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For the 1960s generation, the shift from the secular to the spiritual embodied a form of political conservatism. Thus the figure of Jesus in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1970), who abandons the political in a personal search for the divine.

Jesus is set against a collaborationist Judas (”Don’t you see we must keep in our place?“) and a nationalist Simon Zealotes (”We will win ourselves a home!”) but rejects their political concerns. He has none (”I have got no kingdom in this world”) and expressly rejects them all in turn:

Neither you, Simon, nor the fifty thousand
Nor the Romans, nor the Jews
Nor Judas, nor the twelve, nor the Priests, nor the scribes
Nor doomed Jerusalem itself
Understand what power is

Jesus dismisses secular change (”There will be poor always“) and his own power to effect it (”There’s too many of you … There’s too little of me,” he tells the beggars), because he is essentially fatalistic (”Everything is fixed, and you can’t change it”). 

Jesus describes himself as a political leader, but a truth-seeker (“I look for truth”). His ambitions are spiritual: To know and to see his God. For that, he accepts his potential personal irrelevance and ultimately his own annihilation: “To conquer death you only have to die.”

At the time of the Broadway premiere, Webber and Rice were described in the Times as coming from “solid, middle‐class Anglican homes.” They explained the show as an escape from the political, which was why it did better in America than England:

In England, they didn’t seem to agree with Him at all. In fact, it’s the one country where “Superstar” fizzled.

“England is a most easygoing country,” Andrew says, almost unhappily. “When a country is easygoing, its people are less likely to turn to religion. In the last analysis, England’s national character is such that the young people don’t need to turn to anything for escape.”

“The average kid in England is less likely to be uptight about things.” Tim adds. “The draft and the Vietnam War do not involve him to any great extent. The policemen are not armed there, as they are here. Something like Kent State could never happen in England. Though the Irish business is a bit grim.”

For the generation concerned with war and police brutality, Superstar had a simple message: abandon politics, abandon the struggle (”Why are you obsessed with fighting/Times and fates you can’t defy?”) and embrace the present:

Don’t you mind about the future
Don’t you try to think ahead
Save tomorrow for tomorrow
Think about today instead

Find material contentment (“Look at the good things you’ve got!”) and embrace a personal spirituality that was open to all: “Sing out for yourselves for you are blessed/There is not one of you who cannot win the kingdom”. As Mary Magdalene sings to Jesus:

Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to
Problems that upset you, oh
Don’t you know
Everything’s alright, yes, everything’s fine

Late in life, the Conservatives made Lloyd Webber a life peer. It was a fitting honor for a man whose work was so deeply conservative, but not one the man himself appreciated. He found the political demands too pressing.

Lloyd Webber resigned the peerage a few years ago. “I’m fed up with the fact that I keep being asked now to go in and vote for things,” he said. “There are more important things in my life.” 

@siliquasquama​: 

Look at all my trials and tribulations/sinking in a gentle pool of wine…

“The Last Supper” contrasts the Apostles’ spiritual contentment and Jesus’s spiritual struggle and as a commentary on Jesus’s concerns about his personal irrelevance. It presents a series of challenges to Jesus, to which “Gesthemane”, immediately following, is its complement and resolution.

The Apostles are not merely materially contented, but also spiritually contented (“Don’t disturb me now; I can see the answers”). It is the latter Jesus condemns in “The Last Supper”. He challenges their spiritual contentment and their “blank faces”, which are unthinking, without doubt.

The Apostles’ spiritual contentment is contrasted with Jesus’s search “for truth.” He himself is wracked by doubt (“I’m not as sure as when we started … If I die, what will be my reward?”), but accepts God’s will without reassurance, without conviction (“Take me now/Before I change my mind”) and with doubt.

In “The Last Supper”, Jesus condemns the Apostles for abandoning that spiritual struggle. It is that spiritual struggle (their ”trials and tribulations”) that sinks in Jesus’s own blood (that “gentle pool of wine”):

Look at all my trials and tribulations
Sinking in a gentle pool of wine
Don’t disturb me now; I can see the answers
Till ‘this evening’ is ‘this morning’, life is fine

There is another contrast here. In “The Last Supper”, the Apostles repeatedly express personal ambitions:

Always hoped that I’d be an apostle
Knew that I would make it if I tried
Then when we retire we can write the gospels
So they’ll still talk about us when we’ve died

The Apostles’ contentment stems from their conviction that they are personally relevant beyond their own lives, a conviction Jesus denies for himself (”I must be mad thinking I’ll be remembered … My name will mean nothing/Ten minutes after I’m dead!”).

Jesus accepts God’s will without conviction of his own personal relevance. He asks God for knowledge (”Can you show me now that I would not be killed in vain?”) but receives none. 

Jesus embodies spiritual struggle, without conviction in one’s own personal salvation, resolved faith in a God beyond understanding (”God, thy will is hard/But you hold every card”) to whom we ultimately entrust our fates (”Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit”).

Jesus’s condemnation of the Apostles points not to their material contentment, but to their unwarranted spiritual convictions. He condemns their unwarranted faith in their efficacy, their relevance, and their life after death. They be “[s]inking in a gentle pool of wine,” but the problem is the sinking, not the wine.

It is his blood, after all.