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By Diane Lavos
April, 2004
It’s just a movie, right? A 126-minute film from which
viewers can get up and go about their normal lives in the bright
sunlight outside the theater. But most viewers won’t.
They’ll be disturbed or moved by Mel Gibson’s “The
Passion of the Christ,” which attracts attention like
a flare in the night sky, illuminating different attitudes – many
negative, some positive.
The movie’s themes can prompt viewers to investigate the myriad aspects of redemptive Christianity and the anti-Semitism lurking in unexamined Christo-centricity. Or it can be taken as “fact” and imprint the audience with Gibson’s images of Jews who are all too happy to persecute Jesus and Romans with more compassion than history shows they had.
Some people leave the theater in tears from the violence because of Christ’s suffering, some from anguish that this portrayal overwhelms with brutality and leaves no room in us for “Christ’s call to join him in nonviolent love.”
The above phrase, from Philip J. Mayher, sums up the objections of many UCC people: much brutality, no room for a loving Christ. Mayher, pastor of The Congregational Church of Weston, UCC, has been active in Jewish-Christian relations for years, and was one of the drafters of the UCC “Statement on Judaism” adopted by the denomination in 1987, which overtly rejected the teaching of supersessionism.
Pointing to the visions of French nun Anne Catherine Emmerich which fueled Gibson’s extra-biblical scenes (also see Nancy Taylor’s column) Mayher noted in an interview in The Jewish Advocate, “The profundity of the historic problem is contained in [Emmerich’s] intense contradiction: totally obsessed with the almost entirely intra-Jewish story of a Jewish Jesus and Jewish disciples, she hates Jews in general? All Christians, not just progressive Christian scholars, need to examine ethically how that can be and how they respond to what has been called history’s ‘longest lie.’ You don’t have to be an avowed anti-Semite to perpetuate anti-Semitism; you just have to hold to an unexamined faith.”
Minister and President Nancy Taylor, in a Boston Globe article which ran Feb. 26 after a special viewing of the film by religious leaders, told a reporter, “the movie was worse than I expected. This was not a film about Jesus of Nazareth, but about Mel Gibson’s fascination with violence. We were watching this film with rabbis and priests and scholars, and nobody felt it was biblically or historically accurate. I think it caricatured Jews and misrepresented first-century institutional Judaism.”
Diane Kessler, Executive director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, chose not to see the movie. “I can’t stand to see two kids punch each other on the playground, let alone a movie screen full of violence,” she said. “The Passion narrative is a part of my theology, but not a part of my piety. The cross I look at doesn’t have a corpus on it. My meditation is on Jesus as a living figure and a resurrected being. This is my piety, but I respect other people’s piety.”
Kessler, an ordained UCC minister, reads the texts of the scriptures “in light of the context of my church. I have imagination. Visual images are powerful! I don’t need to see someone else’s interpretation of the suffering of Christ, but I don’t pass judgment on others who do.”
The Board of Directors of the Mass. Council encourages observant Christians to “draw from your own church resources,” said Kessler. “Many denominations have developed texts on how Jews are depicted and how to interpret who was responsible for putting Christ to death. I am hopeful that people will read the Gospel texts and notice how modest in detail are the sections on the suffering of Christ.”
A number of public discussions and presentations have sprung up, reacting to the film’s controversial nature. On March 11 David Fountain, interim pastor of Pilgrim Congregational Church, UCC, Leominster, and Rabbi Alan Alpert of Congregation Agudat Achim, held an open conversation at Pilgrim Church, attended by over 50 people. Titled “Affirming Our Faith: A Jewish/Christian Discussion,” it gave those attending a chance to comment and forge their own interfaith alliance seeking truth, not stereotype. One in attendance, a holocaust survivor, reminded everyone of what it felt like to be called, as a child, a “Christ Killer!”
Rabbi Alpert contextualized the historical setting of the film, clarifying the historical record of brutality we have of Pilate, as opposed to Gibson’s more benign image of him. The movie, Fountain feared, could contribute to a rolling back of the many good reforms of Passion plays, which over the years have fueled anti-Semitic violence. “Good news for Christians,” he said in conclusion, “need not be bad news for Jews.”
Some reviewers have suggested that we get our religion from our community of faith and treat ‘The Passion” as cinema. If viewers and non-viewers alike use this controversial film as an impetus to examine their faith and their interfaith relationships with open hearts, our free society which allows filmmakers this wide latitude (as it allows freedom of religion) will be strengthened.
For more reviews and texts by UCC ministers, see our Web site, www.macucc.org.