Sunday school felt boards, animal crackers, and cartoon Bible shows were the tools of spiritual formation for 1990s evangelical kids. The lessons I learned on Sunday morning and throughout the week were illustrated in picture books and direct-to-video cartoons we received on VHS via snail mail. I remember watching these 2D cartoons about Adam and Eve, David and Goliath and later, Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness by a cartoon Satan, rounded up and crucified by a cartoon Roman cohort. I suppose this would be considered wholesome evangelical media, but I found the imagery frightening. I grew fearful of the weeks leading up to Easter, worried we’d be subjected to live action scenes of the crucifixion in Sunday School.
This fear was compounded even more as a teenager when Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ hit movie theaters. It seemed all my friends were going to see it, coming away with profound experiences —”now I know what Jesus truly suffered,” they said. But I didn’t need an R-rated crucifixion horror film to confirm what I could easily imagine. The felt boards and singing vegetables of childhood faded into required reading: true stories of Christian martyrdom highlighted in D.C. Talk’s Jesus Freaks.
When I wasn’t dreaming of a bloody Christ, I was dreaming of being rounded up and tortured for Him.
In those early years of faith, I had no concept of spiritual formation, no understanding that my beliefs and understandings of Jesus and Christian life were being formed by fear and an unapproachable, gruesome Christ. I think I purposefully distanced myself from Christian media for a while because of the ways it fed my fear (not to mention the plethora of truly terrible Christian art).
And so when I began hearing about the new television series The Chosen, I avoided it. I wrote it off, convinced it was just another terrible (depressing) take on an abstract Jesus and his all male crew. But a few weeks ago, my curiosity got the better of me. Hours passed quickly as I became enthralled by a story of compelling beauty with a diverse cast portraying a ragtag crew of true misfits, and a Jesus who laughs, smiles, listens, drinks wine, hugs his mother.
This is the way of generative art.
Ironically, after weeping and laughing through season one, I stumbled upon a scathing critique of the show. The reviewer argued the Bible stands alone and we don’t need The Passion (a sentiment I agree with for wildly different reasons), nativity scenes, iconography, extra-biblical books, or popular TV shows. All we need, he argued, is the word of God.
But what does that really mean?
There are countless translations of the Bible, there are varying translations from faith tradition to faith tradition. There are extra books that were not included in the canon. And there are books (like Revelation) that were highly contested. But even in finding a translation believed to be fairly accurate, nothing is as accurate as the original text. And original language cannot be completely understood without context. And context is impossible to completely understand with the passage of time. Not to mention the vast differences between Eastern and Western understanding, culture, and tradition. In Hebrew tradition, there is Midrash—creative story passed down through generations to expand on the missing parts of an ancient text, what Marty Solomon calls Hebrew commentary. It’s artful and creative, compelling and, yes, fictional. Fictional because it is not fact. But honestly, not much of the Bible is fact. But being without fact doesn’t mean it is without Truth. And I think that’s what we’re getting at here.
Art allows us to play. Art asks questions. Good art requires no answers.
And so we have this show that can be cheesy at times (with some actors who have distractingly modern pearly white teeth and professionally threaded eyebrows) as a commentary (not a factual account) for what might have been.
This is why I’m compelled by the storytelling of The Chosen and a Christ who is first introduced not in a stable, but outside a tavern, chasing after a tormented Mary Magdalene, calling her by name. There’s an episode devoted entirely to Jesus’s interaction with children who stumble upon his pre-ministry campsite in the woods and grow curious about this strange and kind teacher.
Watching a scene play out of the first public miracle at a wedding—the water turned to wine—allowed me to imagine Jesus beyond a bloody skull and nail-pierced hands. Jesus dances. Jesus eats. Jesus laughs. Jesus drinks wine. But as the wine runs low, Mary seeks him out because tradition dictates the wine cannot run out before the celebration ends. And so he performs his first miracle, a miracle that not only provides wine in abundance but the best, most delicious, highest-end sort of wine imaginable.
Christ is humanized in his refrain from silently judging guests for their second, third, fourth, fifth glasses of wine, as he joins in with the dancing without criticizing how women’s bodies move or how loud the music plays in the background. Throughout church history, much of celebration has been stripped from Christianity in favor of severity and sobriety, as if God wants us to only sit for hours in long, drawn out prayer meetings, only read the Bible, only associate with people who think just as dully as we do. The puritans were famous for their high-necked garb and harsh punishments for whatever they deemed sinful. But Jesus wasn’t above a party. Jesus invites us to step out of the righteous layers that confine us and let loose a bit on the dance floor.
In this television story of the wedding miracle, we see a Christ who loves who celebrates life, not only its existence but its particularities. Here is a picture of a Christ who is not too divine to drink, eat, and be merry for joy is found in celebration. That is a prayer of its own.
In December’s Substack essay, I quoted from Scott Erickson’s Honest Advent about how iconizing sacred stories others them. They become upheld as holy and untouchable and we feel outside them, as if what happened to Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman, James, Peter, and Zacchaeus couldn’t happen to us. That we couldn’t be caught up in a miracle or find ourselves drinking heavenly wine, dancing with divinity. The Chosen illustrates the human side of Jesus we so easily forget about. Even when he tells Peter to cast the net on the other side of the boat, it’s with a twinkle in his eye. We are reminded Jesus wasn’t all reverence and piety, sternness and seriousness.
It’s a redemptive image for me as someone once scarred by a picture of a scourged and crucified Christ. But before he was beaten, he drank delicious wine. Before he was crucified, he danced. He spent three semi-documented years doing mundanely human things, which includes fishing, bathing, sleeping, eating, walking, sweating. He wept. He comforted. He healed. He laughed. He taught. He died. He returned.
I’m getting long-winded here, but the story of Jesus is not compelling because he died a gruesome death. It is compelling because Divinity walked into ordinary life, ordinary time, and instead of acting like a holy figure, he joined in as an ordinary man. His message was hated because it elevated the marginalized and condemned the oppressors. When Jesus asks Peter to feed his sheep, he is asking him to continue on in the ministry of restoration. Jesus living life, feeling emotions, embodying the human experience is a story of human matter mattering from wedding wine, to catching fish, to grieving death.
In The Chosen, we empathize with Nicodemus for his attachment to comfort and fear of the powerful elite. When he talks with Jesus, he’s met with compassion. “Come see the kingdom I am bringing into this world,” Jesus says. Come see the kingdom…here, now…where liberation is our mission and love pours out like wedding wine and we dance through the night with a Christ who dances with us.
I love your writing, the way you think. It always inspires me to think outside my small box.
Like you, I came to The Chosen hesitantly for similar reasons. This has been such a delightful reimagining of who Jesus was (and is).