The Chosen: Finale of Season 3 in cinemas this weekend

Devotees of the Chosen, the TV series about the Ministry of Jesus and his disciples, will be able to see the final two programmes of Season Three in selected cinemas round the UK this weekend.

Although it is preferable to have seen the episodes leading up to it, even if you haven't, as with any good soap opera, the audience is immediately drawn into the drama. It helps too, that most Christians will already know of the main characters and the incidents portrayed. In this finale (which is about 130 minutes running time), the focus is the lead up to the feeding of the five thousand and the storm where Peter gets out of the boat to walk on the water.

As regular viewers know, the Chosen is a mixture of real biblical events, and the imagination of the script writers, who create back stories for the key characters, which add an extra dimension. Purists might object to this, and "faction" always has its dangers in that the biblically illiterate can believe that everything on the screen truly did happen, which is not the intention of the producers. That the script writers have real faith themselves is clear from the way they use the stories to teach about the Jewish religion and its feasts and to deal with questions like suffering, forgiveness and repentance in an accessible and entertaining way.

One of the big subplots in series three has been about Simon Peter and his wife Eden, and the affect that the ministry is having on their marriage, with Peter being away a lot. There is no historical evidence for this in the bible. All it mentions is that Simon had a mother in law, which means Peter must have had a wife. The Chosen uses this snippet of information to imagine what it must have been like being married to Peter and what might have happened when he was on the road. Just as soap operas resonate because they portray real, albeit dramatically heightened, situations that people can easily identify with, so with the Chosen.

In the finale a lot of the focus is on the growing sense of resentment of Peter, who starts to become angry at seeing all the miracles that Jesus is working for others, while his own wife is suffering the trauma of a miscarriage - something which is easy to understand and identify with. Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus gets better and better He is able to incarnate the compassion, strength and humour of Jesus in a way that transcends normal acting, This is clearly a grace God has given to him for the role, as prior to The Chosen, he had bit parts playing waiters and villains!

The tradition of hagiography of the saints in the Catholic Church can be inspiring but it can also seem to suggest that there are two kinds of people - saints and the rest of us. The Chosen helps the believer to imagine what it might have been like if one had been on the road with Jesus, witnessing his miracles but also the difficulties of it all.

At the end of the film after there usual credits, the screen was filled with a list of names in tiny print of those who had donated small and large amounts of money to get the series made, There were literally thousands and thousands of these! A sign that the Chosen is a series that speaks to the hearts and pocket books of many.

LINKS

Book tickets here: https://thechosen-tickets.co.uk/

If you haven't seen it yet, Series one and two is available on Amazon Prime and available to download free from Angel Studios www.angelstudios.com