At the end of January, I went to the UK premiere of Season 4 of The Chosen. Since then, it's screened in cinemas and dropped on major streaming platforms.
If you needed any convincing of the success of the first multi-series depiction of the incarnation, the first three seasons have been viewed about half a billion times.
So far, we've seen Jesus call the 12, start his public ministry, deliver the Sermon on the Mount, and send out the disciples, along with a lot of content that may not exactly appear in the gospels, but can be inferred from 'reading between the lines'. It's some of these interactions that have stuck with me most.
As well as miracles and teachings that show Jesus as fully God, the everyday interactions of Jesus remind us that he was fully human, too – as were his disciples. We regularly get to see Jesus' sense of humour, the group's squabbles, and Simon Peter's ability to always say the wrong thing at the wrong time.
This is all encapsulated in a scene from early in season 4, where two of the disciples are doing laundry. One is unhappy about doing such a mundane job, thinking it should be left to others so they can get on with the important (by which they mean 'spiritual') work.
Yet the other disciple is quick to point out that, as followers of Jesus, we need to connect with what the people around us do in their ordinary life if we're to show them how and why faith makes a difference. So, instead, we're to ask ourselves what Jesus might want to teach us, in and through the everyday tasks.
The life of Jesus was earth-shatteringly transformational, and yet it still had a lot of mundane and everyday bits – and we don't need to shy away from that.
It's part of the wonder of God becoming man: the miraculous and the mundane, the extraordinary and the everyday, all bound up together.
Perhaps one of the gifts of The Chosen is to remind us, as Jesus' followers today, he still cares about our mundane and everyday, too.
