Did you happen to catch the televised version of "Jesus Christ, Superstar" last week?  I managed to see a little of it before I had to move on.  I've not seen the original stage version, though I well remember its immense popularity when it came out in the Seventies.  Even if one has quarrels with its theology (for instance, it does not portray the resurrection), one cannot deny the beauty and flow of its music.  Lead composer Andrew Lloyd Webber produced a masterpiece.
     As I was telling an irreligious friend recently, however, I'm not overly offended by the musical's absence of an account of Jesus' resurrection.  What I find most compelling about it is its ability to present to us a Jesus who is a person like us.  Like all of us, this Jesus gets weary.  Like all of us, this Jesus gets frustrated and angry.  And like all of us, this Jesus wrestles with the demands of his calling.  It is a Jesus as human as you or me
     And this is as it should be.  If God had not become like us, if the divine had not become human, we would have had no real way to understand our creator.  He would forever be the proverbial "man upstairs," there, but actually not:  a Kantian figurehead and nothing more.  We'd still be lost in the various abyssess of our human finitude and fragility, magnificent, yes, but thoroughly unable to make full sense of this existence.
     Hence, wherever your religious sensibilities lie, Andrew Lloyd Webber, thanks for giving this intimately genuine picture of the son of God.