The Cross, the Throne, and the Immanent Frame: On the Christology of Loki
Photo by Carlos N. Cuatzo Meza on Unsplash
[Warning: spoilers ahead for Loki season 2 on Disney+.]
Loki has been part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) for over a decade. As both an antagonist in the first Thor film and the primary villain of the initial Avengers film, Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief was a mainstay long before he received his own series. A fan-favorite, Loki has died and returned several times, to the point that Thanos himself made a joke about it in Avengers: Infinity War. But the perennial trickster received a new story with the Loki series, in which an alternative reality’s Loki goes on a time-bending trip through the multiverse courtesy of the mysterious Time Variance Authority (TVA). Season 1 concludes with a Loki variant (a Loki from an alternative timeline), Sylvie, killing He Who Remains, himself a variant of the evil villain Kang who warned that his death would not solve anything.
Season 2 sees this prophecy fulfilled. Kang’s death has only made matters worse, and the six episodes focus on Loki and his allies desperately attempting to fix time itself before it shatters. Over the course of the season, Loki increases his mastery over the timestream, hoping to learn enough and increase his powers such that he can prevent the decimation of the TVA and the loss of billions of people represented by the multiple realities it protects. Ultimately, he discovers that there is no way to stop the devastation without killing Sylvie, and he reaches a crossroads. But rather than killing her, he chooses a different path, and discovers his vocation is both a burden and a throne. As this piece will unpack, Loki’s arc illustrates Charles Taylor’s philosophy of the secular while also offering a powerful—if unintentional—glimpse of Jesus’ story.
Glorious Purpose
In the first Avengers film, Loki attempted to conquer Earth, declaring he was “burdened with glorious purpose.” Season 1 of his series opens with an episode titled “Glorious Purpose,” making clear how crucial this idea is to the character. This theme is solidified at the end of season 1, in which an older Loki variant sacrifices himself to save others while triumphantly declaring, “Purpose! Glorious purpose!” In hindsight, this presages what will happen with the titular Loki at the end of season 2, whose finale is also titled “Glorious Purpose.”
Faced with the impossible choice of multiversal cataclysm or killing his beloved Sylvie, Loki is forced to seek an alternative. For most of the finale, he was intent on assisting Victor Timely (yet another non-evil Kang variant) in fixing the Temporal Loom, the machine that supposedly keeps time safe at the heart of the TVA, hoping it would allow the multiverse to survive. But after it becomes clear that this is impossible, and his only other option is murdering Sylvie before she can kill He Who Remains, Loki discovers that the “glorious purpose” he had been seeking was not conquest but service.
The Burden
Loki is advised in the finale of season 2 to “choose your burden.” In the TVA, as he walks toward the Loom gathering up the multiversal threads, he is depicted somewhat like Jesus ascending Golgotha. Just as Jesus gathers up the sin and evil of the world onto the cross, Loki takes upon himself the burden of the multiverse’s survival. Jesus gives up his life “for the life of the world,” revealing his kingdom in an act of sacrificial love (John 6:51). Likewise, Loki takes his throne through kenosis (“self-emptying” in Greek) rather than force, making the burden of the multiverse’s survival his burden.
The pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” Loki realizes that his burden is to drive a spoke into the entire system of He Who Remains. When he finally realizes the Loom cannot be fixed because it was intended to perpetuate Kang’s rule, he destroys it in order to take upon himself the burden of time’s survival. Only by destroying it can he heal the multiverse.
The Throne
From our first introduction to him, Thor’s lesser brother had desired a crown. Jealous of his brother, embittered toward his father Odin, Loki meted out his vengeance across the galaxy. In Avengers, Loki’s conquest was thwarted. When we meet Loki in the very first episode of his show, he declares to Mobius that he was “born to be” a king. By the second season, he has changed. Sylvie at one point cynically accuses him of being “seduced by a throne,” but he insists, “the last thing I want is a throne.” By the conclusion to the season, however, Loki discovers a kind of throne he never expected.
Refusing the choice to kill Sylvie, Loki instead rushes into the breach himself, where Victor Timely had repeatedly failed. He walks in agony toward the remains of the timelines after destroying the Loom, gathering up the different strands of the multiverse and somehow restoring life to each one. Loki climbs and climbs, grasping all the strands of the multiverse (represented by something like ropes), until eventually he is seated on a throne that is connected to all the threads he has gathered. As the image zooms out, we see that the totality of the multiversal threads have taken the shape of a tree, with Loki’s throne as the beating heart. This is likely inspired by Yggdrasil, the “world tree” of Norse mythology that also resonates with the tree-of-life motif found in other cultures. Seated on his new throne, Loki both heals and (it is implied) maintains the multiverse. His throne of conquest has morphed into a throne of service.
The Bible, of course, likens Jesus’ cross to both a throne and a tree. He is given a crown of thrones, and the sign above his head reads, “King.” Likewise, Acts 5:30 describes how Peter and the apostles told the Sanhedrin members that they had put Jesus to death “on a tree.” At the beginning and the end of the biblical narrative are trees: in Genesis, in the garden of Eden, and in the New Jerusalem described in Revelation. At the center of that whole narrative, though, the very hingepoint of the cosmos itself, is the true tree of life, the “wondrous cross” on which “the King of Glory died.”
Note the many resonances to Loki’s story. Burden and glory, tree and throne, all commingle on the cross. Loki gives up his life, discovering that his glorious purpose was the burden of a throne which demanded not his domination of the multiverse, but sacrificing his very being for it. The petulant younger brother of Thor has become the humble and secret savior of all that is. As Mobius advised him, “Most purpose is more burden than glory.”
The Immanent Frame is Porous
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has given us the notion of the “immanent frame” to describe the religious state of contemporary Western culture. Where medieval culture assumed a transcendent reality and the belief in the supernatural, under the immanent frame moderns struggle to imagine anything outside of the natural world. In the span of half a millennium, our default setting has shifted from transcendent (supernatural) to immanent (materialist).
In his excellent book How (Not) to be Secular, translating Taylor’s A Secular Age to a wider audience, James K.A. Smith notes that consistent doubters who live under the Immanent Frame will sometimes come to doubt their doubt. In our postmodern world, in which almost any truth claim has as much (or as little) validity as another, there are times in which the transcendent—or at least the desire for it—appears even to those who claim to deny it. According to Smith, then, followers of Jesus should expect this and point out (for evangelistic and apologetic purposes) when and where the secular is porous, where the immanent frame is cracked. For instance, a secular person might send “good thoughts and vibes'' instead of praying, but this is nonetheless indicative of a desire to connect on something approximating a spiritual level.
Likewise, in much popular entertainment, one can see other gaps evident in the Immanent Frame. Loki’s season 2 finale represents just such an occurrence. Here is a show ostensibly about a Norse deity in which sacrificial love is the salvation of the universe, the throne is a throne of service instead of conquest, and self-negation by generosity is chosen over self-assertion by violence. The Kingdom that Loki finally reigns over is a burden, and his glorious purpose is a salvation for others rather than prestige for himself. Rather than subduing the multiverse, he redeems it by handing over his own life.
This is no Norse myth. This is a gap in the secular, a sliver of gospel peeking through like a long-awaited sunrise in the Immanent Frame. In its deeply Christological tenor and imagery, the finale of Loki season 2 is an indication that the message of Jesus still resonates in a world that has forgotten it, rejected it, or never heard it.
Conclusion: Sacrifice, Not Conquest
Both the gospels and the epistles revel in the magnificent reversal that Christ’s death and resurrection effect. Throughout the centuries the Christian tradition has, similarly, gloried in the strange good news that the Crucified One is Lord and King. Jesus himself hints at this mystery, prophesying in John 12:32, “and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” On the cross, God triumphs in and through the executed Son. He is enthroned on the Roman equivalent of an electric chair; in the wondrous providence of God, an instrument of torture and terror becomes the site of victory over sin, death, and evil, and the Crucified One is vindicated in his resurrection on Easter morning.
While implicit at best, this is quite similar to the logic of Loki’s character arc that concludes in the season 2 finale. Having tried everything over the course of centuries, Loki refuses to kill in order to save the twisted sense of multiversal order of He Who Remains. Ultimately Loki realizes that he can neither kill Sylvie nor let Kang rule. He will choose a different path to heal the multiverse.
We may note here, similarly, that Jesus refused many of the major paths of his day: he neither collaborated with religious authorities aligned with Roman imperial rule, nor did he join the zealots or Sicarii committed to its violent overthrow. Instead, he preached, embodied, and inaugurated a different kind of Kingdom in which the poor are blessed, the outcast welcomed, and the sword is ultimately banished. His kingship, unlike that of a Herod or Caesar, comes not from the power of armies or threat of force but from sacrificial love.
Likewise, Loki finally gets his throne when he decides to give himself up for the survival of the multiverse. In a moving scene in the season 2 finale, he looks at his friends and says, “I know what kind of god I need to be. For you. For all of us.” As he begins walking, we see his crown literally appear as he claims his vocation and gathers up the strands of the multiverse. His ego is brought low, his life is forfeit, in order to ascend to a throne of service. His glorious purpose turned out to be a burden; but unlike Atlas, punished with the weight of the world, Loki chooses his burden, breathing life into a dying multiverse, which will now survive at the cost of his life.
I do not know if the show’s writers were aware of this gospel resonance in their story. Either way, as Smith says, it is evidence that the secular is “haunted.” As Taylor has taught us, the Immanent Frame still allows for the sacred to peek through at times. Thus the Loki finale demonstrates that even today, stories of sacrificial love, tales of deities who give up power, and redemption narratives based on grace and not violence still move the human heart.
Loki is not a direct analogue for Jesus. He is no Aslan of Narnia, but his story may just be a conversation starter for people who still long for transcendent mercy in a world that knows too much of cold materialism, crass manipulation, and naked coercion. In the end, we must all choose whether to give our allegiance to one of a thousand small thrones built on fleeting, selfish, and petty power, or to Jesus’ blood-stained throne on Golgotha, the tree of life through which the cosmos is ultimately made new.
Drew McIntyre is an Elder in the Western North Carolina Conference and the pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Greensboro, NC. He serves on Firebrand’s Editorial Board.