Perceptions #200403

"The Controversial Film"

by Dr. Rubel Shelly

The Passion of the Christ chronicles the final twelve hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. That it got an R rather than NC-17 rating surprises me. It is violent, bloody, and barbarous in its central cinematic focus - the cruel flogging of Jesus before his crucifixion. I urge parents of pre-teens not to consider taking their sons and daughters to see the film - and parents of younger teens to see it themselves before allowing theirs to go.

Having admitted how violent The Passion is, the movie understates the violence of crucifixion. It ranks among the cruelest forms of execution ever devised. Men are recorded to have bitten off their tongues under the scourging that typically preceded the cross or to have shrieked themselves to insanity while dying slowly on one. Crucifixion did not damage any vital organ and put people to death agonizingly over hours to days by blood loss, dehydration, and suffocation.

Crucifixion was not a special type of execution conjured up by the Romans for Jesus. In 519 B.C. the Persian King Darius crucified 3,000 Babylonians. In A.D. 66 the Romans crucified 3,600 Jews and lit the flame of revolt throughout the region. Many Christians - Peter among them - died by crucifixion in Roman persecutions that were meant to destroy fledgling Christianity.

Is The Passion anti-Semitic? Most definitely not! The single individual responsible for Jesus' death - both in the film and in the Gospels - is the spineless, self-serving Pilate. With his role as Procurator of Judea at stake on account of charges already made against his cruelty and incompetence, he was not about to let the life of one carpenter-rabbi lead to more complaints against him in Rome. The Jewish figures who had pushed the case onto Pilate's plate are not "Christ-killing Jews" but the religious establishment of Jerusalem that felt threatened by Jesus' popularity with the broader Jewish community.

In the film, there are many more Jewish heroes than villains - Jesus' mother, his disciples, the crowd listening to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, a little girl who gives him water on the way to the cross, pitying faces along the Via Dolorossa. Yes, a bigot could use this film to spew hatred. But the film itself will not be the source of his malevolent railings.

As one writer said, it is more likely that Gibson's raw, bloody images will offend Christians who have tamed and sanitized the cross for the sake of creating comfort-zone religion for ourselves. "Most Americans worship in churches where the bloodied body of Jesus is absent from sanctuary crosses or else styled in ways so abstract that there is no hint of suffering," wrote Kenneth Woodward in The New York Times. "In sermons, too, the emphasis all too often is on the smoothly therapeutic: what Jesus can do for me."

If The Passion reminds believers that it is by his stripes we are healed, it will be a good thing.

In this story, it is I who crucified Christ. And Mel Gibson's cameo role in his movie - as the man whose hands drove the nails into Jesus - is a statement of faith and the ultimate assignment of responsibility for the Son of Man's death.

"This copyrighted article was originally published in Grace-Centered Magazine (www.gcmagazine.net), a daily, online publication, dedicated to stimulating personal and public thought, prayer, and discussion about living the Christian life."

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