Jeremy Berg

MainStreet Covenant will be gathering Sunday evenings at 5-6:30pm this Lent to watch season 5 of The Chosen. We’ve been waiting an entire year for this season, because we wanted to watch it during Lent as the season is a slow dramatization of the last week of Jesus’ life. We hope you’ll join us at St. Martin’s By the Lake for this experience. The season will wrap up with a two-episode grand finale on Good Friday.

What to expect? Kate Lucky of Christianity Today offers this review:

Season 5 of The Chosen is vivid: bright fabrics and flowers, fountains and palms, glugs of olive oil and wine, the gleam and clatter of silver pieces, and the blood of butchered animals pooling in straw. The snap of unleavened bread. The flicker of candlelight. The scent of perfume, bought at great price and poured with abandon over Jesus’ feet…

Sets, costumes, scripts, structure: All matter. But mostly, season 5 of The Chosen succeeds because it’s telling a really good story. Well, of course. Of course! The story at the heart of our faith is good, and not just in the sense of entertaining, though it’s certainly that. Season 5 is where we approach the crux (pun intended) of the action. A king enters a city on a donkey, palms aflutter. By the end of the season, he’s betrayed with a kiss, sold out for coins—“the price of a slave,” as Judas puts it.

There are the machinations of high political drama, the breast beating of classical tragedy, and again and again, stunning irony: the Messiah himself washing feet as his disciples protest, tears gleaming in their eyes. Those disciples swearing loyalty and yet dozing off to sleep. It’s a good story because it’s got momentum and intrigue and complex characters but, most of all, because it’s good. It’s good news for us that Jesus is washing feet and doing the Father’s will, even as he digs his fingernails into rocks and doubles over in sorrow, sweat beading his brow …

I’m convinced this is an earnest show, created out of love for the gospel and a desire to share it with others. I walked out of that theater more a believer in Jesus, and (for now) a believer in this show, a conversion experience I share with other critics. Watch trailer below.

—Excerpted from Christianity Today, April 17, 2025

SEE YOU SUNDAY AT 5PM!