At the top of January, I went to the UK premiere of Season 4 of The Chosen. Since then, it’s screened in cinemas and dropped on major streaming platforms.
If you needed any convincing of the success of the primary multi-series depiction of the incarnation, the primary three seasons have been viewed about half a billion times.
So far, we have seen Jesus call the 12, start his public ministry, deliver the Sermon on the Mount, and send out the disciples, together with loads of content that won’t exactly appear within the gospels, but could be inferred from ‘reading between the lines’. It’s a few of these interactions which have stuck with me most.
As well as miracles and teachings that show Jesus as fully God, the on a regular basis interactions of Jesus remind us that he was fully human, too – as were his disciples. We frequently get to see Jesus’ sense of humour, the group’s squabbles, and Simon Peter’s ability to at all times say the flawed thing on the flawed time.
This is all encapsulated in a scene from early in season 4, where two of the disciples are doing laundry. One is unhappy about doing such an earthly job, pondering it needs to be left to others in order that they can get on with the necessary (by which they mean ‘spiritual’) work.
Yet the opposite disciple is quick to indicate that, as followers of Jesus, we want to attach with what the people around us do of their strange life if we’re to indicate them how and why faith makes a difference. So, as an alternative, we’re to ask ourselves what Jesus might wish to teach us, in and thru the on a regular basis tasks.
The lifetime of Jesus was earth-shatteringly transformational, and yet it still had loads of mundane and on a regular basis bits – and we need not shrink back from that.
It’s a part of the wonder of God becoming man: the miraculous and the mundane, the extraordinary and the on a regular basis, all sure up together.
Perhaps certainly one of the gifts of The Chosen is to remind us, as Jesus’ followers today, he still cares about our mundane and on a regular basis, too.
