The Chosen; and Mastering Hurry, Weight, and the Unseen Realm

Hello again everybody. I’m sorry I haven’t written for a while. Sometimes I just get bogged down with…life and so on, and writing doesn’t happen.

So, this week, I will make every effort to give you some good things.

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To begin with, The Chosen is back for a fourth series. I love The Chosen. If you don’t know it’s a dramatisation of the life of Jesus and his disciples. There are things about which are very silly. Too much of the dialogue is peppered with cringing americanisms. For example, in one of the new episodes, Andrew sits down with Jesus after the death of John the Baptist, and Jesus asks him, “How are you holding up?”

Urgh.

There are also ridiculous anachronisms. For some reason, Peter has a wife and, in one scene in an earlier series, they decide together that “it’s time”…as in, it’s time to start a family…as in, what? They’ve been using contraceptives?!? In first-century Israel? And they’re religious Jews?!

It’s like an exchange from an episode of Seinfeld.

There is also some pretty egregious diversity casting which somewhat spoils the illusion. The worst example I can think of of that is that, in a flashback to Jesus’ childhood, Joseph is played by some kind of Rastafarian actor with dreadlocks.

But, I love this show. It really helps you to imagine the way of Jesus: the way he lived, the way he related to people, the peace he carried within himself, his spiritual life and the way that he would take himself off to pray and to spend time alone with God. It’s inspiring. It really is.

Shows like The Chosen and films like The Passion of the Christ, if they do nothing else, remind us that God has revealed himself specifically in a human life. So, when we read the accounts of Jesus’ life, when we encounter him in the sacrament of Holy Communion, we are seeing not only the clearest and final revelation of God to humanity, but we are witnessing God’s revelation through humanity. Not just God, but God as a human. And thus God as connected with us. We see something of how we can embody the life of God in this world. This would be impossible without the Incarnation.

And Jesus sayeth unto to him, “Truly, truly, Andrew, I hope you’re holding up well my man.”