Shouting At the Devil (The Passion of the Christ)

It takes going to a full-blown, all-out, on-fire Pentecostal church to experience a pastoral practice that overly respectable Christians have long viewed with contempt, the practice of looking Satan squarely in the face and telling him in no uncertain terms to get lost. Exorcisms are no match for shouting-down-the Devil sessions. If you can ever catch Bishop T. D. Jakes at just the right time in one of his many inspiring worship services, you will get this point immediately.

In Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, there was indeed a lot of shouting going on, but none of it was at the one who most deserved it. The Satan figure was given free reign to move in and out of scenes with a will of (his/her?) own --- whispering, staring, hovering, taunting, relishing, gloating --- and to put words from an old spiritual to a little different use, nobody ever said a mumblin' word. Just as Luke did not, when he closed his narrative of Jesus' temptations in the wilderness with the hair-raising words, "So, having come to the end of all these temptations, the devil departed, biding his time." (4:13)

The devil came seriously back into the picture when he took possession of Judas (Luke 22:3), and started sifting the rest of the disciples "like wheat." (22:31) Jesus then conceded him the dark night of his arrest (22:53), a darkness that returned at mid-day to cover Golgotha and "the whole land" in infamy (23:44). But unlike what happens in Gibson's picture, Luke's picture reaches out to Satan not on Satan's terms, but on God's: Satan has been "given leave" to do his destructive work.

Personally, I would like it better had Luke refrained from introducing this character altogether. His narrative has no real need of him, other than to do a little spooking around here and there. Luke's Jesus seems supremely confident that his own prayers for the disciples' faith will be answered in the long run, as they certainly were. And he is in no way himself unstrung by Satan's sifting. Unlike the anguished words put in his mouth on the cross by Mark and Matthew ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), Luke gives him triumphant ones: "Father forgive them…you will be with me in paradise…into your hands I commit my spirit." As another song goes, if the devil doesn't like it, he can sit on a tack.

But Mel Gibson obviously needed Satan in his own reconstruction of Jesus' Passion, just as legions before us have needed Satan for their own foul purposes of hating love and loving hate. So, from Gethsemene to the foot of the cross, the Evil One flounced in and out, on (its) own, through deranged children, in the rage of Caiaphas and the terror of Pilate, and over an inflamed mob, to be seen clearly only by the one through whom God was soon to deal out its final defeat.

I think, though, that there may be an unintended gift to us in all this: for on the big screen, there it was, just waiting to be shouted at and out.

Are you ready, Satan? Try this for openers: when you tell us that you own us and are owed a divine ransom for our souls, you are nothing --- nothing --- but a liar. Still listening? Here's more: when you tell us that God is so angry with us that he must make one of us pay for everyone else's sins, you are nothing --- nothing --- but a liar. When you tell us that God's justice must be served before his love can be savored, you are nothing --- nothing --- but a liar. When you tell us that you have any power, authority, purpose, vision, or truth in you, you are nothing, nothing, nothing at all.

As for you Mel, a little shouting may be in order, too. When you tell us that you are only giving us the gospel story, you are lying to yourself as well as to us. When you tell us that your picture of the Passion is a picture of human redemption, you are lying to God. Yours is a picture of a lava flow of rage: pure, unbounded rage. An exploding star system of rage, with black holes all around. Give it up, Riggs, you want to take us down just like you took the really bad guys down in all those other lethal weapon flicks. You want to know where I saw you in your Passion Narrative? Not where you wanted me to see you, at the cross, with hammer and nail. I saw you in that wretched baby flaunted before the eyes of our misery-ridden Lord.

The Passion of the Christ is, in every sense of the word, a truly dreadful movie. But --- and this is where Satan really does get into the act --- its producers will be praying joyfully all the way to the bank.

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.