8/13/2019 2004 - William Loader - ‘The Passion of the Christ’ and the Suffering of Jesus. A Reflection on Mel Gibson’s film

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 http://ext.sagepub.com/ The Expository Times

 http://ext.sagepub.com/content/115/12/401.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/001452460411501202

 2004 115: 401The Expository Times William Loader

he Passion of the Christ' and the Suffering of Jesus: A Reflection on Mel Gibson's fi

 

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8/13/2019 2004 - William Loader - ‘The Passion of the Christ’ and the Suffering of Jesus. A Reflection on Mel Gibson’s film

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8/13/2019 2004 - William Loader - ‘The Passion of the Christ’ and the Suffering of Jesus. A Reflection on Mel Gibson’s film

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/2004-william-loader-the-passion-of-the-christ-and-the-suffering-of 3/4

402

film’s image of the destructiveness and inhumanity of

rigid religion is familiar to us within our own and the

pathetic figure of Pilate driven by political necessityand fear to betray goodness and justice repeats itself

in our own time.

The gospel story left its moorings in history veryearly to become a timeless mirror of inhumanity,the persistence of love and the persistence of hate in

collision. Already by the time of the gospels the storyis as much about fierce conflicts among Jews about

Jesus as it is about what once happened. Failure

to appreciate the tension of the gospel writers and

their hearers, desperate to lay the blame on their

opponents, opens the door to misunderstandingswhich at worst see the Jews as a people cursed as

killers of God. The film does little to change this. The

legendof Pilate’s wife enhances the

imageof Pilate

as strangely confused and then tragically weak, but

essentially a good man trying to cope with the evil

machinations of the locals.

Novelistic traits embroider the edges of the story.Pilate’s wife becomes a legendary Christian. One of

the brutal soldiers bows the knee. Matthew’s earth-

quake become a literal event of major proportionswhich all but destroys the temple before its time,while strangely the sky only slightly darkens and

the centurion misses his cue to acclaim Jesus Son of

God. Otherwise Gibson employs the disappearingmoon in Gethsemane and sun in the crucifixionscene as symbols that Christ must suffer without

divine escape. Camera angles, omissions, additions,sequences and flashbacks, colour, music - these are

all vehicles of interpretation and artistry.Perhaps most moving of all among the additions

is the depiction of Mary and her antagonist, the

androgynous, yet mainly female Satanic Madonna

and child. While the latter delights in the march of

events, Mary displays the human and humane face of

maternal compassion and anguish. Her image invites

our identification. She listens to his pain from theroof of his dungeon. She consoles Peter who collapsesin failure before her. She meets Pilate’s wife, receives

her gift of cloth with which she then mops up the

spilt blood of her son from the threshing floor of his

beatings. She accompanies him all the way to the

cross. Her portrayal is punctuated with moments

of Jesus’ youth and childhood - very human, even

humorous and very natural.

Most elaboration serves to impress upon the viewer

the pain. The arrest becomes a brawl. The way to

the high priest’s house is one of constant beatings. At one point we have a bizarre scene of Jesus beaten

to collapse, falling over a wall and dangling down a

cliff face where his eyes meet a bedevilled Judas in a

cave. On the road to the cross Jesus must carry a huge

cross, while his companions carry just the beamas was

probably the normal practice. At the site of crucifixion

a soldier dislocates Jesus’ shoulders to fit the requiredspan for the nailing. One could scarcely add more

without collapsing the story into unreality.Could any human being survive such treatment?

We are to be moved by the ’brave heart’ of Jesus.Jesus is a Wagnerian hero, enduring all this pain to

achieve his mission: to bear the sins of the world. It

is a spirituality which came strongly to the fore in

the late Middle Ages and lives again in vivid scenes

which merge their

portraitsand later visions into a

’moving portrait’ of Jesus’ pain. It is not a focus we

find in the gospels. Suffering and pain is there, but

not to the extent that it dominates the story. Even

Paul who finds in his own suffering the sufferings of

Christ, does not make the suffering of the Christ the

grounds for moving people to respond to the Gospel.There was more.

Elaborate attention to contemporary costumes

and conversations in Aramaic lend an air of reality(though not Jesus speaking Latin). But the context

is otherwise ignored. Even that most importantcontext of all, Jesus’ ministry and teaching, scarcelyrates a mention. One would never know he saw his

message as good news for the poor and hungry. His

radical compassion for the marginalized is not worth

a mention. To somewhat overstate the case, it is as

though we are asked to observe the brutalization of

God’s hero, but are never told why he was a hero. We

are seeing the cruel mangling of a good man, God’s

man, but we are given little to inform us what that

goodness was. Perhaps he was mainly concerned to

save our souls, as the Gethsemane subtitles suggest-

by taking our punishment? - as though Godwould otherwise hold compassion back because a

debt was unpaid. Then what preceded the event was

little more than a set of impressive preliminaries to

enhance credentials. By contrast, the earliest gospel,Mark, suggests that Jesus was already offering God’sforgiveness freely to all. The two single times Mark

says anything like Jesus dies for us (ro:45; z4:24), it

must mean much more than forgiveness of sins.

Even if one stayed strictly within the gospels, there

are clues which might break the stereotypical portrait

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403

of the hostile Jewish leaders. On the basis ofJohn I 1 :

47-5 one might catch a glimpse of a wider agenda,of leaders fearing Roman oppression and willing to

sacrifice a stirrer to prevent Roman provoking it. The

accusation, ’King of the Jews’, might have openedconnections to the feared and admired movements

for liberation from the Romans, whose freedom songs

surround the infancy of John and Jesus in Luke. One

might have recognized that Jesus and those crucified

with him and probably Barabbas had much more

in common than the film portrays, which sees them

only as criminals. They all sought Israel’s liberationfrom the Romans, but differed largely in the means.

This was too fine a distinction for the Romans, who

were satisfied with the generic charge against Jesus:’King of the Jews’. It sufficed to categorize a range of

subversives from the militant whose troops would alsoneed to be mopped up to the prophetic and visionarywho raised popular hopes and called the current order

into question. His action in the temple and whatever

went on at the entry were grounds enough, not to

mention second-hand accounts of proclamations of

God’s reign and intimations of messiahship, at least

among his followers.

There are dimensions of hope and dimensions of

suffering which make it almost a contradiction of

Jesus himself to isolate his sufferings from that of

his

people.Even the use of Son of

Man, alludingto

Daniel 7, suggests such a sense of solidarity. Instead

of the one anointed to bring the hope of good news

to his people and to live it out already in the present,we have in the film a beleaguered martyr, a rallying

point for all who fear and find enemies before and

behind. Without the wider agenda the film’s citation

ofJesus’ command to love enemies is lame and in the

script virtually abandoned. In form the film hates the

enemy and makes no attempt to probe the roots of

the violence it shows.For many, nevertheless, the interpretation works.

It has as much right to such responses as any other

work of art. For some, its images will have evoked the

wider story and inspired faith. This is to be honoured.

When, however, Gibson and so many others go beyondthis to claim some kind of historical and theologicaladequacy of the portrait, with some almost to the

point of canonization, then the inadequacy must be

laid bare.

You cannot really understand the passion of

Jesus unless you have some idea of what Jesus was

passionate about. Without it the portrayal of the

passion too easily becomes a spectacle of brutality.Brutalization is inevitably revelatory. But good newsin a world in which we brutalize still, still needs to

offer liberation and change. Ultimately the solution

is not making war on evil and those who hate us,

but addressing what generates the pain to which

some respond with acts of terror, as they did also in

the time of Jesus. He addressed that pain with hope.Hope and love have a way of creating a different kind

of faith from belief that one isright.

There was more

to Christ’s passion than being brutalized or being a

substitute victim. The compassion of hope and the

call for change are the real passion, in his life and

in his death.

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