Sid Roth welcomes Bruce Marchiano

SID: Hello. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally, I said naturally, supernatural. My guest, minding his own business, an actor in Hollywood, and all of a sudden, a circumstance develops, and he gets offered the role of playing Jesus in a movie. So he’s got to memorize the lines. But something amazing happens: all of a sudden he finds that he is doing the same works that Jesus did. He just goes to schools and starts talking about his experience, and miracles start taking place. Bruce, I want to take you back to the day that you auditioned for this role. Tell me about that.

BRUCE: Yeah, well to cut to the chase, because it’s a long, long story, as I was preparing for the audition, the piece that the director gave me to audition was a piece where Jesus was confronting the religious elite of Jerusalem 2000 years ago. And the words were very, very hard sounding: “Woe to you!”, He calls them snakes, He calls them a brood of vipers. He says, “How will you escape being condemned to hell?” They seemed like such hard words, and as I looked at the audition piece, and praying over it, “How do I do this?”, again, without going into the details, I felt the Lord show me one thing: that He loved these guys. That transcending the hardness of the words was His love for these guys, and that He was actually using those words to reach out to those guys. And so, I sat with the director. And you know, to do it that way is a bit of a risk. It’s never been done that way before.

SID: Let’s be candid, when most people read about Jesus having His confrontation with the religious leaders, they’re out to, let’s face it, crucify Him. You don’t picture Him loving them, you picture Him hating everything they’re standing for.

BRUCE: Yeah, but to negate the love of Jesus is to negate the nature of God. I mean that is who He is, and to take those words, “Woe to you”, out of the context of the love of God, is to remove them from reality. And so I sat with the director with a lump in my throat, because it was a bit of a risk. I explained this thought to him. I said I don’t think Jesus was so much angry at these guys as much as He loved these guys.

SID: All you had to do was the tradition, the traditional way.

BRUCE: Yeah, just (yelling) “Woe to you!” And I thought, no. And I remember looking the director in the eye and mustering up…

SID: How’d you start? Start that right now.

BRUCE: (pleading) “Woe to you” is more the sense.

SID: Let’s go to the clip.

Jesus: Woe to you, teachers of the law, and Pharisees! You hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices, mint, dill, and cumin, but you have neglected the more important matters of the law! Justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should’ve practiced the latter without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees!

§ (music) §

Oh Jerusalem! Jerusalem.

§ (music) §

You who killed the prophets and stoned those sent to you. How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house has left you desolate. I tell you, you’ll not see Me again until you say “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

§ (music) §

SID: Well, I don’t know about you, I know about you Bruce, but that just touched me so deep, the love. As a matter of fact, these are just actors playing the role of the religious leaders, the Pharisees, but tell me about one of the actors, the effect this had on him.

BRUCE: I remember running into one of the “Pharisees” maybe about three or four months later, and he told me this story. He said “When you were saying those words, it wasn’t you anymore. Suddenly it was God speaking to me.” He was one of those guys who just scorned God, and I guess his wife loved the Lord and he was always just scoring her because of it. And he said “I went home that day from the set and gave my life to Jesus.”

SID: You know, what hit me though is, Yeshua, that’s Hebrew for Jesus, Yeshua’s love for the Jewish people. I mean that came out.

BRUCE: The heartbreak. The allegory that He uses, “How often have I longed”, the longing, the love, “to gather your children together as a hen.” He paints Himself as a mother trying to protect His children.

SID: You know what He says? “I will not return until the Jewish people say ‘Ruach ha shem Adonai’ – ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'” When we come back, we’ll see what happened in a scene with Judas. Don’t go away.