Is Christ a Magician?

Why is Our Savior so frightful about those seeking “signs and wonders”’? For these are the demands of those men who seek the compensations of this world rather than the rewards of the next.

Published in Crisis Magazine on May 20, 2024

Don’t laugh.

Over the past sixty years, such questions were taken quite seriously. In the 1970s, Christ was depicted as a clown in a runaway-hit Broadway musical, Godspell, and as a hippy guru in Jesus Christ Superstar. These strange renderings became de rigueur in not a few Catholic parishes. All these enormities were not to be outdone by the Dominican (now Anglican) Matthew Fox with his bestselling book On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear, presenting the Savior as a drug-addled sage in hallucinatory stupors. 

Those times seemed apocalyptic.

But, to our more serious question above. We should preface these words by God’s: “It is a wicked and perverse generation that asks for signs and wonders” (Matthew 16:4).

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