Why Captain America Must Die

We meet Steve and Bucky (played by Sebastian Stan) in Captain America: The First Avenger, as World War II rages. Bucky’s the strong, handsome hero then. Steve’s the quintessential wimp from the old Charles Atlas ads. But they’re still inseparable: Best friends for life. And when Steve bulks up courtesy Erskine’s mysterious formula, Bucky signs up to be part of Captain America’s team.

“You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?” Steve jokes.

“Hell, no!” Bucky says. “The little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight. I’m following him.”

Eventually, those jaws of death seem to close on Bucky: He falls to his doom during a fight on a train, plummeting hundreds of feet to the bottom of a snowy crevasse.

But he didn’t die. He was captured instead and turned into the fearsome Winter Soldier, a Hydra assassin with a metal arm and a brain emptied of everything that made him Bucky Barnes. And when both show up in the 21st Century (in the aptly titled Captain America: Winter Soldier, the Winter Soldier has just one thing on his mind: to kill Captain America.

But Steve’s still too dumb to run away from a fight—even if it’s a fight to save the brain and soul of a man so far gone. When he confronts his old friend, Cap refuses to battle him. “You’re my friend,” he tells him.

“You’re my mission!” the Winter Soldier shouts as he hits Cap again and again. “You are my mission!”

“Then finish it,” Steve says. “‘Cause I’m with you ’til the end of the line.”

Captain America may not be an explicit Christ figure, but this is unquestionably a Christ-like action. In The First Avenger, Bucky fell—from a train, literally, but from grace, figuratively—into sin and hell and a sort of living death. His mind is co-opted and twisted (as sin twists us all) into a thing so unlike what he once was, and what he was created to be.

And then comes his “savior,” an old friend who knows him like no other—who knows what he once was and could be again—and is willing and ready to lay down his life in the hopes of saving a lost soul. There’s no guarantee that the old Bucky will understand the sacrifice, or embrace his real nature. The decision is his to make. But it’s a risk Cap takes.

I’m mindful of John 15:13, from the New Living Translation of the Bible: There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.