(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.)
There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him…The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign. – Albert Schweitzer
This may be one of the most famous images of Christ that modern scholarship has produced. Here we see Jesus as a man, bloodied and mangled by a heartless world, his only legacy a barely tenable social agenda that has become the most influential system of ethics in history. If Schweitzer’s social Jesus was the Christ for the 20th century, then Mel Gibson’s iconic Jesus may have set off the conversation that will introduce us to the Christ for the 21st century. I am not saying that his film is this new Jesus, but his film forces us to ask the sorts of questions that may result in his discovery.
Schweitzer’s puzzling, apocalyptic Jesus was not encumbered by being at the center of a massive media controversy, and was able to rest in academic obscurity for the most part. But Mel Gibson’s Jesus has proven so newsworthy that we have all had the odd experience of seeing veteran scholars like Bock, Crossan, and Wright on prime-time talking about typically dull aspects of New Testament history. The prospect of details about the 1st century Jewish judicial system being a topic for conversation at the water cooler is intriguing to say the least. But soon this media frenzy will pass, just like it did with The Last Temptation of Christ or Jesus Christ Superstar, and all we will be left with is a few The Passion of the Christ t-shirts and a number of magnificently important questions.
The traditional question scholars ask about Jesus is how he relates to history. This is a fine question to ask, but the way modern culture (we can include much of contemporary Christianity in this) talks about Jesus implies that he only has meaning insofar as we can talk about him in terms of history. Thus Mel Gibson’s film is bad because: it misrepresents the Jews, it over-emphasizes the suffering, it plays around with the text of the Gospels, etc. These are all matters of historical discussion. But what can we say about The Passion of the Christ as a film?
True, the marketing for the film has focused on its function as an historical document. But this is unfortunate, because where the film stumbles in terms of historical detail it excels as a work of art.
Gibson mainly directs us through the Stations of the Cross as we follow Jesus to Golgotha. Along the way we watch his trial unfold between flashbacks to his life and ministry, and cutaways to the reactions of his mother and disciples during the trial. Simple in plot and structure, much of the dialogue really is an afterthought, an addendum to the images that seem to be Gibson’s point. Book ended by lush, minimalist scenes in the Garden and the empty tomb, the film is occupied with the beaten body of Christ. This lack of context has been to many the biggest drawback of the film. Those with little or no knowledge of the Gospels will have a hard time understanding who this younger Mary with Jesus’ mother is, or who exactly this young man is to whom Jesus trusts Mary’s care. The character of Satan is even more striking in this regard, as his odd presence in the film as a character occurs even outside of the confines of the Gospel narratives.
But this is not to say that one needs a few years at Sunday school to experience the film as it was intended. To watch the film having never read the Gospels would be like reading C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces with no knowledge of classical mythology, or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury having never spent any time in the Deep South. It would be the experience of something totally foreign, the shocking clarity of its images powerful not because they make sense but because one would be sure that somehow, in some grander story, they do make a great deal of sense.
In a strange parallel, this is the same experience many had as they sat and listened to the teachings of Jesus. His parables cast new visions of society and history veiled in a mysterious sort of poetry, one profoundly intelligible to those with the right set of keys but still scandalously alluring to those without.
In the Gospels we learn that people were attracted to Jesus because he “spoke with authority, not as their teachers of the law.” How Jesus taught things was just as revolutionary as what he was saying. Throughout history, Christian art has tried to speak with this same sort of authority, a moving blend of action and mystery. The Passion of the Christ works along the same lines. To be sure, it is little more than twelve hours of Jesus’ life ripped from three years of revolutionary teaching and practice. But as a work of art that functions as a meditation on the sufferings of Christ, its limited scope may be its greatest strength.
Most serious criticisms of the film have simply questioned why anyone would make a film like this. Many see Jesus in this film as Gibson’s ultimate fighting champion, the archetype for Braveheart’s William Wallace, or Lethal Weapon’s cop duo, equal parts stamina and justice. Many have found anti-Semitisms lurking behind the story, or at least things that resemble what have been thought of as anti-Semitisms in other periods of history. Others have found the lack of context crippling, and find Gibson constructing a Jesus that doesn’t exactly fit in with everything else we find in the Gospels.
Some of these are serious criticisms. And the marketing for the film didn’t help at all. Calling something “the greatest tool of evangelism the Church has seen in 2,000 years,” and then proceeding to market the film directly to people certain to enjoy it was sure to guarantee it an audience. But it did little to underscore the fact that The Passion of the Christ really is a great work of art. We were told: it is the “best Jesus film ever made,” a “masterpiece of modern cinema,” or “the next best thing to actually being there!” (Okay, I made that last one up.)
Anything that gets this sort of press deserves the intense critical reaction that The Passion of the Christ has received. But all of this marketing, and its resulting critical backlash, seem to be about a different film. The Passion of the Christ that I saw was a simple, well-produced work of art that could hang next to any number of stained glass windows or triptychs that make our most famous cathedrals as awe-inspiring as they are.
It isn’t the most “historically accurate” depiction of Christ’s last hours ever made. There are a few historical inaccuracies, and a few mythic embellishments of the historical events. It isn’t a clear identification of the motivations of those responsible for Christ’s death. Even though Gibson could have put different words from the Gospels in the mouth of the Sanhedrin and maybe added a little more cynicism to Pilate’s response, the film is obviously not showcasing these scenes as anything other than stops on the way to the Via Dolorosa. The film isn’t even an overt attempt to convert others to Christianity. Its utter lack of any context pretty much guarantees that for these two hours you are going to be thrust into a mindset, into a personality, and into a set of motivations that will feel mystifying even to those very familiar with the events of the crucifixion. It just draws on the same mysteries that make the Eucharist such a central practice in the Christian tradition.
We simply can’t talk about “history” and “ this film” at the same time. We don’t have to. Most discussions of the film, both positive and negative, stumble over this important point and lose their way in the forest for the trees. The idea that something has to be “historical” to be meaningful is the bane of the modern church. This is true even when we are talking about Jesus. In The Passion of the Christ we come imaginatively into contact with the profound personality of Jesus. Pieced together through bits of church tradition, painfully detailed imagery, and a few choice subtitles, The Passion is a seamless garment of good film.
Even if the Historical Jesus has something strange about Him, yet His personality, as it really is, influences us more strongly and immediately than when He approached us in dogma and in the results attained up to the present by research. – Albert Schweitzer
In The Passion of the Christ we come into contact with this strange personality. This is the point of the film and the tradition of Christian artwork in which it belongs, and this is precisely where the film succeeds. As a test case for rendering truly Christian language in film, the language of contemporary culture, The Passion of the Christ is an eloquent example of the possible future of theological discussion. One can question whether the level of violence that Gibson depends upon to get a reaction from us is necessary. It probably isn’t. Just seeing Jesus as a small child tripping over stones, or Jesus drawing a line in the sand as the defender of social outcasts is powerful imagery enough.
The greatest fault of the film may be Gibson’s reliance on imagery of suffering to evoke the same response that the merest fragment of narrative from the rest of the Gospels could if filmed in a way that squeezes every drop of power out of the medium.
But Christian art is the activity of thinking creatively and “Christianly” about things. Though the subject matter of Christian art doesn’t always need to explicitly be the key images and stories of the great Christian narrative, sometimes it can be. Gibson’s film is a great work of art that thinks creatively and “Christianly” about what a Jesus film in the 21st century would look like. Its shortcomings are outweighed by the plain fact that he succeeds on this point. It is hard to relate The Passion to other films of the great “Jesus film” genre because it simply does something the other films don’t. It speaks about Jesus in a different way, it stretches these images to the limits of their capability, and it forces us to take them on their own terms.