Joseph Holmes

6 min read ⭑

The finale of the fourth installment of “The Chosen” — while not quite living up to the greatness of its season premiere — remains among one of the best overall since the series hit our screens in 2019. 

It’s been said repeatedly but continues to be true: “The Chosen” is a ground-breaking series. From its unprecedented crowdfunding campaign to its innovative theaters-first strategy in the last two seasons, the series about Jesus and his disciples manages to be both creative and faithful. 

The fourth season, in particular, has been one of the strongest. While the first season remains the best, the second and third seasons have often struggled to consistently develop their characters with compelling conflicts. Instead, they meandered about with less-than-compelling subplots without strong payoffs and long lectures that felt more like life advice than theological meat.

Jesus, as we got to know him more, felt less like a compelling leader worth following and learning from than he did a comforting friend who alternatively was a shoulder to cry on. The fourth season, by contrast, focused on the rising danger from Jesus’s enemies and his upcoming death. It heightened and focused the conflict and made the show feel like it had a lot more at stake.

That said, the fourth season finale is still a mixed bag. Season finales of “The Chosen” have tended to leave the “big moments” to the second-to-last episode and the last episode a set-up for the next season. The first season had the big Jesus-Nichodemus confrontation in episode 7 and spent most of episode 8 setting up for Jesus and his disciples to go public with their ministry. 

Season 2 had Jesus’s confrontation with Quintas and the return of Mary in episode 7, then spent episode 8 setting up the introduction of Judas and Jesus’s sermon on the mount. Season 3 is one of the few that ends with the big emotional climax of the feeding of the 5,000 and Peter’s reconciliation with Jesus. Likewise, this season, the big moment is Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in episode 7, while the next episode focuses on the lead-up to Jesus’s triumphant ride into Jerusalem for Holy Week. 

This may just be a personal preference, but I think this lends to weaker season finales since they don’t end with a satisfying emotional catharsis. It also doesn’t help that those promises typically get paid off by weak openers the following season, where often the action grinds to a halt. 

Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead has good parts. They really put the work into making us care about Lazarus, Mary and Martha. As a result, the scene has all the emotional pieces necessary for us to be invested. They also do a solid job emphasizing what a big deal it was that Jesus raised someone from the dead — and why this would make the Pharisees commit to killing him. Jesus, in using his force of personality to get people to do what he says, feels authentic and emotional. Lazarus cracking a joke when he is raised also fits with his character.

On the flip side, some things don’t land. The “Jesus wept” scene feels more forced than natural, partly because they can’t seem to decide why he is crying. Jesus cries more intensely than we have ever seen before on the show, almost to the degree of melodrama, and yet it’s unclear what’s motivating it.

Is it because he’s overcome with emotion over Lazarus being dead? Is it because — as one of the disciples suggests — He’s grieving for how everyone else doesn’t get it?

Without a clear emotional motive, the moment almost feels like a parody. I understand why they made that moment such a big deal despite not having a clear emotional or narrative motivation driving it. The verse “Jesus wept” has grown to a mythic stature among Christians because it can be used to prove that men should be more comfortable expressing more stereotypically feminine emotions. Women remain the primary audience for “The Chosen” and they especially like seeing Jesus affirm this trait.

The irony is that most men already know Jesus embraced what we now deem to be stereotypical feminine traits. What they don’t know is that he also embraced masculine ones. As Nancy Pearcey points out in her book “The Toxic War on Masculinity,” Western Christianity largely switched from portraying Jesus as a masculine-coded king of the universe to a feminine-coded sweet, gentle and compassionate character. This means, as Dr. Anthony Bradley recently pointed out on X that most men only know Jesus as an exemplar of stereotypical feminine virtues rather than masculine ones. “The Chosen” largely mirrors this portrayal.

A bigger problem with the Lazarus story adaptation here though is that the moment of the resurrection is overshadowed by the subplot of Thomas’s grief and Judas’s slow slide into treachery. Obviously, part of what’s great about “The Chosen” is that the big moments from the Bible are given greater personal and narrative power by combining them with character subplots. When these work well, such as making Nicodemus a character trying to decide if he’s going to follow Jesus, enhances the drama of his encounter with Jesus.

But the Thomas and Judas story arcs, as shown throughout this season, have failed to have that kind of narrative power. Thomas’s story is weak, largely because it’s repetitive of Peter’s last season, by asking the same theological questions and dealing with the same sense of betrayal by God for not answering prayer, without adding anything substantial to it. Judas’s arc suffers from not enough work done to make us like him. Nearly every scene with Judas involves him being a pill or showing how he doesn’t “get Jesus” the way the other disciples do. Judas needed more likability and greater sympathetic reasons to fall from grace.  

Imagine if, instead of Raymah dying, she had decided to leave Jesus and Thomas to obey her father. This would have given Thomas and the other disciples a new conflict to confront. It would have given the audience yet another thing to wrestle with: How do you deal with choosing Jesus over someone else you love? Meanwhile, perhaps someone Judas loved could have been killed due to Jesus’s inaction. This would have given us a much more sympathetic route to Judas’s ultimate disillusionment with Jesus. 

The remainder of the two episodes largely deal with the fallout from Lazarus’ resurrection. Much of it feels like filler. Jesus' talk with Lazarus largely repeats beats from his conversation about his frustration with his disciples in a previous episode. The scene with the disciples falling apart is good but also exposes the lack of development with many of them since much of their dialogue feels interchangeable.

The strongest scene and character payoff in the two-part finale (and arguably the whole season) is Jesus’s confrontation with Shmuel when Mary washes his feet. Shmuel has had one of the most unpredictable and fascinating arcs throughout the series, starting as a zealous enemy of Jesus, then warming up to him as he starts to be disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, to even being hopeful that Jesus is the Messiah, to this moment where he is so scandalized by Jesus’s words and behavior that he becomes an even more zealous enemy of his. The degree to which Shumel has become an antagonist with layers shows the complexity that comes with being in opposition to Jesus. Shmuel has changed from someone whom I was ambivalent about to one of my favorite TV villains; I can’t wait to see what happens with him and Jesus next season. 

That said, while the season finale was weaker in its character payoffs than I would have liked, it still is the strongest season overall since the first. The stories are more focused, the drama more intense, the characters gelling more and the filmmaking more seamlessly skillful. The series opener with John The Baptist, the third episode with Raymah’s death and Quintas’s fall, as well as Jesus healing of Gaius’s son, the reconciliation of Peter and Matthew, the disciples arguing about who’s the greatest and Shmuel’s character arc payoff all are highlights that show the best of what “The Chosen” can be capable of. 

“The Chosen” will never be everything everyone wants it to be. But the best parts of it are getting better, which means that it continues to justify — however imperfectly — my excitement for future seasons. 

“The Chosen” Season 4 Four finale (episodes 7-8) will be shown exclusively in theaters Feb. 29-March 13.

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast The Overthinkers and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.com, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephhomesstudios.com.

This article is republished from Religion Unplugged under a Creative Commons license.

Related Articles