If you watched the Super Bowl—or any television at all for that matter of late—odds are you’ve seen one of the new “He Gets Us” ads. In one, a series of images of anger and conflict all-too familiar to us from the past few years of Covid, BLM, and politics gone mad—people yelling at each other in subways, at storefronts, and at protest rallies—culminates with a reminder that “Jesus loved the people we hate.”
In another, a sequence of charming moments of children at their most innocent, loving, and childlike is followed by the text “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults.” Another tells the story of a refugee family in language and pictures evoking a contemporary war zone like Syria, only to reveal that the family in question was Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fleeing to Egypt. “Jesus was a refugee. He gets us,” it concludes.