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The Bread of Life

The stories in which Jesus chastises some person or group for not having enough faith or (for lack of a better term) ideological purity, as he does in this play where he calls himself the bread of life, have always interested me, because I think they often run counter to the way Christians actually conduct themselves in real life. Most of the best Christians I know, at any rate, tend to be much more forgiving of imperfection and weakness, much more tolerant and even celebratory of the human condition, and I wonder about the Jesus they see in their minds. Do they feel they’re emulating him? I guess they can find stories to support their preferred way of walking through this world (or imagine the “problem” stories in ways that result in no problems at all) but the job of The Wineskin Project is to draw attention to – I won’t say contradictions, but dissonances between the raw Jesus of the gospels that we would see if we could read them as if for the first time, without knowing that this character they center on was our Jesus, and the impressions of him we hold in our minds. I think there can sometimes be a bit of a gap there, and that it’s worth exploring.