Friday, April 30, 2004
Good Passion article
Check it out.
Safire rails that “The Passion” is the “bloodiest, most brutal example of sustained sadism ever presented on the screen ... reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame ...”
The villains at whom the audience’s outrage is directed are the actors’ playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval ‘passion play’ preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as ‘Christ killers.’
But this is nonsense. The only people who come away from this film in “outrage” are those who went into it in outrage. Even Foxman, who slipped into a preview, acknowledges as much:
As the lights came up, the silence was etched with stifled sobs and tears. The 3,000 Christian pastors, leaders, students and others who attended the preview of the film’s graphic portrayal of the events leading up to the Crucifixion were visibly moved by the images that brought them closer than they may have ever been to bearing witness to the Passion of Jesus.
Does this sound like the “kind of sentiment we would expect from Christians ready to act on their latent anti-Semitism?” asks Dr. William Donohue of the Catholic League. That brings us to the heart of the matter. Though we all see the same movie, we hear and see different messages. Where they see Caiaphas, perfidy, and anti-Semitism, we see Christ, his suffering, and what salvation cost. As Bruce Anderson writes in the Spectator, Christians do not focus on the characters that so captivate Safire, Charen, and Krauthammer.
[T]he horror does not come from the artist’s imagination. It comes from the self-sacrifice of the son of God who, after preaching to and living among the poor and the outcast, endured a felon’s humiliating death. Mocked for His pretensions to kingship, He revealed the nature of His Kingdom by embracing His Cross.
Safire rails that “The Passion” is the “bloodiest, most brutal example of sustained sadism ever presented on the screen ... reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame ...”
The villains at whom the audience’s outrage is directed are the actors’ playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval ‘passion play’ preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as ‘Christ killers.’
But this is nonsense. The only people who come away from this film in “outrage” are those who went into it in outrage. Even Foxman, who slipped into a preview, acknowledges as much:
As the lights came up, the silence was etched with stifled sobs and tears. The 3,000 Christian pastors, leaders, students and others who attended the preview of the film’s graphic portrayal of the events leading up to the Crucifixion were visibly moved by the images that brought them closer than they may have ever been to bearing witness to the Passion of Jesus.
Does this sound like the “kind of sentiment we would expect from Christians ready to act on their latent anti-Semitism?” asks Dr. William Donohue of the Catholic League. That brings us to the heart of the matter. Though we all see the same movie, we hear and see different messages. Where they see Caiaphas, perfidy, and anti-Semitism, we see Christ, his suffering, and what salvation cost. As Bruce Anderson writes in the Spectator, Christians do not focus on the characters that so captivate Safire, Charen, and Krauthammer.
[T]he horror does not come from the artist’s imagination. It comes from the self-sacrifice of the son of God who, after preaching to and living among the poor and the outcast, endured a felon’s humiliating death. Mocked for His pretensions to kingship, He revealed the nature of His Kingdom by embracing His Cross.
