Maundy Thursday … the day the Chief Potentate of the Roman Catholic Church washes the feet of the poor in obedience to instructions from Jesus. “I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:14) The day Jesus transformed Passover into the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion. The day that ended in his arrest and trumped up trial.
Without doubt this has been one of the most dramatic commemorations of Christ’s walk to Golgotha that I can remember. A lot of the drama, for me, centers on the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Extreme elitist reaction to this movie, even before its release, has been nothing short of circus. The box office stats are amazing eve to the most optimistic of us. The movie itself is a creative, moving re-enactment of the most pivotal event in cosmic history.
My Wife Shirley and I watched the movie with friends almost three weeks ago. We were moved deeply. The love for Jesus that is growing in me deepened as I saw, in graphic detail, the humiliation and devastation he chose so that I would not have to suffer these consequences of my own sin. Shirley and I both saw a man, who, though appearing to be at the mercy of his accusers and tormentors, deliberately chose every intricate detail of his death so that he could “carry the sins of the entire world in his body with that cross, and to it, enabling us to die to sins and live for righteousness; so that we may be healed by those wounds.” (See 1 Peter 2:24.)
Reflecting now on the movie and the flurry of media attempts to catch this “wave of religious enthusiasm” – another Peter Jennings attempt (this one three hours in prime time) to reduce it all to a secular event no different than any other historical social event in antiquity; a TIME cover story; opinion upon opinion appearing in the most unexpected places there is much about this circus that troubles me. Still, whether well or poorly represented, Jesus really is, as he should be, front row center during this Holiest of all Holy Weeks.
One commentary on the movie has lurked in the background and frequently played across the foreground of my mind. This critique appeared in The New Republic on March 8. Written by Leon Wieseltier, TNR’s literary editor it is, without question a scathing review. “The Passion of the Christ is intoxicated by blood,” Wieleltier opines. “The bloodthirstiness of Gibson's film is startling, and quickly sickening. The fluid is everywhere. It drips, it runs, it spatters, it jumps. It trickles down the post at which Jesus is flagellated … down the cross upon which he is crucified, … . The flagellation scene and the crucifixion scene are frenzies of blood. When Jesus is nailed to the wood, the drops of blood that spring from his wound are filmed in slow-motion, with a twisted tenderness … It all concludes in the shower of blood that issues from the corpse of Jesus when it is pierced by the Roman soldier's spear.” Gibson’s achievement, Wieseltier concludes, is the “verisimilitude of filmed violence.” “The viewing of The Passion of the Christ,” is, for this critic, “a profoundly brutalizing experience … This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.” Acknowledging the subjectivity of the sentiment he writes, “it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find another way of regarding the horror that you have just observed.” Just in case you’re not quite sure of his assessment he, at one point, in passing, alludes to it as Gibson’s, “slasher movie.” After several lines of insistence that the movie is, “without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie,” he concludes with this. “… the loathing of Jews in Mel Gibson's film is really not its worst degradation … . Its loathing of Jews is subsumed in its loathing of spirituality, in its loathing of existence. If there is a kingdom of heaven, The Passion of the Christ is shutting it in men's faces.”
After several readings and much reflection on this piece I am still troubled by not only the critique but the reasons for such animosity to the vivid re-telling of a real event of colossal, even cosmic proportions. Granted this shouldn’t surprise me. Less than 20 years after it took place St. Paul noted that it had become an event “scandalous” to the Jews, and “foolishness” to the Gentiles. (See 1 Corinthians 1:23.) It certainly is both of these to Wieseltier. It is “repulsive,” “fantasy” to him.
Perhaps the roots of such disgust and disdain can be attributed to the general uneasiness, even denial with which all of us encounter suffering and death. This “uneasiness” has been credibly substantiated in the work of Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist and a 1974 Pulitzer Prize recipient. In his Pulitzer applauded work, “The Denial of Death,” Becker writes this. “We might call this existential paradox (a Kierkegaardian category) the condition of individuality within finitude. Man … is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality … gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.
“Yet at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body … a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.” Later, summarizing his work in “… Denial …” for a subsequent book, “Escape from Evil,” Becker observes that “man’s innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man’s natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image is the root cause of human evil.”
My contention here is that Wieseltier and, for that matter, all of us are so uncomfortable with the unparalleled suffering of Jesus the Christ because of what we must face about ourselves in it. This is how we, humankind, treat good men. The preposterous claim that this good man was, at the same time God, even goes so far as to suggest that this is how we, humankind, treat God when he comes to visit. Deeply offended by such denigrating inferences we ignore the event or convene councils to remove the offensive elements of it. When we protest or deny it, sometimes the ink, with which we record our protest is pure vitriol. But the blood won’t go away. We have been a species of blood since the beginning of time. Within a generation after our preposterous assumption that we could master our own destiny one man killed another. And the killing has gone on, and on, and on.
Something else Wieseltier wrote reminded me how pervasively the blood stains our race. “I do not agree,” he protested, “that Jesus is my savior or anybody else's.” This sounded to me gravely like the protest of the Humanist Manifesto. “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves,” the framers assert in the closing sentence of the First of their “common principles.” Few documents approach the heights of this Manifesto. And yet, hidden even in these heroic aspirations of the “mind that soars,” are dark reminders of our bloodiness. Principle Eight, insisting that, “All persons should have a voice in developing the values and goals that determine their lives,” then states, “Alienating forces should be modified or eradicated … .” There appears to be a contradiction here. “All persons should have a voice.” That is except “Alienating forces.” They, whoever they might be, should have no voice. In fact they must be modified. I can only imagine how that might be done. They must, if necessary, be eradicated. However you imagine this being done one thing is painfully apparent. Here, in the blueprint for a humanist utopia, are stains of blood.
Wieseltier, concerned as he is for spirituality and existence, has failed to reckon with the grim fact that he is every bit as complicit in the bloody history of our race as any of the rest of us. His vitriolic reaction to Mel Gibson’s work is a chilling reminder that it is often the elite, religious, political, or intellectual; those who have found in their creeds, their power, and their intelligence a temporary shroud for their mortality and a case for their superiority, who identify the alienating forces, and determine how best to modify or eliminate them. For all of recorded history it has been so.
But now, in Jesus of Nazareth, we find an exception. A man, with direct access to infinite power, who manipulates or eliminates no one. He chooses, rather, to love all; every member of the human race. He chooses to give himself for the sake of each and every one. He will suffer at the bloodstained hands of everyman so that he, now one of us, can forever change the course of our inglorious history. He forgoes the superiority and privileges of ultimate sovereignty and becomes one of us. He does not deny the truth that to be human means to die. He does not run from it. He does not use his power or the privilege it offers him to get around it. He does not manipulate or eliminate those who are a threat to him. Like the Father has done from before time he risks life in a world of free creatures; people who can scorn and reject him. Love can exist only in such a world. So he risks. As expected he suffers and dies. At first glance it seems he has lost everything. Existence really does seem to be profaned in this darkest of all moments. Look again. Something quite remarkable happens. Life explodes from the bloody ground around the cross. There is a Kingdom of Heaven. And the King has just thrown open the door to any and every human who will permit him to be their Savior/King.
From long before recorded history it has been written into the fiber of things that life is perpetuated in death. “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it remains a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds.” And so it is. So it is now for all of us because Jesus is the “first of many, who, having died, will live on.” And the spirit of this person who dies, ignominiously, so that the many may live, is the passion – the deeply felt, tirelessly patient, no strings love – of the Christ.
Jim Denison
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