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Gibson's Passion tormenting, rewarding
by
Salim Mansur
The following article is a reprint from the London Free Press March 3, 2004.
In Mel Gibson's cinematic rendition of Jesus' torment and death, the moment of catharsis is captured brilliantly when a tear drops from the sky on the scene of crucifixion, and the heaven begins to weep. In The Passion of the Christ, Gibson pulverizes audience sensibilities, leaving nothing for imagination to conjure about Jesus' suffering, with his graphic presentation of the scourging and execution of a terribly abused individual, finally nailed to a cross. There is no reprieve in Gibson's direction from the sound and fury of injustice hurled at this truly innocent man on that Friday of the Jewish Passover feast, whose only crime was to speak the gospel of love and whose death came to signify ever after as the defining moment in the making of the western civilization. The unsparing, gory narrative has generated a torrent of public discussions, lectures, learned essays and polemics, the like of which we have not seen in recent times. But we needed, in our age of bad faith, to be once again awakened to the story of Jesus, to be reminded the precious kernel of truth in our mortal existence, as Jesus exemplified, cannot be reduced to an expedient calculation of the marketplace. The Passion is a tormenting movie. Gibson forces us to watch when we want to avert our gaze, to see when we want to close our eyes, as he relentlessly pounds us with the message, whether we are Christian or not, that each one of us carries the burden of the injustice done to Jesus on the Golgotha. Gibson has his critics. Historians and theologians have taken him to task for his literalism, that exaggerates through a selective and de-contextual reading of the Gospels. There is also fear Gibson's movie, intentionally or not, carries the potential of inflaming the still-gaping wounds of anti-Semitism just below the surface of western civilization. Gibson's Pontius Pilate bears little resemblance to the man recorded in history as the Roman prefect of Judea who governed with an iron fist. Here, Gibson's literalism in rendering the Gospel accounts of Pilate is on perilous grounds. In his brilliant biography of Jesus, A. N. Wilson drew attention to the distinction between the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history. He wrote, "By the Gospel accounts, Pontius Pilate is no more than a bureaucrat, almost genial, unwilling to condemn Jesus, but urged on to do so by the seething malice of the chief priests and other Sadducean leaders. "Such a distortion of history would not have been so serious had it not been used as an excuse for 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism." Jesus of history is a Jew by birth. While he is divine incarnate to Christians, he is to Muslims a sublime prophet of the highest rank, of exceptional birth bearing a special gift of healing. For Muslim mystics, or Sufis, Jesus is loved as the Spirit of Allah, in Arabic, Ruh Allah. Muslims rarely engage in reflecting on the passion of Jesus. The Qur'an is categorical in denying his crucifixion. This is also a matter of faith. But when a Muslim does reflect on the events of that terrible Friday, as did the Egyptian philosopher, Kamel Hussein, in his book City of Wrong, the striking feature of that history stands out as the unceasing struggle between an individual with conscience and the collective possessing power without any conscience. I found Gibson's depiction hauntingly convincing of this aspect of the struggle between collective hysteria and an individual's refusal to abandon his truth, irrespective of the consequences. Gibson is compelling in his message that, in Jesus' death, we are all implicated. The violence done to Jesus is so unbearable because, viewing his sufferings, we confront our forgetfulness in the endless compromises made with wrongs by which we profit. Gibson has given us a film that is as exhausting as are the writings of Dostoyevsky. We are, however, richer for his devotion to Jesus and to his art.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays.
Posted by editor on March 15, 2004 01:56 PM