More on The Passion

Alright.  So on Easter Sunday, I went and saw The Passion of the Christ.  It seemed appropriate.  Before I tell you what I think of the movie (and the debate surrounding it), and I want to point you to a couple of things I wrote before I’d seen it, last fall.  It will help to frame my treatment here.  So, without further ado, there is this entry, and this one. 

Having that said, first, my initial responses to the movie.  It wasn’t an accident on my part that I went to see the movie on Easter Sunday.  Not by a long shot.  I’ve been anticipating the viewing for a long time, but I wanted to go on Easter.  I got my wish.  I went to a favorite restaurant with a couple of the brothers, and then we caught the flick.

I was expecting more gore, to be quite honest.  I did plenty of research as a young Christian about the Roman lectors (the guys with the whips who beat the smoke out of Jesus before he even picks up the cross) and I can tell you, that’s what it was like.  It was slightly inaccurate, actually, and the gore was scaled down.  Forty lashings minus one was the legal limit- forty lashings was the line at which death occurred.  It seemed to me in watching it they hit him far more times than that.  In addition, if you do any studying on the nature of crucifixion, you learn that the victims die of suffocation before they ever bleed to death.  The blood on the cross (excluding the blood caused by the tickling–excuse my brevity– of the nails in his hands and feet) would have been from the exertion of his body in carrying the very heavy cross after being whipped to within an inch of his life.  The whips they used in the movie are accurate enough.  They take a whip, dip the ends of the cat-o-nine-tails in hot tar, and they drag them through broken pottery, shards of rock, metal hooks, etc, and let it dry.  The purpose of this is simple…to rip off flesh.  I was expecting to see Jesus skin peeled back more than it was.  The cruelty of Roman soldiers to people in custody was about right, and fit with the Biblical accounts.  I’ve read worse accounts in history books about the lectors than what was portrayed in the movie.

Second, on an emotional level, the stuff that effected me wasn’t what I was expecting.  I identified in a way a little too poignant to share about the denials of Peter.  It was a terrible thing to watch.  You know what’s about to happen the minute they pan to him.  You know how it is going to work out.  Two things about that.  I had never really thought about the dichotomy in Peter that you see in the first moments of that movie–willing to fight armed guards in the garden, but unwilling to admit he knows the man in the temple precinct.  In a span of only a few hours, Peter goes from carrying the sword against the temple guards to denying his friend and someone he earlier described as “the Christ” (a heretical thing for a 1st century Jew to say) before a woman in the temple precincts.  The moment where Jesus and Peter make eye contact…You can almost hear Jesus saying, “Oh Peter…didn’t I tell you?”  It tore me up.  Any Christian who has had the horrible feeling of denying Jesus at some point knows why that would be horrible.  No matter how many times you see it, hear about it, read it, it never ceases to offend your conscience.  Watching the decline of Judas was hard for me too.  When he finally takes the rope off that rotting animal (Scripture doesn’t actually say where he got the rope from), he is such a pitiable figure that it’s no wonder that Jesus says of him, “It would have been better had he never been born.”  The spiritual aspects of that (with Satan tormenting him) seemed to be at least potentially accurate.  Satan’s M.O. has always been to get people to do things, and then accuse them of it the minute they’ve done it.  Same goes here.  I have a special difficulty watching people hang themselves on the big screen.  I don’t know why.  I think it’s the hopelessness inherent in going through all the process to prepare it.  (The worst of these scenes for me is watching Brooks Hadlin hang himself in Shawshank….I cry every time I watch it.  If you want to understand old people, all you need do is watch that ten minute section of Shawshank where Brooks is talking about how the world passed him by. I’m crying in the Seminary computer lab even thinking about it.  So tragic.)  By the time Jesus gets to carrying the cross, I was emotionally spent.  I was just in disbelief.  I loved John (Iowannes) in this movie.  The look of utter disbelief and despair about him watching Jesus seems appropriate to what the disciples must have felt, “We thought he would restore the kingdom to Israel at this time.” 

Of course, the movie has some Catholic leanings.  The preeminence of Mary in the story is clear enough.  I’m not going to waste your time talking about it. I have no problem seeing Mary as a bereaved mother in the narrative.  To have the disciples calling her mother is to me a bit of a stretch.  The texts in the account, in the Greek, use a word that literally is a loving way of saying, “woman”  (gune).  But that is a matter for another entry.  *shrugs* 

Now.  For what really probably interests you.  How do I stand on the charges of Anti-Semitism.  Well, you could probably guess this, but I think they’re bunk.  I think it’s been overplayed and overhyped, just as the claim that Christianity is, by it’s nature anti-semitic.  What you have to remember about the narrative is that with the exception of the Romans in this story ALL the characters are Jews.  All the disciples, all the people in the temple courts, Jesus himself, are all Jewish.  It is no different than watching a story about lynch mobs in any other culture.  In those cases, no one claims that the depiction is anti-[insert group here].  It’s about lynch mobs and how they work.  The Gospel accounts are no different.  If you think about a classic movie with a lynch mob scene, To Kill a Mockingbird, for example.  Is that movie Anti-American?  No, of course not.  Does the view of those people represent the view of the entire culture? Again, no of course not.  The fact that there was a section of the population strongly opposed to Jesus message should not surprise anyone.  Anytime someone teaches peace and love and God’s truth about sin, people get offended.  You throw in the huge following Jesus attracted (the am- haretz) and the potential political power that represented, and the level of the Pharisees misunderstandings about what Jesus was there to do, and you’ve got yourself all the reasons you can think of (both for political expediency and otherwise) for them to take the course they do.

Part two of this is another thing we must keep in mind.  For better or worse, cultures bear the blame for the sins of their leaders.  Intuitively, we know this.  Tha