Mark Shea is Senior Content Editor for Catholic Exchange. You may visit his website at www.mark-shea.com check out his blog, Catholic and Enjoying It!, or purchase his books and tapes here.
A Golden Opportunity
The film has been pre-emptively pilloried as anti-Semitic (even though Gibson films his own hands driving the nails through Jesus' hands to literally drive home the point that it was he — and you and I — who are the authors of Christ's sufferings).
All this you know if you've been following the controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ.
But what you may not know is the remarkable spiritual fruit that this film has borne, beginning with the production and now spreading out to both Catholic and Protestant lives that have been touched by it. From the conversions which took place among crew members on the set, to the repeated reports of Protestants stunned by this powerful film, to the non-Christian reviewers who have found themselves confronted as never before by the gospel, this is a film which presents a unique opportunity for Catholics to share the love of Christ and to read the signs of the times as our Lord commands us to do. We are sitting on the threshhold of a golden opportunity, not only to tell the world about Jesus, but to do the sort of “practical ecumenism” that the Second Vatican Council urged in the Decree on Ecumenism:
Before the whole world let all Christians confess their faith in the triune God, one and three in the incarnate Son of God, our Redeemer and Lord. United in their efforts, and with mutual respect, let them bear witness to our common hope which does not play us false. In these days when cooperation in social matters is so widespread, all men without exception are called to work together, with much greater reason all those who believe in God, but most of all, all Christians in that they bear the name of Christ. Cooperation among Christians vividly expresses the relationship which in fact already unites them, and it sets in clearer relief the features of Christ the Servant.
Amazing Ecumenical Events
Things are taking place now which would have been unimaginable a generation ago. So, for instance:
• The head of a prominent Protestant television ministry said to a gathering of more than 500 hundred mostly Evangelical ministers who had just viewed The Passion of the Christ: “This film puts Christ back on our bare crosses.”
• Multiplex theatres in some cities in the deeply Protestant South debuted the film on up to twenty screens at a time.
• A not-uncommon reaction of Evangelical women to the film is that Catholic reverence for Mary is starting to make sense. As one Evangelical woman summed things up: “I could relate to Mary watching her son die.”
• Mel Gibson himself told Christianity Today: “I've been actually amazed at the way I would say the Evangelical audience has — hands down — responded to this film more than any other Christian group.”
• A Guide to the Passion: 100 Questions about The Passion of the Christ, published by Catholic Exchange and Ascension Press, has sold nearly 400,000 copies in the past month, making it the fastest-selling Catholic book in history.
What makes all this so amazing is that The Passion of the Christ is, with a full throat, a profoundly Marian and deeply Eucharistic proclamation of the gospel in a largely Protestant and even post-Protestant culture.
And our Protestant brothers and sisters are loving it!
Mel's — and St. Paul's — Weird Theology
One reason for this is that the fault lines in our culture have shifted radically. To illustrate, here are a couple of articles which are fairly representative of the mainstream media's ongoing (and futile) attempt to neutralize this movie. Significantly, one is from a “Catholic” writer and one is primarily focusing on “mainline” Protestantism.
Here is Canadian “Catholic” scripture scholar Fr. Gerald Caron who loftily writes in the February 19, 2004 issue of the Globe and Mail:
In Mel's view, God's extraordinary love for humanity is measured by this unimaginable suffering “for our sins.” This is the message that is marketed in this movie. This is the “gospel” according to Mel.
It is as if the more blood there is, the easier one will be convinced of the love of God. It is this emphasis on the blood and suffering of Jesus that I find so disturbing. The fact that God would require Jesus to pay such a price “for our sins” may say a lot about how Mel perceives our humanity, but what picture of God are we left with — a loving Creator or a sadistic destroyer?
Note the scare quotes. It is not the film that Fr. Caron objects to. It is the idea (an idea that just happens to be the teaching of all Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic — not to mention Orthodox and Coptic) that Jesus died for our sins. For Fr. Caron, the idea that Jesus died for our sins is the problem. And he actually has the temerity to suggest that this is some eccentric idea of Mel Gibson's and not the teaching of the Church for all time. This will come as news to eccentrics like Isaiah who wrote “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). And it will be a real jolt to weird cranks and fundamentalists like St. Paul who taught that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3) and seemed to be under the impression that this is among the most elementary truths of the entire gospel.
Ah, but there's more where that comes from. The Dallas Morning News, not to be outdone, informs us in its February 21, 2004 issue that not all Christians go for this bizarre “atonement theology” notion shared by strange sectarians like Mel, St. Paul, and, oh, every faithful Christian who ever lived. Nosiree! According to the DMN, there is another view taken by Highly Educated People:
“It doesn't make sense to me that God would need to be satisfied by sending His Son to be killed,” said Kip Taylor, a religion major at Texas Christian University. “That's a vengeful God and not a God I want to worship.”
“My death is no more important than my birth or every day in between. Why should it be any different with Jesus?” said Kelly Webb, after a class on the gospels at TCU. “If all that mattered was His death, why did He spend three years teaching and preaching?”
So there you are. There's the odd little “camp” of strange and bloodthirsty “atonement theology” adherents occupied by weirdos like Mel Gibson, the Twelve Apostles and a billion other Catholics and Protestants. And, over here, on an absolutely equal footing that is taken with chin-stroking seriousness by the Dallas Morning News, there's the “camp” occupied by people like Fr. Caron, Kip, Kelly, some profs who Know More Than You Do, and the media elite who are tearing themselves in two in their desperation to find some way, no matter how ridiculous, to make it look like Jesus Christ is not the crucified Savior of the world.
Seismic Shifts
What this adds up to a is a seismic shift in relations between Protestants and Catholics. Frankly, a serious, believing Catholic has much more in common with a garden variety Protestant who affirms the deity of Christ and who hails Him as Lord and crucified and risen Savior than he has with an allegedly “Catholic” scripture scholar who repudiates the elementary apostolic teaching that Jesus died for our sins. Likewise, Protestants are coming to recognize that a Catholic who takes seriously and worships the Incarnate, Crucified and Risen Christ is a much closer brother than the apostate who mouths Jesus-as-social-worker twaddle such as, “Perhaps redemption is found in Jesus' teachings about the kingdom of God. Maybe He came to earth to show humanity how to live — to feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, to stand in solidarity with the marginalized. Or maybe He died simply for His unpopular, even subversive beliefs rather than for the sin of the world.”
That's one of the reasons The Passion of the Christ is so significant. In a way that is literally unprecedented in the history of the Church, we are seeing old denominational barriers crumbling as thousands upon thousands of Protestant Christians respond with visceral force to the work of a deeply Catholic filmmaker. The comment quoted above, about returning Christ to His bare cross is a remarkable breakthrough. Much Protestant piety has (understandably) been fearful of Catholic use of images since many Protestants have feared this is a violation of the Second Commandment (“You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4)). Coupled with this has been the fear that Catholics are, in some way, forgetting that Jesus is Risen in their veneration of crucifixes.
But now, more than ever before, Protestants are seeing that the command against images no more condemns Catholic use of images than it forbids the film itself. Moreover, they are seeing that a meditation on the sufferings of Jesus no more denies the Resurrection than the actual crucifixion did (or could).
Likewise, many people are impressed by the way The Passion of the Christ focuses on Mary as a person. Catholics have tended to revere Mary so much that she fades into a plaster saint when artists try to depict her. Evangelicals often have tended to fear Mary so much that she becomes dehumanized in ways that no other mother would be. Some Protestantism has been so skittish of her that she is reduced to a mere “vessel” whose sole function was to act as the means for the Incarnation. Gibson's film renders the great service of showing her as she is: a profoundly human character who loved her Son deeply and whose heart is intertwined with His in a deeply human way. As anyone who has lost a child can relate to, the sword that stabbed Jesus' heart truly pierced hers as well. And a largely Protestant audience is thereby filled with love and respect for her who is the Mother of all the baptized, Protestant as well as Catholic.
God Writes Straight with Crooked Lines
In all, The Passion of the Christ and the unexpected shock waves it has sent through our culture is a remarkable illustration of the old adage that God writes straight with crooked lines. The unlikely collision of a former Hollywood Bad Boy turned Catholic Traditionalist filmmaker with formerly anti-Catholic Evangelicals who are now eager to meditate on a crucifix, all in the service of a film whose Eucharistic and Marian devotion is illustrated with images from Scripture, the Stations of the Cross, and the writings of German mystic, is a confluence that could only happen in America — and only with the help of the Holy Spirit. May the Church seize this uniquely Catholic moment and not be afraid to proclaim the gospel to the millions of filmgoers who will be emerging from the theatre, stunned and deeply moved at what may well be the first time they have ever encountered the gospel of Jesus Christ.
