Thoughts on *The Passion of the Christ*
"Beyond every personal form of witness, I remain convinced that my Christian faith, in order to be faithful to itself needs the Jewish faith. From every Christianizing theology on Judaism and from every Jewishizing theology on Christianity, I tried to witness all that Martin Buber expressed so well: it is the Alliance of the same living God who makes us exist, Jews and Christians, and who creates a community beyond the breakage" - Cardinal Roger Etchegaray.
When I was growing up my Italian mother and grandmother would remain in prayerful silence on Good Friday marking the three hours Christ suffered on the cross. As a child, this sort of solemn piety seemed remote and almost incomprehensible. Of course, even then I knew the story of Jesus' death and Resurrection, but it is easy for 2000-year old events to seem remote. However, after spending two hours watching Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ perhaps I can better understand at a deeper emotional level the piety my mother and grandmother appreciated without the crutch of state-of-the-art cinematography.
There is no way events portrayed in The Passion of the Christ could come as a surprise. Christians have told and re-told the story for two millennia. Catholics explicitly recall the Stations of the Cross every Easter. It is also true that the Scriptures from which we learned the story are not a screen play. Therefore, any movie maker, and Gibson is obviously a skilled one, must fill in the structure. After re-reading the relevant portions of the Gospels, despite small quibbles, most reasonable people would conclude that Gibson's film remains faithful to the story as told in the Gospels. Indeed, a reading of the Gospels is a necessary pre-requisite to meaningfully comment on the movie.
What the film provides is authentic immediacy. The subtitled film is spoken in Latin and Aramaic, the languages of the time. Considerable effort was devoted to re-create the Jerusalem of 2,000 years ago using authentic costumes and actors who appear as Jews and Romans might have looked. There are no blue-eyed, Nordic-looking, carefully-coiffed Jews or Romans in this film. The realism of The Passion of the Christ confronts us with the depth of the sacrifice that Christ experienced and the love for us with which he embraced the suffering. It is just that simple. This is not a movie in the conventional sense with a tidy plot. It is really a scene pulled out of the entire Bible story.
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