Braveheart Christianity - Mel Gibson’s Troubling Passion Play

[Matthew Myer Boulton was Assistant Professor of Worship and Preaching at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, Massachusetts.]

The Buddha once remarked that understanding his instruction is like “trying to catch a poisonous snake in the wild”: it’s all too easy to get bitten. Teachings themselves, the Buddha warned, even and especially the best ones, are dangerous. And among Christian teachings, none are better or more treacherous than those about Jesus’ “passion” (from the Latin, passio, “suffering"). Theological ideas have teeth, and in the new film, “The Passion of the Christ,” Mel Gibson ventures out into the wild, and gets bitten.

The real trouble, of course, is that he won’t be the only one. Buoyed by controversy, the film will become the most watched passion play in history, and so its strengths and flaws - “The Passion” has plenty of both - will have a breathtakingly broad audience. Already, the film’s critics are deeply divided: some have hailed it as a masterpiece comparable to the works of Dante (First Things), while others have chosen different terms: “obscene” (The Boston Globe), “almost sadistic” (The Los Angeles Times), and “a sickening death trip” (The New Yorker).

Worries about anti-Judaism arose first, as many recalled the sordid history of Christian pogroms against Jews, and the ways Christian passion plays have often provoked and helped justify violence against so-called “Christ-killers.” Hitler himself, after attending the renowned passion play in Oberammergau, Germany, declared the production a “convincing portrayal of the menace of Jewry,” and a “precious tool” for his war on Judaism.

But concerns about the film’s graphic and gory depictions of torture soon arose as well. Most will never see a more violent movie than this one (that it is rated “R” and not “NC-17” is indefensible), with its sadistic soldiers and pools of blood. To explore these two concerns - anti-Judaism and excessive violence - I want to zero in on two of the film’s key aspects: the portrait of Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, and the sequence in which Jesus is flogged and flayed. Like miniatures, these features point to the film’s larger problems, which are, finally, theological.

Gibson has both the will and the ingenuity to imagine an extra-biblical scene in which Pilate and his wife, Claudia, privately confer. The troubled procurator laments how imperial life, with its endless cycle of repression and rebellion, pulls him into shadows where “truth” is obscure - and so the scene invites us to understand Pilate as a man caught up in the larger, rougher forces of his time. But this raises the question: couldn’t Gibson have done the same for Caiaphas?

There are good biblical and historical grounds for doing so. The biblical grounds, which are more relevant to Gibson’s overall approach in “The Passion,” are found in John 11. There, immediately after Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, “the chief priests and the Pharisees” call a meeting of the Sanhedrin and ask, “What are we to do? . If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation” (Jn 11:47-48). Pilate has his troubled tale to tell, but so do the members of the Sanhedrin, and their fears about the Roman threat to their temple and their people - which they are, after all, charged to protect - form the basis of Caiaphas’ proposal: “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (Jn 11:50).

Gibson fails to include this episode in his film, and he also fails to imagine a scene that elaborates on it, as he does in the case of Pilate. And so in “The Passion,” Caiaphas’ particular circumstances, fears, and motives remain obscure; in him, we can only see the blank face of evil. The same is true, of course, of the bloodlusty Jewish crowds in Pilate’s courtyard and along the way to Golgotha (scenes which both Catholic and Protestant passion play guidelines strongly discourage). Without more insight, these clamoring figures can only be caricatures - and when it comes to passion plays, Christian caricatures of Jews are only too chillingly familiar.

The first snakebite, then, is here: in “The Passion of the Christ,” Jesus’ Jewish opponents are villains, pure and simple, and the purely villainous Jew has been a cliché in Christian anti-Jewish art for centuries. Gibson’s portrait of Caiaphas, and of the Jews who follow his lead, is amnesiac and irresponsible filmmaking. Every passion play is an exercise in historical and liturgical memory, and with respect to historical anti-Judaism, it ought to be an exercise in Christian repentance, too.

But by omitting the key scene from John 11, Gibson also passes by one of the most interesting theological themes in the New Testament passion narratives, and his film suffers for it. For immediately after Caiaphas’ proposal, John writes that the high priest, however unwittingly, has prophesied correctly (Jn 11:51). What appears as a Machiavellian proposal (that “one man die for the people") is also God’s good news for humankind: that “one man die for the people,” indeed, and that this man die, as John goes on to put it, “not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God” (Jn 11:52).

In other words, for John, even the very plot to kill Jesus is, at the same time, an unconscious prophecy revealing the divine work of salvation. God transforms even the apparent enemy’s plan into a proclamation of God’s graceful rescue. The sword is not thrown into outer darkness, but preserved, and remade into a ploughshare.

This is a kind of deep divine irony, and the gospel passion narratives brim with it. Those supposed to follow - Jesus’ disciples - in fact betray and desert. Those supposed to be enemies - religious and imperial authorities - in fact unwittingly follow. When the Roman soldiers robe and crown Jesus as “King of the Jews,” their mockery is an ironic, unconscious form of telling the truth. And above all, when they crucify him, the paradigmatic and ubiquitous instrument of death in their day - the Roman cross - is transformed into what is, for Christians, the paradigmatic symbol of abundant life.

Gibson is alert to divine irony at times in “The Passion,” and here he is at his best. For example, he visually links Pilate’s hand-washing to the hand-washing before the Last Supper, suggesting that what Pilate thinks is mere disavowal is, deeply and ironically, the preparation for the Eucharistic sacrifice at the cross. Or again, Gibson imagines a scene in which the initially reluctant Simon of Cyrene agrees to help Jesus carry his cross, but only after making clear that he, Simon, is an “innocent man” carrying the cross of a criminal. Simon has it exactly wrong, of course - or, better, he unwittingly has it exactly right, but reversed. Jesus is the one true “innocent man,” carrying every cross, everywhere.

But when it comes to portraying Jesus’s most ardent opponents - Caiaphas and the angry Jewish crowds most of all, but also the Roman soldiers - Gibson’s feel for God’s secret reversals eludes him. His vision flattens out, and the snake bites a second time. Instead of a richly ironic musical score, in which even Jesus’ enemies are caught up in the symphony of grace, we get a Manichean morality play, where evil is not so much transformed by God’s love as merely beaten by it. The passion narratives themselves, thanks be to God, are far more interesting, and far more hopeful. After all, the cross is the great Christian symbol of suffering and death transfigured into abundant life, not suffering and death merely outdone by a valiant hero.

But then again, “The Passion of the Christ” is a film brought to us by the director and star of “Braveheart,” Oscar’s “Best Picture” of 1995. Heroism is Mel Gibson’s specialty, as is violence, the other memorable feature of that Scottish epic. And so if we find in “The Passion” a heroic Jesus beset by an exceedingly violent world, we should hardly be surprised.

The most violent sequence of all begins when Roman torturers, following Pilate’s order, shackle Jesus to a low pillar. “My heart is ready, Father,” he prays (Psalm 108), and the blows begin. First they flog Jesus with canes, and bring him to his knees. This, it seems, is enough. But then Jesus turns, and sees his mother.

Most fundamentally, “The Passion of the Christ” is a cinematic Stations of the Cross, and Mary - hauntingly played by Romanian actress Maia Morgenstern, whose performance carries the film - is our guide. By my count, there are at least three key junctures in Jesus’ ordeal when he and his mother come face-to-face: at the Sanhedrin trial, at the public flogging, and after Jesus falls on the road to Golgotha. She does not want to see her son brutalized, but she nevertheless looks on, with a blend of incomprehension and intimacy.

And when Jesus, brought to his knees by the Roman canes, turns and sees his mother, something happens. As if gathering strength from her, he stands again. The soldiers are incredulous; this Galilean is stronger than the others. And only then, with Jesus back on his feet, does the sadist-in-chief order his men to switch from canes to whips tipped with metal and glass - and the flaying begins.

What is going on here? The crucial clue, I think, is in the film’s opening Gethsemane scene, where Gibson rather daringly inserts a satanic figure who tempts the struggling Jesus to abandon his mission. “No one man,” Satan purrs, “can carry the burden of all sin. It is far too heavy.” Thus the challenge is announced, and now Gibson’s Jesus, hero of heroes, must rise to meet it. Mary will help him. The sin of the world is very, very heavy, and so the handsome Son of God must be very, very brave, and very, very strong.

Gibson is theologically convinced that the greater the torment, the greater the portion of sin’s burden is carried, and the greater the shepherd’s love for his sheep - and so he sets out to overwhelm us with a dark kind of awe. Caning, he decides, is not enough; and so Jesus stands again. We must move to flaying. And so on. The film’s scenes of graphic violence, then, far from being extraneous or merely fetishistic on Gibson’s part, are essential to his theological point of view.

Of course, Gibson did not invent this particular atonement equation, but he has given it a stunning, consistent presentation. The trouble with it is this: Jesus’ suffering in “The Passion,” precisely because it is so severe and apparently exceptional, virtually eclipses suffering everywhere else. The snake bites once more, this time with respect to the meaning of the passion itself.

Jesus’ flayed and bloody body, so graphically destroyed on screen, and finally so distinct from the relatively unscathed bodies of the two thieves crucified alongside him, will for most of us stand out above all other suffering bodies we have ever seen. Thus the film effectively exalts Jesus as the one sufferer above all others. But this exaltation, to my mind, is a perfect reversal of the true meaning of the passion of Jesus Christ.

“Christ crucified” is not the Hero, not the strongest man. On the contrary, he is the weakest man, the least of these. There is his strength. He is not the greatest sufferer, famed above all others. He is, finally, the anonymous sufferer, in radical solidarity with every sufferer, everywhere. There is his proper fame. As the Son of God, he suffers and dies with sinners, forgotten and alone, disappeared into the thousands of Jews and others crucified under a brutal, violent, imperial regime. And so he continues, even today, wherever agonies are borne among the human family.

In the end, the trouble with “The Passion” is that it proclaims a “Braveheart” Christianity. But the Christ of the New Testament, whose passion is so harrowingly portrayed in the four gospel narratives, has a heart not so much brave as broken - “broken for you,” Christians recall. As this film makes its rounds, and another Lenten season moves toward Easter, Christians will do well to remember and proclaim anew Christ’s brokenhearted love.