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Passionate About the Passion by Jon S. O'Donnell, Chancellor to the Anglican Province
of Christ the King
"Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man: And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried: And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures: And ascended into heaven." In these few words we find the essence of the salvation doctrine of Catholic Christianity. From these words Mel Gibson was inspired to make his movie The Passion of the Christ. Archbishop Morse has asked me to reflect upon the popular appeal of this movie and the media hysteria that has accompanied it. For those of you that have not seen the movie, it depicts the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ…a period referred to in the Mass and common literature as the Passion. The movie is a very vivid and intense depiction of the brutalization suffered by Christ as he made by himself once offered a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world. Just as the Holy Eucharist is not for the timid, the movie The Passion of the Christ is not for the timid. This is not a popcorn and milk duds film. This is not entertainment; it is an experience that is emotionally exhausting and draining. I found that after I saw the movie that I was not capable of doing much of anything except thinking and pondering. Reading a magazine, watching television, reading email, engaging in any of the acts of everyday life was too mundane in juxtaposition to what I had just witnessed. Instead, I pulled out the Bible and read the section of the Gospel of John concerning the crucifixion and resurrection. Quite honestly, I wanted to remind myself, and reaffirm that Christ's Passion as so dramatically depicted in the film was a necessary prelude to His ascension into heaven and the opening of the door to life ever-lasting for those of us who believe on His name. My negative criticism of the movie is that the resurrection and its promise of freedom from death and sin received limited attention. Instead, the focus of the movie is the trial, tribulation and suffering that lead to the promise. Nonetheless, this suffering is a critical element of Catholic Christian doctrine and it is accurately portrayed in the movie. I then began to thumb through other sections of John's Gospel to test how faithful to the scriptures the movie had been. I concluded it was very faithful. Yes, there were some minor scenes in the movie that are not contained in the Gospels primarily flashbacks to Jesus' life before his salvation ministry began. But, I think that all of us understand that the Gospels do not purport to tell the sum total of the life of Christ and these extra-biblical scenes were consistent with what is written. It is against this back-drop of faithful depiction of the scriptures that I began to consider the attacks against the movie and its producer Mel Gibson. There have been two principal attacks made against the movie and both of them are equally offensive and made in ignorance of historical fact and the reality of Catholic Christian doctrine. First, the media and Hollywood establishment asserts the movie is too violent. To call this charge hypocritical is very generous. The same people that revere Psycho with its brutal shower scene and the celebration of the cannibal in Night of the Living Dead have the temerity to call The Passion of the Christ too violent. Many excellent movies, including recent Best Picture winners Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator and Gibson's own Braveheart have underlying themes of great turmoil and many scenes of graphic violence. Yet, I don't recall the mainstream media wringing their hands over the violence in any of these movies. The accusations of gratuitous violence in the movie are made in ignorance of historical reality of the times depicted. The Romans perfected the art of colonization. They were the authors of the law and order concept of zero tolerance. In a Roman colony such as Palestine, like all other Roman colonies, the Romans were men of blood and iron. Dissent lead to death. And for the Romans death alone was not enough. Rather, executions presented a very public opportunity to drive home lessons in Rome's overwhelming power and thereby deter further opposition. Thus, the preferred Roman way of capital punishment was crucifixion with its brutal prelude, the scourging or whipping, followed by a prolonged procession to the place of crucifixion. The Romans intended the process to be prolonged, public and painful. It was all three and was shown to be in the film. Of all the common methods of capital punishment, Crucifixion is among the most brutal and dehumanizing. In recognition of its barbaric nature, Roman law prevented a Roman citizen from being crucified because Roman citizenship, the most prized possession in the ancient world, could not be devalued by the dehumanizing effect of crucifixion. Cicero called Crucifixion the most excruciating way to die. From a physiological point of view, the victim of crucifixion, if he survived the scourging and procession, generally died of suffocation, sometimes many hours or days after being hung on the cross. Eventually, the weight of the body made it impossible for the victim to breath. As this occurred, the victim would need to pull himself up on the cross to catch each breath. The legs of the victims were broken to prevent the victim from breathing this way. In reality, the violence of the Crucifixion depicted in the film is substantially less than the violence that Christ and the hundreds of thousands of others that went to the Cross actually endured. The media also attacks the scourging scene as being too long and violent. These newly arrived biblical scholars say that the scourging is mentioned in one line in the Bible yet lasts 10 to 15 minutes in the movie. Apparently, these researchers have discovered a new link between the length of lines in the Bible and real time. Of course, this is just the opposite of their position on Genesis in which they insist that a few lines of the Bible equal billions of years of real time. Nor do the attackers understand basic Catholic Christian salvation doctrine. God became man and entered human history so that he could endure the Passion and the Crucifixion and thereby atone for the sins of the whole world from the beginning to the end of time. By believing in Him and his sacrifice for us we are saved from sin and death and promised life ever lasting. Think of the magnitude of the violence of the sins of the whole world in just the 20th century. Communists in Russia killed 20,000,000 of their own. Nazis in Europe killed between 15 and 20 million Christians, Jews, Gypsies and others. Red Guards in China murdered millions. The Khymer Rouge in Cambodia slaughtered at least a million in the killing fields. And, closer to home, since Roe v. Wade was decided here in the United States about 30 years ago, 20,000,000 unborn innocent babies have been sucked into vacuums. There has been a lot of sinning and death. The violent death of Christ depicted in the movie and the Gospels is overshadowed when measured against this small sample of the sins of the whole world. And, since under Catholic doctrine the purpose of the Passion was to atone for all such sins the enormity of the sacrifice needed to equate to the enormity of the sins for which it atoned. The Father's plan of salvation included the violent death of Christ. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus prophesized the end to which his life was headed and directed. To meet this end, the Word needed to become flesh, that is to say God needed to become incarnate and enter human history in a time and place of great violence and turmoil. The plan of salvation could not have unfolded in an idyllic pastoral setting of love and tranquility. It needed to occur in an environment of great emotions, violence and brutally. What better time for God to enter history than the Roman era of the Caesars when some of the most depraved and perverted men ever to yield power in human history were on center stage? What better place than occupied Israel where some scholars estimate that more than 250,000 people were crucified in the course of the long Roman occupation. What better time and place than the time of Roman hegemony when more than 60,000,000 people were enslaved by the dominant world culture? By necessity, the Father chose a violent place and time for human salvation history to be written and it is so depicted in the film. The other attack on the movie is the all too familiar race card that has become the last refuge of the radical relativistic rhetoritician. The cries of anti-Semitism have been loud and long and strong. The elite's reliance upon the race card reminds me of something I learned the first year I was practicing law. One of my mentors taught me: Jon when the facts are on your side argue the facts, when the law is on your side argue the law and when neither the facts nor the law are on your side argue a fraud. That principle applied here means, if you can't make any logical or reasoned points launch a personal attack. Of course, in these politically correct times the most damaging personal attack that can be made is the accusation of racism. You are guilty until proven innocent. The claims that the film is anti-Semitic are totally meritless. It is true that many Jews in the movie are portrayed in a very bad light just as some Jews are portrayed in the best possible light. This is just as it is in the Gospels. Indeed, it is just as it is in life. Among all groups of people there are good ones and bad ones. To paraphrase Mel Gibson, Schindler's List shows the Nazis performing acts of unspeakable horror and brutality. But, it was not an anti-German movie and no such accusations were made. Caiphas, the high priest, in particular is portrayed as very evil and very anxious to see Christ crucified. This is consistent with the Gospels and consistent with the behavior of collaborationists in all Roman colonies. Just as the Romans perfected crucifixion and capital punishment, they perfected development of loyal colonial clients. All Romans colonies followed the same pattern. The Romans allied themselves with local leaders who would do their bidding and they murdered those who would not. This occurred in Gaul, in Germania, in Britainia and in Israel. By Christ's time, the Romans had occupied Israel for more than 50 years and you can be certain that the so-called local leaders were nothing more than Roman cronies and sycophants. To claim, as the attackers of the films implicitly do with their accusations of anti-Semitism, that Caiphas and his crowd represented the Jews is as insulting to the Jews as it would be to claim that the Vichy French during the Nazi occupation represented the French. It simply is not true. The Gospels show that Caiphas wanted Christ dead even before he arrived in Jerusalem for the fateful Passover. Jesus was a direct threat to the unholy political, social and economic alliance that Caiphas and his extended family had woven with the Roman occupiers over the prior 30 or more years. Numerous members of Caiphas' family had served as the High Priest during the Roman occupation and the family had much to lose by any change in power. Thus, as Christ is making his way to Jerusalem, Caiphas muses: "If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away our place." "Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not." Consider for a moment the differences between Christ and Caiphas. Caiphas wanted to kill Christ to save the nation for himself. Christ was willing to sacrifice himself to save the people from themselves. Upon his arrival in Jerusalem Christ went to the Temple and threw the money-changers out. Who were these money-changers? They were the Temple insiders who checked those attending the rituals for cleanliness. Among other things, they would determine if the animals that had been brought in for sacrifice were "clean." If not, they would sell the attendees properly clean animals. Not surprisingly, most attendees were found to have brought unclean animals from the outside and the money-changers were more than happy to sell clean animals at a very tidy profit. This was probably the last straw for Caiphas, as his extended family had participated in and profited greatly from this sordid business over the years. The mobs in the streets are also portrayed in a very negative light in the movie. But, then I can't think of a single mob in history that acted positively. When the mob sacked the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1917, when the mob destroyed the Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad in 2003, when the mob pulled Reginald Denny from his truck in Los Angeles in 1996, when the mob ruined the Christian city of Constantinople during the Crusades they were ugly, violent and barbaric just as the mob that mocked and spit on Christ in the Gospels and in the movie. But, the mob, the rabble on the streets of the streets, were not the Jews, they were the mob. The mob misbehaved as it always does when humans allow themselves to be herded together into a pack of nameless, faceless, and faithless dehumanized animals and act out their most violent and remorseless impulses. In truth, it is the individual Jews in the movie that are the heroes just as in the Gospels. There is a beautiful portrayal of motherhood and the Blessed Mother. There is a heroic young woman that offers Christ water during the procession to Golgotha. There is Simon of Cyrene who while unwillingly pulled from the crowd to help carry the Cross eventually locks himself arm in arm with Christ and becomes willingly determined to help Christ complete his suffering and sacrifice. And, of course there is Christ himself who after all the pain, deprivation and suffering he experiences still promises one of the thieves he is crucified with a place in Paradise and who in his last words asks for forgiveness for all those who have tormented him. These are the heroes and they are all Jews. The critics of the movie claim it perpetuates a notion that the Jews killed Christ. Here, the critics demonstrate their inability to comprehend black letter Christian theology and its symbolic depiction in the movie. In every scene where violence and brutality occurs there is an evil menacing demonic presence, an androgynous hooded figure. This figure appears each time that men exercise their free will in a manner contrary to the will of God. It is the option to do good or evil that distinguishes man from the animals and it is the selection of the evil option that leads to sin and death. The hooded figure is in the Garden with Christ as he elects to stay or flee, it is there during the scourging, it is there with the mob and it is there at the Crucifixion. And, although not shown in the movie, it is there everyday in our own lives too. Thus, in filming the crucifixion scene, Mel Gibson made his only appearance in the movie and filmed his own hand driving the nail into the Cross. Gibson understands the timeless and infinite nature of God and the salvation purpose of the Passion. He knows that even though Christ died 2000 years ago he died for all sins, including those of Mel Gibson, the Romans, you, me and yes even the Jews. Why is there so much controversy about this movie? Why did the media attack it and try and dissuade attendance? Why, now that the film has become a box office block-bluster is the media suggesting that there is something wrong with those who attend and appreciate the film? Why the false claims of anti-Semitism? Any why have audiences flocked to the movie in such large numbers? I think the answer to the last question is that Christians are troubled by the ever-watering down of theology that has occurred across most denominations over the last 40 years. I think that Christians are starving for tell it like it is and was doctrine and theology. The Pope, after viewing the film said: "It is as it was." Or as Mel Gibson said in an interview: "I know what went down and I filmed it." Too many Christians can't learn in their churches what really went down in Jerusalem 2000 years ago much less what it means. They are flocking to the movie, as difficult as it is to watch, because they are thirsty for the truth and the film presents it in a very unabashed manner. It is this quenching of the thirst that troubles the media, the talking heads and the self-anointed elite experts of the secular world. Motivated by the exact same fear of self-preservation as Caiphas, they claim the movie is no good and that it is not good for us to see. The revelation that there remain millions of people that hunger for the bread of life is a direct threat to their experiment of living in a God-less materialist culture. They are troubled and threatened by such developments. The threat is so real that they have played their ace in the hole… the race card and they have played it very hard. The accusations of anti-Semitism and its automatic association with Nazism are intended to marginalize, indeed demonize, the opinions of those that attend and appreciate the movie. These false accusations should be recognized and called what they are: a perpetuation of the ongoing anti-Christian hatred that flared during the French Revolution and that has been a central feature of the so-called Western enlightened intellectual tradition since then. But this should not surprise us faithful Catholic Christians. Christ told us it was coming when He said: But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me: © 2004 Jonathan S. O'Donnell, Chancellor to the Anglican Province of Christ the King Delivered at St. Ann's Church, Palo Alto, California
(March 14, 2004)
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