Jesus’ life about hope, not torture
By the time Jesus was spilling his first quart or two of blood, and the Roman torturers were still swinging their spike-tipped whips for all they were worth, and the Jewish high priests were watching the horror with their cold little eyes, I was thinking, WWJD? What would Jesus do if he were with us now at the theater watching Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”?
He would leave, was my guess, not so much in anger as in exasperation and perhaps sorrow. He might have wondered why Gibson used his money and considerable stature to bring to life this section of the gospels. Why not the many passages about kindness and hope, which would seem a more useful — one might even say more Christian — contribution to a world grappling with war and fear?
I imagined a puzzled Jesus tapping Mel on the shoulder. “I lived a life of healing, helping those in need, teaching people to be generous and not to be afraid — and this is the part you show? Where’s the spiritual nourishment in watching two hours of human depravity?”
Unlike my imagined Jesus, I stayed through the entire movie, mostly because I had invited people to watch it with me: my friend, Lorna Stevens, who is an artist, and biblical scholar Teresa Brown, a professor at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif.
As it turned out — not to ruin the ending for those of you who haven’t seen the movie or read the book — there is about a 20-second clip of a reborn Jesus about to emerge from the crypt. That’s the entirety of the resurrection: Twenty seconds of a fluttery white shroud and a close-up of Jesus’ healed face.
By focusing solely on the torture and death of Jesus without the context of his life or resurrection, “Passion” seems uncomfortably like a Christian version of a pagan sacrifice in which a human had to be slaughtered so that the gods would let the rest survive. This person carried the burden for everyone. Yet the filmmaker barely hints at the spiritual heft behind Jesus’ death, depicting it so crudely and simplistically as to be religiously useless.
The passion thus becomes not so much about what Jesus endured or why he endured it. It is more about what was inflicted on him and by whom.
“Absolute accuracy isn’t the point,” Stevens said, referring to Gibson’s mandate as an artist. “It’s whether the work gets at that thing inside, whether it speaks to people, connects on a visceral level. People are hungry for a religious movie. But I think what they’re desperately seeking is Jesus’ teachings, not this.”
Loads of church groups are buying blocks of seats for the movie. Some are taking youth groups, even though the movie is rated R. Perhaps they think if a movie is “religious” it must be good. I can’t imagine a more disturbing movie for a young person whose faith is still taking shape. And what, in the end, was accomplished? There is still war, poverty, cruelty, corruption — how is the world a better place for it?
“What is the lesson here?” Brown asked as we headed outside, back to our jobs and our lives. “How can you use what you saw to make your life better?”
Now, days later, I still don’t know. I fled Catholicism years ago, but I held on to the core beliefs of forgiveness, loving one another, helping the least of my brothers and sisters. Gibson’s movie left me thinking not about the transcendence of Christ, but only about the cruelty of man.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].)