It’s not easy fitting the important stuff into normal life. Even if you’re a wise cracking genius with super powers – somehow, there’s always some crazed super villain out to blow up half the city just as you sit down to finish writing your term paper. Aunt May asks you to take out the trash and you end up spending the rest of the night trying to stop the rampage of a giant lizard man. Mary Jane FINALLY says yes – and you show up an hour late, smelling of raw sewage because of some idiot with a sewage powered whatsis that would have turned everyone in New York into monkeys if you hadn’t stopped him. As you watch Mary Jane walk off in an understandable huff, you wonder why you bothered – who’d have noticed anyway?

You would. The story is familiar enough to everyone now, how you could have stopped the crook who later killed the uncle who raised you as his own son. How that tragedy taught you the real meaning behind your uncle’s adage ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. How that lesson continues to drive you to help others, no matter what.

The interesting thing is that Peter isn’t a jerk to begin with. He’s a bullied kid that is just trying to get by when a field trip goes hysterically wrong and his life takes a turn for the powerful – and seriously weird. That power is a goldmine – an easy way to earn money (amazingly, this occurs to very few in either superhero universe and virtually none of them ever find positive ways to capitalize on their abilities) by an underground fight club. Money, power – both go promptly to the head of our favorite geek. He becomes the jerk he hates – and in a moment of stupid selfishness, he watches a robber flee past him, the same robber who will shortly murder his Uncle Ben.

Peter’s immediate reaction is a human one – he wants revenge. He’ll use that power to get that revenge – and so he methodically hunts down the murderer. Only, facing the killer brings him face to face with himself. The Peter he’d become – not the Peter he used to be. The bitter pain of regret blended with the agony of loss – and the man who killed his beloved uncle is right there – literally in his hands. But he’s also the man Peter himself let run by – the man Peter could easily have stopped.

Peter has a decision to make. Will he continue to be the selfish jerk he’s become or will he turn back – what the Bible calls repentance – and no longer choose selfishness over righteousness? It’s not how he frames it, but it is the choice he faces. It’s the choice he makes in this instant that makes him a hero.

Peter chooses to do the right thing. He turns the murderer in – he doesn’t kill him. All that power – and all the money that he’d gotten with it – these did not make him a hero. His choice did – the choice to do the right thing. Scripture calls it ‘seeking after righteousness’. It’s messy and painful – sometimes costly – the process of figuring out what the right thing is and doing it, even when it’s not what you want to do. Choosing right – justice – over wrong – that’s what turns Peter Parker into Spiderman – not some irradiated arachnid.

Which probably doesn’t make him feel any better as he turns dejectedly to walk home, wondering if Mary Jane will ever speak to him again – and how the heck he’s going to get the smell out of his clothes before Aunt May finds out. Doing the right thing in a hectic life isn’t an easy choice. It’s just the right choice – the one that makes Spiderman great.

If sometimes smelly…

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