‘Its violence is harrowing but not gratuitous, and is an antidote to the rather sanitised way in which we tend to think about the cross’
SIX years ago, I was on my own on Good Friday in a village in the diocese. There was no service, so I went into the church for a quiet hour before three o’clock. I sat alone in a pew, looking at the stained glass, with its clean white figures dressed in sumptuous robes, and thought how that event in Palestine all those years ago had become encrusted in English culture, and wondered if it was even vaguely possible to strip away our cultural assumptions and get at something of how the cross might originally have been.
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ makes its own assumptions about both Palestinian culture and what makes for good cinema, but it gives a closer glimpse of the story than many of our English traditions allow. Two hours spent watching this film would serve as a better devotional practice than perhaps many of our Good Friday services.
The film is exactly as its title suggests: Christ’s Passion, no more, and no less. It starts at Gethsemane, takes us through the arrest and trials before the Jewish religious authorities, Herod, and Pilate, and then shows Christ carrying the cross out of the city and being crucified on the small hill outside. The resurrection appears as the briefest coda, giving us the balance of the empty tomb without the resuscitation of Christ’s corpse: the graveclothes collapse while Christ, sitting beside them, opens his eyes, and strides off manfully, naked, into the dawn (presumably his first job is to find some clothes, or do resurrected people not wear them?).The only references to Christ’s life are flashbacks to earlier episodes of his ministry, the recollections of those involved in the Passion, prompted by moments in the Passion itself. So, for example, the woman caught in adultery remembers being saved from stoning as she mops up the blood from where Jesus has been flogged; Jesus’s institution of the eucharist, ‘for the forgiveness of sins’, is recalled as he is lifted up on the cross. This helps us to see those earlier teachings in a new way, as they are interpreted in the light of Christ’s death. Gibson by no means uses only the spoken words of the gospels: he puts them imaginatively in the context of conversations, which again, enable familiar texts to be nuanced with fresh insights.
We are enabled to interpret Christ’s life in the light of his death; but the concentration on the Passion (through much of which Christ is semi-conscious) results in little opportunity to interpret his death in the light of his life. It thus becomes a very physical film about death and torture, and humanity’s inhumanity to humanity. I was aware that I saw the film on 8 March, the day in the Church of England Common Worship calendar for commemorating Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, the famous chaplain to the forces in the First World War. It was the 75th anniversary of Studdert Kennedy’s death; and the friend with whom I saw the film happens to be one who among contemporary theologians has done the most research into Studdert Kennedy’s life and work. Studdert Kennedy made frequent connections between the suffering of Christ and the suffering which soldiers endured in the trenches, but was also able to draw on Christ’s life to show other themes of redemption. The Passion has a message about human bodies that the contemporary world needs to hear; but being short on Christ’s life, it is short on other messages about how the world might be redeemed.
The media have characterised the film as violent and antisemitic. Its violence is harrowing, but not, I thought, gratuitous, and is in any case an antidote to the rather sanitised way in which we tend to think about the cross.I did not find it anti-semitic. It shows good Jews and bad Jews, good Gentiles and bad Gentiles. The Jewish authorities are shown as threatened, fearful and reactionary; the Romans are portrayed as brutal. More interestingly, the film is very Catholic, reflecting Mel Gibson’s own standpoint: Mary is the second key character of the film, never far away from Christ, and the camera dwells considerably on her reactions to what is going on. My friend, who is more familiar than I am with catholic devotions, thought that the stations of the cross were all carefully represented.
If I were to choose my best and worst moments of the film, I would choose, for the latter, the appearances of Satan, whose occasional gliding along in the background of scenes (especially around an over-cursed Judas) seems rather purposeless. For the former, I was moved most of all when, having fallen with the cross, Jesus is briefly held, as he gets up, by his mother. ‘Behold’, he says, ‘I make all things new.’ The irony of this statement by a bloodied man on his way to execution, is smothered by the double irony of our knowledge that in fact his death has indeed within it the power to transform the world. I had to swallow hard to prevent a tear.
In short, as I say, I think The Passion of the Christ can draw believers more deeply into the heart of their faith. And as an evangelistic tool for non-believers that will hopefully intrigue them and cause them to ask questions and further explore particularly the life of Christ under-emphasised h e r e , I think it will do far more g o o d t h a n harm.
Michael Brierley, chaplain to the Bishop of Oxford, went to see an early screening of the controversial
Mel Gibson film,The Passion of the Christ, which is out in the UK on March 26
