WEEP -- JESUS LOVES YOU
By Frank X. Blisard

© Copyright F.X.Blisard 2004

Having seen the movie "The Passion of the Christ" twice now, I can
empathize with people who are hesitant to see it at all. I am not sorry
that I saw it, and I am actually "glad" that I went back a second time. I
put "glad" in quotes because what I really mean is not that it made me
happy, but simply that it was important for me to see it, and to see it
again. It was important because I am trying to take Jesus seriously these
days.

A Protestant caller to a Catholic talk-radio program the other day
observed that reactions to this movie are breaking along "liberal" and
"conservative" rather than denominational lines, and he had a point. I'm
sure that many of us have made the same observation since the film opened
on Ash Wednesday...actually, long before that. Perhaps this is one of
those nasty stereotypes we are always warned about: "liberal" Christians
prefer a "warm and fuzzy" Jesus and a "social" gospel; "conservative"
Christians prefer a "fire and brimstone" God and a "messianic" Messiah
(imagine that!). But I think it goes deeper than that. It goes back to a
question that Jesus himself asks in the Gospel: "What think ye of the
Christ?" (Matt 22:42). And, since the thrust of the whole conversation
related in that passage (Matt 22:41-46) is that the Christ is not King
David's "son" but rather the son of someone greater than David, this
question in turn points to another set of questions: "Whom think ye his
Father is?" and "What think ye of that Father?"

Indeed, the debate over this movie merely brings to the general public's
attention a debate that has been raging in academia for over a century
now, well under the "radar screen" of most of us: Is Jesus Jesus? Are the
Gospels "gospel"? What is "The Good Book" good for? The ticket sales for
Gibson's Gospel give a thundering answer to those questions, an answer
which academicians and journalists alike find most unsettling --
unsettling because they have long enjoyed the illusion that these
questions can remain forever open and debatable, and Mel's minions have
given them a glimpse of a world in which such questions have been
resolved. And what is worse, in this other world life goes on quite
normally, even peacefully: no hordes of true believers streaming out of
cineplexes hell-bent on torching synagogues or universities or the New
York Times building; no book-burning parties in the town square; no
rallies of goose-stepping Christians rounding up infidels and burning them
at the stake. How can this be?

This can "be" simply because the multitudes who are vicariously walking
the Via Dolorosa with Jim Caviezel are turning the wrath of God inward,
not out. They are experiencing through this particular flawed work of
religious art what every devout Jew experiences on Yom Kippur - the
awareness of their own sinfulness, and the assurance of a gracious God
that "though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow"
(Isaiah 1:18). They regard Jesus of Nazareth as the 'scaped-goat
"pre-figured" in the ancient Jewish rites, and the inescapable Aramaic of
the film forces them to face the mysterious bond that exists between them
and the Children of Israel. And many of them see "The Jew" not in the
dark-cloaked members of the Sanhedrin, but in the man on the cross -- and
in his grieving mother, whose piercing gaze at the film's conclusion they
cannot forget.

My father, like Gibson's, has tried for years to convince me that the
Nazis could not possibly have destroyed six million Jews in six years
("Just do the math..."), but I have never bought it. I have been to Yad
Va-Shem. My wife has been to Auschwitz. I have seen the photographs her
Uncle John brought back with him from "The War." And I have loved (and
lost) more than one Jewish woman in my life. Both of my parents -- and
most of their siblings -- were racists of one sort or another, yet their
children, by and large, are not. And I do not believe that this paradigm
shift is an isolated event; I believe that it was something experienced by
my generation as a whole, regardless of how many of us have resisted it.
Secularists might call this "evolution." I would call it "grace."

One inescapable fact highlighted by the "Protestant caller" I mentioned
above is that this movie is bringing Catholics and Protestants together in
a genuine religious experience in a way that no formally "ecumenical"
event in recent memory - not even Vatican II - has been able to do. I
fully expect that, after the dust settles, we will discover that it has
done something similar for Christians and Jews, despite the furor over the
issue of anti-Semitism surrounding the film.

I am profoundly grateful to Mel Gibson for making this film, not only for
the effect it has had on me, but especially for the effect it has had on
my children, both of whom are now independent, self-sufficient adults
dealing with the usual issues of their postmodern generation -
disillusion, doubt, and distrust of anything resembling tradition. What
he has done for them is "simply" to translate the essence of the Gospel
into a medium that they and their peers find irresistible, into a "story"
that they will actually "read" (or, in postmodern-academic jargon, into a
"text" that they will actually "negotiate"). He has, in effect, done for
them what I could not. And yet their response to this film is nothing
less than an affirmation of everything that their mother and I, in our own
stumbling way, have tried to teach them about faith, love, and forgiveness
- three things that Mr. Gibson has repeatedly said are what his film is
all about.

Personally, I don't care if certain journalists or university professors
can't fathom my faith in a God who would die for me (and even for them).
I don't even care if they mischaracterize this movie as a "sadomasochistic
snuff film" (as more than one of them has done) or as fodder for the
lurking anti-Semites among us (as hardly any of them has failed to do).
Nothing that they -- or any of us, for that matter -- say or do can unsay
what "The Christ" said in his life or undo what he did in his death.

And I really don't care whether Mel Gibson, Jim Caviezel, or the amazing
cinematic icon they have lovingly crafted ever wins a single award from
the American Motion Picture Academy, the Golden Globes, or the Cannes Film
Festival. The treasures they are storing up in heaven are much to be
preferred over such trinkets.