Underdogs in the Story in the Bible

Just for your entertainment, I’ve included this compilation of underdog movies. If you watch it, don’t worry, all 10 are not boxing movies…

Underdogs. Very important in story, and the Christian story is no exception…

Real life is full of surprises about people who turn out to be nothing like we first thought.
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey

Here’s an obvious empathetic connection related to the Active Hero in the story in the Bible:

Jesus was an underdog.

Seriously.

And, it looks like Jesus is an underdog in a story full of underdogs. I guess you could say the Christian God is into underdogs…

Finally, metanarratives through their claims of truth can lead to domination, but the biblical plotline reveals “a story of God’s repeated choice of the dominated and the wretched, the powerless and the marginal.”” The Bible begins with the book of Genesis, written when primogeniture–the passing of all the family’s wealth and estate to the eldest son-was the iron law in virtually all societies. Yet the entirety of Genesis is subversive of this cultural norm.“ God constantly chooses and works through the second sons, the ones without social power. He chooses Abel rather than Cain, Isaac rather than Ishmael, Jacob rather than Esau, Joseph rather than Reuben. And when he works with women, he does not choose women with the cultural power of beauty and sexuality. He does his saving work through old, infertile Sarah, not young Hagar, through unloved and unattractive Leah, not lovely Rachel. God repeatedly refuses to allow his gracious activity to run along the expected lines of worldly influence and privilege. He puts in the center the person whom the world would put on the periphery. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann comments on the place in Genesis 25 where God prophesies through an oracle that he will be working with the younger of two sons, Jacob rather than Esau. He explains that the lesson of Genesis is that “the oracle is against all conventional wisdom.”
Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God

Underdogs often look strange to others…

I’ve come to believe that the story is much more powerful as truth than as metaphor; it demonstrates that God can ask things of us that seem impossible. I’ll bet old Noah looked pretty foolish, building that big boat in the middle of the desert, but that’s the whole point. We can all look foolish to others when we answer what we believe is a call from God.
John Kasich, Every Other Monday

And Robert McKee says you want to star an underdog…

Avoid Overdogs

When casting your protagonist, bear in mind the self-contradictory dynamics of your fellow human beings. A person can find her identity in anything from torn jeans to a diamond ring, from Big Macs to haute cuisine. So while people use products to shape their sense of self, that doesn’t mean they empathize with the corporations that make them. People do not identify with power. They respect it, shelter in it, rebel against it, worship it, but they rarely empathize with it. The wealthiest of people, for example, often need high-end luxury goods to confirm their identity. Despite their obvious social prestige, they lie awake at night, feeling, in their heart of hearts, like an underdog. This perception is virtually universal.

When human beings survey their place in the world, they instinctively feel that they’re up against overwhelming forces that stretch from the unpredictability of love to the inevitability of death. Weighed against the sum total of negative forces in life, we all feel, to some degree, on certain days, like an underdog. When your story’s inciting incident upsets the balance of your protagonist’s life, the audience should sense that she is up against powerful antagonistic forces. The perception of underdogness draws empathy faster than any other cause. So above all else, avoid “overdog” protagonists. If you cast a corporation as protagonist, do not brag about its size, its reach, its wealth, its influence. If you cast a product as a protagonist, do not brag about its newness, its hipness, its celebrity. The world spares no empathy for an overdog; market with a graceful humility.
Storynomics, By Robert McKee and Tom Gerace

NEVER STAR AN OVERDOG

When human beings weigh their chances for achieving their deepest desires against the almost overwhelming forces of mother nature, social institutions, and even their own subconscious selves, they feel that they are an underdog. Indeed, no one feels like an overdog. Even the most powerful, wealthy, influential people fear, deep down inside, that everything they’ve achieved could be taken from them in a sudden moment of bad luck. Therefore, for a story to engage the feeling side of its audience, it must draw them into empathy or identification with a protagonist who, like the audience, is up against very powerful forces of antagonism.

ROBERT MCKEE’S STORY IN BUSINESS TIPS

The third way to persuade people is with story. You take all the facts that you would have used in a PowerPoint presentation, you take all the emotional impact that you would have used coercing people, and you create out of that a story that imparts those facts emotionally. And the story stars you, or stars the corporation, or your division as an underdog up against very powerful forces and admits to the existence of the negative.

When you tell a story, it isn’t just and then, and then, and then, and we all lived happily ever after. It’s that and then, and then this and that, and that and this, and by admitting that somebody stole our patent and we had to go out and fight that in the court, but we got it back, some competitor stole our best people, but we rehired and we got even better people, and so forth.
Screenwriting guru tells all – Film Salon – Salon.com, April 21, 2010

And it looks like Shawn Coyne agrees with McKee…

Because I think part of growing up is learning perseverance and resilience and part of how we learn that is through what we read and what we enjoy in our stories. So I was always attracted to the stories where the hero is against all, that’s why we all love underdog stories….
Stealing Versus Inspiration, by Shawn Coyne

Here’s another interesting collection of movies starring underdogs for your entertainment…

Top 10 From Zero to Hero Movie Protagonists

We all root for the underdog…

So when you’re thinking about action stories and you need to create a villain and you need to create — say you have a dream of eventually creating a trilogy of novels or whatever. One of the things to think about is the hierarchy of power. Meaning, the first thing you have to establish is that the villain has to be far more powerful than the hero. The villain has to be almost indestructible because you want to create a real chasm between — because we all root for the underdog, right?
Freud and Jung and You, by Shawn Coyne

When I first ran across what I think is the Beginning Hook in the Christian story from the famous story in the gospel of Matthew, I marveled at how it was so much like what happens all the time in the famous television show, Game of Thrones

Because in the Christian story, right from the beginning, Jesus came into the world as an underdog…

Matthew 2

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it is written by the prophet:

“‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” After listening to the king, they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Are you tired of these compilations yet? Well, this one is a little different–it’s where villains kill the hero. I wonder if it gives us a way of seeing how the story of Herod pursuing the baby Jesus was setup somehow for climax in the story…

Top 10 Movies Where the Villain Kills the Hero

As you might guess, underdogs are all over the place in the story in the Bible.

As the Bible’s story line proceeds, we see God standing beside Israel in slavery against the oppression of the greatest empire in the world. Proceed to the story of Judges-the deliverers and leaders who one after the other led Israel whenever it fell under the domination of more powerful nations. But readers have pointed out how often the man God raises up–Jephthah, Gideon, Samson–is someone from a smaller tribe, a low status family, or even the class of social outcasts. David the king is the youngest and smallest of Jesse’s sons (1 Samuel 16). Then in the New Testament, when Jesus Christ encounters a respected male and a socially marginal woman (John 3 and 4) or a religious leader and a tax collector (Luke 18) or a religious teacher and a fallen woman (Luke 7), it is always the moral, racial, sexual outsider and socially marginalized person who connects to Jesus most readily.
Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God

So, just for kicks, I started to create an index to the underdogs in the story in the Bible, and this is the beginning …

JESUS THE UNDERDOG

ABRAHAM

Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

DANIEL

DAVID

ELIJAH