Seven Pounds (Columbia Pictures, 2008), starring Will Smith and Rosario Dawson, is summarized by the Internet Movie Database like this (here): “A man with a fateful secret embarks on an extraordinary journey of redemption by forever changing the lives of seven strangers.”
IMDB.com gets this mostly right. An anguished man with a secret—huge spoiler alert coming!—has, with the help of a friend, hatched a plan to identify seven individuals whom he finds worthy of benefiting from his body parts, after he commits suicide.
This is the strange impetus that drives the plot of Seven Pounds. It’s what makes the film both loved and hated, depending on your demographic. Meaning, if you get paid to rate films, you generally hated it; if you don’t, you generally loved it.
Specifically, by a roughly three-to-one margin, the professional critics panned it. On the other hand, everyday audience members loved it. That is, Rotten Tomatoes, here, shows that 195 critics gave it an overall score of 27 percent, while over six-hundred thousand non-paid viewers gave it a score of 75 percent. Hundreds of thousands more people freely offered their generally positive opinion than the relative handful who were paid to review the film.
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Regardless of who you are, I believe one thing about film and film-making: to understand the medium, one has to understand what’s beneath the visuals of the story and maybe even the story, itself. The result of that may have nothing to do with what you’re watching, yet everything to do with it.
For example, Steven Spielberg’s E.T: The Extraterrestrial (Universal, 1982) appears to be about an alien boy stranded on Earth and befriended by a non-alien boy named Elliot. However, as Spielberg told Roger Ebert, in 1997, “From the very beginning, 'E.T.' was a movie about my childhood—about my parents' divorce” (for more on that, see Ebert’s page, here).
So, on the surface, the narrative gives us E.T., a boy who must phone home. But just below the surface is separation from the family unit and the grief and anxiety that the separation generated. These are the aspects of life that the Apostle Paul might call common to man (I Corinthians 10:13, NASB); they are universal experiences illustrated by the story-teller. The narrative is just the placeholder for those common-to-man experiences.
With this in mind, the jury may be out on the film Seven Pounds. This is because the film doesn’t touch on something universal, as Spielberg’s E.T. had done. It instead considers something philosophical. It conveys two interdependent ideas that three quarters of its unpaid critics appear to agree with. It first says that for one to die for another individual is a good and noble thing; it then says that the laying down of one’s life ought to only benefit those who are worthy of the ultimate sacrifice.
Seven Pounds tries to be Spielbergian. It tries to tap into a universal truth—namely, that to lay down one’s life is beautiful. And the film wonderfully illustrates how such a selfless act can forever impact the life of another—or, seven others, as in this film.
The film delivers a corollary to this truth. Namely, that to make the sacrifice worth it, it ought to only be made on behalf of those who are good; it should only benefit the truly deserving.
The film’s screenwriter, Grant Nieporte, must have believed that, in this, he was simply relating another universally held belief. His story’s protagonist—Ben Thomas, played by Will Smith—believes that only a good man (or woman) ought to receive the gift of life being offered to them. We see this in a portion of dialogue that Ben has with a man named George, to whom he would donate a kidney:
George: You know, Ben, I keep asking you this but why me?
Ben: Because you are a good man.
George: No, really.
Ben: Even when you don't know that people are watching you.
This same thought is seen again, as Ben talks with Emily, to whom he would donate his heart:
Emily: Why do I get the feeling you're doing me a really big favor?
Ben: Because I get the feeling that you really deserve it.
Nieporte and Thomas—and, I assume, Will Smith—seem to believe that the beneficiaries of an ultimate sacrifice must be worthy of that sacrifice. I believe that they also thought they were conveying something which the majority of the public had also thought, along these same lines, if the film’s approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes is any indicator.
But God has another opinion. As Paul writes to the Romans, Christ didn’t die for those who had lived good lives and were therefore worthy of his sacrifice. No; instead, he died for the sinners (5:8), as every one of us are such (3:23), and for the ungodly (5:6).
While the film Seven Pounds attempts to confirm the supposed universal idea that ultimate sacrifice requires worthiness, the maker of the universe had another idea. Instead, he flipped that thought on its head and changed the economy of that contract from one of worthiness to that of worthlessness.
The economy of God says that none are worthy of benefitting from his Son’s ultimate sacrifice, yet all are invited to participate, anyway. Worthiness has actually been taken out of the equation, altogether. As Matthew Henry puts it (here), Christ didn’t die for the “good” (as Ben told George) or the deserving (as Ben told Emily), but for the ungodly among us; He died for the:
helpless creatures, and therefore likely to perish, but guilty sinful creatures, and therefore deserving to perish; not only mean and worthless, but vile and obnoxious, unworthy of such favour with the holy God.
Moreover, Henry says that we are “enemies,” “traitors and rebels, in arms against the government.” We were of “carnal mind.” He says that we were “not only an enemy to God, but enmity itself.” We were not only unworthy of the sacrifice of Christ, we were totally and completely worthless.
Yet, we were—and are—those for whom Christ died. He died for us vile and obnoxious ones.
C.S. Lewis seems to have anticipated Seven Pounds and its viewpoint on sacrifice and worthiness. He must have understood the idea’s pervasiveness when he mentioned the valiant nature of the sort of thing that the film’s Ben Thomas had done. Lewis says that, “As St. Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners”(1).
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Ben Thomas, dying for the lives of seven others was merely heroic. He died for valuable men and women, donating his heart, eyes, kidneys, and lungs, so that others might see and live.
Our Lord’s death, on the other hand, was beyond heroic. It was divine. It was such because it refused to consider the worthiness, godliness, or guilt of those for whom the sacrifice was made. Whereas, in the film Seven Pounds, it was Ben Thomas’s guilt that had motivated him to go through with the sacrificing of his life in the first place (he had accidentally killed seven people, as he texted while driving).
Christ laid down His life not because of any degree of worthiness on our part. Instead, He knew how unworthy we were and laid down His life, anyway. In this case, the guilt belonged to the beneficiary of the sacrifice and not the one who had become the sacrifice.
Jesus’ motivation was not guilt, but love—His love for a people who had gone astray: namely, all of us (Isaiah 53:6). He was so motivated by love that He, “for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising and ignoring the shame” (Hebrews 12:2) in order to bring us into His presence.
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My philosophy of life is that everything in life is a lesson. And I see two lessons here.
The first is the lesson of Seven Pounds, that sacrifice like Ben Thomas’s is merely heroic; the second is that of the New Testament: we need to consider how we might be more like Jesus. With those two thoughts in mind, then our directive for this day is that, as we lay down our lives for the King, we ought to think about how we can be more than heroic.
We are not and we cannot be divine, but we have the divine God living in us. As we follow Him, with His Spirit within us, He will direct us to the ungodly, to the unworthy, and speak to us about how to sacrifice ourselves, to lay ourselves down, so that we might love them into the Kingdom.
This is our mission. This is why we’re still here: so we can love the obnoxious into the Kingdom. You and I were worth the blood of Jesus. Likewise, those around us are worth loving—not because of who they are, in themselves, but because they, too, are those for whom Christ died.
In the film Seven Pounds, Ben Thomas literally gives the woman he loves his heart, that she might survive a soon-to-be-fatal cardiac condition. This is, for us, but a weak metaphor for what God has done for us through His Son: He has given us His heart, so that we might do the same—that we might, in turn, give our hearts to Him.
This is the message of the Gospel. It’s a message worth dying for. At the very least, it’s the message that we can sacrifice a part of ourselves to every day, as we’re directed by God. There are plenty of unworthy ones around us, in days like this. Even during a pandemic.
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1. C.S. Lewis. “Membership.” The Weight of His Glory and other addresses. 1946. Harper Collins. Hat Tip: Pastor Greg Hill.
—Kevin Hutchins
*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.