as he can, not a task to be completed.
But there is one task God does want completed: faith. This is a necessary though not sufficient part of Abraham’s expansive fatherhood, and it is the one and only part that Abraham actually does. God will accomplish, on his own, everything else.
Abraham’s one great success is this: his faith in God’s promise, by which God reckons him righteous (Gen. 15:6, Rom. 4:3). Not only does Abraham do it, but he does it, in a sense, on his own. There is no “miracle” (in the restricted sense of a materially sensible supernatural intervention); there is just Abraham acting in his soul with God.
The greatest adventure for a man is his conversion. Francis de Sales explains this truth from the negative side: all of our great labors in the world, even our labors for the Church, end up being negligible in light of eternity.
We will see how all the affairs of this world are such little things and how little it matters whether they turn out or not. At this time, nevertheless, we apply ourselves to them as if they were great things. When we were little children, with what eagerness did we put together little bits of tile, wood, and mud, to make houses and small buildings! And if someone destroyed them, we were very grieved and tearful at it; but now we know well that it all mattered very little. One day it will be the same with us in heaven, when we will see that our concerns in this world were truly only child’s play.
Man’s projects, insofar as they affect the outside world, are nothing, or at best child’s play. Certainly that’s the case for Abraham . . . and for Indiana Jones.
In the iconic opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana is portrayed as the quintessential pursuer of adventure. But the action of the movie really begins only when the adventure pursues him, and the Ark of the Covenant comes unexpectedly back into his life.
Like Abraham, Indiana accomplishes all kinds of incredible feats. But the one thing he can’t accomplish throughout the movie is getting and keeping the Ark. In the end, God takes care of that.
Like Abraham, in spite of all his exploits in the exterior world, the only lasting thing Indiana accomplishes is a conversion. At first, he considers himself both the pursuer of the ark and its subduer: it’s going to go to a museum, it’s going to be studied and probed and scientifically analyzed. In fact, his attitude is hardly different from the Nazis’. At best, his attitude is that knowledge is power, which in the end reduces to that of the Nazis: “Use is power.”
It is not entirely clear exactly how or when Indiana changes his heart. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a film, after all, and the human eye, much less the human camera, cannot see a heart change. Although some scenes seem to suggest that Indiana’s piety is being reawakened, they can easily be interpreted the other way: that Indiana is motivated merely by the desire for knowledge.
Nevertheless, there is one scene where the latter interpretation is impossible—the crisis of the film, when the Nazis open the Ark, and Indiana averts his eyes and warns Marion, the film’s heroine, to do the same. The man who wanted the ark in his power, to study and to test and experiment on at his leisure, suddenly acknowledges with the Psalmist that there are things human beings must reverence and not pretend to understand: “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me” (Ps. 131). Indiana has gained a new wisdom, or perhaps has recovered the awe of God he had from his Sunday school days.
The lives of Abraham and of Indiana Jones reveal the limitedness of action in the world, but they also emphasize the importance of our action inside. The scholar-turned-monk Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis puts it wonderfully: “For, truly, the most fruitful deeds are either wholly interior events exacting from the soul a radical decision, a huge leap of faith, and heroic self-surrender or, even when such acts are partly exterior, must still emerge and flow out of the most inward region of the heart.”
If one looks at the life of not only the Patriarchs, but the other great men such as David and St. Paul, the same thing shows up. One sees this either directly from Scripture or by a process of elimination. For example, Scripture states that God loves David because he is a man after his own heart; all of the great deeds of David mean anything only because of what he does in his heart.
Meanwhile, St. Paul boasts that he is a fool for Christ, and about his weakness. How does a weak fool convert half the Mediterranean? Only if the adventure really is not his doing, but God’s. Why does one boast about being a fool? Only if he is in love. In the end, Paul sees his love for God and souls as the one thing he can say that he has accomplished.
Indiana Jones is not a St. Paul or a patriarch, but his adventures in Raiders of the Lost Ark are a unique cinematic representation of the themes in the lives of saints; the heroic failure in obtaining exterior success, and the quiet conquest of oneself for God in the center of man’s heart. Raiders of the Lost Ark reminds us of even greater adventures than what came out of the mind of a great screenwriter and director . . . and leads us to appreciate the transcendent one who guides them.