Super Star, Not Superman
Becoming Christian was a rookie mistake
One look at King Herod and I felt my heart strangely warmed.
She was seventeen, a blond in blue shorts cast in the role because she could dance. When my friend Greg told me Herod and Jesus shared a scene requiring lots of post-rehearsal practice, I auditioned.
Turns out the part entailed more than enchanted time with the angel. Andrew Lloyd Weber put Jesus in almost every scene of Jesus Christ Superstar. I should have looked before I leaped. A rookie mistake. It was my first play.
Our Methodist ministers said Jesus was the name we give to the one who saves us. Adults seemed to know why we need saving and what that looks like. Made no sense to me.
Reverend Marie talked a lot about the “means of grace.” Had no idea what grace was, but I adopted the phrase. For me, at seventeen, Jesus was a means of gracing my life with a goddess. Or so I planned.
Mrs. Roberts said I had to get inside his head. How might he have felt as he suffered the events of Easter week?
The librarian showed me the whip the Romans used to scourge people before crucifixion. Three leather thongs with bone and metal. The weapon from which we get the word “filet.” Brutal.
Much later in life, I learned my ancestors used a similar technology to terrorize those they enslaved.
We rehearsed the scourging. In the play, the Romans flayed Jesus 39 times. Mrs. Roberts taught me to kneel and to writhe in increasing agony as the lashes landed.
The inhumanity of it all bothered me. Made me curious. What did Jesus do that others would hate him so?
His prayers at the garden called Gethsemane confounded me. He knew he was about to be arrested and executed as a political prisoner. Asked his best friends to stay awake with him as he awaited that reckoning. Instead, they slept.
Strange that he didn’t pray for deliverance. He didn’t pray to be rescued from torture and a horrific death. Instead, he prayed for the courage and clarity to obey his Father despite uncertainty that his death would matter. A suffering servant. What kind of man prays such prayers?
My costume included blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a Superman logo on my chest. But this was no Superman. He had no superhero powers. He bled like me. He doubted like me. He feared like me. An ordinary man with extraordinary unity with his Father. A mystery to be explored.
How great it would be to report that playing Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar was a great conversion moment - my Road to Damascus bolt of light that radically changed the course of my life! How different things might have been had my heart been strangely warmed by Jesus rather than a 17-year-old blonde performing Herod’s song and dance! How I’d prefer to relay the tale of how the stage lights illuminating the Cross miraculously illuminated my mind so that from that moment on I could do no other than follow Jesus the rest of my life.
But none of that happened.
After opening night, I got the girl. I also decided to learn more about this man, Jesus. Neither of those commitments lasted. But that’s another story.