Holy Week, if I’m being completely honest, was never more than a blip on my radar until I became a staff member of a church and it affected my calendar.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care or failed to understand the significance of the narrative in the liturgical season. Instead, I’d become desensitized to the highs and lows of the story. To the cries of Alleluia. To the death and resurrection.

Usually when something like this is said, it’s followed by a story of lost faith, or perhaps a childhood understanding of faith that has been outgrown but not replaced. I enjoy those stories, as surprising growth often comes from the moment when you no longer think you can believe.

However, I hadn’t lost the mystery of Easter, but instead turned it ordinary.

The first time I heard Jesus Christ Superstar was on my mom’s record player, blasting through the floor speakers. I have vivid memories of singing along with “King Herod’s Song,” mimicking the piano part on couch cushions. Feeling the pain of Jesus in Gethsemane.  The anxiety and fear. As a household who treated a musical (excuse me, rock opera) with high reverence, the Bible-like record sleeve, the onionskin lyric inserts, and the still-fascinating logo of the twin angels praying, was divine.

I was hooked.

The fact that I immediately gravitated to a religious-based rock opera from the 1970s shouldn’t have surprised anyone. I was already weird, an outcast. I listened to it constantly and quoted it often, always to the utter confusion of my fellow students, a habit which didn’t exactly shoot me up the social ladder in elementary, middle, or high school.

Still, I found something deeply satisfying in the music and lyrics—an answer to a question that I wasn’t even asking yet.

I hope this won’t embarrass my mother (it shouldn’t), but we didn’t go to church regularly, and I had no idea that Easter had anything to do with Jesus. Like many kids, all I cared about were eggs and candy and whatever small gift would be in that basket when we woke up. A minor Christmas, in my small mind.

So, in many ways, Jesus Christ Superstar is how I learned about the Bible, a fact that—depending on where you grew up on the faith spectrum, or how much you know about the gospels—might be alarming.

I eventually went to Sunday school and confirmation (and even had a brief, but inspired, run with AWANA), but listening to those records was my true introduction, planting something inside me that I still can’t shake.

Perhaps more importantly, Jesus Christ Superstar was with me during a time in my life when church wasn’t, or maybe couldn’t be. It was a constant presence, a persistent reminder that I was captivated by questions of faith, even as a young child. That this mysterious and strange God seemed to have a place in my life, even though I wasn’t necessarily seeking it out.

For a long time, I thought this fascination was something I needed to keep secret. My secular friends never wanted me to pop the album into the car CD player. And once I got to seminary, it didn’t seem adequate when held up against the haughty influences others trotted out—Tillich, Barth, the occasional Pelagius—leaving me to wonder if my devotion to a fairly secular and, at times, admittedly problematic piece of musical theater had ruined me as a Christian.

But who can ever know what will affect us? What will speak to us in the exact right moment of our lives? Who are we to believe that we can’t be reached?

My answer came in the realization that I’ve always, though unwittingly, been an Easter person.

And that belief has shaped me in both subtle and profound ways. It allows me to remain hopeful, oftentimes in spite of myself, when the world feels irrevocably broken. It reminds me that, before I even knew about the Kingdom of God—about living in a world that has already been claimed by restorative grace and justice to the point that nothing can stop it, not even death—I understood a story that held power beyond my own comprehension.

This is also how I understand grace to work.

And so, I hold onto Jesus Christ Superstar, to my Easter leanings, with a grip that turns my knuckles white. Hoping and praying that one day the evidence of a transformed world will be seen by all of us. That we’ll be able to change S.M. Lockridge’s famous sermonic refrain, “Sunday’s coming” into the equally hopeful and unstoppable proclamation: “Sunday is here.”