At least a dozen people since Thursday night have asked me if I liked The Passion Of The Christ. Now, I liked Rush Hour. I liked The Return Of The King. I didn’t like Bulletproof Monk. But The Passion is not a movie one likes or dislikes.

The movie was brutal. The ten other people I saw it with could barely speak when it was over. Several women within earshot of me wept disconsolately for fully half of the movie. When it was over, we sat numbly through the credits without even seeming to consider whether we should get up (I haven’t done that since I was fifteen), then we meandered out into the lobby and stood in a circle, staring at the ground. Eventually we migrated out to the sidewalk in front of the theater: more standing and staring. None of this was planned or considered at the time. We were just raw.

The movie is every bit as violent and gory as the hype makes it out to be, but I am left wanting to differentiate the blood in The Passion from that of a slasher or snuff film, as it has been accused of being. Unlike the dehumanizing sport of horror flicks, the entire narrative is intensely personal. It seems were are never more than three feet away from Jesus, even when sitting under the judgment of the Sanhedrin, standing in the effeminate court of Herod Antipas, or seeing the blood splattered on the faces of his Roman torturers. The camera never leaves him as he suffers. This is not Sam Peckinpah’s blood fountains for dramatic effect or the sexualized gore of the Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth traditions. It is not blood for fun or blood because blood is cheap. It is blood because a weak man is in the grip of a wicked human system. It is blood because an all-powerful man is willingly laying down his life for a divinely ordained redemptive purpose. Criticisms of the shallow theology of the film notwithstanding, the dialog was sufficient to establish this proposition. The whipped and crucified Jesus is not some shadowy anthropomorphic outline aping the effects of physical violence for teenybopper shock factor; he is a man dying for the world, and we are standing next to him for 90 minutes as he dies in slow motion.

The question still must be asked and answered: Should we be watching this? My own pastor has said:

Some are arguing that the violence is necessary to accurately depict the event. I question that thinking when I look at what the Gospel writers, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, felt was necessary to say about the physical suffering of Jesus. When Luke describes the physical suffering of Jesus arrest, trials and death he does so with very few words: Luke 22:63 “The men who were guarding Jesus began mocking and beating him” and Luke 23:32 “When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him…” Luke uses a sum total of two words to describe the physical assault on Jesus. The other Gospel writers are nearly as brief. Even the prophetic passages in the Psalms (22) and Isaiah (52,53) are surprisingly brief compared to the liberties taken in the movie. I must at least ask if the Holy Spirit was intentionally taciturn on the subject so that we would not get distracted by the minor issues and miss the major one. To be certain, Jesus’ suffering was intense, but that is not the major point. The suffering is not the point; what he accomplished with his death and resurrection is the point. The major point is Romans 4:25: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”

This is a weighty accusation. In response a friend has suggested that the original readers of the Gospels would have been familiar with the process of Roman beating and crucifixion, and would have had a ready mental referent for the frugally-worded text: they would have been able to remember the last crucifixion they saw. Viewed in this light, Gibson’s film then becomes a vehicle to give 21st-century readers better knowledge of the cultural context of the New Testament, a problem contemporary readers of the Bible are always trying to solve.

But the question will not go away so easily. We are not merely watching a scourging and crucifixion firsthand as the first-century residents of Palestine or Asia Minor might have. We are watching a dramatized, expertly photographed and edited, slow-motion depiction of a Roman-style scourging and crucifixion with many assumptions and potential inaccuracies included. The Roman citizen’s ready mental referent becomes our polished movie. Film is not a record of reality; it is moving picture art. Even candidly videotaped live events are altered when played in slow motion. Reality is altered much more when live events are photographed and edited to some intentional effect. Add to this a script that, while generally faithful to the Gospels, is clearly influenced by medieval Catholic tradition and the director’s artistic proclivities, and you have a series of images that may be very different from the personal experiences of the original readers of the New Testament.

The relative inaccessibility of the culture that produced the Gospels is normally not an excuse for not trying, so I don’t mean to turn these qualifications into a blanket condemnation of the film as an attempt to recount historical events. However, the burden of proof ought to rest on the film for justifying its tremendously graphic violence, and these considerations recommend against its approach.

That being said, Christians believe that Christ endured true physical suffering during his passion, but that his spiritual anguish was immeasurably worse. When he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” on the cross, he is affirmed to have been experiencing fully the wrath of his Father, becoming a curse for God’s redeemed in their place. Many have pointed out that the experience of this anguish is truly inaccessible to us, even to those who have vivid experiences of their former estrangement from God turning into close fellowship subsequent to conversion. This point must be granted: we have no idea what it is like for the eternal fellowship of the Son and the Father to be broken, and we cannot know. In attempting to appreciate the suffering Christ endured for his people–surely a worthwhile devotional exercise in anyone’s view–even overstated images of his physical torment will not lead the viewer to an exaggerated understanding of his overall torment as the wrath of God toward us was imputed to him in that moment on the cross. The error of the overdone scourging, if error it be, probably will not lead to a particularly faulty view of what Christ endured for his people.

Continuing in this vein, Denver Seminary’s Craig Blomberg looks towards the development of an American theology of suffering:

…it is probably fair to say that contemporary American culture, perhaps more than any other culture in the history of the world, does not adequately appreciate the immensity of suffering that most of humanity has experienced throughout time. Not surprisingly, American Christianity is therefore infrequently faulted for having an inadequate theology of suffering. If this film helps Christians to better understanding something of what it means to “carry the cross” that their master shoulders, it will have been worthwhile.

Without adding to his words, I can say that I share this hope.

I found the defeat of Satan to be understated. As Jesus died, the genderless Satan figure kneeled in the middle of a barren hellscape, writhing energetically and growling some unspecific superlative. One reviewer read this as the agony of Satan’s defeat, but for my viewing it could as easily have been delight in his presumed final victory. It was simply unclear. The resurrection was likewise muted, a mere fifteen seconds of near-symbolism poorly reflecting the once-for-all defeat of death described in the New Testament.

Considering the anti-anti-Semitic bedlam starting a full year before the movie’s public release and the response of some critics afterward, I was surprised that I left the theater in anything but a murderous rage, wanting to avenge the senseless death of Christ which wouldn’t have happened but for the perfidy of all world Jewry, ever. The reality: the temple guards certainly would have earned U.N. censure for their mistreatment of their prisoner, Caiaphas was portrayed as conniving and murderous, and the mob demanding that Jesus be crucified would cause no one’s heart to well up with ethnic pride. But throngs of Jewish women wept as Jesus walked the Via Dolorosa, Simon of Cyrene was a manifestly heroic and tenderly human character, and dissenting Jewish voices did speak up in the Sanhedrin in defense of Jesus. Jewish religious and political leadership comes out of the movie looking bad, but Jewish people at large are untainted. It is highly unlikely that “when non-Jews around the world now see the Jewish prayer shawl, the tallis, on the heads of praying Jews, they will think, ‘Oh yeah, those were worn by the angry crowds in The Passion‘” as Fox’s Roger Friedman supposes. I am frankly more likely to think about Islamic terrorism or the question of West Bank settlements than what “Jews” did to Jesus–things substantially unrelated to Christ’s passion or Gibson’s Passion.

Italians? That’s a different story. Pilate and his wife get the benefit (as the Gospels all but afford them) of some moral ambivalence, but the Roman guards are unremittingly sadistic monsters. They cane, scourge, beat and kick Jesus, crown him with thorns, whip him even as he carries his cross, dislocate his shoulder as they crucify him for the mere subhuman efficiency of fitting the nail into the same hole used by the cross’ last victim. A judicial scribe seems to take offense at the excesses of the torture almost because it stretches the boundaries of his bureaucratic station: blood gets on his log book, one of the guards damages his table demonstrating the scourge, and there are more prisoners to be whipped, so move it along, boys. Pilate’s lieutenant disapproves of the torture and may show some compassion towards the victim, but is chiefly concerned with enforcing the governor’s politically-motivated diktat that the prisoner not be killed. In short, the Romans are weak and compromising at their best and subhuman at their worst.

Rabbi Stanley Wagner has observed that the “nice” Jews in the film are in fact not really Jews: they are followers of Christ. To satisfy him that the movie is not fundamentally anti-Semitic, Gibson would have had to invent characters who clearly rejected Jesus as the Messiah but fought to prevent his torture and unjust execution out of principle. It is worth noting that the two members of the Sanhedrin who were shown to object to the kangaroo court proceedings were not clearly identified as followers of Christ, but they were not clearly identified as his detractors either. While Gibson might have had to push too far the boundaries of artistic license by inventing important new characters and themes to satisfy this requirement, I do hear the objection with some sympathy. Ultimately I think it fails to commend the film’s alleged anti-Semitism, but I do recognize that Rabbi Wagner’s definition of “Jew” does allow for a rational framework in which to make the accusation, even if it is almost tautological.

I have yet to answer the question of whether I “liked” the movie, or whether its graphic depiction of the execution of Jesus is justified. And I don’t mean yet in this review; I mean yet in my mind. I don’t know that I can answer these questions. Applying my quintessentially American utilitarian criteria to the experience, I am tempted to say that I approve of it inasmuch as it furthers some concrete goal of Christian evangelism or discipleship, and certainly it is difficult for me to object to the true expansion of God’s Kingdom in the hearts of men. Three days after seeing it, that’s the best I can do: I don’t know how I feel about what I saw, but I trust God to move forward the boundaries of His Kingdom either through the movie or in spite of it.

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• Posted by Tim on Sunday, February 29, 2004 at 11:57:10 pm PST
• Category: Theology, Religion, Culture
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