What's the Buzz? Jesus on Stage and at the Movies

This post is written for the Bloomsbury Online Group, July 2026.

I was a teenager when I first met Jesus Christ Superstar, and not in a theatre but on a cassette tape: the "original cast recording", played and rewound until the ribbon started to wear thin. I was captivated, and I was moved. Here was the story I'd grown up with, the story I thought I knew inside out, suddenly sounding urgent and raw and dangerous. I learned every word of every song, and if you catch me at a certain point in the evening I can probably still give you most of them. It did something to my faith that a hundred sermons hadn't managed: it made me ask questions. And it turned out that asking questions was not, as I'd half feared, the opposite of believing.

That's why I wanted us to spend an evening on this. We have a church trip coming up to see Sam Ryder in Superstar, and it seemed the perfect moment to sit with a bigger question. When artists put Jesus on a stage or a screen, what happens to him? What do their interpretations reveal, distort, or illuminate about the gospel story we carry? Every generation remakes Jesus in its own image, and watching how it does so tells us as much about us as it does about him. So here are four attempts, two on stage and two on screen, one reverent and one less reverent in each pair. I'd love you to watch the clips before we meet.

Superstar: the gospel according to Judas

What startled me most about Jesus Christ Superstar, and still does, is whose story it is. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's 1970 rock opera hands the microphone to Judas. It's Judas who opens the show, agonising that things have gone too far; it's Judas who, after his death, comes back to sing the title number and fling his questions at Jesus like stones. Why here? Why now? Did you know how this would end? Are you who they say you are? It's a betrayer's-eye view of the passion, and it's electrifying.

Watch: "Superstar" (Carl Anderson as Judas, 1973 film):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGcIvK7f77o

For a young Christian who was starting to have doubts he didn't dare voice in church, this was oxygen. Superstar takes Jesus' humanity with total seriousness. The Gethsemane number is one of the most honest depictions of fear and reluctance I know, with Jesus arguing with God, frightened, wanting the cup to pass. It refuses easy piety. And notice where it leaves us: at the cross. The show ends with the burial. There's no resurrection scene, no Easter morning, just a body taken down and an aching, unresolved silence.

Now, every instinct in me wants to insist that the story doesn't and mustn't stop at Good Friday. But there's something here that gives me pause, because Mark's gospel does something not so different. In its original ending, at 16.8, Mark breaks off at the tomb too. It's an empty tomb, granted, with a young man in white announcing that Jesus has been raised, but there's no risen Christ in sight, only the women fleeing in terror and saying nothing to anyone. The earliest manuscripts stop right there, and the familiar resurrection appearances were added later. A Jesus story that ends abruptly, in fear and unresolved silence, without Easter's reassurances, turns out to be not a modern innovation but arguably the oldest ending we have. Superstar holds us in the space of Holy Saturday, that terrible day when the disciples didn't yet know how it ended, when God seemed absent and the worst had happened. Most of us live a good deal of our lives in that Saturday space. A retelling that dares to sit there, and doesn't rush us to the happy ending, may be doing something more pastorally truthful than we first assume. It's a good question for us: does leaving out the resurrection distort the gospel, or does it hold up a mirror to how faith feels a lot of the time?

Godspell: the gospel as joy

If Superstar is anguish, Stephen Schwartz's Godspell (stage 1971, film 1973) is the opposite emotional key entirely. Same era, same countercultural energy, wildly different theology of tone. Where Superstar broods, Godspell plays. A ragtag troupe of clowns and hippies gather around a Jesus in a Superman t-shirt and face-paint, and act out the parables of Matthew's gospel as knockabout street theatre. It's silly, it's tender, and it's unashamedly full of joy.

Watch: "Day by Day" (Godspell, 1973 film):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekoHxB4idmg

Some Christians find Godspell too flippant, and I understand why. But I think it grasps something the church often forgets: that the good news is meant to be good, that Jesus gathered people and made a community, that discipleship might involve delight. It's built almost entirely on Matthew, and it stages the teaching not as a lecture but as play, as friendship, as belonging. Its ending is instructive too. The crucifixion comes, and then the company lifts the body and carries it out through the streets, still singing. There's no staged resurrection here either, but the community goes on, the song doesn't stop, the life continues. Resurrection as something a people carry rather than a moment we witness. Set it next to Superstar and you have two very different answers to the same question: is the heart of this story grief, or is it joy? (The gospel, of course, insists on both.)

Jesus of Nazareth: the reverent screen

To the movies. Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977) is the reverent Jesus film par excellence: lavish, painterly, epic, the Sunday-school picture Bible brought to luminous life. At its centre is Robert Powell, whose pale-eyed, barely-blinking Jesus became, for a whole generation, simply what Jesus looked like.

Watch: the Sermon on the Mount / Beatitudes (Jesus of Nazareth, 1977, Robert Powell):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBqk04eO-kM

There's real power in reverence done well, and Powell's stillness is deeply moving. But reverence carries its own risks. This Jesus is beautiful, serene, ever so slightly unearthly, and you might ask whether a Jesus this composed and this Northern-European can still surprise us, still offend us, still overturn the tables. The gospels' Jesus wept, lost his temper, got tired, was rude to at least one foreign woman before she out-argued him. Does the reverent tradition, with all its devotion, risk smoothing him into an icon we admire from a safe distance rather than a person who might disrupt our lives? Keep Powell's face in mind, because it matters for what comes next.

Life of Brian: the irreverent one, and the most profound

Which brings me to Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), and to a claim I will defend to the day I die: that this "blasphemous" comedy is the most theologically perceptive of the four. Brian, let's be clear, is not Jesus. He's an ordinary man born in the stable next door, mistaken for a messiah, and the film's satire is aimed squarely at us: at the crowds who follow blindly, the factions who'd rather fight each other than the empire (the People's Front of Judea versus the Judean People's Front), the human genius for turning a message about love into a squabble about a shoe.

Watch: the Sermon on the Mount scene (Life of Brian):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpkWT5voTSE

Watch that clip closely, because it does something I don't think the Pythons fully intended. The crowd at the back can't hear properly. "Blessed are the peacemakers" comes drifting down the hill as "blessed are the cheesemakers", and off they go, earnestly debating what's so special about dairy producers and whether it's meant to be taken literally. It's the funniest scene in the film. It's also an almost perfect dramatisation of one of Matthew's deepest anxieties.

Matthew is obsessed with hearing and not-hearing, seeing and not-perceiving. "Let anyone with ears listen," Jesus keeps saying. In chapter 13 he tells the parable of the sower and then quotes Isaiah on a people who will listen and listen but never understand. The whole gospel worries away at the gap between the word going out and the word landing, at how the same teaching produces disciples and misunderstanders side by side. And here are Python, entirely by accident (or was it?), staging exactly that: the truth is proclaimed, but distance and distraction and our own preconceptions garble it into nonsense, and we go to war over the garbling. There's a lovely detail the scholar Mark Goodacre has pointed out, which is that the distant Jesus figure in Brian was deliberately made to resemble Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth. The film is standing at the back of the reverent tradition, straining to hear, and telling us the truth about how badly we listen.

That's why I find Brian more profound than the pious films, not less. It knows that the problem was never Jesus. The problem is always the crowd. The problem is us.

Some questions to bring with you

Watch the four clips, and come ready to talk. A few things I'll want us to talk about:

• Which of these four Jesuses (or non-Jesus, in Brian's case) feels truest to you, and what does your answer reveal about the Jesus you already carry?
• Three of these retellings stop at the cross and leave the resurrection implied or absent. Is that a distortion of the gospel, or an honest reflection of how faith is really lived?
• Is there such a thing as too irreverent? Where's the line, and who gets to draw it?
• Superstar helped me question my way further into faith rather than out of it. Has a film, a song, a novel or a play ever done that for you?
• If our church were to put Jesus on stage tomorrow, what would he look like, and what would that tell us about ourselves?

See you at the Palladium. And blessed are the cheesemakers.

Come - A Sermon for Pride Month 2026

A Sermon For Renew Inclusive Church, Cambridge

Pride Sunday, 14th June 2026

Revelation 7.9; 21.1-5; 22.17

It was a joy yesterday to be present for the Pride parade in Cambridge.

When Jess told me she'd like a focus on God's inclusive love for Pride Sunday,

            my mind went straight to the book of Revelation.

 

And I'm aware that for some of you,

            that might feel like the last place to look.

Revelation, after all, has a reputation.

            It's the book that gets quoted at you by street preachers.

            It's the source of the imagery on the placards that tell you you're going to burn.

It's the book that's been used, again and again,

            as a weapon against the very people we're celebrating this weekend.

 

So I want to begin by saying: that's not what Revelation is.

            The people who use it that way haven't really read it,

             or at least they haven't read it properly.

 

Here’s the key thing to know: Revelation is resistance literature.

            It's a letter written by a man called John, exiled on the island of Patmos,

            watching the Roman Empire crush the communities he loves.

 

It's his act of defiance,

            his insistence that Rome doesn't get to write the final chapter,

            that the empire's version of reality isn't the only version on offer.

 

The Greek word we translate as "revelation" is apokalypsis,

            it’s the word we know as apocalypse, but it doesn't mean catastrophe.

                        It means unveiling.

            It means: let me show you what's really going on.

 

And what John shows us, when we let him, is extraordinary.

 

The first text I want us to sit with is Revelation 7:9.

            John writes:

 

"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count,

            from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,

            standing before the throne and before the Lamb."

 

That image, a crowd too vast to count,

            drawn from every nation and tribe and tongue,

            is John's counter-vision to the Roman Empire.

 

Because Rome had a version of unity too,

            it just didn't look anything like this.

 

Rome's unity was enforced sameness.

            One language, one currency, one Caesar,

                        one way of being in the world,

            and if you didn't fit, there was a cross waiting for you.

 

Rome called it the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome,

            and it was real enough if you were wealthy, male, and Roman.

For everyone else, it was a peace built on their silence,

            their servitude, their erasure.

 

Does that sound familiar to you?

 

But against that, John offers this:

            a multitude of dazzling, irreducible human difference,

            gathered not by conquest but by love,

                        not in uniformity but in unity,

            every language still spoken,

                        every people still recognisably themselves,

            all oriented around the Lamb

                        who gave himself rather than taking from others.

 

Now, I want to be clear about how I understand this vision,

            because it matters enormously.

 

This isn't a picture of heaven as a future destination

            we'll arrive at one day if we're lucky.

This is a vision of what God wants,

            held up as a mirror to the present,

            a challenge to the church to ask:

                        is this what we look like?

                        Is this what we're aiming for?

 

The question Revelation puts to any community

            that calls itself the body of Christ

isn't "will you be ready when the end comes?"

            but "are you becoming this now?"

 

And here's where I need to be honest,

            because I think part of what we're doing this weekend,

                        not just celebrating, but actually lamenting and repenting,

            is acknowledging that the church has so profoundly failed this vision.

 

The church has, for most of its history,

            been the empire in this story, not the multitude.

It has been the force of enforced conformity,

            the institution that told people their love was wrong,

            their identity was broken,

            their presence conditional on their silence.

 

The church has been the source of wounds

            that are still being carried by people who may be in this room.

 

And it's not just the church.

 

Just over a year ago, the UK Supreme Court ruled

            that the words "woman" and "sex" in the Equality Act

            mean biological sex at birth;

and the Equality and Human Rights Commission has followed that up recently

            with guidance that trans people must use the facilities

            of the sex they were assigned at birth,

            in workplaces, public services, and schools.

 

The British Medical Association’s Resident Doctors called it scientifically illiterate.

 

What it means in practice is that the state has decided

            that it gets to tell people who they are,

                        regardless of how they live,

            regardless of who they know themselves to be,

                        regardless of the dignity and safety of having to use a bathroom

                        that publicly marks you as other.

 

In 2015, the UK was ranked first in Europe for LGBTQ rights.

            By the time of that ruling, we'd dropped to twenty-second.

That's not progress.

            That is empire logic: the insistence on enforced categories,

                        on making some people invisible or impossible,

            it is the empire doing what it always does.

 

Which brings me to the second text. From Revelation 21:

 

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

'See, the home of God is among mortals.

            God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples,

            and God will be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

            for the first things have passed away.'

And the one who was seated on the throne said,

            'See, I am making all things new.'"

 

God will wipe every tear from their eyes.

            And God is making— not God will make, not God has made,
            but God is making, present tense, ongoing, now — all things new.

 

This isn't a promise you wait for.

            This is a description of what God is doing in the world at this moment,

            the continual divine project of making new things,

                        healing broken things, restoring what has been damaged.

 

And for this to be good news on a Pride Sunday,

            we have to name honestly what some of those tears have been.

 

Some of them were shed in churches.

            Some of them were caused by people wielding scripture as a weapon.

Some of them belong to teenagers who were told they were an abomination,

            to adults whose relationships weren't recognised,

to people who loved God and were told by God's representatives

            that God didn't love them back.

 

When the text says God will wipe every tear,

            all those tears are included too.

Maybe especially those tears.

 

There's something important in the phrase "the first things have passed away."

 

The old arrangements, the old hierarchies, the old mechanisms of exclusion,

            John sees them as part of what God is in the business of dismantling.

 

The new creation isn't just a bigger and better version of the old one.

            It's built on fundamentally different terms.

 

And communities like this one, small, imperfect,

            doing their best to be genuinely what the church is supposed to be,

are signs of that new creation,

            not because you've got everything right,

            but because you've committed to a direction of travel.

 

The third text is the one I want to end with,

            because I think it's the most beautiful and the most radical of all.

 

It comes right at the end of Revelation, chapter 22, verse 17:

 

"The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come.'

            And let everyone who hears say, 'Come.'

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

            Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift."

 

Come. The Spirit says it. The church says it.

            And then, and this is the bit that gets me,

            everyone who hears is invited to say it too.

 

The invitation becomes contagious,

            spreading from person to person, community to community,

            until the whole earth is echoing with it.

 

And then: let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

            Anyone who wishes, anyone who wants to.

That's it. That's the criterion.

            Want to come? Come.

 

The welcome isn't conditional on your sexuality, or your gender,

            or your relationship status, or your past,

            or how other churches have treated you.

 

The Spirit holds the door open and says: anyone.

            If you're thirsty, there's water here.

 

I'm not part of the LGBTQ community myself,

            and I want to be honest about that,

            I'm here as an ally, and as a witness to what I've seen.

 

I've been minister of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church in London

            for fourteen years now,

and one of the things I'm most grateful for is that we've tried,

            often imperfectly, to work out what it means

            to be a genuinely inclusive community,

not in a way that has people prove their credentials at the door,

            but in a way that simply assumes whoever walks in belongs there.

 

We haven't always got it right, and we're still learning.

But what I can tell you

            is that when you try to be the kind of community that Revelation 7 describes,

            extraordinary things happen.

 

People come home who'd assumed they'd been permanently expelled from the faith.

            People find healing they'd given up expecting.

People discover that the God they were told didn't want them

            turns out to want them very much indeed.

 

The vision of Revelation isn't a destination we're waiting to reach.

            It's a calling we're trying to answer, today, in this room,

            with this particular gathering of people.

 

And the word the Spirit keeps saying, right to the very end of the whole Bible,

            is simply: Come.

 

Come as you are.

            Come, and find the water of life.

Come, and take your place in the multitude

            that no empire can number and no power can silence.

 

That's the vision. That's the calling.

            And I think you already know it's yours.

 

 

Discussion Starters:

1. "Has there been a moment, in a church, or somewhere else, where you felt genuinely welcomed as you are, rather than welcomed on conditions? What made the difference?"

2. "John's vision in Revelation 7 is of a community where every nation, tribe, people and language is present. If you picture the communities you belong to, including this one, who's missing? And why might that be?"

3. "The sermon suggested that these visions in Revelation aren't about a future destination but a present calling. Does that feel like good news, or does it feel like too much pressure? Or both?"

4. "God wiping every tear, if you take that seriously, what does it ask of the communities who claim to follow that God? What would it mean for this community, specifically?"

5. "The ruling that trans people must use facilities based on their birth sex was described as empire logic in the sermon, the state insisting it gets to define who people are. Do you think that's a fair framing? What do you think the church's response should be?"

6. "Revelation ends with the Spirit and the church together saying 'Come', an open, unconditional invitation. If you were going to say 'Come' to someone who'd been hurt by the church, what would you need them to know first?"