Stranger Things: The Upside Down of Love
Powerful 80’s nostalgia, bicycle riding friendships, other-worldly dimensions, middle school drama--is there anything lacking in Netflix’s critically acclaimed Stranger Things? Viewers have gone crazy for this series.
The concept of the “Upside Down” really caught the audience’s attention early in the first season. If you haven’t seen the series, Upside Down is a dark and lifeless dimension that runs parallel to the world that these middle schoolers from Hawkins, Indiana call home. It’s lonely, void and broken, desolate and dilapidated... (not Indiana… but the Upside Down). The whole show is built around these kids surviving as they struggle against the horrors of the Upside Down.
The climax of the first season is built upon sacrificial love. At the end of the season—as all hell literally breaks loose due to the creatures from the Upside Down breaking through a rift and entering reality—one of the main characters named Eleven (or “El” for short) gives her life to save her friends and destroy the main antagonist (the Demogorgon!!!) in a powerfully emotional scene. You can find it here:
What I haven’t mentioned is that El possesses supernatural powers. Unlike her normal middle school friends, Eleven has been tested on in a lab as a young girl and, as a result, can distort reality and do things with her mind that shouldn’t be humanly possible. Eleven does what the other boys cannot do on their own and, as she approaches her fate, she knows it’s going to cost her everything to destroy this creature from the Upside Down.
And that’s the point! El’s sacrificial love is the whole point!
Her sacrifice for her friends is the linchpin of the whole first season—she’s the key to defeating the darkness of the Upside Down! And the reason that this sacrificial love is so attractive is because it is the very nature of the love of the God of the Bible. This kind of love is the climax of the season because it plays off of a 2000 year old narrative where Jesus Christ has a love more radical, life-altering, and STRANGER than anything else this world has to offer us.
Love is mentioned more than 300 times in the Bible over the course of its 66 books. One of these verses about love from the book of John says this:
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
This “greater love” El demonstrates in laying down her life for her friends is similar to the love that defines the story of Jesus. When you lay down your life for your friend, you are assuming that you will get nothing in return. El knew that in the course of saving her friends, she probably wouldn’t make it.
Similarly, this God-Man from the Bible named Jesus gave His life for us—His friends. One main difference between the Bible and Stranger Things, however, is that the story of Jesus is real. This isn’t Netflix, the Bible has real life implications! This is what the book of Isaiah has to say about this Savior Jesus on the cross:
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
Whether we like to admit it or not, at our core we really are broken and desperate. We cover up our brokenness with money and success and popularity and busyness, but at the end of the day we really are in desperate need of something more—and we know it. Without a relationship with Christ and deep friendships with God’s people, we’re lonely, void of life, and broken—we reside in the Upside Down.
No wonder the creatures from the Upside Down wanted to escape, it is a miserable place to live! But we aren’t stuck there.
Jesus’ sacrificial love brings us PEACE with the creator of the universe. There is healing here and now for us because Jesus first loved us. Why wouldn’t we want a friend like that? We don’t have to sit in our brokenness and discontentment any longer: we have a Savior from that darkness and His name is Jesus.