Why?
No, I haven’t seen it yet. But what seems clear to me from watching the trailer and reading reviews is that the film doesn’t emphasize the purpose for the brutality of the Cross of Christ. Viewer reactions of disgust and bewilderment evidence little understanding of why Good Friday’s horrors were necessary.
One of my favorite writers, John Piper, has made an admirable effort to rectify this. His short book, The Passion of Jesus Christ : fifty reasons why he came to die, provides scriptural answers to the big question for revulsed and nonplussed moviegoers.
You can read five of the 50 reasons in an excerpt of the book (Acrobat Reader required) that’s been made available on the web.
[…] Since God meant it for good, we must move beyond the question of human cause to divine purpose. The central issue of Jesus’ death is not the cause, but the purpose—the meaning. Man
may have his reasons for wanting Jesus out of the way. But only God can design it for the good of the world.
The March 1st New Yorker has an excellent review of the Passion which makes it abundently clear that for those who dont mind watching incredible violence this maybe a satisfying film but for those seriously interested in Christianity in a fully developed sense this film is pretty awful
“Gibson is so throughly fixated on the scouring and crushing of Christ, and so meagrely involved in the spiritual meanings of the final hours, that he talls in danfer of altering Jesus’message of love into one of hate” etc I recommend readinf the whole review it is thoughoutful and intelligent
Yes, I read this review. It is one of the reviews I read that prompted this entry.
I don’t think Mel Gibson has done the world a disservice by making this film insofar as his subject is the Passion episode and not the entirety of who Jesus was and what he came to do. As crucial (pun intended) as the Cross is to orthodox Christian theology, Jesus’ death is meaningless apart from an understanding of his perfect life; he fulfilled the Law of God perfectly in his life, and then paid the penalty of believers’ sin in his suffering and death, after which he rose from the dead to demonstrate his victory over the curse of sin.
The violence is the point of the film—it gives viewers a glimpse of what it was like for God himself willingly to suffer the wrath of God for his people.