Have you ever seen a Jesus movie before? You know movies depicting Jesus, Like The Passion of the Christ, The Last Temptation of Christ, and a new film coming out later this year, Mary Magdalene. I watched the trailer for this new film and it really seems to be focusing on the humanity of Jesus, His human characteristics. The trailer has Him talking about His feelings and really depicts His earthly relationships. I thought about it and most movies depicting Jesus do this. At least the three I mentioned here do. The Last Temptation of Christ is all about if Jesus never died and went to go on and live a “normal human life.” The Passion of the Christ depicts the brutality of His death on the cross. Death is such a human experience and this film tries to connect us with Jesus on this shared experience. But there’s more to Jesus than just His humanity. Yes He was 100% man, but He was also 100% God. In the Gospels we see Jesus preform amazing miracles that only He could do. In John 9, Jesus heals a man born blind. When the blind man was asked who the man that healed him was he said, “This Man must be from God.” Heck, after his brutal death, He rose from the dead! Only God can do that. So why do we only focus on the humanity of Jesus? Because we are 100% man. That’s all we know. That’s our experience. And it’s so hard to fathom someone being Man and God. So when we depict Jesus in our culture, in our films, we show Him as 100% Man, because that’s all we truly know. Yes the Bible gives us glimpses of how Holy and Awesome our God is, it shows us His Character and His nature, but we can only grasp so much before our mind goes down a rabbit trail and explodes out of sheer awe of how unfathomable God really is to us. Praise The Lord that He gives us His Holy Spirit so that we might actually understand anything about Him! So people take “artistic liberties” of how Jesus was as a man. Now I think we can do a much better job of making these type of narratives more biblical, but the Bible only gives us small glimpses into the life of Jesus. The Bible says at the end of the book of John that Jesus did so many more things than what we have recorded, so much in fact that the “whole world would not have room for the books that could be written.” We don’t have it all, so we fill in the blanks ourselves and we do it from our human experience. So how can we make an accurate Jesus movie? I don’t think we can. I think we can get closer than what we have right now but it’ll never be perfect. I think the life of Jesus is “unfilmable.” God is above our realm of understanding, so much so that our ways of showing His life here on earth will never be able to get the full picture. I guess I say all this for two reasons. One, don’t get overly upset when films get the life of Jesus wrong. These are thoughts of imperfect humans trying to depict a perfect God. They are just trying to understand Jesus the way that we understand each other and thus we create a human Jesus. Two, look to the Bible if you really want to understand how Jesus can be 100% man and 100% God. As I mentioned earlier, we have multiple accounts of Jesus’ life on record in the Bible, and with the power of the Holy Spirit, God can help us understand these accounts that He has given to us. It’s crazy to think God Himself was here on earth among us in a form we can understand. I pray that He continues to reveal Himself to us as we grow closer to Him in all we do.
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Austin VincentJust a guy with a passion for film and Jesus who's trying to show that He can be found in our creative endeavors. Archives
November 2018
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