This morning I was reading The City of God by venerable Mary of Agreda. I would say forthrightly the chapter I read was more engaging and more thought-provoking than the TV series The Chosen.
That’s my context for the question. Are you a fan of The Chosen?
The first clarification is that I like The Chosen. I would even call it great TV, in the sense that it stands out as an enjoyably crafted product, from real believers, where entertainment and media have flooded our culture while being themselves flooded with secularism.
But here are my critiques.
The very thing that is making The Chosen so popular (relatability) is a double-edged sword. It can be good and it can be bad. It is good because it is really getting some people into the Gospels, where they previously had not been. It is bad because for other people it is communicating a truncated Gospel, where they need much more than they think they need.
In simple terms, I can say objectively that which hopefully is not taken to be malicious: the chosen is Protestant, it is not Catholic. It cannot, even symbolically, contain the “universal whole” of the Gospel. Clearly, I speak here with the eye of a Catholic pastor.
For me personally, the Catholic interpretation of Scripture is something I will not lose sight of. Here the Biblical typology in The Chosen is edifying, but it also is not Catholic. To the extent that the script of the Chosen incorporates the literal words and events of the Gospel (and the types of old), it will help move people towards the sacraments. But all the additional, imaginative interpretations of “what it actually was like,” will not accomplish the same feat directly. If you wish to test that assertion theoretically (spoiler alert here), ask yourself whether the second multiplication of the loaves and fishes (watch season 3) will be included in the upcoming seasons, and with as much attention paid to the attached Passover-Bread of Life Discourse as was given to the Sermon of the Mount (watch season 2).
The above is a very Catholic critique. But we give one more which will be more ecumenical. We go back to that double-edged-sword of relatability. By far, one of the most noticeable and entertaining aspects of The Chosen is the humor. Yes, the jokes and teasing are dramatically set against pain and grief, and some very relatable phycological wrestling. But to me it is clear, as I have enjoyed The Chosen, that the humor, and all the moments of joy, are meant to be in selective proportion to outshine, on the whole, the harder elements of the Gospel.
The critique may be subjective and intricate, but I am very confident in saying the following: I am certain that the joy and the humor of the disciples, the Apostles, and our Lord himself, were really not of the same character as shown in The Chosen. I am certain in saying “what actually happened” had, at one and the same time, a little less teasing, less joking, and less laughing, but much more joy, more profundity of wit, and more elevation of the soul.
To put it in a riddle: The Gospels never say that Jesus laughed, although we certainly must try to picture how it is that he might have laughed. The Gospels say rather that “Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit.” I think it was more a levity in the sense of exultation, an unquenchable satisfaction, not of an outburst of relief, as humor most often is for us.
In conclusion, let me not hide my interpreter of the Gospels who leads me to offer this critique: no canonized saint, but a fictional writer who certainly has a legacy to match The Chosen. It’s Chesterton.
Orthodoxy is one of my top 10 favorite books of all time. And I am always enchanted by its closing thoughts, the sentiments at the heart of Chesterton’s conversion to Christianity, in the sense of basics of the Apostles Creed. I use his conclusion for my conclusion:
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the
Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume [Orthodoxy] I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came [the New Testament]; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth. (www.freeclassicebooks.com)
Here then is my challenge for all of us who are enjoying The Chosen: let us live in Christ. But can we make our witness something noticeable not by intentional displays of teasing, joking, or even laughing, but by true joy, profundity of wit, and elevation of the soul? Is joy displayed for all superficially, or is it a powerhouse of satisfaction, guarded only because we want to accompany others personally into it, and not leave them gossiping about it from the outside? In this regard I suggest again that reading The Gospels ourselves will prove to be engaging and through provoking, in the end carrying us away much more than the most enjoyable of enjoyable TV series.
Ubi Petrus VT 