Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ": A Plea for Fairness

Seldom can a film have been as massively defamed as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Despite praise in some quarters (some of it enthusiastic), critics all over the world have mounted a veritable crusade against the film. Their indictment seems, at first sight, devastating. Examined more closely however, most of the charges are seen to be false. Some of them are mutually contradictory or purely arbitrary. Still others are unintelligible and make one wonder whether the critics saw a different film or whether their real goal was preventing people from viewing this one. After waiting two months to see the film, meanwhile reading all the critics, I encountered outside the theater a sign with a warning from the government film commission that the film was sadistic and brutal, historically unreliable, and contained religious propaganda that could encourage anti-Semitism.

Doing justice to the film and judging it positively does not require approval of everything in it. Even less must one agree with Mel Gibson's traditionalist Catholicism. What we witnessed, however, in the weeks and months following the film's appearance was a campaign of deliberate disinformation that completely failed to take account of the film's artistic and theological content.

The film, according to its critics, is a 126-minute martyrdom—nothing but violence and brutality—typical of both Hollywood and Gibson. This is quite simply false. The film is almost half over before we see the first violence, the scourging of Christ. Even here the critics are wide of the mark. Far from spending ten minutes following "every blow of the whip on and even beneath the skin" (as one critic wrote), the camera breaks away to flashbacks (the washing of feet, Christ's encounter with the woman taken in adultery). And while the scourging continues on the soundtrack, the camera frequently focuses on people in the background: Jesus' mother, Mary Magdalene, Pilate's wife, and the actual director of the action, the archangel Lucifer. The film makes it clear that it is the Devil who instigates this unending violence, humanly incomprehensible in its inhumanity and, for this very reason, realistic, reminding us of so much that we have seen in history.

The charge that the film shows "rivers of blood . . . more than any human being has" is a gross overstatement. It also fails to recognize the theological significance of blood, the biblical symbol of life. Blood also reminds us of the blood of the paschal lamb, which promised rescue and salvation for the Israelites as they were about to depart from Egypt; and of the blood of the sacrificial animals that Moses sprinkled on the people at Sinai as a sign of the covenant with Jahweh. Through flashbacks to the Last Supper the film makes it clear that the few drops of blood that fall from Jesus' wounds as he hangs on the cross on the eve of the Jewish Passover are "the blood of the new and eternal covenant . . . poured out for the forgiveness of sins" by the true Easter lamb, "who takes away the sins of the world" (John 1:29).

Gibson does not show Jesus bleeding to death on the cross, however. This is no normal death. Instead we see Jesus clearly accepting death, just as he has previously embraced and kissed the cross under the mockery of one of those condemned with him, dragging himself to the place of crucifixion with the last of his dwindling strength. Similarly, on the cross we see Jesus actively entering into the process of death freely and consciously with the words "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

The golden thread running through the entire film is the absolute sovereignty of the God-man, Jesus, over all that is happening and his acceptance of the Father's will. Denying himself, Jesus accepts human injustice without complaint, answering hatred and injustice with love. The film's central message is not the brutality of scourging and crucifixion but the transformation of these horrible sufferings into an offering of...