The Physical Suffering of Christ (The Passion of the Chirst)

If you have not yet seen Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, you just might want to give up the project, even if your friends are adamant that you go, NOW. The violence is extreme and unnerving, and because it is, the film cries out for our taking a second look at just what the Passion Narratives in the Gospels were trying to do in their own depictions of Jesus' physical suffering.

One thing they were trying to do was to make sure that Jesus' followers fully appreciated his humanity as well as his divinity. By the time the Gospels were written down --- close to half a century after Jesus' death and resurrection --- many people were becoming bewitched by the notion that God's Son only appeared to be a man, but really was the Eternal Father in disguise. The brutal treatment that Jesus endured in the final hours of his life on earth was of interest because by focusing upon it, his followers could insulate themselves against false, because overly spiritualized, representations of the Christ circulating widely by the end of the first century.

Another thing that the Gospel writers were trying to do was to help people not only know about, but experience concretely and deeply God's freeing them from the consequences of their sins. The premise of the Passion story is stated best at Isaiah 50:6, that through the lashes on the Messiah's back, humanity's relationship with God is permanently healed. The right man, in God's sight, suffered in our place. Remembering and meditating on Jesus' pain came to be a way of receiving God's mercy and grace into one's own heart.

But how many lashes did Jesus have to take for the sake of both our redemption and our experience of it? Or to put the question another way: just how painful did Jesus' suffering have to be in order to accomplish God's purpose for his chosen people, and eventually, for us?

Mel Gibson is a lot clearer about how to answer these questions than early Christian tradition seems to be. A cursory reading of the Passion Narratives in the four Gospels together, the basis of Gibson's script, suggests that Jesus was at the very least mocked by both Jewish and Roman officials, struck or beaten by the former, and whipped with flesh-ripping, blood-gushing precision by the latter. As is usually the case with the Scriptures, though, more than just a cursory reading almost always makes things more complicated.

Mark and Matthew seem to have known about a Roman practice of flogging criminals before crucifying them, and from the way that both tell the story of Jesus' humiliation, they presupposed that their readers would know about it, too. Perhaps this was why they chose not to incorporate the gruesome details into their respective narratives. Had they given us a verbal picture as vivid as Gibson's visual one, though, it almost certainly would have been for a different purpose than his. They would have known that Jesus' severe flogging actually hastened his death on the cross, and that the Roman soldiers' violence toward Jesus, therefore, actually served a merciful and not only a sadistic purpose.

Things are quite different, though, in the next two Gospels. Luke's Jesus is ridiculed and beaten by some of his fellow Jews, but he receives no flogging either from them or from Roman guards. Pilate proposes a flogging, but only as an alternative to sentencing him to death by crucifixion. The (Jewish) crowd will not hear of it, of course, so Jesus goes straightaway to the cross. In John's Gospel, Pilate both proposes the flogging and has it carried out, but for the same purpose as Luke describes: to avoid condemning Jesus to die while also keeping a Jewish crowd satisfied. If Jesus' conversation with Pilate after the flogging is any indication, he seems anything but whipped senseless in the process. (John 19:8-11)

What might we take away from this brief second look at the Passion Narrative to help us assess Mel Gibson's film? Two things, perhaps. The first is that the details of the physical violence done to Jesus did not have the same importance to the Gospel writers as it does to this archly traditional Roman Catholic movie director. The second is that the focus of the first Passion Narratives was less on what Jesus did for us in his suffering than on what God does for us through raising him from the dead. When Joseph of Arimethaea mercifully saw to a proper entombment of Jesus' broken body, he left Calvary's cross empty. We can, too, with gratitude and joy.