Ted Scott:

Kirk and I have significant similarity in our views of this film. But let me start with Paul in Corinthians. Paul says, "we have this treasure in earthen vessels." Wonderful combination: A treasure, housed in an earthen vessel. In The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson shows in full cinematic detail just how quickly the "earthen vessel," the body, can be reduced to agony and death. Jesus, like you and me, is person of the flesh, subject to all the problems of the flesh, at the hands of torturers. Like Kirk, I part company with Gibson just at this point, because he focuses primarily on the earthen vessel and skimps on the treasure which it contains.

My understanding about Jesus’ Passion (i.e. "the suffering") is that it’s not about the suffering, but about what is behind the willingness to suffer that is the deeper story. This deeper story is about God’s love, grace, and Jesus desire to express, teach about and embody the Spirit, the Lord of Life. The first noble truth of Christianity is that we are loved. Jesus shows us in his Passion that to love is also sometimes to suffer. In expressing our response to that love in our lives, in confronting the non-loving, alienated forces in the world, we too will at times suffer.

Gibson seems to concentrate on suffering for its own sake—he glories in it. Yet what lay behind that? As David Denby said in his review of the New Yorker, "Gibson shows little interest in celebrating the electric charge of hope and redemption that Jesus Christ brought into the world." We know what he’s talking about: Jesus passion for the poor, the marginalized. His passionate connection to God (Abba, the Father), and his desire to share and express that connection. His healing of the sick in mind and body. His sense that caring for ordinary people was far more important than following rigid rules. This made him a revolutionary to some, and he was—they saw him as a threat to the established order for a reason. What excited, attracted, baffled, aroused hope in people—this Jesus, was in every sense a phenomenon:

• Who said, "let the little children come to me."
• Whose sensed presence led blind Bartimaeus to step into the road and say, "master, heal me". And led several men to carry their paralyzed friend up onto the roof of a house and break through so they could get him lowered down to Jesus to be healed.
• Who said, "blessed are the poor" and "you love your friends, even the heathen do that; I say love your enemies."
• Who fed the five thousand.
• Who befriended the wrong kind of people.
• Who got angry at people using the temple as a marketplace, and angry at those who preferred form over substance in the spiritual life.
• Who caused people to wonder out loud "who is this man?"
• Whose presence and speaking led people to call him Rabbi, or teacher, or Lord.
• Who was constantly saying some version of "don’t you get it?" "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." "The Kingdom is near."

So we are here today in part because a guy got brutally tortured to death long ago. But more because of what this man, our Christ, taught and embodied. It is because the grace and love he expressed that so disturbed the peace and yet brought a peace that passes understanding. And it is because of resurrection: the truth that death was and is not the final word; any more than suffering is the final word. As Paul says in Corinthians, "we carry his death around within us," but it’s not the final word. We carry his life as well. What’s final is the Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being. What’s final is the grace and power of the Spirit. In expressing grace and love, we too will have difficulty; we will suffer. He did. Why not us? Yet glorying in his or our suffering is to miss the point. It’s about love and caring, affirmation and life. God’s love for us, God’s love within us, us sharing and being that love. Suffering happens, and it can be terrible. Enemies exist. We need to take it seriously. But we can never forget that as real as suffering is—his and ours—it’s not the whole story. It’s but part of a story of God’s grace active in the world and in us. You and I are people of the flesh, subject to all the problems of the flesh. And you know what, Paul reminds us in Corinthians, its an opportunity for us to know and show that the Spirit of God is in charge, is greater than the flesh, which is as easily broken as a clay pot, which is subject to all manner of tribulation

Lent, and Jesus suffering, is a reminder to us that the spiritual life isn’t all sweetness and light. It places demands on us. As David Brooks said this week in a NY Times column, we are drawn to spirituality lite. "Our general problem is not that we're too dogmatic" he says, referring to Gibson’s film. "Our more common problems come from the other end of the continuum. Americans in the 21st century are more likely to be divorced from any sense of a creedal order, ignorant of the moral traditions that have come down to us through the ages and detached from the sense that we all owe obligations to a higher authority. Sure, let's get angry at Mel Gibson if he deserves it. But let's not forget that the really corrosive cultural forces come in the form of the easygoing narcissism that surrounds us every day." So, as Christ and Paul and Brooks remind us, God is not somehow a warm and fuzzy extension of ourselves. Turn it around. We are an extension of God. The power and the glory and the leadership are God’s. The world isn’t warm and fuzzy, so we will suffer as God’s disciples. But, as with Christ, our suffering is not the whole story. We carry, as Paul says, his death within us, and also his life and resurrection.

We stand in the Protestant tradition here. The Protestant cross is an empty cross, not one with a crucifix hanging on it. We are part of a tradition that protested against the crucifix view of the cross. We would not be here today without the teachings of this great Rabbi our Lord, his example of incarnation, and the conviction that there is something more than suffering and death in his and our story. That’s why the cross is empty. Because the Lord is life is no longer there, bound by that. So the cross has become a symbol of triumph, not tragedy.

The Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ" was for me, egregiously brutal. Make no mistake; crucifixion was a brutal, tortured way to die. The Romans used it as a deterrent precisely because of this. However, if possible, Gibson makes it even worse.

The film did seem somewhat anti-Semitic—although any telling of the story will be viewed by some as anti-Semitic. Brutal temple guards, a largely united Sanhedrin wanting Jesus dead. Read the Gospels and they show not only Jews who demand Jesus death, but also Jews who protest, repeatedly, and others who stand on the sidelines. Such back-and-forth nuance is largely missing from Gibson’s film. I differ about who are the biggest heavies in the film, however. Mostly in the media you hear it’s the Jews (specifically Caiaphas the high priest), and that Pilate is presented somewhat sympathetically. However, the Romans as a group are presented far more harshly than anyone else, as extremely sadistic racists, in alliance with the devil.
 

Kirk Bingaman:

And we thought the Da Vinci Code novel caused a stir. Now it’s The Passion of the Christ. Everyone seems to be weighing in with his or her opinion of the film: Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, Mainline denominations and evangelical churches, film critics and newspaper columnists. Even comedians, like Steve Martin in a recent issue of the New Yorker: "Dear Mel," he writes, "we love, love the script. The ending works great. You’ll be getting a call from us to start negotiations for the book rights. Love the Jesus character. So likeable. He can’t seem to catch a break. We can identify with him…." And NPR film critic, David Edelstein, who, and I am not certain if this was tongue-in-cheek or not, subtitled the film, "The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre."

In any case, let me begin with what I liked about The Passion. I liked the flashbacks, early in the movie, to Jesus as a young adult working in the carpentry shop. What I liked about it is that Mel Gibson’s Jesus is authentically human, not like some of the other Jesus films that depict him as human in appearance only, a divinized being in the shell of a human body. No, in The Passion, he IS human. He fully participates in and experiences the very same humanity that you and I do. He works with his hands; he lets his mother know in no uncertain terms that he is hungry; he possesses a playful sense of humor, as evidenced in the scene where he splashes his mother with water; and he experiences the depths of human emotion. When, on the cross and in response to the thief’s heartfelt plea, "Jesus, remember me," he tells the dying criminal that "Today you will be with me in paradise."

And this is the moment of the film where I can honestly say that I was moved to tears, just as I am every Holy Week and Good Friday, when I hear this particular word, one of the so-called "seven words from the cross," recited from the pulpit. "Jesus, remember me," to which Jesus responds, "Today you will be with me in paradise." But the tenderness and love and deep compassion of Jesus are of little interest to Gibson. Because, immediately after Jesus conveys to this criminal that he will never be forgotten by God, the camera shifts to the other thief, to the most ill timed and revolting scene in the entire movie. "Today, you will be with me in paradise," the implication being, as we sang in our first hymn, that all that borrow life from God are EVER in God’s care. But Gibson will not let us sit with this reality because he has another agenda, that being to numb us with violence upon violence. In case we were not horrified enough by the severity of Jesus’ brutal ordeal, we are treated, at this pivotal moment of the Jesus story; to the other thief getting his eye pecked out by a crazed raven. What is the point?

I thought to myself, sitting there in the theater, there you have it, a window into the soul of the filmmaker. For there is no indication whatsoever, in the biblical record or according to Tradition, that the other thief had his eye pecked out. But this does not seem to matter to Gibson; it is an opportunity to share with us even more gratuitous violence. And, this is not the worst of it, believe it or not, because what we are witnessing is a form of throwing salt into the wound, tit-for-tat, an eye for an eye, literally, us vs. them, in short, mean-spiritedness par excellence. And, in terms of WWJD if he were watching the film, he would stand up in the theater and shout, "No, no, don’t you rub the other thief’s nose in it; I love him, too."

If you have not seen The Passion, and are planning to go at some point, be prepared. It is, as Mick LaSalle pointed out in his review in the Chronicle, a "bloodbath." Not that I have any illusions; crucifixion has to be up there as one of the worst ways, ever, a human being could possibly die. But, if you have seen the film, you know the crucifixion is not the worst part; it is the flogging scene that goes on, ad infinitum, with historical precision. Criminals, in the Roman Empire, were not flogged with a whip you might find at a rodeo or the Kentucky Derby, but rather with one that did have pieces of bone and metal and glass in it. The better to keep the masses in check and to enforce the Pax Romana.

The only trouble is, do I and other Christians need to sit through the violent brutalization of Jesus on the big screen, in order to prove that we’ve got faith? I do not think so. Do not get me wrong. I am not talking about a watered-down version of Christianity. No, the season of Lent reminds us that Jesus faced the "demons" inherent in the human psyche. Furthermore, the resurrection is little more than pie-in-the-sky if we try to bypass the cross and Good Friday. As Thomas Merton writes, to know the cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ (By his stripes we are healed), but more than that, it is to know the love of Christ. And this is the missing ingredient in the Gibson film: the love of Christ. If it is there, it is more or less drowned out by the cacophony of violence that really seems to be an end in itself.

What about his love? What about his life? What about his teaching? Are we not also saved by these realities? You bet we are, but they are so overshadowed by Gibson’s almost obsessive and compulsive fascination with Jesus being beaten to a bloody pulp. And that is just plain wrong, theologically and morally. That is not what saves you and me. Even worse, it makes us wonder what kind of God we are serving. A God who will not be satisfied unless Jesus, the Son, is beaten and scourged and crucified and just plain humiliated? Is that God? God help us! Do not believe it for a minute. God does not expect us to embrace such a distorted and one-sided theological view. True, we do carry in us the death of Jesus, so that, the LIFE of Jesus may also, and even more so, be revealed.