Walking Together

March 19, 2004

Christ’s Passion and Death

            Our Catholic parishes and missions pray the Stations of the Cross during Lent.  The fourteen stations have for centuries provided Catholics a way of meditating upon Christ’s sacrificial love.  “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13).

            Catholics who frequently pray the rosary know that Tuesdays and Fridays are devoted to the five sorrowful mysteries.         In churches and homes, Catholics have crucifixes - - the cross with the body nailed to it, a reminder that love can be stronger than  pain and suffering.

            Most other Christian churches do not have Stations of the Cross;  few Christians other than Catholics pray the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary.  And most Christian churches display the empty cross, the cross of victory, rather than the crucifix.  Catholics are blessed with several forms of prayer for meditating on  Jesus’ suffering and death.

            Hundreds of thousands of  Christians have visually encountered the Lord’s suffering and death through the recent film The Passion of the Christ: beating, scourging, mocking, crowning with thorns, carrying and being nailed to the cross, a Roman spear into the Lord’s side - - all these violent acts The Passion of the Christ depicts graphically. 

            The violence in the film, in my opinion, is overdone.  The same story could have been dramatically told with five or ten less minutes devoted to brutality, especially in the scourging at the pillar.  Nevertheless, the film strongly dramatizes Christ’s persevering love throughout the violence he endured for our salvation.

            Mel Gibson, a schismatic Catholic who is the film’s director and producer, uses artistic license to advantage several times in the film by including vignettes not in the gospels.  For instance, when Mary sees Jesus fall under the cross (itself not in the gospels), the film has a brief flashback to Mary helping the child Jesus after he had fallen at their Nazareth home.

            Some criticism of the film, I believe, is also overdone.  For instance, one commentator objected to a visual presence of the devil,  saying that the devil’s presence is not found in the gospel stories of the Lord’s passion and death.  The overpowering evidence of evil in the Lord’s last hours, however, provides a script-writer the license to visualize Satan’s presence.

            Much controversy surrounding the film revolves around whether it blames Jews for Christ’s passion and death.  The high priest Caiaphas is certainly portrayed in a bad light as are other Jewish leaders. So too is the Jewish crowd, goaded  by Caiaphas to insist on Jesus’ crucifixion.  But the film makes clear that only the Roman authorities and their soldiers had the power to crucify.

            Some Jewish leaders and people, not Jews of all times, and a specific Roman procurator and his  Roman soldiers, not all Romans, occasioned the Lord’s suffering and death.  The film seems to maintain that it is sinners who are really to blame for the Lord’s crucifixion: after Christ is taken down from the cross, Mary tenderly holds his limp body and then peers directly at the audience as if to say, “See what your sins have done.”  It’s easy to blame others, instead of ourselves and our own sinfulness, for Christ’s death.  Each Mass proclaims that Jesus died “so that sins may be forgiven.”

            May meditating during this Lenten season on the suffering and death of Jesus leads us with greater love to the most important event of all, Easter’s celebration of the Lord’s resurrection from the dead.

Anti-Semitism

            It is a fact that the high priest Caiaphas and other religious leaders, with some Jews in Jerusalem, wanted the death of Jesus.  It is also true that it was the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, who ordered the Roman soldiers to carry out the crucifixion of Jesus. 

            It is also a fact that the early Church was persecuted by Jewish religious leaders: Peter and John were brought before the Sanhedrin, Stephen was stoned to death for blasphemy, followers of Jesus were arrested by Saul (Paul) prior to his conversion and his own eventual imprisonment.  These contentious relationships between Jewish leaders and early Christians fostered animosity and a later prejudice which led to terrible injustices against Jews during subsequent centuries.

            Some Jewish leaders are deeply concerned that the film The Passion of the Christ will occasion or even cause an increase in anti-Semitism.  Those concerns should be taken seriously!  Pope John Paul II wrote recently in his apostolic exhortation  Ecclesia in Europa that “acknowledgment be given to any part which the children of the Church have had in the growth and spread of anti-Semitism in history; forgiveness must be sought for this from God, and every effort must be made to favor encounters of reconciliation and a friendship with the sons of Israel.”

School Story

            A second grader came home from school and said to her mother, “Mom, guess what:  We learned how to make babies today.”  The mother tried to hide her shock.  “That’s interesting,” she said.  “How do you make babies?” “It’s simple,” replied the little girl.  “You just change ‘y’ to ‘i’ and add ‘es’.”