The Chosen, now streaming its fourth season, is a worldwide phenomenon. Crowd-funded from the beginning, the show has been so popular with viewers that it’s now available on multiple streaming services, attracting more than 200 million people who’ve watched at least one episode. I’m one of them…
“Skeptical” is probably not a strong enough word to describe how I approached the first episode, after many friends urged me to watch. A crowd-funded show about Jesus and His disciples, produced by the son of Jerry Jenkins, the king of what I might call schlock Christian fiction? I resonate with Atlantic writer Peter Wehner’s trepidation in his article “Jesus of the Small Screen,” detailing how he was kindly (but persistently) coerced by his wife to watch just two or three episodes of the show: “At a relatively young age, at the outset of my own journey of faith, I decided I was done with cinematic portrayals of Jesus. I didn’t want to have a particular contemporary actor in mind when I imagined Jesus, because it would surely distort my understanding.”
But The Chosen somehow managed to portray a Jesus close enough to my own intimate experience of Him that I was taken off guard and reeled in. It’s been startling to see a Jesus who seems much closer to the way I experience Him—in Scripture and in my life—than past conventional depictions of Him. But as time goes on, I’m struggling more and more with the way He’s depicted in this show. I think that’s because the show’s creators have an enormous challenge—how to frame a Jesus who had such a disruptive, magnetic, and wholly other impact on everyone He met. It’s realistically impossible to replicate the way I experience Him, or the way Scripture describes Him, because He and I have, well, a lot of water under the bridge together…
Think about someone you know well—what would it be like to see an actor play that person in a Broadway play, for example? Take it a step further… What if you used ChatGPT (the popular AI generator) to paint a picture of someone you know well? Try it—go to chatgpt.com and ask it this question: “How would (name of spouse or friend and hometown) describe himself/herself?” Then hit “return” and see how ChatGPT self-describes your spouse or friend. What did AI get right, and what did it miss?
The closeness you enjoy with a person, and the more intimately you know them, will determine your assessment of AI’s accuracy. Conversely, the less we know a person, the easier we can be duped into thinking about that person in ways that don’t actually reflect who they really are. And the more we invest ourselves in that “deep fake,” the harder it is to break out of our set-in-concrete assumptions.
And that brings us to Jesus…
Think about how our assumptions about Jesus are wholly dependent on how close we are to Him. Coming at it from a different angle, in what ways can we be “deep faked” about Jesus simply because we really don’t know Him well, or not as well as we think we do? There are plenty of people eager to tell you who He is, but a lot of them are flat wrong… And this is nothing new. Check out this observation Jesus made about the people who, early on, were following Him because of their “deep fake” understanding of the Messiah:
“To what can I compare this generation? It is like children playing a game in the public square. They complain to their friends, ‘We played wedding songs, and you didn’t dance, so we played funeral songs, and you didn’t mourn.’ For John didn’t spend his time eating and drinking, and you say, ‘He’s possessed by a demon.’ The Son of Man, on the other hand, feasts and drinks, and you say, ‘He’s a glutton and a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and other sinners!’ But wisdom is shown to be right by its results” (Matthew 11:16-19).
So, what does Jesus mean when He says: “We played wedding songs, and you didn’t dance, so we played funeral songs, and you didn’t mourn?” I asked the young people in the “home church” my wife and I lead to explore and answer this question, and here’s what they said:
- He’s pointing out that the people in front of Him are upset because He’s not living up to their expectations. The Messiah, they assumed, was supposed to arrive as a conquering hero who would oust their Roman oppressors. But Jesus told them that the Romans weren’t the real enemy.
- He’s exposing the motivations of the people who’ve gathered to listen to His teaching—they’re trying to control Him, forcing Him to deliver on their preconceived expectations. But Jesus will not be controlled.
- He’s saying the people are immature—that they can’t handle the truth about Him. As David Foster Wallace says: “The truth will set you free. But not before it’s done with you.”
- He’s diagnosing the people as blind—they live in a religious bubble, deeply impacted by their closed-system understanding of the Messiah. But Jesus is a bubbly-burster.
And what about the kicker at the end of this passage, when Jesus says: “But wisdom is shown to be right by its results”? Again, when I asked young people to dig into this little P.S. that doesn’t seem to fit the context, they said:
- Wisdom comes with perspective and time—time enough to test its results.
- Wisdom, in the end, is always about getting closer to Jesus, the source of all wisdom.
- Results, in this context, translate to fruit—wisdom produces a certain kind of fruit, something that has to be tasted to appreciate.
- Truth speaks for itself.
The point here is clear: the counter-strategy that undermines the lure of the deep-fake Jesus is to slow down, pay attention, and re-discover (over and over) the truth about Him. As soon as we stop exploring, as soon as we are content in our understanding or experience of Him, we are opening ourselves to be fooled by “reasonable facsimiles.” And this is at the center of our calling as ministry leaders—to inoculate the people we serve against the deep-fake Jesus.
By the way, when I asked ChatGPT how Jesus would describe Himself in one sentence, it produced: “The way, the truth, and the life.” Score one for AI…
Help Is On the Way!
Fall is fast approaching, and we innovative, practical resources that will help you infuse your ministry environment with “rich soil” for transformation. First up, Following Jesus is a curriculum resource you can use with both adults and teenagers in your church this fall—help them explore what an ABIDING/REMAINING relationship with Jesus is like. It’s an experiential, highly interactive, co-discovery way to invite people into deeper intimacy with Jesus. And The Life of Jesus TalkCards is a simple, devotional way to invite small groups into the heart of Jesus.
Meanwhile, my new book Editing Jesus is now out. If you’d like an extended teaser of the book, just to check it out, the publisher has put together a pdf of the first three chapters that is exclusively available to the Vibrant Faith community. So, here you go… Just click on this link and you can download a pdf of this long excerpt from the book.
Rick Lawrence is Executive Director of Vibrant Faith—he created the new curriculum Following Jesus. He’s editor of the Jesus-Centered Bible and author of 40 books, including his new release Editing Jesus: Confronting the Distorted Faith of the American Church, The Suicide Solution, The Jesus-Centered Life and Jesus-Centered Daily. He hosts the podcast Paying Ridiculous Attention to Jesus.
A Deeper Way to Lead Others Into Faith Maturity… Guide your people into depth relationally and experientially… A new curriculum by Rick Lawrence for both youth & adult ministries. Learn More Here
