Jesus Christ Superstar – My thoughts

For Tara’s birthday, I did the usual… bought her something for me! I got us tickets to Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hershey Theater. What a great experience. If you’ve grown up a Christian, you usually have one of two views on this kind of thing. Either, one, you shun everything but the theological perspective you have on Jesus in order to preserve the Jesus you’ve come to enjoy and thus run from such a humanistic perspective. Or, two, you look for other perspectives, even the humanistic ones, in hopes that they just might add some color or perspective to the Jesus you’ve thought you always knew. Obviously, I’m for the latter.

To begin with, Jesus Christ Superstar, in my childhood remembrances, was considered an absolutely abominable pop-culture abuse of Jesus. But actually, it’s gained some acceptance in the evangelical world… possibly because… go figure… people actually have gone to see it.

Since I’ve dissected Christology every possible way over the years, I tend to judge these kind of things by the new perspective I gain. I’m always hungry to see Jesus in a way that is fresh while still consistent with scripture. I found several moments of fresh insight during the show…

1. Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene had to be quite a bit more scandalous than I realized. In the musical, I was quite offended by the fact that in one scene, Mary was rather sensually rubbing Jesus’ face and hands with oil. It was a TMI moment. In the scripture (Luke 7), it is His feet that she anoints. But really, how offensive is it that she poured herself all over his feet? Well, about as offensive to the Pharisees as her stroking his face is to us! I fell for it. At the moment I was offended, I was pulled into the Scripture to join the Pharisees in their disgust. I guess it’s hard to let Jesus be as cozy to sinners as he really wants to be. (Here’s Mary’s famous song, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” – Scroll down for more review…)

2. I was struck by how offensive Jesus’ sayings could be. One example. Judas is the one in the musical pushing for Jesus to do more for the poor. Jesus responds by saying, “You will always have the poor. But you will only have me for a little while…” I struck me how dumbfounded His followers must have been at his sayings.

3. Judas – I’ve been vacillating between streams of thought on Judas. The flat, fundamentalist view is that Judas was just evil, and evil people just kill good people. The sympathetic, more complex view of Judas is that he was fiercely loyal to Jesus and used the betrayal to force Jesus’ hand to act against the Romans, only to have it backfire on him. The musical blends these two, showing a much more confused Judas… loving and loyal at times, then hateful because Jesus wasn’t doing things his way. And he hated Jesus because he wasn’t doing the good things Judas wanted him to. I appreciated the more complicated viewpoint, and will hesitate now from pinning Judas down. (By the way, Corey Glover of the band Living Color played Judas… here’s a clip of Judas’ death as done by a modern movie version. It’s a little freaky… not like it was on stage, but you can hear the words)…

4. Jesus – We know him as 100% God and 100% man. But we think that somehow His Godness reduces his manness to getting hungry and suffering pain. But, when you’re Andrew Lloyd Webber, and you aren’t convinced Jesus was really God, you can posit some real man-like emotions on Jesus in a way a devout Christian has a hard time doing. So it’s good once in a while to let Jesus go beyond our sanitized version of him. The song, Gethsemene, which is the absolutely crowning jewel of the whole musical is worth studying and analyzing for it’s portrayal of Jesus’ emotional pain. If you don’t listen to any of the clips above, you’ve gotta listen to this one… over and over.

Lastly, in regards to presentation… Ted Neeley, the original Jesus, is making his last and final comeback tour. But… he’s 61. So while it was enjoyable to watch a classic unfold, I did miss a younger, more expressive Jesus. Ted Neeley was a little to stiff, like the Jesus of Sunday School. I was hoping for a less caricatured version of Jesus. Go here for a look at Ted Neeley.

I recommend this at least once in everyone’s life. It’s different, psychedelic at times, but a much better evening out than at the local church cantata.