Dear Friends,

Since a number of people have asked for my take on Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, let me give just a few thoughts that might be helpful to some of you. Take them for what they are worth.

I must admit that I went to the movie with strong prejudice, largely because of Gibson’s Neanderthal version of Catholic Christianity, and his similar politics. I figured it would have no redeeming insight or quality. I attended with a group of fellow friars, and came away touched by some scenes, and even awestruck by others, although I think it largely came from a lifetime of meditation on Jesus and personal love of Jesus. I was prepared to fill in the gaps. How could a movie about him not prompt deep response and sentiment?

Specifically, I have hopes that the movie can give images of unconditional love and a redemptive quality to suffering that our world barely understands anymore, and deeply desires. It also has that “whomp on the side of the head” quality that it takes to get young peoples’ attention, and particularly to get male attention. It could well start some people on a serious Jesus journey or spiritual search, even by some of the confusing questions that it raises. This is excellent, and the Spirit will surely use the movie for good.

Negatively, I agree with those who say the movie is almost entirely one-dimensional. It is about suffering pure and simple, as if Jesus was just born to suffer. He has no other message. There is no plausible “why?” to his suffering, and no connection with his teaching, his social or religious critique, his prophetic vision. Any true drama needs character development and not just spectacle. Aristotle said that spectacle was a cheap substitute for true drama, and it would drown out any in-depth message. I believe that is what happens here.

It ends up being a message of Divine will power instead of the much more needed messages of human vulnerability, human solidarity, and human compassion. Jesus for me is the quintessential human, a God given prototype of the human problem and solution, more than a religious version of Atlas or Prometheus. Gibson’s version of Jesus is closer to a Hollywood superhero or Greek god than to the Biblical version of the “son of man.” Although again, I admit, it can still lead people to the human Jesus, but I am just afraid that the Divine heroics will cancel out the human.

As many of you know, I am a strong proponent of the Franciscan understanding of the redemption, based on the teaching of Blessed John Duns Scotus in the 13th century. He did not believe in any “substitutionary atonement theory” of the cross: Jesus did not have to die to make God love us, he was paying no debt, he was changing no Divine mind. Jesus was only given to change our mind about the nature of God! (Imagine what we are saying about the Father, if he needed blood from his son to decide to love us! It is an incoherent world with no organic union between Creator and creature. No wonder so few Christians have gone on the mystical path of love, since God is basically untrustworthy and more than a little dangerous.)

For Duns Scotus, Jesus was the “image of the invisible God” who revealed to us a God’s eternal suffering love for humanity, in an iconic form that we could not forget. He was not “necessary,” but a pure gift. The suffering was simply to open our hearts, not to open God’s – which was always open. Unfortunately, the movie is entirely based on the old atonement theory that suffering was needed, the more suffering the better, and the most suffering the best of all. Unfortunately, it has been the mainline tradition, and has been made into dogma by evangelical Christians. It creates a mercantile Christianity with God as the major debt collector, when what Jesus came to offer was a mystical Christianity with God as the “bridegroom.” It might take these graphic images of suffering love to break through some peoples’ consciousness, but I am afraid it will largely be true for people who do not think too much. Because once you start thinking, the whole thing falls apart. The movie does not appeal to the whole person. Emotions are not bad, however, and can serve as a catharsis and an opening. They might be God’s way into the soul – and our way out of ourselves. But eventually, the message must compel head, heart, and gut, and lead to an honest image of God, the world, and ourselves.

Maybe the success of the movie reveals our own lack of wholeness, or even any desire for the whole picture. Maybe we don’t want to put religion and life together. Maybe we don’t want our spirituality to have any social or political implications. Maybe we like parts more than wholes. And surely good parts are very good, as long as we do not allow them to become substitutes for and deflections from the whole picture, which is the very definition of the Holy.

Richard Rohr, OFM