Rent "Rent"...

Last night, I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for a good while. You may not know, but I have a minor (and I say “minor”, but mean fairly major…) love of musicals. So, I took a night to watch the movie “Rent”. It finished in the wee hours of this morning, and yet, since then, I haven’t been able to shake it off me.


In case you don’t know what this stage-musical-turned-movie is about, it’s the story of a year in the life of 8 friends at the end of the 1980’s in New York. There are many issues that this film deals with, we see them struggling with addiction, death, sex, drugs, disease, relationships and more, all in the space of 525, 600 minutes…

The thing that strikes me is that this is a world that is so far removed from my own, and probably from most of you that are reading this right now. You might be thinking “Thank goodness!” and I suppose in some ways, I’m thinking that too… And yet, the picture that keeps coming back to me is an image of Jesus, this Jesus who we assume we know, a Jesus whom we think fits into this neatly packaged box we have created for Him, and this Jesus I see is sitting somewhere that I wouldn’t expect. The Jesus of the Bible, the true Jesus who we are encouraged to pretend didn’t exist more often than not, is a Jesus who sat with the tax-collectors, the leprous, the prostitutes, the outcasts and the despised.

These are the people Jesus spent His time with. And, I’m pretty sure as I watched Rent last night that, were Jesus here today, those people who were on the screen were the ones He would be sitting with. The drunk, the addicted, the HIV+.

There’s a whole world out there that we from our pedestals call “the marginalised”, literally millions, if not billions of people living with these questions on their lips:

“Will I lose my dignity,
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow
From this nightmare?”

“Will I” From Rent
(watch it on http://youtube.com/watch?v=2FKJhKwDaTQ I’d advise it! Great song…)

The challenge? As the family of God, our job isn’t to sit in our churches, Bible colleges and houses and read about the love of God, to theorize about what it means to be “Jesus with skin on”. The challenge for us is to DO it. To take this message of the love of Jesus to these “marginalised”, because, the truth is, in Jesus’ eyes, there’s no such thing as an “outsider”.

While not what I would call an “easy watch” by any means, if you feel like you need to be inspired to see this world through some different eyes, I’d advise a viewing of this movie. Give me a call and I’d be glad to watch it with you.