What “The Chosen” and The Bible Can Teach Us About Cancel Culture

Ephesians 5:1-2 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

In season 2 episode 6 of “The Chosen”, we see how Mary Magdalene went back to her old ways of drinking and spending time in taverns. As the episode progresses, we see how disciples Matthew and Simon set out to find her and bring her back to the rest of the group to prepare for “The Sermon On The Mount” with Jesus. When Jesus and Mary Magdalene see each other again, he immediately takes her into his arms, hugs her, and tells her that she is forgiven.

“The Chosen is a TV series which portrays Jesus through the eyes of those who met him.” While some critics of the show would argue that the scene between Mary Magdalene and Jesus is nowhere in the bible, it does an incredible job of showing who Christ is and can inspire us all to reach out for our bibles and further develop our relationship with God. This very scene helps us to understand what the Bible means when God forgives us. We all fall short of the glory of God, but time after time, when we repent for what we’ve done wrong, Christ continuously shows his love for us.

There are many of us who need this reminder in today’s modern world, where if we see someone who goes against what we believe, we are taught to take our phones, film, shame, mock, spread their wrong doing over the internet until they’ve been brought down and forced into making some kind of apology. Or if at some point in our past we have made a mistake or said something wrong, we bring up their past mistakes, make sure to post it all over social media so that our friends and family will also be informed about what our favorite celebrities did or did not do.

When Jesus corrected others he did so in the context of grace and relationship. If we were to look directly at the scriptures in The Story of The Adulterous Woman in John 8, after Jesus tells the Pharisees “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” everybody just walked away, and when it was just the two of them, he forgave her of her mistake.

As we go about our day to day lives, living and interacting with other human beings, we must remember that we are all making mistakes, learning, and growing. How can others experience His grace and have a relationship with God if every time they make a mistake, they only experience our wrath in their social media feeds?

The Bible calls us to be more like Christ and less like the religious people of the day who went around town making sure people followed the rules, but they themselves never really had a relationship with God. It was those very religious people during Jesus’ time who sent him to the cross and pretty much thought they could “cancel” him. While sending him to the cross took place 2000 years ago, are those who claim to be “good people” 2000 years later, not just modern day pharisees? While so much time has passed, can we really say that we have transformed since then?

Let’s ask ourselves and reflect on this, would God also behave like this towards us? Would God cancel us if we were to make a mistake? Very few people would be alive on this earth if that were the case.

The next time we find ourselves in a situation where we feel the need to “cancel” someone, perhaps if we were to show them the same love as God shows us, it would give that other person the chance to know who God is, to truly feel sorry, to learn and allow God the space

to work and transform their lives.