The Passion -- Missing the Point

I deserve to be scourged for presuming to write about the Passion at this point, so many weeks after everybody else. I'm sure that most folk are sick to death of the issue. But there are some ideas about the movie that I feel obligated to address, and as it took me a while to actually see it, and a few more to digest it, you're putting up with me now. Such is life.


I live in St. Mary's County, MD, in what used to be Tobacco country and what is most distinctly Bush country. It's also Church country. I won't say that the churches have an absolute majority over the bars, but I will say that they give the bars a run for their money. They're mostly mainstream Protestant churches: Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptist, with a noticeable minority of Catholic churches, and the occasional Church of God/Pentecostal types. In other words, a fairly good cross section of American denominational habits. And it is invariably the Protestants who are advertising showings and tickets to "Passion of the Christ" in big shiny banners outside their rectories. Outside the Catholic churches, nary a one.


At first glance, this might be something that a Catholic would be ashamed of, much the same way we occasionally feel buttonholed when discussing Scripture with a Prod. It would seem as though they're "getting" the movie more than we are. Can they have more passion for the Passion?


Before I proceed on this subject, let me relate my experience with the film. I saw it with my dad a few weeks into Lent. That it was a dark, savage two hours, I will not doubt. I cringed at many moments, felt horror far more than I felt joy. That it was a film in any way anti-Semetic, I dispute. Only the modern age could see Pilate as a sympathetic character, rather than the gutless provincial bureaucrat I saw. The only piece of outright racism in the film was when one of the Roman guards escorting/whipping Jesus on the road to Golgotha said to Simon the Cyrenian, who carries the cross for a way: "Get going...Jew." Given the circumstances and the characters, it is hardly logical that Gibson intended such sentiment to be emulated. That everyone who should have spoken up for this man failed to do so, the movie makes abundantly clear. I really don't know what Charles Krauthammer, whose views I normally pay great credence to, is talking about here. He admits that most of the main characters in the story of the Passion, outside of Gibson's film, are Jews. But to depict that in a film is apparently an act of "irreligious agression." When I watched it, there was as much screen time given to Mary, John, and Mary Magdelene, all Jews, as to Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. Krauthammer ignores this, much as thousands of medieval Christians and Nazis must have. He also ignores the fact that the Satan character walks among the Roman guards as they scourge Jesus. All he can see are Jews: not humans, not Sons of Adam, not carriers of the moral virus known as Original Sin, just members of a particular ethnic group. I can't help but see this as an excessive focus on the racial makeup of a story, an impulse that is no less to blame for anti-Semitic violence than are the Gospels.


All of this makes Andrew Sullivan's me-too from March 5th less than convincing. Sorry, Andrew, if you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that the Jewish children that "turn into demons" disappear as soon as Satan has Judas out by the tree with the rope. This meant that they were illusions, which is what the Devil trafficks in. You can be frightened by Gibson's Traditionalism, reasonably call him a schismatic and heretic if such is your desire. But I didn't see anti-semitism in his film, and from what I've seen and heard since the film came out, the only ones who did were the ones writing the lead on the way to the ballpark.


But the bloodiness still needs to be confronted. Sullivan called the film "pornographic," in the sense that it reduces all matters of importance to the flesh. Christ's physical suffering is so graphic as to crowd out the enormity of the spiritual irony of the Incarnation of God destroyed by those he came to love. I take his point, and William F. Buckley's, such as they are. A more ethereal, more intellectual film could easily have been made, and indeed, might have been better. But they have missed the point and purpose of Gibson's film.


When my father and I walked out of the theater, we understandably had little to say. I felt emotionally exhausted. It had been too much; beating after falling after beating after nailing. But with some fresh air, I found perspective. As the truck pulled out of the parking lot, I said "That's pretty much what I thought it would have been like." Dad agreed. And that's why Catholics haven't been showing screenings of "the Passion" at their churches, because most Catholic churches already have it there.


Gibson's film is basically the Stations of the Cross set to film, with an extra prelude (at Gethsemane) and postlude (the 30 seconds of Resurrection). I've done Stations service on Holy Thursday as an altar boy, so I knew the account. I was able to predict what came next as it happened ("okay, that chick must be Veronica"). The only unique aspect was confronting the raw physical reality of those falls, those nails, that cross. It showed me Christ as a living reality, muscle and bone and blood. It was oddly, the stripping away of that life that made me see his pained humanity, and the horror of destroying a human, the lowliest of humans, let alone the Son of God.


This is, as near as I can fathom, the only justification for visiting such savagery upon our eyes: to show it for savagery, to show that violence really is pain, and that our Caiaphan fury and/or Pilatean complacency are the forces that permit violence and pain to grow to the point where it could devour the most holy among us. Sullivan is therefore half-right: Gibson has made a spiritual film for a pornographic age, an age that views physical truth as the only truth worth understanding. All who see it have a chance to see the fruits of ignoring truth, of giving reign to our pride or our indifference. It may be that the film is too much, that the brutality overshadows this message. If so, we should resolve ourselves to do better, and make films that better balance the spirit with the flesh. It would be a much better use of our cultural energy than most of what Hollywood offers.


And the market may just demand such.