In an Elevator with a Sociopath

In what does this joy consist, the joy that makes the world’s half-hearted and hungover “hedonism” seem so intolerably dull? Is it the joy of being forgiven, declared not guilty by God the Judge, living free of shame and free from the fear of death, having the promise of life everlasting? Certainly, there is joy to be found there. Revel in those gospel truths! Shout them from the rooftops. But what if there is something deeper still to which all those joys point?

Our chief excavator to those depths is one of the great theologians of the last century, J. I. Packer. With more than seventy years of studying theology, Packer summed up the New Testament in three words —

“Adoption through propitiation,”

adding, “I do not expect to ever meet a richer and more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.”1 Packer makes his case that the point of Jesus bearing our sins wasn’t merely that we could be declared “not guilty,” although that is incredibly good news. The goal of Jesus’s death also wasn’t merely that you or I get to go to Heaven when we die, although that, too, is stupendous news. What Jesus accomplished on the cross had an even more profound, intimate, and joyous effect: it made us children of God.

“To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater.”2 

We enjoy God as justifier that we might enjoy Him more profoundly still as Father.

Consider the breakthrough Blair Linne experienced: I had been forgiven by a holy Judge. I’m grateful for that forgiveness, but I almost felt like God was just tolerating me. It was this transaction like, “I saved you. Now you need to keep this thing going, so work hard.” ... It took me a while to get to, “God is also my Father.” It took a couple years to realize that He’s more than a judge. He wants to be my loving Heavenly Father... He’s a God who’s filled with mercy, who loved me when I was still in my sin, who chose me before the foundation of this world to be His, realizing that fatherhood didn’t originate with my earthly father. It doesn’t originate with even the best earthly father.

• Fatherhood originates with God. He is the essence and the truth of that concept.

He was a father before this world began.3

To better make sense of Packer and Linne’s insights, let us begin in a most unlikely spot, a busted elevator with one of the greatest comic villains of all time, the Joker from Batman lore. Of the twenty-five plus actors who have taken on the Joker role over the last fifty years — including such celebrated talents as Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, and Heath Ledger — there is one particular version of the Joker best suited to shed light on Packer’s theological insight into the joy of calling God Father. That is the Joker of Todd Phillips’s feature-length film, Joker, starring an emaciated and unhinged Joaquin Phoenix as the caped crusader’s rising nemesis, while the Batman gets only a combined twenty-nine seconds of screentime and that as an adolescent.

If we watch Joker from within a closed universe, sealed off from supernatural reality, then our explanations of Arthur Fleck’s actions are limited to factors like physical abuse, mental illness, and broken social systems. Such explanations are enlightening but incomplete. What if we watch Joker within an open, theologically charged universe?

As Christians we have the awesome and under-appreciated privilege of adoption, calling the Creator our Abba.

Whether we translate the Aramaic as “Father,” “Daddy,” or “Papa,” the truth it conveys is what J. I. Packer calls “the highest privilege that the gospel offers.”4 From this perspective we come to see Arthur more profoundly as a man tragically seeking Abba. Arthur’s descent into the Joker offers a chilling exposition of what happens without adoption, that is, when our deep existential need to be chosen, protected, embraced, and heard goes unmet. To grasp this, let us imagine ourselves stuck in a busted elevator with the Joker. Here are five truths we could tell Arthur.

1.You Were Abandoned, but There Is a Father Who Chooses

From the paperwork Arthur steals from the Arkham mental ward, we read, “Child was abandoned.” It was not only his biological father who abandoned him. Arthur asks, “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?”

Many first-century Christians also knew what it was to be abandoned by their biological fathers and treated like trash by society. Many cities in the Roman Empire had literal human dumps outside their gates, a place where unwanted infants could be tossed away like garbage. They were often taken in by slave masters and exploited. They would have been among the first to read Paul’s letter to Ephesus:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ. — Ephesians 1:3–5

Your lowercase f fathers gave you nothing. Your capital F Father has blessed you with every spiritual blessing. Your fathers tossed you on the human dump. Your Father chose you before the world began and deems you unblemished. Your fathers abandoned you. Your Father predestined you for adoption into the divine family.

Dear Arthurs of the world, there is a Father who takes those treated like trash and chooses them to be His beloved sons. Through Christ, you can step into a new identity from abandonment to adoption. 

2.You Were Brutalized, but There Is a Father Who Protects

After being abandoned, Arthur is adopted by a woman who subjects him to his next failed father figures. The authorities find young Arthur chained to a radiator, covered in bruises, with a massive head injury. All this trauma came at the hands of his mother’s abusive boyfriends. There are lowercase f father. figures who brutalize rather than protect. The doctrine of adoption means that we have a better father, a Father we can count on as “a shield,” “a hiding place,” and “a refuge” (Psalms 3:3; 32:7; 46:1). Romans 8 tells us,

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” — Romans 8:15

For all the tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and swords the world throws our way, nothing can separate us from the Father’s love (Romans 8:35–39).

Dear Arthurs of the world, you were brutalized, but through Christ there is a Father who vows to protect and preserve us, and nothing can separate us from His love.

3.You Were Rejected, but There Is a Father Who Embraces

Next comes Arthur’s relationship with Murray Franklin, the late-night television host played by Robert De Niro. While watching from his drab Gotham apartment, Arthur’s imagination transports him into the studio audience. He shouts, “I love you Murray!” Murray returns an “I love you too.” Arthur basks in the spotlight, with the glowing smirk of a seven-year-old being praised. Then comes one of the most important lines of the film. Murray pulls Arthur close and confides, “You see all this: the lights, the show, the audience? All that stuff, I’d give it all up in a heartbeat to have a kid like you.”5 Murray wraps his arms around Arthur in a fatherly hug. We don’t see the iconic red makeup smile. We see unpainted, teary-eyed joy on Arthur’s face.

But it is only a fantasy of Arthur’s imagination. In reality Murray rolls a clip of Arthur’s standup routine to mock him. He sets up the clip with the line “Take a look at this joker,” and behold, the moniker of the iconic villain is born. He wasn’t embraced as a son. He was humiliated as a “joker.” Later in the green room, Arthur asks, “Murray, when you bring me out, could you introduce me as the Joker? I mean, that’s what you called me isn’t it?”6 Fleck assumes his new identity of mockery and rejection. 

Instead of an imaginary hug from someone who in reality makes fun of us, the doctrine of adoption tells us that

• there is a Father who embraces us, even at our worst.

Think of the parable of the prodigal son.

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. — Luke 15:20

Dear Arthurs of the world, you were rejected as a joker, but through Christ we find a Father who races toward us and hugs and kisses us as His celebrated sons.

4.You Were Unheard, but There Is a Father Who Listens

Then Arthur discovers that Thomas Wayne may be his father. Arthur contrives a bathroom break encounter with Wayne. “I don’t want anything from you. Maybe a little bit of warmth. Maybe a hug, Dad!” Wayne responds by punching Arthur in the nose, threatening to kill him, and storming away. It’s brutality, rejection, and abandonment all over again. Later Arthur emotes, “If it was me dying on the sidewalk you’d walk right over me. I pass you every day and you don’t notice me... You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think what it’s like to be someone like me? To be someone but themselves. They don’t.”7

Instead of being invisible, the doctrine of adoption tells us that we are “known by God” (Galatians 4:9).

Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. — Matthew 6:8

We can approach Him “with confidence” and “receive mercy and find grace and help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

We know that He hears us in whatever we ask. — 1 John 5:15

Dear Arthurs of the world, you have spent your whole life feeling like you don’t exist, unheard and unloved, but through Christ we have a Father who meets us not with fists but with open arms.

5.You’re Inspiring a Movement of Destruction; Instead, Join a Family of Redemption

We not only need a Father. We need brothers and sisters. When we grasp the awesome privilege of calling God “Father,” we begin to understand the meaning of calling one another “brother” and “sister.” Church becomes a family gathering. We learn what it means to honor our Father as we reflect his only begotten Son together, adding to the net hope, beauty, and life in the world. Without Abba, those deep relational needs don’t magically vanish. Instead of church, we form an anti-church, seeking accomplices and comrades in our mission of destruction. Like Heath Ledger’s Joker, we “want to watch the world burn.”8 Like Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, we want others around us in clown masks to join us in unleashing rage and chaos.

Dear Arthurs of the world, you have sparked a movement to burn an already smoldering world. Through Christ you can join brothers and sisters on a mission of bringing beauty, life, and redemption to the world.

Instead of seeing Phillips’s Joker as senseless gore, we may see it as a timely reminder of just how necessary and precious the doctrine of adoption is. The truth is that we are surrounded by Arthurs every day. 

Let’s be honest. We are all Arthurs seeking Abbas. We all want someone to love us at our worst and our weirdest. Who doesn’t want to be chosen, protected, embraced, heard, and enlisted on a redemptive mission? We all want Abba. The glorious truth of adoption is that we have Abba thanks to Christ.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. — 1 John 3:1

We must preach that joyous truth to the Arthurs inside of us and to those around us. Otherwise, we, too, become agents of mayhem and destruction. Instead, let us rejoice in our adoption and the fatherhood of God, as described in the Westminster Confession:

All those that are justified, God vouchsafeth, in and for His only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption: by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God; have His name put upon them, receive the Spirit of adoption; have access to the throne of grace with boldness; are enabled to cry, Abba, Father; are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by Him, as by a father; yet never cast off, but sealed to the last day of redemption, and inherit the promises, as heirs of everlasting salvation.9

1. J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2018), 214.

2. Packer, Knowing God, 207.

3. Blair Linne, “Finding God as Your Father,” Wonderfully Made podcast, June 13, 2022, https://wonderfullymade.org/2022/06/13/finding-­god-as-your-father-with-blair-linne/.

4. Packer, Knowing God, 207.

5. Joker, directed by Todd Phillips (Hollywood, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2019), DVD.

6. Joker, directed by Todd Phillips.

7. Joker, directed by Todd Phillips.

8. The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan (Hollywood, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008), DVD.

9. The Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. 12.

Excerpted with permission from Revering God by Thaddeus J. Williams, copyright Thaddeus J. Williams.

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Your Turn

There’s some of Arthur Fleck in a lot of us, right? But, we have a Father who loves us so much that He adopted us to be His own children, His family, His dearly loved! Praise Jesus! ~ Devotionals Daily