Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
For more features from the life of our diocese, check Diocesanlife....ONLINE; and Bethlehem
News.
 The
Passion of the Christ
You Could Make a Movie Out of It
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Diocesan Life, April 2004
The first written works from which the familiar gospels sprang were rather compact
stories of Jesus' death and resurrection. From these early passion narratives
the gospels grew in detail as more stories were remembered and recorded. What
is important is the fact that the key issue the first evangelists wanted to set
down was the manner in which Jesus confronted and defeated death. For us who
are being saved, it is the most important story there is.
That story has so many compelling elements that you could make a movie out of
it. Of course, you would have to choose, when making a visual representation
of a story, what you would emphasize. Let me tell you what my movie would emphasize.
Who is the main character? It is hard to put him in a box. Sometimes beautifully
tender, sometimes poetic, sometimes speaking judgment, sometimes downright apocalyptic-and
driven by a vision of the Reign of God whose coming involves both terrors and
joy. Someone who fits in nobody's pocket, who is so poor that he cannot be bought,
is headed for trouble, and he knows it. He knows it and speaks of it as his greatest
accomplishment. I have struggled with his story on a somewhat adult level for
more than forty years now (enough time to have reached any other promised land),
but he eludes the grasp of being figured out, possessed, domesticated. I have
no insight into him that gives me power over him; he cannot be trapped in his
own speech or in some inner contradiction as you or I can. Basically, because
he cannot be controlled by others, he is a suspicious character.
That such a person would be seen as enemy by religious leaders, state officials,
and various self-consciously good people is not a surprise. Nobody likes someone
who challenges the Way We Do Things. Nobody likes someone who says that the normal
ways of feeling good about oneself and having power over other people are insufficient.
Nobody in the clothing business, or any business, appreciates anti-consumer remarks
like that notorious speech about the lilies of the field. Nobody who makes the
Elder Brother angry is going to be very popular: prodigals seldom take the time
to vote.
Where the movie could get interesting is that he is betrayed by a friend. In
a culture where we coolly turn and say, "So I lied," or "That
was then, this is now," where we stay faithful until someone better comes
along, we may ask what the big deal is. Is there any sense of desolation quite
like knowing that someone you trusted, befriended, loved, or to whom you have
made yourself in some other way vulnerable, has not honored that trust? Human
relationships are all built on the concept of reliability. When that is gone-well,
the story of Cain and Abel is hardly ancient history. In the most literal way
imaginable, Christ begins to bear our sins when Judas rats him out for money.
That they were Jews should have been irrelevant. Tragically that lesson was missed,
to our lasting shame. What is relevant is that people who thought they stood
for good thought it was acceptable to get rid of one troublemaker in order to
protect God and the people. The idea of disposable human life is still around.
It's not just the obvious bigotry. People in Philadelphia want to get rid of
toxic substances when they dredge their harbor, so they decide to dump it in
Carbon County and the ex-mayor in Harrisburg colludes-after all, we raped that
coal land and population once, twice should be all right. The concept that other
people's lives are not as valuable as ours is pervades time and history. Christ
before the Sanhedrin is not about Jews, it's about the lies people tell themselves
when destroying the less powerful.
The Romans. They conquered the world without trying to win anybody's hearts or
minds, and did not stoop to hypocrisy. They maintained order by a kind of systematized
brutality that has to be respected for what it was, and it certainly did bring
a species of "peace." The ultimate pragmatists, they knew what they
had to do, and having decided to do it, did not leave room for sentiment. Ask
the Carthage Chamber of Commerce. In terms of law and order, from a Babylonian
original they perfected crucifixion precisely because the whole process, as depicted
by Mr. Gibson in such detail, amounted not just to dispatching an undesirable,
but the total humiliation, degradation, and reduction to wretchedness of those
who were to serve as public warning: resistance is not only useless, it will
bring total destruction. All governments have blood on their hands. Our American
self understanding is that the government reflects our will, so this episode
of the Romans is an important one. Do we see in Jesus before Pilate anything
of the complicity of "we the people" in atrocities ancient or modern?
Or is that too offensive a question to ask in an election year? Have we ever
meditated on the photograph of Palestinian teens dancing with joy at the news
of 9/11 and asked, why?
I guess then that my movie is about cosmic and personal forces of evil, of which
the scourging and nailing are a part but not the point. Jesus' suffering and
death reveal us for what we are. Pity and horror certainly are appropriate, but
they dare not distract us from this truth: individually and corporately we continue
to do the very behaviors that brought the Son of God to horrible death, or we
will not be changed and the world will not be changed.
That so dying, bearing in every way your sin, my sin, our sin, he could pray
that God would forgive us, is the converting moment for me. Christ indulges not
in victimhood but intercession; the love just never stops. How does any sane
person reading the story dodge that love? Even the centurion at the foot of the
cross gets it-and that's what the passion narratives want us to get. By Christ's
consistently loving the Creator and the creatures, sin is exposed, love is exalted,
and we are invited to look on the one we have pierced and might as well return
to God, because his love is just not going to quit.
Gibson's Christ is resurrected with an ugly, mean look on his face, and strides
off, perhaps to kick somebody. In the book on which the movie is based, however,
the Jesus whom the disciples meet after Easter says, "Peace be with you." When
the story ends this way, the possibilities are endless, aren't they?
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