A few days ago a friend of mine shared how teens reacted watching The Chosen (check the video at the bottom).
The Chosen is a series showing Jesus’ life emphasizing his human nature and this short video looked quite amazing. So I decided to watch season 1 which is available on the channel on YouTube.
What I saw gave me some of the most mixed feelings I have for a film or series.
From one side it has more historical and cultural inaccuracies that I could count. It was like the scriptwriter couldn’t be bother to do any actual research on 1st century Palestine. And it’s a bit of a shame because it could have been a quite magnificent series.
And this is where the other side is coming in. The series blows a fresh air in a world of lame Jesus productions. It portrays a Jesus that will offend religious baby boomers but fed up millennials will love.
A Jesus that in the morning heals a leper and preaches about the Kingdom of God, and in the evening makes jocks about Andrew’s terrible dancing skills by saying, some things even Him can’t fix, and the next evening will tell scary stories to kids around a camp fire. I just loved the reception scene at the wedding of Canna (just go a watch it).
It was also very interesting that Matthew’s character was autistic, and that gives a whole new perspective of the people who first loved Jesus.
This a Jesus who’s as human as I am. This is a Jesus that knows what is to be a normal human being, if normal human being was a thing, and not the stoner Jesus of Nazareth (pan intended).
This is the Jesus the church must rediscover because her own existence depends on it.
Christian films and series are well known for the bad production value and half baked evangelism. They cater to your every day evangelical Christian that suffers from a serious persecution complex. Those people live in a parallel universe where their faith is constantly attacked by an invisible enemy. Just look at the success of the ‘God’s not Dead’ franchise amongst evangelicals.
Anyway,one of the worst things the Church did to our faith is stripping Jesus from his humanity and by doing this we end up with a God who lives in a galaxy far far away, a God that his main concern is to make our life miserable.
A lot of the misery Christians created through history it wouldn’t happen if they believed to a Jesus that was truly human.
One on the Salvation Army’s article of faith says, He [Jesus] is truly and properly God and truly and properly man but when it comes to the actual message we preach and live, we don’t really know how to worship and follow Jesus the man. This is the Jesus that the first disciples knew and followed and gave their lives for.
Taking away his humanity we are left with an over spiritualized Jesus that can’t really relate to our joys and sorrows.
His subversive and awkward message is devalued to words we chant or memorise for the sake of memorising them and use them to make people miserable.
His invitation to rejoin God’s family becomes just another party invite we can RSVP if we haven’t got anything better to do and missing the party of our lives.
A Jesus stripped of his humanity, is a Jesus that can’t show us how to be human the way it was suppose to be. This is happening not because Jesus’ message is not good enough but because the feet of the Jesus we sit on are the feet of an imaginary Jesus that exist only in our own dystopian universe.
But, the Jesus I love and follow is the one who religious people call friend of whores because he spends far too much time at the red light district.
The Jesus I love and follow is the one who loves to party with the most common folk and the worst of the sinners.
The Jesus I love and follow is the one who befriends pimps and shows him that the women (and men) he treats like shit are his brothers and sisters.
The Jesus I love and follow is the one who although is God’s only son won’t think twice to put on an apron and cooks for his friends, and enemies.
The Jesus I love and follow is the one that his piss is boiling when church elders saying to the abused wives to just shut up and go back to their husband or turned a blind eye when their superstar pastor grooms younger girls, and boys.
The Jesus I love and follow is the one who buys coffees to homeless junkies and illegal immigrants.
The Jesus I love and follow is the one who cries his guts off outside of detention centres where snatched children of ‘illegal immigrants’ are imprisoned.
The Jesus I love and follow is the one who healed my own deep wounds and left the scars as a remembrance for his amazing love and friendship.
The Jesus I love and follow is the one who’s tattoos are the scars of my own sins.
Bilbo
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