Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. … Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.
~ Psalm 90
Sometimes, Hollywood gets it right. Even when they’re telling you they’ve got it wrong, they might actually have it right.
The movie Children of Men, for example, tries to tell us that the film had the wrong message, but it turns out its message is spot on. Writer and director Alfonso Cuarón—known for directing Gravity and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—has produced a film that, on the surface, appears to be hostile to Christians. In fact, the film’s subtext is more than friendly toward Christians.
Others have called the film a Modern Masterpiece and a lesson on the importance of hope. It’s more than these things. It’s a parable on the reason for the hope that lies within us (1 Peter 3:15) and within anyone who would seek to understand the gospel of hope.
The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) gives us this nutshell description for the film: “In 2027, in a chaotic world in which women have somehow become infertile, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea.” The catalyst for the world’s chaos is a crisis of infertility—such as that discussed in my previous post, only taken to its ultimate end.
Message in Metaphor
Children of Men shows how—within this chaotic world, where no living births have been reported for the last eighteen years—there are various cross-sections of society forced to cope with the loss of meaning and purpose, as these things are inextricably linked to futurity, and man’s future has been negated, with his inability to bear fruit from his loins (Genesis 35:11).
As a reflection of this struggle to cope, nearly every member of society had adopted pets, who are for them surrogate children. Tribalized segments of humanity, for their part, had each sought their own means of dealing with this collective loss; such means included denialism, catatonia, terrorism, internet obsessiveness, drugs, alcohol, politics, art, and religion.
Cuarón overtly portrays this last coping mechanism as Hollywood typically does. He depicts the religious as monolithic, mindless, soulless, slogan-chanting lunatics who bemoan about evil and proclaim their rejection of it. In so doing, they proclaim that infertility is a manifestation of God’s judgment.
These religious zealots preach condemnation and omit the love of God from their message. Though, the film does show them posting signs that say Repent. This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t invite anyone to repent and turn toward anything or anyone who would want them in their presence.
Who would want to be in the presence of anyone who is all about judgment, yet offers no solution to that predicament? The message of God’s love is lost when conveyed by the film’s stereotypical psychopaths.
But it’s not lost entirely, not when conveyed by the director, not when one looks below the surface. The text of the film says the message of the fanatics isn’t credible, since the fanatics themselves aren’t credible—they’re the same drones we’ve seen all our lives, whenever Hollywood includes them in their narratives.
Yet, this overt message is inverted in the film’s subtext, where the covert message is the opposite of that which is spoken by the fanatics on the street. What lies beneath the narrative’s surface is the true message of the love of God; it awaits decoding by those ready to comprehend the film’s metaphors.
This is why Children of Men is a parable. It is as any New Testament parable, in that it’s not about what it appears to be about; it’s about the message in the metaphors.
The parable of the prodigal son is not about a son who squandered his inheritance and his eventual return; instead, it’s about the joy our father God experiences when those who were lost come back home. It’s not about a son wallowing in a pigsty, coming to his senses; it’s about the depravity of sin and our need to realize how depraved we are, when once we wander from God our father. The father is but a metaphor—a placeholder for God; the son is the same, for the penitent.
For its part, Children of Men is a parable of hope delivered to a world devoid of hope and peace, one that is engulfed in chaos; and this hope is delivered through the womb of one who was impregnated by no explicable natural means.
This is the gospel, in a nutshell, as the nativity of Jesus did indeed bring hope and goodwill toward men—just as the film depicts, though in a different form, as the warring factions’ firefight had turned to ceasefire, with the arrival of the child that should not have been born.
The Prophetic
What are the metaphors of Children of Men? What’s the subtext?
To answer these questions, we first have to consider the prophetic. The film has a number of signs that it is operating on such a level.
Children of Men depicts London full of illegal immigrants; they had fled other countries, as the rest of the world had become chaotic, due to the infertility crisis. Nihilism was the rule of the day. Those that had fled to London and were caught were held in cages.
Immigrants in cages was a big complaint of the American left during the Trump administration (2016 – 2020), though it had started during the Obama administration (2009 – 2017). The film shows this to be an issue years before it had become one. It was shown as a future issue, as the film takes place in the year 2027, but it was released in 2006, years before this sort of thing was on the public’s radar.
Through exposition—a common literary device often seen in films where, through dialogue, events are told of, not portrayed—the film describes a worldwide flu pandemic. The son of one of the characters had died from it in 2008. That is, three years before the real-life serious pandemic of 2008 – 2009 and thirteen years before the more serious Covid-19 pandemic, such a worldwide health event was discussed in this film.
Shown in the film is a shirt that says London 2012 Olympics. The film forecasted the city hosting the Olympics six years before they had taken place there.
Children of Men opens with a terrorist attack on London. Planning for the scene had occurred months earlier—i.e., just weeks before an actual terrorist attack had occurred in the city at the hands of Al-Qaeda. The film had anticipated this as a future event, which had become an incident contemporaneous with the filming of things yet to come. Life had shaped art, which was imitating life.
Lastly, the film’s premise is that of a global infertility crisis, as shown to occur in the year 2027. As considered in my previous post, this is a very real possibility and is already being manifest throughout the western world.
These prophetic elements of the film help to lend it credibility. They also serve to remind the audience of how prophesy had foretold of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—as many as three hundred of them, all told.
Theological Subtext
Against this backdrop are a handful of characters with carefully selected names that denote their meaning within the film’s subtext. As a whole, and through their actions, they convey the hidden gospel.
Children of Men’s protagonist is a man named Theo Faron. He is the man whom IMDB says is tasked with transporting to safety a miraculously pregnant woman. Theo mostly walks around in sandals. His name means the servant (Faron) of God (Theo). He should sound familiar to us.
The inexplicably pregnant woman’s name is Kee. She is key to the survival of mankind. She bears the hope of mankind. She represents man’s prospects of continuing. She represents the future itself, of pushing beyond this mortal coil, to quote Hamlet (Act 3, Scene i). Another familiar character.
Kee’s child is named Dylan, which means Born from the ocean. Kee, for a time, had trouble naming her child, until she settled on Dylan, which was the name of Theo’s son, whom he had lost in the flu pandemic. Kee names her child while on the sea, awaiting a ship that will transport her and her child away from the chaos all around her, and away from those who would try and use Dylan for their own political purposes. The ship’s name is Tomorrow.
Theo has a friend named Jasper. Theo and Kee flee to his house in the woods, once they escape the anarchists who want to use her son as a political tool. Jasper is named after a blood-red rock, a way of indicating he’s connected to blood sacrifice. Indeed, he is sacrificed (killed), in order to protect Kee’s whereabouts. His name also means diamond in the rough, which is a way of symbolizing the glory of God.
Jasper has a wife whose name is Janet. Her name means God is gracious.
Among the antagonists in the film is a woman named Julian. Her name is a form of Julius—which, on two counts, relates to Rome. On the one hand, there is Rome’s Julius Caesar; on the other hand, her name is related to Jupiter, the god of the sky, who was the Roman Army’s symbol.
Assembling the Puzzle
These are the puzzle pieces. Together, they don’t add up to the Gospel According to Cuarón, but his narrative does reflect the gospel we already have, as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
With all of the pieces before us, Children of Men tells of a gracious God (as in Jasper’s wife’s name) who acts as a shepherd (as in Psalm 23), even as Theo had shepherded Kee, who had miraculously borne the hope of mankind, in the midst of the storm raging all around her.
Theo was as YHWH was, as Isaiah had proclaimed, aware of Kee’s need for comfort in the midst of the storm (Isaiah 54:11), leading her to the still waters (Psalm 23:2), where she could face Tomorrow, the boat that would take her and her child to safety. As the song might say, because her son lives, she can face tomorrow.
Theo and Jasper are each types of God—a type is something that points to something else; and, once we understand the connection, the purpose is to focus on that which is pointed to, not the type, itself. For example, Romans 5:14 says that “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.” The one to come was Jesus; Adam was the type that pointed to him.
As for Theo and Jasper, they each point to God’s character and that of Jesus—in their names, as mentioned, in their appearance, and in what they do or what happens to them. Jasper looks as if he could be Jesus, if Jesus were in his mid-seventies. He is eventually killed, but before that happens, he is shot in the hand. That is, he was pierced, as Jesus had been pierced: in the hand, to help secure mankind’s hope—that is, Kee and the child who was key to man’s survival.
For Theo’s part, he suffered a long, agonizing death; he was shot in his side, as Jesus was pierced in his side. As with each of them, the process of his passing began as he was helping to deliver hope to a hopeless world. In Theo’s case, this occurred as he helped to delivered Kee’s child, the personification of hope; in the case of Jesus, he delivered hope to all of mankind by taking on our sins in his flesh (1 Peter 2:24).
As mentioned, Theo is often clad in sandals, as Jesus was, and his last name means Servant. He was God’s servant here on earth, as Jesus had been. As Isaiah said of him, “By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous” (53:11)
As also mentioned, for nearly everyone but Theo there exists a dog or a cat that would fill the void that is left when there are no more children. For Theo, the opposite is true. He doesn’t need them; instead, they seem to need him. They gravitate toward him, as if to say that they know who he is and, as children would, they want more of the comfort that a loving father can bring.
Lastly, we have a musical association. As if to remove all doubt regarding his messianic connection, we see Theo in one scene in the back of a car, about to visit a family member. There, we hear a song playing: “The Court of the Crimson King.”
Jesus is, of course, our crimson king. The old hymn “Jesus Paid it All” had said that “Sin had left a crimson stain. He washed it white as snow.” This is correct, according to Isaiah 1:18. And Jesus is a king; he is THE King of Kings and Lord of Lords (1 Timothy 6:15).
Grand Finale
As we used to hear in movie theaters, when the coming attractions would play, Children of Men illustrates how—in a world of lawlessness, death, and despair—the script can be flipped on all of that. With the miraculously conceived child, these things could then be reversed and even erased.
The film reminds us that, in Christ, lawlessness, and the chaos and anarchy that go with it, are replaced with the promise of a new law written on the hearts of men (Jeremiah 31:13). The message is that Jesus came to replace death with new life; he came to replace despair and uncertain futures with the hope of certain eternity. Mankind, in the world of the film, needed such hope, as Children of Men’s race of men was headed toward extinction.
In all the ways outlined above, and more, the film points to Jesus, he who is our blessed hope (Titus 2:13). For example, the child at the center of the film had sought to be used by warring factions for their own misguided political purposes; the man Jesus, who had been the child Jesus, would also be used by those around him—if he could be—for their own political purposes against, Rome, which also prominently figures in the film.
The God-Man
Finally, there is the final scene. On a rowboat, out on the water, are three individuals awaiting a bigger boat, one named Tomorrow.
First, there is Theo, the God-man, who died to bring Kee and her child to a place of refuge—as Jesus, our God-man, died to bring us to a place of refuge, safe from the wrath to come (1 Thessalonians 1:10). There is Kee, who delivered a child in a poor section of the city, far from her hometown—even as Mary had given birth to Jesus under similar circumstances. And there is the newborn Dylan, who represents all of humanity, as Dylan can be either a boy’s name or a girl’s name.
In this end, is the beginning. As I discuss in the introduction to my book Gender Confusion, waters in the bible—unless we’re talking about the still waters of Psalm 23—are a metaphor for all that is not God: confusion, anarchy, lawlessness, oppression, chaos, etc. And Children of Men, as we’ve seen, is a biblical story, though not when viewed at the surface level.
What is at the beginning, the beginning of all things? What we have is the earth, as we’re told in Genesis 1:2, being “without form.” But this, in the Hebrew, does not mean formlessness; it refers to a “place of chaos and confusion.”
As this same verse relates chaos to the Spirit of God, we’re told that the spirit was “hovering over the face of the waters” (ESV). God’s spirit was above all of the confusion that the universe had known, until God appeared on the scene to bring to it clarity and order.
Another way of saying hovering is to say floating—as in, on a boat, as in what Dylan, Kee, and Theo were doing, before they were taken away by Tomorrow, the rescue vessel. What God was doing, as he was hovering over the chaotic waters, was preparing to bring light where there had been darkness, order where there had been disorder, and functional systems to a dysfunctional universe. That is, he set about redeeming the chaos.
Similarly, the rescued trio echoes God’s creative order, in that the newborn Dylan, both represents humanity and is the means for humanity to continue into tomorrow and to rediscover “peace, goodwill toward men” (Luke 2:14, KJV).
This is illustrated in the film when, after Dylan is born and is then carried out of the war-zone, everyone involved in the conflict is stopped in their tracks; all those who see him put aside their conflict. Uniformed soldiers holding M-16s can be seen kneeling down or genuflecting.
Children of Men is not the only film to use metaphor to speak biblical truth out of the movie’s subtext. As I’ve shared elsewhere, The Shawshank Redemption is another. They each use subtext as the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:46) to tell us that the deeper meaning is worth searching out, just as everything that the bible has to offer—the prophecy, the exposition, the historical accounts, the poetry—is worth seeking out, to its fullest.
Each film appears to be hostile toward Christianity—or, at least toward Christians. In the former, this is seen in its religious protestors; with the latter, we see it in the corrupt warden.
However, each of these films utilize this surface-level antipathy to convince the viewer that the movie is going in a direction that is hostile toward the gospel. Yet, once the metaphors are decoded, it goes in the opposite direction, toward a friendly, though symbolic, theme that points us toward the message of salvation. The viewer finds that the misdirection was worth it.
Perhaps you already know the message of salvation. Perhaps not. If you don’t know it, I pray that, were you to watch either of these films, you would be inspired to see the gospel in them.
If you do know the gospel message, you may consider sharing these films, and their hidden meanings, with loved ones who need to know the meanings in the metaphors, the purpose in the parables. For them, this could be their pearl of great price.