Consider This

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Consider This: A Few Words on
The Passion
by Wendell Sexton - Guest Writer
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Over the course of months Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of The Christ” has generated news stories, I have managed to follow the fervor (the anticipation and the agony) as closely as anyone. The Jews cry out anti-Semitism. The Christians shout evangelism. The critics bemoan gratuitous violence, empty inspiration, and lack of context. The non-religious/pagan/heathen just yell about religion: Don’t want none of that old-tyme religion! Don’t give me none of that Jesus talk! I ain’t no religious fool needing some damnable crutch lists of do’s and don’ts!

My own personal conclusion, after sitting in the audience of a hundred for a 9 a.m. opening showing, is I must have seen a different film.

To the charges of anti-Semitism – the most pronounce of all the criticisms – I speak from the position of a non-Jew. I can never understand fully what prejudice Jewish people face simply for being Jewish; therefore it is impossible view issue from that perspective.

However, viewing what I saw in the film objectively, anti-Semitism never surfaced its ugly head because all the Jews were not presented as a collective unit. In other words, I saw good Jews (Mary, Mary Magdalene, Simon of Cyrene, Veronica, the disciples, and – of course – Jesus, Himself) and bad Jews (the religious leaders, the false witnesses, and the temple guards).

The religious leaders, the Pharisees who brought Jesus to trial, can even be subdivided into their own separate group. No one, of all the critiques being leveled against the film, has made reference to the Pharisees objecting to the witch-hunt of a trial Caiaphas is conducting. Their complaint fleshed out his character as the true villain, while the complaint the false witness threw at Jesus identified his jealousy of Jesus’ assumption of the high priest’s true responsibility; but that remains for another discussion, one more thoroughly attuned to theology than film review.

Returning, for the moment, to the issue of anti-Semitism, the idea itself is completely without merit; and to accuse one who professes the name of Christ (i.e. Mel Gibson) of this nonsensical hatred is to borderline, if not cross, the same emotional error in judgment those who succumb to the anti-Semitism flaw commit.

For an anti-Semite to hate Jews, such a person should hate Jesus as well; yet if that person hates Jesus the Jew, His death on the cross cannot be given as reason for hatred of all Jews. If they believe in Jesus as Messiah, a natural presumption from this use of His death as impetus for their hatred, they cannot remain true to the faith, as they are refusing to forgive as He forgave.

Indeed, how can any honest soul claim a right to judgment after witnessing the depiction of Jesus, in this film, refrain from the judgment He could rightly, and justly, imposed?

People who hate Jews, while claiming Christ’s name, are ignorant of the faith they profess and utterly unaware that Jesus's death was imperative for their own salvation to be attained. For those who choose not to believe in Jesus – if they believe in anything outside of themselves at all – they show themselves as dupes for giving into the lie that hate, simply on the basis of hate alone, is reason enough.

Now as for the opposite side of the belief coin, that of the Christians who assert the film’s arrival as the greatest evangelism opportunity in memory, The Passion of The Christ is no more a film to proselytize the masses into any particular ideological bent than Jesus’s earthly ministry was to preach the Torah, the Jewish law religious leaders obfuscated away from God’s love and into God’s judgment. They took the words God gave to Moses and made them unnecessarily unclear, impossible for the common man to understand.

Such is religion. At its essence, it is man’s own invention to please his concept of God, a return to a fearful bondage pronouncing judgment against an intensely fallible race of creatures.

Jesus came preaching no such message of the sort. On the contrary, it was for freedom that He came to set the people free.