“Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their efforts. For if either falls, his companion can lift him up; but pity the one who falls without another to lift him up. Also, if two lie down together, they can keep warm; but how can one person alone keep warm? And if someone overpowers one person, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not easily broken.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Comic books have always been about more than the tales and exploits of super-powered heroes and villains. They have always served as vehicles for exploring and addressing deeper topics and themes. The X-Men comics, for example, have been about tolerance for those who are different. Superhero movies do the same thing. Wandavision (and Dr. Strange 2, which was just a continuation of the Wandavision story) was a study in grief. Captain America 4 was about seeking justice for the oppressed. Iron Man 3 was about dealing with anxiety. The Infinity Saga was about the infinite value of every single life. Marvel’s second-most-recent release follows this same pattern. It’s a story about heroes and villains, yes, but it’s about a whole lot more than that. I finally got to watch Thunderbolts* this week, let’s talk about why it’s so very good.

When social media was invented, it was about helping people connect with one another. Thus it was called social media. The problem that the various founders, but especially Mark Zuckerberg, didn’t seem to understand, though, is that in person connections are better than digital connections. The benefits of being with people versus being alone and typing to someone on a screen aren’t even close to comparable. But the thing about social media is that it made feeling like we were connecting with ever more people in more places than we could possibly connect in person giving the illusion of a kind of hyper-connectedness.

So we leaned into it. Hard.

But after a while, we found that we were lonely not being with actual people IRL, as they say. (That’s “in real life” if you’re wondering.) But we are also lazy, so rather than fixing the problem, we just stayed online, and the loneliness got worse. It got to the point that entire nations were declaring a loneliness epidemic among their people. The loneliness was causing all manner of collateral social issues that were costing the government (especially in nations with state-funded healthcare) lots of money to deal with.

It turns out when God said that “it is not good for the man to be alone,” and when Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, said, “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their efforts. For if either falls, his companion can lift him up; but pity the one who falls without another to lift him up. Also, if two lie down together, they can keep warm; but how can one person alone keep warm? And if someone overpowers one person, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not easily broken,” they were right.

Like I said, I finally got to watch Marvel’s Thunderbolts* this week. The asterisk, by the way, was supposed to be a sneaky indicator that the title of the movie wasn’t really Thunderbolts, but rather The New Avengers, which is the “dramatic” revelation at the end of the film, but I don’t think it was quite as much of a gasp moment as Marvel had hoped it would be.

In the comics, the Thunderbolts were a team of super villains put together by General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, Hulk’s antagonist and eventually the villainous Red Hulk. They all posed as superheroes for the public, but it was always really a show so that Ross had a team he could use to help him control the heroes he hated. As Marvel has done so many times in its movies, that comic book origin was changed entirely. Here, the team got their name from the little league soccer team of Yelena Bolova, the sister of Black Widow, who Marvel is going to make a key player in phase six.

The rest of the team of former villains and sidekicks is Bucky, who has become a congressman from the Bronx, Red Guardian, the Soviet super soldier and Yelena’s fake but also real dad, Ghost, the villain from Ant-Man 2, and U.S. Agent, the super soldier who was to be the replacement for Captain America until his inferiority complex got the better of him. The last member of the team is Bob. Bob is a meth addict who unwittingly joined a secret super soldier experiment in search of purpose beyond being a bipolar, child-abuse victim, meth head. His…unique…physiology reacted with the super soldier serum to grant him godlike powers as the hero Sentry, but also a dark side, The Void, who he struggles to control.

The real bad guy of the film is Val, the anti-Nick Fury who has been making the rounds on the big screen and the small screen throughout Phases 4-6. Having somehow risen to be the director of the CIA, she accidentally brings the Thunderbolts together while trying to have them all killed to hide the evidence of her secret super soldier project (that created Sentry/Void) from a congressional impeachment investigation. The team figures out her plan, helps each other escape, and works to stop her, which actually never happens. From a larger MCU standpoint, the movie was really only about setting up this new team of heroes who will play some sort of a role in the coming Doom cycle of Avengers movies.

In terms of its function as a superhero movie, it checks all of the right boxes. Super-powered individuals? Check. A team of misfits that struggles to find their group cohesion, but becomes a dedicated and loyal team? Check. Super-powered villain who turns out to not really be the villain at all, but rather a victim? Check. Sneaky main villain who hides behind the scenes (at least in the context of the story)? Check. Lots of humor and a couple of big action sets? Check. It did all the right things in all the right ways.

But that’s not really what made the movie so good to me. It was a better superhero movie than Captain America: Brave New World, although it also ended with the heroes talking the “bad guy” down since they didn’t have a chance to defeat him otherwise. Some sympathetic reviewers put it in the same class as Captain America: Winter Soldier, but as much as I liked it, it wasn’t that good.

No, what made this one so good, and so worth your time to see, was the story it was really trying to tell. Thunderbolts is really about the importance of purpose and community. For a culture struggling under the weight of meaninglessness and purposelessness that was an entirely predictable outcome of our generational experiment with secularism, and also struggling under the weight of loneliness thanks to social media that we’ve already talked about, Thunderbolts pointed forward toward a way out of our pain: community.

All of the heroes (because even though there were former villains in the mix, Marvel is in the business of making everyone into a hero these days to apparently show that anyone can be redeemed…which isn’t a bad message from a Gospel standpoint), struggle with purpose and meaning. They all struggle with checkered pasts. They’ve all done things…lots of things…they are ashamed of having done, many of them at Val’s direction as she has used them as her own personal black ops agents. They have lost stable relationships. They’re all broken. But in their brokenness, they find community, and in that community they find a road to healing.

Bob’s personal struggles turn out to be the most threatening because of his powers. Once The Void is unleashed, he sets about apparently blinking the entire population of New York out of existence. It turns out he just sends people to…another place…whose exact location is not touched. The Void is essentially all of Bob’s hurt and anger and self-loathing given form. It is a manifestation of Bob’s low swings on his bipolar journey.

When The Void is loose, Bob gets trapped in a mental prison of all of his worst moments. He traps the other characters in their worst moments as well. The only escape from these “shame rooms” as Yelena calls them, is to face those demons and work through the pain and the shame. But the only way they can do this is together. Community matters.

Community is what winds up saving the day. When Bob finally gets the courage and strength to confront his darkness, he thinks that the way to defeat it is to just beat it into submission. He winds up sitting atop his dark self, punching it in the face over and over and over. But beating ourselves up is not the way to work through our brokenness, and as Bob continues beating on his darkness, the darkness starts to overtake him as well. It is when the rest of the team comes around him with love and the assurance that he is not alone in his journey that he finally finds his way out of the darkness and back into the light.

It’s a heavy theme that director Jake Schreier handles with great deftness. He blends in plenty of humor to keep things from getting too heavy, but also without taking away from the punch of the message. This helps send the additional message that when confronting our own personal brokenness, we cannot take ourselves too seriously. Even when the battle we are facing is no laughing matter, being able to laugh, and especially at ourselves, is an important part of the healing process. Honestly, he handles the whole thing so well that the climax scene had me in tears.

We need community. We were made for it. We need a community where we are accepted as we are, but where we aren’t left as we are. We need a community that helps us face our brokenness, but not one that encourages us to simply embrace it. We need help in healing through it because we can’t do that on our own. We need purpose and direction for our lives. The best purpose is going to be found in pouring into and serving others to help make their lives better. This focus on others helps us to not get stuck in our own issues. We lift them up, they lift us up, and together we all move forward toward a better future.

To put all of this in much simpler terms: We need the church. There is nowhere else in the world the kind of community we need exists in healthy, sustainable ways other than the church. When the church is working like God designed it, it is the place – the people – with whom we can find the hope and help and healing we need to become more fully who God made us to be. It is where we can find accountability to stay on the path of righteousness. We can find acceptance of who we are and something that unites us that is bigger than anything else the culture around us has to offer.

If you are struggling under the weight of loneliness and meaninglessness, getting plugged into a church community may be just the thing you need to find a positive way forward. The biggest reason for this is that in a good church you will encounter the presence of God in Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit. The church is where you can find and nurture the faith that will save you by God’s grace. The Thunderbolts pointed the way forward. We’ve just got to follow the path to the place it is really leading us.