"Jesus Revolution" and Epiphany

Discovering the Longing for God in Unexpected Places

The readings for the Feast of Epiphany make clear that the story of the three magi, or wise men, should be interpreted as a sign that the coming of Christ was not only foretold by the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, but also longed for, if only inchoately, by the Gentiles. For example, the refrain of the responsorial psalm exclaims, “Lord, every nation on earth will adore you” (72:11), and Paul, in the Letter to the Ephesians, states, “[T]he Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same body,
and copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (3:6).

Of course, it is not until the baptism of Cornelius (Acts 10) and the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1-29) that Gentiles are first admitted into the Body of Christ. The story of the magi, however, suggests that the events of Acts were the fulfillment of something at which God had already long been at work, rather than an ad hoc missionary decision.

Gerard David, “The Adoration of the Kings,” ca. 1515

Over the centuries, theologians have pondered the mystery represented in the story of the magi. For example, the early Church Father Justin Martyr spoke of the semina verbi, or “seeds of the Word,” present in pagan culture, the workings of God in preparation for the Gospel. As I have written about in the newsletter, Counter-Reformation theologians explored the idea of an “implicit faith” potentially present among non-Christian peoples, and seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries to China proposed that Christian revelation was pre-figured in ancient Chinese religious texts like the I Ching.

Cardinal Walter Kasper has written that something like this mystery is one of the keys to interpreting the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes, and by extension to understanding the Church’s relationship to the world. The Gospel does not come to the world as something entirely new and extrinsic; rather, the Gospel is the fulfillment of grace already at work, although in a hidden and ambiguous way, in the world.

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The 2023 film Jesus Revolution (currently streaming on Netflix) is a moving and entertaining illustration of this theological insight. The film chronicles the origins of the religious movement variously known as the “Jesus people,” the “Jesus freaks,” or simply the “Jesus movement,” spanning from 1968 to 1973. The Jesus movement emerged out of the hippie culture of San Francisco in the late 1960s, but rejecting drugs and promiscuous sex, participants instead embraced a charismatic form of evangelical Christianity.

Jesus Revolution centers on three of the major figures in the Jesus movement. The story begins with Chuck Smith, the pastor of a small, staid and dormant church in Costa Mesa, California. Smith’s daughter introduces him to Lonnie Frisbee, a hippie who only recently had been caught up in the drug culture of Haight-Asbury but had turned to street preaching, whom she had picked up on the side of the road. Frisbee, through his evangelical passion, convinces Smith to welcome hippies into his congregation. Together, Smith and Frisbee develop a new style of ministry, adapting their preaching to the worldview of the new congregants, creating a new musical style blending gospel music and 1960s folk, and conducting charismatic worship services, primarily led by Frisbee, involving healings and testimonials. The film also features Greg Laurie, a teenager saved by Frisbee from spiraling out of control with drugs and who, by the end of the film, starts his own congregation along lines similar to Smith’s.