The Last Supper (The Movie)

 

I have not fully followed The Chosen, the first-ever multi-season TV series about the life of Christ. I have watched just a few episodes from the first season. But yesterday I went to the theater to see the latest episode, The Chosen; The Last Supper, Part 1. 

The series itself has gotten great reviews. From what I have heard from others who have followed it more faithfully, for the little I have seen myself, and finally from watching this in-theater episode, it is certainly impressive. The series is beautifully filmed, conveying a real feel for what the world of the New Testament - at that very specific place and time must have been like. It illustrates first-century Jewish life, which we Christians need to appreciate as much as possible. It also illustrates what kind of dramatic affect Jesus had on people's lives, people whose lives which until then had been otherwise ordinary but were suddenly being dramatically challenged to transformation through their experience of and relationship with Jesus.

As I remarked in regard to the current series House of David, one of the problems with dramatizing biblical narratives is that there is a lot of space to fill in with what must inevitably be made-up events, stories, and even characters. In the case of House of David, the downside of this is evident in the effort and amount of fictionalization required required to fill eight episodes with only three chapters of the biblical account. The latest episode seemed totally like a forced attempt to make up enough to fill in the time so as to get in one more episode. I haven't seen enough of The Chosen to be certain that this series avoids that pitfall. What I have seen suggests it is doing a more interesting job of filling in the spaces between actual biblical events.

That said, The Last Supper, Part 1, is really more about the first few days of Holy Week than about the Last Supper itself, which is only shown in intermittent excerpts of Jesus' Last Supper Discourse. The highlights of the evening (e.g., the foot washing, the Eucharist) are presumably being saved for a later episode. Instead of the Last Supper itself, this movie is about the triumphal entry into the city on Palm Sunday and the cleansing of the Temple (which the Gospels suggest occurred right away, but which the movie makes happen a day or two later). Both are well dramatized, and both are preceded and followed by fictionalized events that seem intended obviously to fit in with the bigger events and help interpret them (for example, the Gentiles from the Decapolis perplexed reaction to the Temple commerce and their wonder what Jesus would think of it).

This is the season for biblical dramas - especially passion plays. The Chosen; The Last Supper seems to do a better than average job of filling that niche of seasonal expectation, with something that definitely invites us to put ourselves into the story and imagine personally how Jesus' activities impacted his surroundings and what they are meant to mean for us today.

Abundance (The Book)

 

Ezra Klein is a well known NY Times political columnist and podcaster, originally from California, now based in Brooklyn, and author of Why We're Polarized (2020). Derek Thompson is an Atlantic staff writer and also a podcaster. The two have teamed up to produce Abundance (Simon and Schuster, 2025).

Abundance is dedicated to what its authors consider a simple idea, but which they and we know to be actually a quite controversial one, that "to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need." They oppose this to a 21st-century American "story of chosen scarcities." Thus agenda transcends the 20th-century political dichotomy between "a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it."

As anyone familiar with the way these issues have come to be framed recognizes, this book is a conversation largely within the progressive left. It expresses "the anger any liberal should feel when looking at the states and cities liberals govern." California, for example, "has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst hosing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living. As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona." The authors also highlight the consequent effect ineffective progressive misgovernment in such places has had electorally - in the form of the rise of populist Trumpism.

In their argument for a retrieval of growth politics, the authors take on the misanthropic antigrowth politics that they see as having developed somewhat in tandem with the environmental movement and related quality-of-life concerns in the last 50-60 years.  Back then, the rising anti-growth ideologies sometimes attacked Christianity. Here. the authors rebut that attack. They call degrowth "an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors, hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity's promise of dominion over nature."

The book gos into great detail illustrating the ways in which liberal preoccupations with process have frustrated and stunted the outcomes liberals ought to have been seeking. I live in New York City, a city that once epitomized what America could build. Imagine anyone trying to build the Empire State building in just a year today? Let alone trying to build enough housing for everyone who wants to live here?

But the authors believe that this may be one of those rare periods in our national history, "when the decline of one political order makes space for another." They recall how the New Deal political order arose in the 1930s and then collapsed in the 1970s, to be replaced by the neo-liberal order which has been fracturing under the weight of the Great Recession, the climate crisis, the pandemic, and "our interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability." In such times of transition, "ideas once regarded as implausible and unacceptable become possible and even inevitable."

So is it time for such a retrieved politics of abundance? The authors see the politics of scarcity  in the currently reigning right-wing populism, which "seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy's failed promises." Meanwhile, however, Blue America remains stuck in its own scarcity politics. The authors' argument is that, given the right's abandonment of its many successes (e.g., the Texas housing market, Operation Warp Speed) in order to embrace a politics of scarcity, there may now be room for liberals to embrace the politics of abundance that Republicans have abandoned.

This is a very thoughtful and provocative book. It is hard to contest its data. But diagnosing where we have historically gone wrong is always easier than producing the political solution that may be needed. At present, the left lacks political power, without which little can be accomplished. To acquire power - and to use it effectively in our present predicament - require a kind of liberal "strongman," a liberal anti-Trump, an FDR for the 21st century, who can coalesce a new coalition that can be led to embrace not just more of the same, but a new political order, responsive to the new challenges of the present. Whether the current opposition party can rise to that challenge remains yet to be seen.

77

 

Our span is seventy years or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain. They pass swiftly and we are gone (Psalm 90:10).

Those familiar words from the psalter, recited regularly for a lifetime in the ordinary course of the Divine Office, take on a special salience on one's birthday - especially when one is in his late 70s, on a day like today when I celebrate turning 77.

Frankly, the first feeling I have as I turn 77 is simply gratitude - gratitude at having lived this long, at being still around after so many years and so many experiences and so much that has happened both to me and to the world that no one would have anticipated on this date back in 1948. 

It is good to be alive, in tolerably decent health, much slowed down but nowhere near stopped. It is good to remember the people I have known, the places I have been, the things I have done - and also the opportunities missed and other inevitable regrets. (No honestly examined life is without its regrets.) 

Today, it feels good to reflect on where I have been, not mainly for nostalgia or regret, but for where I am going in whatever time may yet be given me.

 

What's Going On?

 

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” Some of us here are old enough to remember that as the title of a popular 1980s best-seller. Long before then however, as today’s gospel [Luke 13:1-9] suggests, this was a perennial problem and an endlessly asked question.

 

Since even Jesus in today’s Gospel avoided answering the questions directly, neither will I be so presumptuous as to attempt an answer here. Jesus’ refusal to speculate why bad things happen to good people in life – or, for that matter, why good things happen to bad people – appears almost as enigmatic and mysterious as God’s answer to Moses’ somewhat impertinent insistence on asking God’s name [Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15]. God reveals himself not through philosophical and moral speculations about what is going on in the world but by otherwise unforeseen personal initiatives. Maybe I Am merely means that God exists, as opposed to false gods who do not, and was God’s way of telling Moses that some things about God that are just mysterious, as if God were saying, “I am who I am and that’s all you need to know.” Maybe that’s why the real Moses (in contrast to the famous 1950s movie’s Moses) refrained from asking God the obvious question, why it has taken God so long to react to his people’s suffering in Egypt and hear their cry of complaint.

 

On the other hand, God is obviously showing personal interest in his people’s problems. Moses may not have asked, but he may still have wondered why they had to have those problems.  Well may we wonder as well. Likewise, those anonymous some people who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices may well have wondered why good Galilean pilgrims on pilgrimage in Jerusalem had been killed by Roman soldiers. And why, for that matter, had 18 innocent people been accidentally killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them?

 

The last example reminds me of Thornton Wilder’s famous 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which revolves around seeking some connection among the apparently random victims of a bridge’s collapse – in the hope of explaining why they, in particular, died instead of someone else.

 

Of course, no one needs to read a novel to find plenty of comparable examples in real life, which is full of natural disasters and as many multiple tragedies and injustices of human making. All these things inevitably inspire people to wonder. Could it possibly be that we, whose lives have so far been spared, who are lucky to live lives of affluence and abundance, are somehow more worthy or deserving or virtuous than those who haven’t been so lucky? The question itself seems absurd and maybe morally repugnant. The very universality and randomness of so much human suffering would seem to rebut the logic of any explanation, even if our all-too-human desire to impose some order and logic on the apparently arbitrary randomness of so much of what happens causes us to engage in such speculations in the first place.

 

As if to pre-empt any such speculation, Jesus just rejected it out of hand, telling us, in effect, don’t go there.  Focus instead, he seems to be saying, on where we do have agency, particuarly on our universal need for conversion and repentance. By becoming one with us in the burning bush, by becoming one of us in Jesus, God has, so to speak, agreed to meet us where we are at. But where we are at, Jesus warns us, may not be such a good place after all. Hence his parable – simultaneously so comforting and so threatening – of the unproductive fig tree.

 

Now most people would probably agree that the whole point of cultivating a fig tree is to produce figs. A fruit-less fig tree hardly warrants the work involved in cultivating it year after year. If there were ever an obvious application for the slogan “three strikes and you’re out,” this would seem to be it. After all, how likely would it be that, after three fruitless years, yet another year’s effort might make the tree bloom at last? Not much!

Yet the gardener in Jesus’ parable is willing to give it one more try. Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future.

 

To us, impatient people that we are, the thing to do with an unproductive tree would be to stop wasting soil and effort and just cut it down. But God patiently postpones cutting us down. He gives us extra, even lavish attention, cultivating and fertilizing us, revealing himself to us more and more clearly, and more and more fully, through Moses and others, finally sending us his Son as his final and fullest revelation of himself, his final and fullest expression of his patience and mercy, the one piece of really good news in our otherwise dismal history.

 

As this saga of God’s long-lasting mercy toward the human race reveals so dramatically, amid the world’s cacophony of otherwise bad news and in spite of all that is wrong with the world, God has been opening up new perspectives and opportunities and has been incredibly patient to us in spite of everything. The challenge, however, is that, while God’s patience and mercy may be infinite, we are not. The world may be in a mess, but meanwhile we have to avail ourselves of God’s limitless patience and mercy in the inevitably limited time each of us has.

 

Lent is our annual reminder, our annual wake-up call, challenging us to bear fruit in spite of everything else that seems so wrong right now, to put God’s patience and mercy to good use – right here right now.

 

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, March 23, 2025.

A Frighteningly Contemporary Crime Drama

 

Adolescence is a powerfully gripping (and at times somewhat emotionally frightening) four-episode British mini-series recently released on Netflix.

Episode one begins with the shocking arrest of a 13-year old, Jamie Miller, at his seemingly peaceful and ordinary family home early one morning, on suspicion of murder. Jamie claims to be innocent, and continues to protest his innocence through the horrifying experience of arrest and questioning at the local police station. Most of the episode seems set up to make the audience sympathize with the traumatized young Jamie and his terrified family. Not only do we want to believe in Jamie's innocence, but the dramatic expectation built into this kind of crime drama normally leads one to expect - even as the evidence against Jamie accumulates - that at some point the case could collapse and someone else's guilt will be uncovered. Jamie meanwhile desperately wants his father to believe in his innocence, as if that could undo what has happened and, so to speak, fix the situation. Only in the second episode, set three days later at Jamie's school, when the detectives try to gather evidence (and perhaps the murder weapon) from Jamie's unruly schoolmates, do we begin to realize that this is not a typical  "whodunit," and that the drama is less about who committed the crime than about why it happened. Meanwhile, at the school (an "academy," with lots of stairs, where students wear uniforms and generally behave badly), we are  introduced into a really frightening world where teenagers appear to live primarily on-line, a world which adults (police, parents, and teachers) all seem incapable of comprehending. 

Episodes three and four take place respectively seven and thirteen months after the crime. The interesting minor characters (and sub-plots) we have been introduced to in the first two episodes, about which we might expect to see and hear more (like the story of the detective and his son, a student at that school), disappear. The tone changes dramatically from the more typical crime-drama of the first two episodes. Now that we know what happened, we are supposed to focus on the reasons why. Thus, episode three depicts the (now incarcerated) teenager's interview with a psychologist assigned to prepare a report on him for the judge. Their conversation continues and highlights a terrifying world of adolescent on-line and in-person bullying and male sexual obsession, that was earlier alluded to already in the second episode. In the course of episodes two and three, we learn about some of the factors that apparently contributed to Jamie’s crime, such as his extreme lack of self-esteem, his experience of being bullied at school, and especially the on-line world's mixed messages about masculinity and the fear of being labeled an "incel." Then, the final episode, set over a year after the crime, focuses on Jamie's parents and sister and how they have coped with this family crisis and the inevitable feelings of recrimination and guilt which these multiple tragic events have left them with. There are no family secrets to be uncovered (as one might be tempted to expect there will be), just seemingly ordinary people experiencing sadness and regret over something that can no longer be fixed.

This is a very difficult series to take in. It is depressing and at times shocking. It invites us to examine what kinds of messages contemporary on-line culture may be conveying and how such messages may further complicate the already chaotic challenges of growing up unsure of who one is or whether one is valued. It also challenges contemporary society not only about what boys may experience but also about how society should respond and better enable them to to navigate through this increasingly toxic and dangerous world of masculine expectations and pseudo-expectations.