A View from the Pew on Gibson's Passion

By the time this special edition of Shofar hits the press Gibson's once front-page-news movie may have the lingering interest most front-page stories retain. The heavy publicity preceding the movie's release, and the record ticket sales in the early showing, which are the kinds of details often catching the media's ephemeral fascination, do not completely overshadow the issues that arise from the composition, filming, watching, and effects of The Passion of the Christ. My task here is to critique something of the ordinary Christian's response to the movie. In particular, did Passion stir up anti-Jewish sentiment? And did it add fuel to supersessionist tendencies among Christians? Other questions arise from the flash of popularity the movie aroused.

Why did numerous conservative Protestant churches pay out some of their peoples' tithe money to buy up whole showings of this R-rated film, produced by an arch-conservative Tridentine Roman Catholic? Why did being overwhelmed by the movie become nearly an act of faith for many devout Christians, Protestant and Catholic? Watching the movie was for many Christians tantamount to standing by in Jerusalem, watching Jesus suffer and die. But I remind my Christian friends that Gibson's Passion is not a documentary, but a movie, replete with dramatic license. The Pope may have said, "It is as it was," but in a number of ways it was not as it was.

The view from the pew is well mixed. Some Christians feel seeing the movie is virtually an act of faith. By contrast, a devout Scots lady in my congregation would not see it because she saw it as another evidence of the Gibsonian fascination with violence. In Passion he tried to out-violate Braveheart. William Wallace and Edward I faced off in a wee section in the north of the British Isles. Jesus took on the devil in eternity. Jerusalem in 30 CE just happened to be the earthly time and site where this cosmic battle took place.

It was the shadowy figure of the devil who lurked in a number of scenes in the movie with whom Jesus really did battle. Heaven engaged hell as Gibson saw it. It was a harbinger of the Apocalypse, Armageddon. Braveheart instigated some dreadful deeds by hot-headed young Scots against Englishmen who happened to be at the same pub in my Scots friend's Glasgow suburb. Not only Jews, but Christians too feared that The Passion would fan the smoldering embers of the age-old evil of anti-Judaism. Happily, the fear that Passion would trigger anti-Jewish violence has not materialized—in the United States. What might develop in parts of Europe or the Middle East where the movie might nourish existing anti-Jewish fermentation remains to be seen.

Those in my flock and my city who most appreciated Gibson's movie responded with zero anti-Jewish sentiment. The climate is not the same as when medieval passion plays provoked attacks against Jews. The dark shadow of the Holocaust remains long. Even if Gibson had created an English subtitle of the blood-libel line from Matthew's Gospel, I doubt that this would have awakened the un-Christlike behavior against Jews that it once did. Christians have taken to heart the grotesque images of the Crusades, the medieval pogroms, and the Holocaust. Many wonder how the idea of revenge ever contaminated the way begun by Jesus, who said, "Come learn of me for I am lowly and gentle of heart." Tragically religion may instigate the best and the worst behavior. The worst is the corruption of the best.

Some aspects of the movie stirred me deeply. The serpent's slithering to Jesus' feet in the Garden of Gethsemane immediately alerted me that it was an apocalyptic moment coming. Here Gibson depicted the Christian view of the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15, where God says to the serpent, "He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." Rashi saw no apocalyptic prediction in this verse, but Christians have since early in Church history. The serpent...