The Dead Speak!: Reading with the Jedi (Article for Mere Orthodoxy)

The Last Jedi is filled with provocative moments, but one scene is especially inflammatory—literally. Rey has just flown away to try and turn Kylo Ren back from the Dark Side. For exiled Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, who insists the Order is so morally compromised that it should end with him, this is the last straw. He brandishes a torch, intending to burn down the tree housing the ancient Jedi texts. The ghost of his own master, Yoda, appears, but doesn’t stop him. Instead, when Luke hesitates, Yoda himself calls down lightning to strike the tree—and laughs about it! As the tree burns, Luke concludes, “So, it is time for the Jedi Order to end.” But Yoda replies, “Time it is—for you to look past a pile of old books. … Wisdom they held, but that library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess.”

I’m working on a PhD in literature. It bothers me that Yoda treats old books so flippantly. What’s more, I’m a Sola Scriptura Protestant. My alarm bells go off at the suggestion that people don’t need a sacred text to guide them or already possess what wisdom they need. I recall someone commenting that The Last Jedi’s jab at books and received wisdom went against everything he believed in. If this scene were the film’s final word on the subject, I would have to agree.

But the Jedi texts were not destroyed. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot at the end of the film reveals that Rey took them aboard the Millennium Falcon. This puts Yoda’s words in a new light: it was only from a certain point of view that “[the] library contained nothing that [she] does not already possess.” That should lower the blood pressure of the booklovers and Bible-thumpers, but why the misdirection? Why does Yoda let Luke think the books were destroyed? If Rey still finds value in the books, why does he tell Luke “to look past” them?

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT MERE ORTHODOXY.