Saints and Sinners: ‘The Passion’ lacks imagination
I promised myself that, in order to give it the benefit of the doubt, I would allow plenty of time to thoroughly research and reflect upon Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” And after much consideration, what kept springing to mind was the timeless argument made in the epilogue to George Bernard Shaw’s play “Saint Joan.” It goes something like this:
One of the characters says, “Well, you see, I did a very cruel thing once because I did not know what cruelty was like. I had not seen it, you know. That is the great thing, you must see it. And then you are redeemed and saved.”
The man he was speaking to replied, “Were not the sufferings of our Lord Christ enough for you?”
The answer came back, “No. Oh, no. Not at all. I had seen them in pictures, and read of them in books, and had been greatly moved by them, as I thought. But it was no use. It was not our Lord who redeemed me but a young woman whom I actually saw burn to death. It was dreadful — oh, most dreadful. But it saved me. I have been a different man ever since.”
His antagonist replies, “Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age in order to redeem those who have no imagination?”
This is the major fault with Gibson’s blockbuster. The audience is forced to relive the cruelty and torture of the crucifixion in grim, unrelenting — even sickening — detail.
“Oh,” you say, “but this is how the story is told in the Bible. The Bible does not shrink from telling the terrible truth of Jesus’ death on the cross.”
To be sure, the evil of the world — the sordidness and wretchedness of the human condition, man’s inhumanity to man — is all there in the Bible. But the Bible’s writers employed a lean, spare style, eschewing overstatement. The Bible accounts do not flood us with the “details.”
Willard Sperry, the longtime dean of Harvard Divinity School, used to remind us in class that the Bible writers exercised a “fine reticence” in telling their stories.
Read the account of David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba in the second book of Samuel. The writer tells the whole episode in less than a hundred words. Imagine what a writer would do with that story today.
I remember one of my parishioners at King’s Chapel in Boston coming up to me after a sermon in which I had used some colorful description. “Don’t be too vivid,” she cautioned me. I have always remembered her wise words.
There are others who feel the way I do about the graphic violence in “The Passion.”
Cynthia Astle, editor of the United Methodist Reporter, says, “I have decided not to see the movie for a simple reason: I don’t need to see it because I am very aware every day of what Jesus endured for my salvation.”
The movie prompted a wave of letters to the editor in the Feb. 26 New York Times. And the message was clear: The violence all around us — in what we see and what we read — is not good for us.
The cultural war currently being waged on our civilization is between that which uplifts the human soul and that which tears it down. Malcolm Muggeridge, the British writer, defines culture — true culture — as “looking up from the trough.” Our culture, on the other hand, seems of late to get its pleasure from looking down into the trough.
What’s the answer for Bible-loving people as far as “The Passion of the Christ” is concerned? I’ll put it in the words of Victory Van Dyck Chase, a letter writer to The New York Times: “Forget the movie. Read the book. It’s good.”
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)