What brought this generation of the 1960s and 1970s to Christ? One of the manifestations of Christ's human nature in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita and in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar is his self-esteem, which is very difficult to preserve in historical conditions of disregard for personality. History knows only three main behavioral scenarios in such conditions: either to come to terms (a Christian form of humility as non-resistance to evil with violence), or actively fight against the arbitrariness of the authorities (rebellion), or victimize, identifying yourself with the aggressor/authority, and betray those who are not infected with victimization.
Christ's pattern of behavior under these conditions is incomprehensible to people. This is the kind of humble/pacification of Man's pride who, at the cost of his humble sacrifice, has been condemning people to suffer from realizing their “created” community with Him, but also unable not only to follow Him in conditions of disregard for their personality, but also from time to time to become part of a crowd demanding another sacrifice. Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), an English philosopher and apologist for Jesus Christ, described in his 1925 book The Eternal Man. The title of the philosophical work indicates the connection between the philosopher's optimism (“Christianity declines, but the Lord remains with us”) and the reason for this optimism — the democratism and realism of Christ's actions described in the Bible (“the story of Cana of Galilee is democratic, like Dickens's books”). Chesterton believes that Christ's human words and actions (“He and man and something more”) are timeless: “He did not utter a single phrase that made His teachings dependent on any social order.” In 1925, Chesterton drew parallels between contemporary reality and what was happening to Christ during the last hours of his life:
“A thief was hastily turned into a picturesque, popular hero and opposed to Christ. You will inevitably get to know the mob of our cities and our newspaper sensations. <... > We have already talked about disregard for the individual, even for individuals who vote for execution, and especially for the personality of the convicted person. The soul of the hive, the soul of paganism, spoke. She was the one who demanded at that time that one Man die for the people. Once upon a time, much earlier, devotion to the city and state was good and noble. She had her own poets and martyrs, who are still glorious today. But she did not see the human soul, the sanctuary of all mysticism. The crowd followed the Sadducees and Pharisees, the wise men and moralists. She went after officials and priests, after scribes and warriors, so that all humanity, en masse, would tarnish itself and all classes would merge into one choir when they pushed Man away.”
Developing the philosopher's thoughts, I will make a controversial assumption that in the conditions of historical disregard for the individual that are repeated from century to century, people only begin to realize that they are people when a Man dies for them. And the conditions of disregard for personality make people, in each subsequent historical era, realizing the difference between meaning and fact, learn more and more meanings of what He once did and said, to relate these meanings to their actions and words and to the redemptive sacrifices that accompany this realization. Let us recall that it was precisely in the face of total disregard for the individual in Soviet Russia in the 1920s that Mikhail Bulgakov began writing his novel The Master and Margarita. And Webber and Rice conceived their rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar in that memorable 1970 year when the hippie student massacre in Kent, Ohio. It was a landmark event in the life of the United States and a turning point in the hippie movement. Let me recall that on April 30, 1970, President Nixon announced that he wanted to expand military operations and send troops to Cambodia, which led to an outbreak of protests on university campuses across the country. The National Guard forcefully dispersed the students, and one soldier opened fire, killing four students and injuring nine others. The bloody news was on the front page of every newspaper and was broadcast on TV news, accompanied by a photo of a crying young woman kneeling over a bleeding student. This scene, somewhat reminiscent of Michelangelo Buonarroti's piatta, very clearly demonstrated that the “dirty hippies” were closer to Christ than emasculated critics of the counterculture and good and “godlike” government. It is possible that even this death of students turned from a fact into an event included in a chain of world events whose significance immediately became timeless and invariably reminded of Holy Week, which will never end.
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