Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, has lead to heated debates about historical fact, Biblical accuracy and spiritual truth. The three are not synonymous. Therefore, when dealing with a topic both so culturally familiar, and so subject to the personal interpretations of the artist and the social climate that produces it, to pretend that any film is accurately telling the story “as it really happened” is a mistake.

Gibson’s effort is visually striking, no pun intended. He has an almost painterly eye in composing shots and in lighting scenes, colored, according to his interviews, by the dramatism of well-known Christian art- especially of artists steeped in the emotional fervor of Mediterranean Catholicism, like Caravaggio. And, like Caravaggio, Gibson has a sharp eye for detail, pressed into the service of telling his story with great passion. It’s the story he’s telling that is perhaps problematic. And despite the staggering amount of media hype about this film, Gibson’s interpretation is crushingly traditionalist. It is more like a paean to the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the 16th Century than a persuasive and refreshingly insightful attempt to relate the Gospel in a way that speaks effectively to the sensibilities and issues of the 21st.

What is at the core of Gibson’s interpretation is his sincere belief in the heroism of Jesus as a man who “died for our sins”. There is some theological ambiguity, however, in his interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement. It is unclear whether Jesus died “because of our sinfulness” or “in order to relieve us of the burden of our sins”. The tendency to universalize Jesus’ actions as applicable to all people throughout history, though spiritually understandable from a faith perspective, is actually midrash after the fact of whatever historical specificity can be attributed to the event. Gibson seems to ascribe to Catholic views of humanity’s fallen nature, articulated in the fifth century by St. Augustine in his doctrine of Original Sin, and persistently emphasized throughout subsequent centuries until the Second Vatican Council. Gibson demonstrates the traditional Christian obsession with human sinfulness through scenes of exceptionally vicious and sadistic torture ad nauseam, continuing relentlessly through most of the film. He does provide a few halfhearted attempts by the commanding Roman officers to put a stop to their soldiers’ competition to see which of them can outdo and exhaust the other first. But these are oddly ineffectual on soldiers historically noted for their strict training and obedience- a characteristic explicitly noted in the Gospels, where Jesus’ heals the faithful centurion’s daughter. Gibson’s agenda seems to be to convince the viewer by such relentlessness that this nightmare was God’s will, and nobody could stop it. He makes it look, however, more like Satan’s will than God’s- especially with the white faced character in black always floating through the background from Gethsemane to Golgotha glowering at Jesus through his eyebrows- at one point even perversely, if incomprehensibly, caressing a freakish cross between a baby and a midget with a hairy back (reminiscent of scenes from Fellini’s Satyricon).

Jesus, presumably, is to be seen as heroic for simply surviving this grisly ordeal at all, but is rendered as devoid of both personhood and personality as the raw meat into which his body is so graphically converted. Nor is there any attempt to convey a convincing motivation for the Romans taking such perverse and obsessive delight in their torture. The Latin dialogue has them even making puns about caning the dog, as they select the sticks for his beating (cane being a homonym for the word “dog”), and exhorting each other to make joyful music with their blows. Jesus, rendered nearly unrecognizable by this psychopathic brutality, is then continually and gratuitously whipped more as “incentive” to get him to drag his huge cross up the hill faster. That other execution victims are only given the cross bar to carry, but Jesus is expected to drag this huge structure of solid 10x10 beams, is another nod to traditional iconography over more probable historicity. Bleeding enough in the fortress courtyard and on the streets of Jerusalem to need several transfusions, his mother and Mary Magdalene reverently wipe the ground where he had been beaten, sopping it up in clean white towels improbably given them by Pilate’s distraught and compassionate wife. We can only assume this was to preserve his sacramental blood as a relic rather than to do the Romans the maid service of cleaning up their torture chamber. En route to Golgotha an unnamed woman, whom tradition has called Veronica, wipes his face with another clean cloth, (hinting at the miraculous relic, the “Veil of Veronica” in which the “Volto Santo” or sacred face was supernaturally imprinted), leaving Jesus’ face no cleaner, but the cloth soaked in blood, clutched reverently to her breast. Jesus and his enormous cross are then dragged up the final hill by the hapless bystander forced by the Romans to help their prisoner last long enough to be crucified - a man whom the Gospels name Simon of Cyrene. After more torture- nailings and rough treatment- Jesus is then crucified next to two thieves who looked freshly bathed and coifed by comparison, yet are supposedly being justly executed for their sins by the brutal Romans.

Gibson’s claims to having attempted maximum accuracy and faithfulness to the Gospels are highly selective, to say the least. The Canonical Gospels do not all agree that he was even beaten before crucifixion, some making no mention of it at all. And when we include the broader scope of early Christian writings- orthodox and gnostic- we see that for the first three centuries of Christianity there was no consensus about the “facts”- other than that he was crucified. Yet this beating becomes the very centerpiece of Gibson’s vision. The portrayal of the Jewish priesthood as clearly cynical, jaded and cravenly self-serving, is not only offensive, it is is so sweeping and almost caricaturish that it can hardly be deemed historical. The portrayal of the people is confusing as to whether they’re screaming their abuse at Jesus, at their own priesthood, or at the Romans. This is apparently Gibson’s way of expressing the traditional Catholic conviction that we are all sinful by nature. And the portrayal of Pilate as a sort of philosopher on the horns of a moral dilemma, torn between trusting his wife’s intuition and his own political instincts, is hardly credible of a man known to have ordered the crucifixion of over three thousand people. Such a tyrant would not likely have been intimidated by either the Temple priesthood or the rabble. Here too we have Gibson buying into what was a traditional interpretation, whose implicit exoneration of Pilate’s responsibility for Jesus’ death pandered to an empire whose endorsement was needed for the faith’s continued survival. There is, moreover extensive documentation, both Christian and Roman, from that “Age of Martyrs”, when early Christians endured horrific torture serenely, and in some cases even cheerfully- to the disarming consternation of some of their pagan tormentors. It is hard to imagine that Gibson, who claimed in an interview on the Tonight Show to have spoken to “literally thousands of scholars and theologians”, would be ignorant of such things. It is even odder, if he knew of this, that he would make the artistic decision to imply that the servant was in fact greater than the master if his followers could endure such pain better than Jesus did himself. That stands in contradiction to Gibson quoting Jesus’ insistence that the servant is not greater than the master in one of the film’s very few flashbacks to his actual teaching of the disciples.

The greatest failure of this movie is not, however, its traditionalism or its selectivity. It is its failure to connect the horror to Jesus’ life or teaching. The failure to convey his spirituality as anything more than stoicism is deeply disappointing. In fairness to Gibson, this not just a disappointment with his film, but one felt by many people who find traditional presentations of Christian doctrine remote and unsatisfyingly, divorced from their own life experience. A torturefest of such appalling graphic clarity does little to bring Jesus closer to us- but does much to reinforce institutional Christianity’s primary weapon- the use of guilt and shame to elicit the compliance of the faithful with Church doctrine. It is as likely to instill hatred of the perpetrators in the viewer as it is compassion for or understanding of Jesus. This is sad, because it grossly undermines the genuine power of the doctrine of the Atonement, or “At-One-ment”, that the crucifixion legitimately represents. To understand how Jesus’ crucifixion accomplishes atonement for humanity’s sins requires deeper reflection on the nature of sin than Gibson seems to have done, or at least conveyed in his film.

Christianity is often experienced as instilling a notion that sin is "wrong action”- yet the classic definition of sin is that it is a state of being- not an action itself- producing alienation or separateness from God (and, by extension, from neighbor and self as well). The point of the crucifixion is not the horror of what Jesus’ body was subjected to, or the cruelty of those who inflicted it upon him- whether directly or by collusion- but the transcendence of that horror. Nor was the point simply that he, Jesus, was able to achieve this transcendence by virtue of his alleged divinity. That would be a given assumption that does nothing for our mortality. Since it took nearly four centuries for Christians to even come to any agreement about whether Jesus was in fact divine, and what that might actually mean, it becomes all the more important to ponder what Jesus’ behavior might teach us about ourselves and about both his and our humanity. His transcendence, according to even the canonical Gospels, was something he taught was an option for all- for anyone who chose to put his teaching (and behavior) into practice.

A former priest who also spent years in India, I have seen fakirs and sadhus with remarkable abilities to transcend physical pain- piercing themselves with blades and not bleeding or flinching, even performing such bizarre feats as the Naga Babas or naked ascetics do, pulling a jeep loaded with comrades by a rope tied to their penis. In my experience our Western focus on and identification with pain and physical suffering seems myopic and inaccurate, not to mention spiritually unhealthy. I remember my own surprise in Seminary when I learned that this Christian obsession with the agonies of the crucifixion has not always been prevalent. Art history reveals that Jesus was not portrayed in agony on the cross until the tenth century. There was a darker theological shift during the Middle Ages that many Christian romantics still adhere to as the most “genuine” faith. Christ was increasingly portrayed in agony on the cross- as if empathizing with humanity’s sufferings, and eliciting our empathy for him as a sacred bond. The Catholic morbidity that reached its apogee in the gruesome altarpiece for the hospital chapel at Isenheim, painted by Matthias Grünewald in the fifteenth century, was a phenomenon reflecting that shift in the psychology of devotion in the Middle Ages.

The Isenheim Altarpiece portrays a Jesus whose body was covered with hideous boils. It is as ugly as Gibson’s images of flayed flesh. The altarpiece, however, hung in the chapel of a hospital noted for treating a leprous sort of skin disease. By allowing patients to pray before a Christ who so visibly took on their specific suffering, it was deemed to have a healing effect. The altarpiece, moreover, opens up to an inner panel portraying a dazzling figure of the Resurrected Lord, blemish-free and radiant- to inspire the patients to their own healing. This is something Gibson barely even hints at, with a resurrection snippet at the end that seems almost an afterthought.

Whether one believes in Jesus as God Incarnate or not, and whatever one thinks or believes about the Resurrection, institutional Christianity, especially in its catholic variants, has tended to make the crucifixion the primary focus of the faith. When that pivotal event is divorced from the resurrection it becomes merely a tragic, brutal, and seemingly unjust execution of an innocent man whose career as a spiritual teacher was cut short in his prime. If the focus shifts to the resurrection, as Evangelical Protestantism tends to prefer, but fails to treat the life that preceded it, even if the resurrection were provable, it would be simply rendered an anomaly. Jesus’ crucifixion and his disciples’ experience of his resurrection as an ongoing presence after that tragedy, derive their meaning entirely from what preceded those events. Had Jesus not been who he was and lived as he did, the crucifixion would have been unremembered and the resurrection (even if provable) would probably have gone unnoticed. Gibson’s movie does nothing to further or deepen our understanding of that, and by dealing with the crucifixion “in isolation”, does both the event and the viewer, whether believer or not, a disservice.

It would be unfair to dismiss Gibson’s effort altogether. But it is difficult not to speculate about the connections between the use of heroic violence in his other films, (from the “lighthearted” Lethal Weapon series to the passionate Brave Heart and the Patriot), his apparently extremely conservative brand of Roman Catholicism, and the reports of his father’s denials of the holocaust and implicit anti-semitism. Gibson insists defensively and appreciatively that he learned his faith from his father, and has refused to address the holocaust comments head on. Clearly it is possible (and frequently the case) to love someone, but not approve of their words or actions. Distinguishing the two, however, is often hard work, and the failure to do so can create some twisted and conflicted relationships, both personally and institutionally. Even the Church itself may arguably been seen as a dysfunctional family system.

There is no denying the sad fact that Fascism and Catholicism have at times been close allies, even though untold millions of faithful catholics have nobly resisted and rebelled against fascism. Pius XII’s refusal to act against the Nazis is only the most famous example. The Opus Dei, the arch-conservative Catholic “Private Prelature” founded in the 1920’s by a Spanish priest, who also expressed anti-Jewish sentiments freely, was well known in its native Spain to be supportive of the Franco dictatorship. The founder of Opus Dei was recently canonized by Pope John Paul II, and Opus Dei members on the pope’s household staff have purportedly attributed to the pope the comment on Gibson’s Passion, “it is as it was”. Yet whatever endorsements of his film may be given by highly placed clerics- whether Catholic or Evangelical, it would be unjust to accuse Gibson himself of fascism or anti-semitism. I see nothing in the film to blatantly support either claim, since nobody in the film , other than a few women, comes off looking very good. But as we are all products of our upbringing, for better or worse, it is not inappropriate or unreasonable to wonder if Gibson’s has not instilled in him both an understanding of the Gospels and of humanity that sees the dark side more clearly than it experiences the light. If he continues to grow in his faith, if the Christian promise that the Holy Spirit will lead the faithful into all truth is valid, Gibson may yet alter his own views.

The ability to perceive God, theologically speaking, is a reflection of the innate spark of divinity , the imago dei, implanted in each of us. But the clarity of that vision is clouded by our own sense of limitation and our attachments to it. As the German Mystic, Meister Eckhardt, pithily put it, “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me”. While seemingly on her death bed in her twenties, Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English mystic, experienced nine “showings”, in which Jesus revealed the true nature of his Passion to her in successive stages. The first is as gory and agonizing as Gibson’s film, but that torture is soon morphed into increasingly radiant and transcendent images, with the assurance that “all shall be well”. Dame Julian wrote an account at the time- and a second version twenty-seven years later when she had matured in her own understanding of what had happened to her. Each of us has our own subjective reality and experience. To quote a Sanskrit text, “the world is as you see it”. Yet our ability to “see” God is determined by our consciousness of our integral connection to divinity. The more enlightened we become, the more clearly we “see” God. If we were not created, as Genesis puts it, “in the image and likeness” of God, or if that God (by any name) were not inherently present in and accessible to us, our humanity would be reduced to an animal nature. But theologically and spiritually, religion insists that is not the case. Perhaps Gibson’s faith will grant him the grace to see beyond the torture, and the heroism of enduring it, so that the physicality of neither victim nor perpetrator is rendered the sole beastly focus. That does little for his viewers, however, who are stuck with this film’s endless unredeemable brutality.


Robert H. Stucky is the Executive Director of Faith In Diversity Institute.

Copyright © 2004 by Faith In Diversity Institute