The Passion of the Christian:
Having Little Passion for Mel Gibson’s Christ
Dr. John C.
McDowell is Meldrum Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of
Edinburgh, Scotland, and a member of the Church of Scotland’s Panel of Doctrine. After his PhD at
Familiarity can breed, if not contempt, then at least a dulled imagination. Possibly one of the main reasons why Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has become the most talked about movie in Christian circles in recent times, then, has to do with the shock factor of displaying Jesus’ passion before one’s eyes can potentially bring to life the events depicted in the Gospels.
The
claim frequently heard is that the film is ‘close to the Gospels’, as it is
intended to be.[1] What could such a statement mean, especially
since the film involves both numerous moments of ‘artistic licence’ that pad
out a handful of biblical verses, and a sensationalist emotion-generating and
mood-determining score from John Debney? Even without these, Gibson, like so many
biblical literalists, it would seem has not learned that truth of an event is
more than what can be observed by anyone there at the time.[2] The author of the Fourth Gospel recognised
that we need rules for reading, and so provided a prologue to his Gospel to
shape the very way the subsequent material is to be read (John 1:1-18). And, of course, as any thoughtful comparison
of the Gospels can discover, each Gospel seems to make selections of material
to be used (see Jn.
On first viewing of the film I could not see any explicit anti-Jewish imagery. There are certainly numerous features that at least could suggest a curb on any politics of anti-semitism. For instance, while Pilate is disturbed by the tragedy of his predicament, his underlings are perversely energetic in their torturous enthusiasm. The Jewish leader thrown out of the religious trial of Jesus or proclaiming its illegality declares that not al the requisite Jewish leaders are present, thus suggesting that there are several sympathetic to Jesus who have been deliberately excluded. The infamous speech of Matthew’s crowd (Matt. 27:25) is here put into the mouth of the high priest, Caiaphas, proclaiming that Jesus’ blood “will be upon us and our children” but suggestively it is left without subtitles by Gibson. Finally, one should not forget the Jewishness of Jesus, his family and his followers.
And yet, apart from the ritual handwashing before the last supper, the Old Testament imagery used by the Gospel writers is absent thereby scything the important links between Christianity and its Hebrew heritage. As a result, Jesus’ threats against the temple look somewhat out of their proper place when not drawn into the corruption of the temple courts; the rich imagery of the peripatetic prophet announcing apocalyptic judgment and redemption, in the tradition of Elijah and, Amos and the like is lost to view (see Matt. 21:33ff.); and similarly lost is the notion of Jesus as the fulfilment of the Hebrew Law and the prophets (Matt. 5:17). The Matthean account of Pilate’s washing his hands of the guilt of Jesus’ death (see Matthew 27:24) is also overplayed.[3]
This is made all the more problematic by the Pilatean politics.
Possibly contrary to the still debated historical truth of the matter, Gibson
sensitively and poignantly portrays the governor struggling with his options in
what is amounting to a politics of tragic choice – condemn this innocent man
and risk a revolt by his followers, or free him and risk a revolt by his Jewish
enemies (see Mtt. 27:19, 24). The problem is that this exploring of the
psychological conditions of the choice to execute Jesus by Pilate is not
extended to the Jewish officials.
Leaving their complex motivations undeveloped (see Jn.
The problem overall, then, is not so much the possible anti-semitic sins of commission but of omission, although these are no less significant for being that. The film, because of its abstracted period of focal reference leaves little sense of Jesus’ compassion and inclusive love for his Jewish people. Its silence over the Jews here may well constitute an evasion of responsibility for preventing, on the basis of precisely the person and life of Jesus, the portrayal of Jesus the victim at the hands of Jewish victimisers, the role long played by the Jew in the Western imagination. The film just does not provide enough markers against anti-semitism as precisely a defamation of the Gospel; nor does it test the context of the Gospels’ own presentation of the Christian-Jewish relation, texts that themselves are shaped in their own reading of the life and work of Jesus Christ in a milieu of seriously strained relations.
That is just the point – this shallow film loses Jesus’ context, and leaves itself open to a politics of ignorance, to the ignorances of the audience’s readings of it. The very fact that it is accused of anti-semitism certainly says as much about the film’s ‘readers’ and about the lingering politics of exclusion operating through a condition of Christian-Jewish relations so historically blighted by a decontextualising of the Gospel occurring in a predominantly Gentile church that wanted to announce independence off its Jewish mother – an independence that soon was defined in competitive and supercessionistic terms. Put plainly, Christians have been all too prone to forget how to read Jesus the Jew, Jesus the Jewish Messiah, Jesus the son of God as being the son of David. As important as the later reflections on the relation between this man and his God were as readings of his universal significance, the talk of Jesus as the Christ (often forgetting that this is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew), of son of God read as God the Son, play with this abstraction and enforce it in the Christian imagination.
A second abstraction may at first seem to be less theologically significant and more aesthetic. Apart from occasional flashbacks (which I found to be unhelpful in providing a matrix of meaning – they were too thinly informative, and my mind began filling in the blanks) the film begins in Gethsemane and, despite a rather strange brief look inside the tomb on the first Easter Day,[4] largely ends with the decoupling of the lifeless body from the cross. At the very best, the character ‘from nowhere’ did not sufficiently provoke my emotional sensibilities any more than any other person enduring such torture would have done had I intruded on the final moments of his/her inglorious end. But at its worst, and this is where the point about abstraction imprints its theological importance, the Jesus of the film is but a body, a body victimised and assaulted.
There are very few hints as to why he should be so victimised, why he has become the object of such abject hatred and loathing to the point of the contriving of an execution. The two suggestions given have to do with Jesus’ ‘blasphemy’ against God and the temple, but even that Pharisee trial scene is muted by the sound of the impact of the film’s blows inflicted upon him, and the meaning and significance of the charges is left unexplained.
More
importantly perhaps, and almost in spite of the actions of the various
characters in the film, is Jesus’ own determination to die. “For this was I born”, says Jesus in a
statement not present in the Gospels (the Gospels themselves, of course, which
were written post-Easter, or in the light of Jesus’ having been raised). Yet Luke’s Gospel records Jesus as saying that
“the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost” (Lk.
In other words, there is a sense of control – Jesus is ultimately in control of his own destiny (echoing Jn. 10:17f.), and that raises tough questions left unaddressed as to the importance of the action of the executors. This, then, plays from a particular opening reference to Isaiah 53:5: “he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; … and by his bruises [‘stripes’, AV] we are healed.” The sufferings and the death themselves, it would seem from this film, are what is redemptive – the body abused and victimised is what is saving.
Moreover, the way of Jesus before the sufferings inflicted is disturbing: there is sense of resignation, or a quiet acceptance of the suffering reinforced by Jesus’ super stoic bearing of it. In one incident, Jesus receives horrendous blows from the canes of his Roman floggers that knock him motionless to his knees. Yet within moments, he rises defiantly, undefeated and unbroken, surprising the Romans by his sheer strength and endurance – in a sense, Jesus ‘asks for’ the abuse of the cat-o’nine-tails. Jesus subsequently has to endure a beating (graphically, almost psychotically, and relentlessly detailed by the film-maker)[6] that would have killed any ordinary human being – but Gibson’s heroic sufferer is no mere mortal.
In another revealing incident, a severely beaten
Jesus, weakened and very slowly stumbling with both his cross and the
continuing blows delivered under the whipping of the Roman police, utters the
words to Mary when they meet again (the mother-son relation was for me the only
really poignant thing about this film), words not recorded in the four
canonical Gospels: “mother, behold, I
make all things new!” At that very
moment, Jesus finds renewed strength, lifts himself up under his burden, and
triumphantly strides determined to die.
This is a bravehearting of salvation. But what does this heroic endurance of
suffering say about suffering itself, about the injustice of much sufferings
inflicted in the world, and about one’s ability to contest and resist the
infliction of unjust suffering? Here new
life is directly linked to Jesus’ sufferings and death – the life and
resurrection of Jesus are not redemptive events. The resurrection has been rendered
unnecessary by the superhuman capacity of Jesus to bear suffering (but how does
that make Jesus different from numerous martyrs?). One critic observes that “Instead of a richly
ironic story, in which even Jesus’ enemies are caught up in the symphony of
grace, we get a Manichean [eternally contrasting absolute good with absolute
evil] morality play, in which evil is not so much transformed by God’s love as
merely beaten by it.” [Matthew Myer Boulton, ‘The
Problem With The Passion’, Christian Century (
[1] A Zondervan/belief.net poll of March 2004 reported that when asked how close the movie was to the Bible’s account of Jesus’ death, 75% answered “very close”, while 15% responded “somewhat close”.
[2] Moreover, the fact that Jesus conversed with Pilate in Latin and not Greek should give us pause for thought. Indeed, the ‘universal’ medium of the Greek language is absent from the film.
[3] Is it significant that Jesus, Mary and Mary Magdalene were the most European-looking of the films’ Judaean characters?
[4] A cleaned up Jesus looks more like a resuscitated body than the One raised to God’s new life.
[5] For a critique of this, I would refer the reader of this magazine initially to Michael Northcott, ‘Atonement and War’, Third Way 26.6 (summer 2003), 10-12.
[6] The incident with the raven on the cross of the robber being crucified on Jesus’ right was unpleasant, disturbing, and simply gratuitous and unnecessary.
[7]
Matthew Myer Boulton, ‘The Problem With The Passion’, Christian Century (