The Passion of the Christ - Reflections by S. Mark Heim
This movie raises many topics for discussion. But two are virtually required. One is anti-Judaism. It is required by a history of Christian failure on this score. Matthew Boulton and Sharon Thornton have effectively addressed the question, so in my brief comments I will simply echo what they said. The second topic is Christian belief about Jesus’ death (hardly unrelated to the first point). This is, after all, the occasion for the movie’s existence and—for Christians—the necessary reference point for a response. The reactions to the movie have made it clear that even where there is passionate agreement on the saving significance of this event, there is no agreement on what that significance is.
So we need a five-minute summary. The short version is that Jesus’ death saves the world and it ought not to happen. I think that is a fair telegram of what the four gospels communicate. On the one hand, Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. He teaches his disciples that the messiah must be delivered over and die. He goes “as it is written” in prophecy, it says. Despite his own reluctance and anguish, he does nothing to avoid the end---“not my will, but thy will be done” he says. He is supposed to die.
And yet the gospels are equally emphatic that Jesus is innocent, falsely accused, that his killing is unjust, that it is shameful for his friends to abandon him, that those who try and execute him are indifferent to truth, captive to evil, motivated by expediency and power. It is wrong for him to die.
This is God’s plan and an evil act. Which is it? Are Pilate and Judas criminals or saints? Do the gospels know what they’re talking about? If this hasn’t bothered you, you’re not paying attention. Until you have this problem, nothing is going to make sense. Everything worth learning has its hard parts, the tricky passages…like math problems where there’s that one point where it’s so easy to take the wrong turn. The difference between being right and being wrong is so small, that one last multiplication step and remembering whether it should come out negative one billion or positive one billion (and that’s a difference of two billion!). The gospels have such a passage in the passion narratives. It’s a razor’s edge. Hold on to the problems. You have to add up all the oddities or it won’t come out right.
So here is the movie I wish Gibson had made. The key point in the movie I wish for is already in this one. It comes when Jesus is brought back before Pilate and the crowd after having been whipped and brutalized. After the plot goes back and forth a bit, with Barabbas being released and Pilate temporizing, pushing and shoving breaks out in the front ranks, between the Roman soldiers and members of the crowd. And that’s it. Things snap. Crucify him, Pilate says.
Satan is a figure in Gibson’s film. But this is the one moment Satan certainly should have appeared (but doesn’t)….moving in the crowd and saying “We’ve got to get rid of Jesus or he’s going to bring the Romans down on us.” And moving among the Roman soldiers and rulers, saying “We’ve got to get rid of Jesus or there will be rebellion and blood on the streets.” And nudging up to Peter and John…and Mary, saying “Don’t say anything---do you want to get killed like that too?”
This movie would have run the same verses from Isaiah at the beginning that Gibson does: with his stripes we are healed. And alongside it there would be a single other verse, Luke 23:12, the verse that comments after Herod and Pilate have shipped Jesus back and forth between them and each taken a turn at humiliating him. It says “And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other.”
The Romans are at odds with the Judean Jews. Jewish factions are at odds with each other. The Romans are afraid of rebellion. The religious leaders are afraid of repression. They all want and expect Jesus’ death to have a reconciling effect on this situation. That seems to be precisely what Caiaphas and Pilate have in mind. It makes enemies like Pilate and Herod friends before it even happens. There’s nothing like a little redemptive violence to bring us all together.
So is this the way God works? Is this God’s plan, to become a human being and die, so that God won’t have to kill us instead? Is it God’s prescription to have Jesus suffer for sins he did not commit so God can forgive the sins we do commit? That’s the wrong side of the razor’s edge. Jesus was already preaching the forgiveness of sins and forgiving sins before he died. He did not have to wait until after the resurrection to do that. Blood is not acceptable to God as a means of uniting human community or reconcililng with God. Christ sheds his own blood to end that way of trying to mend our divisions. Jesus’ death isn’t necessary because God has to have innocent blood to solve the guilt equation. Redemptive violence is our equation. Jesus didn’t volunteer to get into God’s justice machine. God volunteered to get into ours. God used our own sin to save us.
Is there any point in Jesus dying this particular, specific kind of death? Yes, because his death exemplifies a specific kind of sin we all need saving from, and lays the basis to overcome it.
We humans took a terrible thing—scapegoating violence against the innocent, or against those who are guilty of something but not the demonic effects we claim----and made it a good thing. It brings us together, stops escalating violence, unites us against a common enemy. We overcome our conflicts and make peace by finding a common enemy, by hating together. Satan can cast out Satan, and become all the stronger for it.
God was willing to be a victim of that bad thing we had made apparently good, in order to reveal its horror and stop it. And in so doing God made that occasion of scapegoating sacrifice (what those who killed Jesus were doing) and occasion of overcoming scapegoating violence (what God was doing). It is the same event, but what is happening in that event for the people who kill or accept the killing is not what’s happening in that event for Jesus and God. God used our sin to save us from that sin. So that victims of such acts would never be invisible---they look too much like Jesus. So that we would turn to finding some new basis for peace, such as that around the communion table.
This is the razor’s edge. It is why you have what sounds like the same language overlaid on this event from both sides. Christians say it is a sacrifice….but to end sacrifice. They say “blood shed for us,” but blood shed once for all. They say “We are reconciled in his blood,” but they mean we have been freed to live without the kind of reconciliation that requires blood, the kind Caiaphas, and Pilate and Herod had in mind.