I have known for a long time that I should sit down and watch The Chosen.
I kept saying it the way we say a lot of things. I should call that person back. I should drink more water. I should. And then we don’t. Life fills in the space where intention used to live, and suddenly years have passed, and the thing you were going to do is still waiting quietly in the corner, patient as a saint. Procrastination. I wish there were a support group for this. Maybe I will convene it tomorrow.
So here I am on Easter Sunday, finally watching The Chosen.
It’s not like I came to this completely cold and with wide new eyes. I’d seen a movie or two over the years. These movies were the kind that put Jesus in a white robe. He had blue eyes and blonde hair. And every scene is bathed in a golden light that makes him look less like a man and more like a very attractive painting. You know the ones. And I watched. And I believed. But I never quite saw him, if that makes sense.
The thing about the Biblical Jesus is that he is almost too perfect to touch. He exists in the text like a law, present, authoritative, unquestionable. We are told what he said and what he did, and occasionally, only occasionally, we are given a glimpse behind the curtain. Jesus wept. Two words. The shortest verse in the Bible and arguably the most devastating. His friend Lazarus is dead, and Jesus, who knew he would raise him, who had already planned the miracle, still stood outside that tomb and let himself fall apart.
But the Bible tells us this. It doesn’t show us.
It doesn’t show us the way his breath might have caught before the tears came. It doesn’t show us whether he turned away from the crowd because he didn’t want them to see, or whether he wept openly and unashamedly, the way a man who knows grief is not weakness weeps. It doesn’t show us Mary and Martha’s faces when they saw the Son of God cry for their brother. The Bible reports it and moves on, because the Bible is a sacred document and not a screenplay, and there is only so much any book can hold.
I used to try to fill in those gaps myself. I would sit with a passage and try to imagine the texture of the moment, the smell of the crowd, the weight of the air, the specific quality of silence that falls when someone is about to say something that will change everything. I was earnest about it, but I was woefully unimaginative.
What I needed, it turns out, was writers. Actual, gifted, unafraid writers who were willing to sit inside the story and ask, what if we stayed here a little longer? What if we followed these men home? What if we showed Matthew counting his coins and hating himself for it? What if Matthew were just a touch autistic? What if we showed Peter being loud and wrong and deeply, tenderly human? What if we let Jesus laugh and show humour? What if we let him be exhausted? What if we saw him tenderly telling the woman who touched the hem of his garment that her faith had made her well?
The Chosen does this. And I was not prepared for how much it would undo me.
There is a version of faith that is very clean and very correct. You learn the doctrine, you follow the rules, you keep Jesus at a certain respectable distance because proximity to him feels dangerous, like it might ask something of you. Like it would show you just how unworthy you are and have you turn away from that perfection because you can’t quite soil that perfection with your imperfection. The Biblical Jesus makes it easy to keep that distance. He is presented in such elevated language, surrounded by such theological weight, that you can admire him the way you admire a mountain, from far away, aware that it is significant, not entirely sure what you would do if you actually had to climb it.
The Chosen removes the distance.
It puts him in the dust and the noise of first-century Galilee and shows you a tired man. Who joked with his friends. Who had a mother who worried about him. Who sat with people that polite society had decided were not worth sitting with. This was not done as a grand gesture, but because that is simply, exactly where he wanted to be. And watching this, something in me is rearranging itself.
I know him, I keep thinking. I don’t just know about him. I know him.
There is a slippery slope, of course. I am aware of it even as I write this. The actor on my screen is doing extraordinary work, and part of my brain wants to send him a fruit basket and a thank-you note. This is a line I tell myself that I have to remember. The performance is the door. Jesus is the room. I cannot confuse the two. I have to keep walking through.
But I think about the generations before me who did not have this. Who had the Bible and the paintings and the stained glass windows and their own insufficient imaginations. Those who loved Jesus the way you love someone you have never met, faithfully, hungrily, always slightly unsure if the picture in your head is accurate. There is holiness in that kind of love. I am not saying they had less. I am saying I have been given something they didn’t have and I want to be grateful for it rather than casual about it.
I am glad to be alive now. I am glad to be watching this on Easter Sunday, of all days. I am glad to live in a time when someone thought to ask the question: What if we made him real for people who are struggling to see him? What if we used the tools we have now, the cameras, the scripts, the actors, the streaming services, the Sunday mornings with nowhere to be, to bring people into the story instead of just reciting it at them?
He was Jesus. Yes. But he was also human. He had human moments. He felt human things. And that doesn’t diminish him. If anything, it makes what he did so much more staggering. Because knowing what it costs to be human, knowing the weight of it, he chose it, and He chose us.
Happy Easter, everyone.
