Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
The Passion of the Christ
You Could Make a Movie Out of It
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
April, 2004The familiar gospels sprang from compact stories of Jesus’ death. They grew as more stories were remembered and recorded. You could make a movie out of how Jesus confronted and defeated death. What would your movie emphasize?
It’s hard to put the main character in a box. Sometimes tender, sometimes poetic, sometimes speaking judgment, sometimes downright apocalyptic, driven by a vision of the Reign of God, he fits in nobody's pocket. Headed for trouble, he speaks of it as his greatest accomplishment.
As an adult, I’ve struggled with his story for more than 40 years (enough time to have reached any other promised land), but Jesus the Christ eludes the grasp of being figured out, possessed, domesticated. I have no insight into him that gives me power over him. He cannot be controlled.
It’s no surprise that he would be seen as enemy by religious leaders, state officials, and various self-consciously good people. Nobody likes someone who challenges the Way We Do Things. Nobody who makes the Elder Brother angry is going to be popular.
Christ begins to bear our sins when a friend rats him out for money. Is there any sense of desolation quite like knowing that one you trusted, befriended, loved, or to whom you made yourself in some other way vulnerable has not honored that trust?
That some Jews were among the antagonists in the divine drama is irrelevant. 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. That other people's lives are not so valuable pervades time and history. Christ before the Sanhedrin is not about Jews, it's about lies people tell themselves when destroying the less powerful.
What about the Romans? They conquered the world without trying to win hearts or minds. They maintained order by systematized brutality that brought a kind of "peace." 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. Do we see in Jesus before Pilate anything of the complicity of "we the people" in atrocities ancient or modern? 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?
My movie is about cosmic and personal forces of evil. The scourging and nailing are a part, not the point. Jesus' suffering and death reveal us for what we are. Pity and horror are appropriate; but if they distract us from the truth that individually and corporately we continue to do the very behaviors that brought the Son of God to horrible death, we will not be changed and the world will not be changed.
My converting moment is that he could pray that God would forgive us. Christ indulges not in victimhood but intercession. The love just never stops. Even the centurion at the foot of the cross gets it. 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. We might as well return to God because his love is just not going to quit.
Gibson's Christ is resurrected with a mean look on his face, striding off perhaps to kick somebody. In the book, however, the Jesus whom the disciples meet after Easter says, "Peace be with you." Endless possibilities.
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