Passion
A few years ago, I was asked to give a reflection at a Good Friday service. This was always a somber night, of course, even for a fairly liturgy-shy Protestant congregation; the lights were low and there were no attempts at humor, and we left a darkened sanctuary in silence, to return 36 hours later in our Easter bonnets. So to speak.
My subject was Pontius Pilate, and I gave a little five-minute riff on the ultimate responsibility of those who see horror unfolding and do nothing, not to mention (what intrigued me the most) the Pirandello aspect of a low-level Roman bureaucrat caught in a drama without knowing his lines.
But I saw the strangest thing that night. As I approached the pulpit, I noticed crouched behind it, just to the side of where I was to speak, a middle-aged lady from our congregation, a church elder. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, and she had a hammer and a board.
At the end of every reflection, the speaker would extinguish a candle, and she’d give the board a couple of good whacks, filling the sanctuary. Boom. Boom. Another candle, another nail driven into the all-too-human form of our Lord on the cross. In case we missed the point.
This is the most violent movie I have ever seen.
That was Roger Ebert’s reaction to “The Passion of the Christ,” to which he awarded four stars, by the way.
Listen: If Roger Ebert says this, a man who sees, what? 200 films a year? Then it’s going to be the most violent movie I have never seen.
We’ve known this for a while, those of us who’ve been following Mel’s Big Adventure, but I wonder about the rest. Mom and Pop, Bud and Sis, all heading to the mall to start Lent with a reminder of the suffering of Jesus and throwing up on the way home. I don’t know.
I really don’t. I’ve read the commentaries, seen the interviews, heard the noise. I understand the theology and the philosophy here, but I still don’t know. It’s a puzzlement, not just that Gibson has marketed his film on the backs of this country’s evangelicals, a group, as a traditional Roman Catholic, he must see as hell-bound for being outside the True Church (do they know this? do they care?), but also a constituency one suspects is not all that keen on violence in films. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
But I’ll pass, thank you. Not my cup of tea, scourging and torture and blood, not at the metroplex with my popcorn. Boom. Boom. No thanks. I am a wuss in these matters.
8:28:00 AM 
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