Bible Books Movies

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By now, most BR readers will have seen the Bible-movie event of the year, The Passion of the Christ. It’s June, and the movie is already a falling star. After all the hype and anticipation, Mel Gibson’s film turned out to be surprisingly conventional. It’s a Passion Play on film.

Anyone who has ever seen a Passion Play will know the formula for the movie. Bits and pieces from the Gospels’ portrayal of the last hours of Jesus’ life are mixed with popular lore and then presented in a series of moving tableaus for the benefit of Christian believers. The hope is that viewers will feel as though they are really there, witnessing what really happened. Some presentations of the Passion Play even encourage audience participation. You can join the throng in shouting “Crucify him!” and “His blood be upon us and our children!” At the viewing I attended, many people applauded at the end.

In some sense, the Passion Play has finally found its medium. The camera provides close-ups of the anguish on Mary’s face as Jesus is tortured. Special effects show the flailing of Jesus’ flesh as it rips from his body. Demons, dreams and other new elements can easily be inserted into the script. The dialogue can be spoken in ancient tongues, with subtitles, to give viewers the impression that they are eavesdropping on actual events as they unfolded 2,000 years ago. The effect can be truly mesmerizing.

The aim of the Passion Play has always been two-fold: to entertain and to inspire. I went to the theater to be entertained. But as a theologian, I kept waking up to the question of inspiration. As the Passion finds its eternal life in DVD form, surely to become a seasonal classic in Christian households around the world, what are the religious passions that Mel Gibson wishes to inspire in this video Passion Play? Gibson has been rather coy about the religious views with which he was raised and which he still professes in some form today. So we are left to guess at the master’s vision based on the film. Here are my guesses.

The religion inspired by this Passion has a lot to do with blood. Blood runs, drips and splatters all through the movie. And just as quickly as it spills out, it is daubed up by adorers. It is put on the face, or smelled, or dripped onto the lips of the Virgin herself as she tenderly kisses the feet of her dying son. Adorers of the Precious Blood will find this especially moving, but there are probably many blood-centered Christian groups who will be able to find their own meaning in these bloody images. What exactly Gibson sees in them is not clear from the film. Blood is left to linger as a kind of open-ended symbol, much as it is in that strain of traditional Christian hymnody Methodists, especially, like to claim as their own. What does it mean, really, to drink blood, or to be washed in blood? This is not a common experience for most Americans today.

Of course, the spilling of Jesus’ blood is closely tied to the Christian doctrine of atonement—the idea that Jesus’ death was a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity. This, too, is clearly part of the inspirational message Gibson wishes to convey in his Passion. On two or three occasions Jesus states the he must die as part of God’s greater plan to save the world from sin. Unlike the Christian Gospels, where Jesus’ death is tied to his life of healing the afflicted and teaching about the Kingdom of God, in Gibson’s Passion Jesus dies for no such menial cause. He is not a champion of the poor and unclean. Jesus’ challenges to the Roman Empire—the historical reason for his execution—are completely muffled. Jesus’ death is cast here as a universal cosmic event, concerned with bigger things: the salvation of all humanity. It is God’s will and plan that he die.

But this is common in Christian theology. Christians long ago abandoned any notion that Jesus’ life ought to count for something theologically. Our common creeds skip blithely over the life Jesus lived, reducing its significance to a mere comma 042nestled between “born of the Virgin Mary” and “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” What Jesus said and did is not important. What counts is his atoning death, proven in its effects by the miraculous evidence that Jesus was in fact the Son of God and so uniquely qualified for this role. Pretty standard Christian theology.

But in Gibson’s Passion this atonement theme is watered down and confused by two competing causes for Jesus’ suffering and death.

One is “Satan,” a pasty-white effeminate figure who lurks in the background and appears to direct some supernatural force against Jesus. Gone are the traditional horns and tail, derived originally from the medieval anti-Jewish slander that Jews had tails and horns. This Satan seems to be depicted as gay, or maybe androgynous, perhaps a subtle attempt to locate him more clearly in modernity’s culture wars. At one point this new, effeminate Satan carries an albino child or midget, who also seems to delight in Jesus’ suffering. The meaning of this is unclear. Apparently the role of Satan, absent in the Gospels’ portrayals, derives from Anne Catherine of Emmerich, the 19th-century mystic whose visions serve as a major inspiration for much of the unusual and bizarre that appears in the film. In her imagination, it was Satan who orchestrated Jesus’ torture and death by entering into the hearts of the Jews who turned on him.

That, of course, is the other cause of death in the movie: the treachery of the Jews. A few lines sprinkled here and there remind us that Jesus really wants to die, but the main plot of the movie is the story of how the Jews killed Jesus. This must be what Gibson meant when, in an interview with Diane Sawyer, he said, “I know how it went down.” The film opens with Jesus’ arrest by a Jewish cohort (not a detachment of Roman soldiers, as in John’s gospel—Gibson apparently prefers Mark or Matthew here, though the mystic Anne Catherine may be in the mix, too), who brutalize Jesus all the way to the court of the high priest, a snarling, sometimes sniveling figure decked out in pretend Jewish finery. A slovenly Jewish mob soon joins the ruckus as Jesus is further humiliated and abused. Pilate, a clean- cut chap, masculine, thoughtful and wise, tries at the insistence of his beautiful wife to stop the miscarriage of justice. But he cannot. Herod, the Jewish king, depicted here as a sexually ambiguous party animal surrounded by drunken toy-boys (Anne Catherine or Gibson’s own touch?), is too cowardly to intervene. But never mind. In a clever pastiche of Matthew (27:24–26) and John (19:10–11), Gibson creates a dialogue in which Jesus himself publicly absolves Pilate of all blame and places responsibility for his death squarely on the Jews. The famous “blood curse” from Matthew 27:25 (“His blood be upon us and our children”) is spoken in Aramaic, but left untranslated in the subtitles—a nod, Gibson says, to concerns of anti-Semitism.

So, did Jesus die willingly, as part of a divine plan, or at the hands of his Satan-inspired enemies, the Jews? Perhaps Gibson wants to inspire both thoughts at the same time. Christians have often held the two together: Christ died to save us all from sin, but the Jews rejected him and so are cursed to wander the earth in great suffering until they repent and believe in Jesus—an idea that originated with Saint Augustine. This was, in fact, how most Christian theologians felt until the 1940s, when the Holocaust finally revealed to most thoughtful people that the idea was pernicious. The Catholic Church officially repudiated it in 1965 as part of the Second Vatican Council, whose reforms Gibson openly rejects.

Gibson’s excessive use of graphic violence serves this theological structure in a very shrewd way. The centerpiece of the film is the slow-motion flogging of Jesus, using a variety of instruments of torture. It is a gruesome display, and probably realistic. It is difficult to watch, and by its end everyone in the theater will have had quite enough. On screen, even the Roman soldiers who administer the flogging seem embarrassed by what they have done. Pilate’s lieutenant is angered that they have gone too far. Pilate himself is sickened by the sight, and his wife aggrieved. Conservative Christians, who believe that Jesus suffered because of their personal sins, report being moved by these scenes to profound remorse. It is a deeply humane response to an astonishing display of inhumanity. But then the camera pans to the Jewish crowd and their leaders, the high priests. They are not moved. In fact, they only want more of this violence. They want him crucified. And as Jesus bears his cross through the streets of Jerusalem, the Jewish mob continues his torment, punching and kicking him, and spitting on his bloodied, near-lifeless body. At this point, the Jews in Gibson’s vision become not just the enemies of Christ; they become inhumane monsters, incapable of feeling what we feel, devoid of pity or compassion, ruthless and bloodthirsty (as James Carroll most eloquently suggested in the Boston Globe, on February 24, 2004). At the end of the film, as Jesus dies and an earthquake shakes the pillars of the Temple into a pile of rubble, we see the beginning of the suffering they must now endure for who they are and what they have done.

This brings me to other ideas that 044might—intentionally or not—be inspired by this film. Will the depiction of Jews in such uncomplimentary ways, and the rekindling of the idea that the Jews killed Jesus, inspire new thoughts of anti-Semitism? Or, in a world in which anti-Semitism is on the rise, especially in Europe and the Middle East, will Gibson’s Passion incite new acts of violence against Jews? In my own city, in the weeks after the film opened, a synagogue was vandalized, a rabbi was verbally assaulted by teens on the street, and Jewish school children were harassed with words Jews say they have not heard in this city for 40 years: Christ killers! No one knows how far this new trend will run, but the power of film working in an atmosphere of ignorance and intolerance should not be underestimated. After a talk I recently gave on the film, a young evangelical college student perturbed by my critical remarks admitted to me with unselfconscious candor that she had never before heard of the term “anti-Semitism.” Small wonder that many Christians have pronounced the film entirely free of anything remotely anti-Jewish. Our cultural memory is ever so short.

These concerns came especially to mind as the film ended. Gibson—unlike the Christian Gospels—actually depicts the Resurrection: Jesus coming out of the tomb. He is handsome and masculine again, and healed of the wounds inflicted by his enemies. He looks stern. Now the music comes up. It’s that sort of “now something’s really going to happen” music one hears at the climax of most action hero flicks, at the moment when the abused hero finally turns the tide and starts to vanquish his enemies. I wondered, as the credits rolled, how many zealots would be stirred by Gibson’s cinematic choices to go out and vanquish a few enemies of their own? In a chilling moment caught on camera outside a New York theater, one viewer candidly said: “At least now we know who really killed Jesus, and I don’t have to say who” (quoted in the New York Times, February 28, 2004).

The Christian story of Jesus’ death is not to be toyed with. It can be a story filled with love and joy, but as we tell it, it is also laced with anger and hatred. Christians, especially Christian filmmakers, have to take responsibility for both as they tell this story in the modern world. The Holocaust isn’t a myth, and it wasn’t an accident. And our (Christian) memories of Jesus’ death have played an enormous role in creating the legacy of anti-Semitism that has been so deadly in our time. Sixty years ago the most devoutly Christian country in the world exterminated six million Jews. Sixty years is a mere “breather” in the history of anti-Semitism that spans more than two millennia. Intended or not, the blood flowing through Mel Gibson’s Passion risks inspiring more than traditional Christian piety. There are other passions lurking in the violence of this film. Why does Gibson tell the story in this way? Why have Christians always told it something like this? Is there another way to tell it?

By now, most BR readers will have seen the Bible-movie event of the year, The Passion of the Christ. It’s June, and the movie is already a falling star. After all the hype and anticipation, Mel Gibson’s film turned out to be surprisingly conventional. It’s a Passion Play on film.