One of the biggest similarities I see between Jesus and professional wrestling is storytelling. Wrestlers will often say in interviews that their goal is to tell good stories. The rivalries and factions and their entanglements that appear in the ring and backstage interviews are often mirroring real life global headlines. These stories can play out slowly over a course of weeks, months, years, or in some very special cases, generations. (Lookin’ at you Anoa’i family!) And, as far as I can tell from the gospels, Jesus rarely chose to make a long story short when there was an opportunity to go deeper. And while there’s a lot you can come to understand from engaging with the stories, neither Jesus nor wrestling actually give you a direct and clear answer about what the “right” interpretation is.
The great ingenuity of storytelling as a medium is that it allows multiple entry points for the one hearing it. A really good story meets you where you’re at. A good story will sometimes tell you who or what you ought to strive to be, but a great story holds up a mirror and invites you to draw your own conclusions. Sometimes we may identify with the hero, sometimes with the villain, sometimes with the victim, and - perhaps most often - sometimes we identify with different aspects of all three.
I have put FAR more thought into this than I think someone of truly sound mind would, but I have come to the conclusion (at least for today) that professional wrestling is telling a very specific genre of story. What genre would that be, you ask? Simply put, wrestling shows speak to us in the form of parables.
A parable is defined as “a usually short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle.” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary) Jesus took inspiration for his parables from the everyday lives the people around him would be living. He spoke of experiences that they would likely relate to: family disputes, farming practices, dropping desperately needed money, the prevalent race and class issues of the region and time. He didn’t make the entry point difficult for the people he was speaking to. His stories cast people just like them as the main characters.
When it comes to the parables wrestling shows tell, they are also woven in such a way that it’s not hard to distinguish who the characters are and which parts of them resonate with us. Everyone who follows any given story for a few weeks can pretty quickly learn who the faces (the “good guys”) and heels (the “bad guys”) are. Most of the time the audience will support the face and boo the heel. But not always.
Well-crafted parables tend to create a somewhat uncomfortable gray area for listeners who have lived an authentic and full human experience. Because yes, it’s true that these types of tales are ultimately told in order to bring out a moral lesson or some point of universal truth. But what that lesson or truth may be is going to have varied results depending on the lived experience of the audience member.
This is why the suffering, poor, and oppressed were downright ravenous to hear more from Jesus in every town he went to. It’s also why the corrupt religious elite and politically powerful wanted him dead. Further, it’s also why professional wrestling is most often categorized as a “low-brow” art form in America. Because as you watch, you begin to realize that the faces are almost always the blue-collar underdog types, and the most hated heels in the game are those that come from privilege and power. One demographic will almost certainly be more interested in what these stories are saying to them about their world and their lives.
Case and point, arguably the biggest faction of heels in the entire history of WWE is the McMahon family. For those not familiar, the McMahons aren’t wrestlers. They own the company. (Or, at least they did before the recent merger with UFC, but that’s a whole other can of worms.) The individual and collective members of the McMahon family have been booed out of almost every wrestling ring they’ve entered. They’ve perfectly played into the idea that universal power corrupts universally in their storylines.
When we zoom out on these parables as a whole, it seems that certain shared themes emerge.
Corruption, oppression, and empire exist, and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
Corrupt powers will do anything - truly anything - to keep that power.
Hope springs from knowing that the story doesn’t end when the corruption says it does.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson did not buy WWE from Vince McMahon.
Jesus did not overthrow the Roman Empire.
When Shane McMahon’s efforts to coerce WWE superstar Kevin Owens into helping him win a match by cheating fell short, he fired Owens for failing to do his bidding.
When it became clear that Jesus’ message was getting through to the people, the powers that be had him killed.
Even though Becky Lynch’s constant resistance against the McMahon family and Vince McMahon’s misogynistic rhetoric led him to suspending her and naming her archrival as her replacement in 2019’s Wrestlemania, she still managed (with the somewhat underhanded help of Ronda Rousey) to find just enough loopholes to make history by being reinstated into the match that would make history as the first time women were in the main event of Wrestlemania; a match where she would go on to win not one, but two different championships, cementing her legacy forever.
Just days after the trouble-making preacher from Nazareth was finally good and dead, he was resurrected and walked among this world inhabited by his friends and foes once again. He transcended the world that killed him. He transcended the currency of life and death. He took the rule book written by and for people in power and threw it out the window.
The bigger the story, the more momentum it seems to gather with the audience following along. The more unlikely an underdog is to win, the more their impossible triumphs disrupt the status quo. Parables hold a magical healing quality. They let us see the best and worst parts of ourselves through role play and imagination. And that, my friends, is nothing short of grace.