Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

by Irwin, William, Gracia, Jorge J. E.

  God’s call to us is a Good News call of compassionate forgiveness. When God pronounces forgiveness upon us, we are being judged by God’s love as having fallen short of His love commands. We are judged as needing forgiveness and as being worthy of judgment, owing to our rebellion against God’s love commands. We expect judgment as condemnation, but instead we receive judgment as merciful forgiveness in Jesus. This is the core of the Good News, the Gospel, of Jesus Christ. Part of this core is that we receive, as a free gift, the very Spirit of Jesus and of His Father. The Passion vividly illustrates God’s forgiveness in a flashback to Jesus who frees a woman caught in adultery from punishment by stoning.

  In Jesus, God has taken care of any supposed or self-imposed ground for human alienation or hiding owing to human rebellion. In Jesus, God offers compassionate forgiveness to all people, however alienated and rebellious they are. God counts the death of Jesus as any needed payment for justly forgiving our rebellion. God’s offered reconciliation of us to Himself is a free, unearned gift. It undermines any of our distorted conceptions of a “just” reconciliation. God’s gracious gift of Jesus sets the standard for justice in reconciliation. This is a central theme of Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 3:21–26), and it is foreshadowed in the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16). Divine reconciliation comes in a kind of unselfish, suffering love foreign to us and our inferior, “nice” and selfish ways. It shatters our distorted ideas, including our philosophical preconceptions, about God and about our value before God.

  In receiving Jesus as our Lord, we receive God’s gracious offer of forgiveness and reconciliation. We thereby receive the gift we need to live in unselfish freedom and love. Receiving Jesus as Lord consists in loving, trusting, and obeying him in the spirit of Gethsemane: His will must be authoritative over our wills, just as in the Garden Jesus gave his Father’s will priority over his own. We must forgive others as God has forgiven us (Matthew 6:15); otherwise, we are not truly receiving God’s universal offer of forgiveness. This is a tall order, because our forgiving others, including our enemies, requires that we love them (Matthew 5:43–45), but we lack the power to love our enemies on our own. Such rare forgiveness and love must be empowered by our trusting God to be faithful to us. Otherwise, our selfish fears will hinder us. The Passion powerfully represents Jesus as resisting the temptation to be selfish in Gethsemane, where he obeys his Father’s call to offer his life on our behalf.

  The proper reception of God’s forgiving love requires that I subject my faulty, selfish will to God’s perfect, loving will. This is an ongoing struggle, and not just an intellectual commitment. It requires that I seek help from God, and it cuts to the core of my intentions and desires, the attitudes that motivate me. It is thus a power struggle between God and me, and in the end I will not defeat God. I am thus well advised to fold now, without delay.

  Our second opening question concerned how we can know the God of self-giving love. We can now appreciate the answer. The extent to which we know God as our loving Father depends on the extent to which we are gratefully willing to acknowledge God’s non-coercive authority for us and, as a result, to participate in God’s life of redemptive love (1 John 2:3–6). It thus becomes obvious why we humans (not just atheists and agnostics) have difficulty in knowing God as our loving Father. The difficulty comes from our resisting God’s authority for us, just as Satan does in the movie when he tries to dissuade Jesus from his atoning purpose. The heart of this resistance is our resisting God’s desired agape transformation of us: that is, our change in the direction of God’s morally perfect all-loving character. We contradict Gethsemane in saying or in acting as if we are saying: “Not what You will, God, but what I will.” We thus supplant God’s will, and thereby steal the place of God. We do this whenever we yield to selfishness. We are then at odds with the only One who can give us lasting joy and peace. “The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).

  Our knowing God as loving Father, requires our welcoming and embracing a child-parent, or filial, relationship to God. It includes filial trust in God as one’s rescuer from all that is bad, including moral failure and death. Its heart of obedience emerges in Gethsemane, in Jesus’s obedient prayer to his Father: “Not what I will, but what You will.” Such filial knowledge rarely, if ever, emerges in philosophy of religion or even in Christian approaches to knowledge of God. The result is widespread misunderstanding of suitable knowledge of the living God. We need to understand knowledge of God in terms of the Gethsemane of Jesus rather than the Athens of philosophers.

  The Real Jesus as Scandalous

  The scandal is that despite God’s self-giving love for us, we rebel in ways that call for the suffering of God’s innocent Son. This is the crisis of the cross. The crucified Jesus is a scandal to us and to religion as we know it, but the crucified Jesus is the only real Jesus. So, the real Jesus is, as always, the odd man out. He stands outside and knocks, with his cross and wounds of love, awaiting a receptive entry. The Passion conveys this Good News message clearly. It vividly portrays God and His Son as taking the merciful initiative in coming to us with self-giving, suffering love on our behalf. Jesus suffers long and lays down his life for us, and his Father raises him up again, with love’s approval.

  Will we welcome the real, scandalous Jesus? We move now from a movie to reality. As we stop pretending to be God, the true God will emerge as real in our lives. Will we let God be God? Will we let Jesus be Jesus? Will we come to see who we really are, through the eyes of the crucified Jesus, the savior of the world?*

  SOURCES

  Wesley Carr. 1992. Tested by the Cross. London: Harper.

  Michael J. Gorman. 2001. Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

  Luke T. Johnson. 1999. Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel. San Francisco: Harper.

  Leon Morris. 1981. Testaments of Love: A Study of Love in the Bible. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

  Paul Moser. 2002. Cognitive Idolatry and Divine Hiding. In Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul Moser, eds., Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 120–148.

  Helmut Thielicke. 1959. The Waiting Father: Sermons on the Parables of Jesus. New York: Harper.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Would an all-loving God allow God’s innocent Son to suffer and to die by crucifixion? If so, why?

  2. If God is perfectly loving, could God be a “people-pleaser” who aims mainly to satisfy our wants? Would an all-loving God seek to satisfy our true needs rather than our wants?

  3. If God wants humans to be transformed into God’s all-loving character, what place would obedience have in our coming to know God? Would God seek to change our wills (and our desires and intentions) and not just our beliefs?

  4. Who is in a position to say how God must relate to us, in giving us evidence and knowledge of God? God or humans? Do we naively presume to be able to say how God must reveal Himself to us?

  5. What is idolatry? Do we commit a kind of idolatry when we demand that God meet our standards for how God should be revealed to us?

  * Many thanks to Linda Mainey for very helpful comments.

  V

  Who Is Morally Responsible?

  18

  Christ’s Choice: Could It Have Been Different?

  JONATHAN J. SANFORD

  No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down and power to take it up again. This command is from my Father.

  —Christ, in Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ

  One set of questions Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ brings to the fore center around why the way of Christ was the way of the cross. Why did it have to be like that? The movie vividly presents the pain, physical and emotional, that Christ suffered. Think of the scourging scene where Christ’s flesh is flying from his body, or of the anguish in his eyes as he looks at his chief apostle, Peter, aft
er being denied three times. We ask ourselves why Christ, or anyone for that matter, would willingly go through with it. Did Christ have to? Central to Christ as he is depicted in the film is that he chose to suffer. We see the full moon, the olive trees in the garden, and Christ, alone, imploring his Father: “Hear me, Father. Rise up, defend me. Save me from the traps they set for me.”

  Satan knows of Christ’s anguish, and arrives on the scene to suck hope from Christ by ridiculing his goal of saving humanity through suffering as foolishness. We see the curl of triumph about to wrap itself around Satan’s mouth as Christ is on the verge of cracking. He asks his Father to take his chalice—his allotted portion of suffering—from him, but nonetheless chooses to submit his will to his Father’s: “But let your will be done, not mine.” Satan makes one last attempt to strike at Christ, this time seeking to sting the very core of his being: “Who is your father? Who are you?” But Christ knows the answers to those questions, and his choice is already made as he rises and smashes the head of the serpent which represents temptation, emboldened for his passion. Why this choice? Was this the choice of a madmen? Did he really have a choice? In what sense might it be necessary that Christ suffer and die? Could Christ’s choice have been different?

  Was It Necessary?

  Perhaps you have given no thought to your use of the term ‘necessity’ and its cognates. But if you have, you probably noticed that you use the term to mean different things. For instance, let’s say you suddenly realize that if you don’t return home immediately to turn off the burner on your stove, your house will catch on fire and burn to the ground. You’d like to spend time with your friend, but you hardly need to reflect on the decision to hurry home. There is the force of necessity in this example, but you are also exercising choice. We might call this necessity of the end. If the end is to be accomplished, it is necessary that you do one thing and not another.

  There are other kinds of necessity where you don’t have any choice in the matter. The way gravity causes you to fall on things you’d rather not serves as a ready example of this sort of necessity. We might call this necessity of compulsion.

  Another sort of necessity where you don’t have choice is on the order of nature, or the way things are. For instance, because you are human you don’t fly on your own accord like a bird. It is not in your nature. But there were no birds in my local theater when I watched The Passion of the Christ, and if there were some in yours then we can be sure they missed the central points of the film. It is not in the nature of birds to understand films. The point is that beings are what they are, and this puts certain limits on them that are intrinsically tied to their capabilities. We might call this last instance of necessity necessity of nature. Although you don’t have a choice about this necessity, it is not in every case incompatible with choice. This is so because some beings are, by their very nature, choice-makers. Human beings are one example: We have a nature that necessarily involves the exercise of free choice.

  In determining whether Christ’s choice could have been different, we need to examine it from the vantage point of these three different kinds of necessity: Was Christ’s choice necessary to accomplish an end? Was Christ’s choice compelled by some external force? And, was it in Christ’s nature that he had to die on the cross?

  Redeeming Humanity

  Consider again the words of Satan to Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Do you really believe that one man can bear the full burden? . . . No one can carry this burden, I tell you. It is far too heavy. Saving their souls is too costly. No one. Ever. No. Never”. Satan knew what Christ was up to. This androgynous being chides Christ that it is not possible for one man to bear the sins of all, that his earthly mission is without hope. Why try? Why suffer for nothing? Why indeed, unless Christ had some reason to hope that his passion would be effective, unless he knew that it was possible to bear the sins of humanity on his back on his way up Golgotha. And he does know, or at least thinks he knows. Consider the scene where Mary watches her son fall beneath his cross. Christ’s flesh is in tatters and he’s covered in filth, laying on the ground unable to get up–seemingly as low as a man can get. Mary runs to him: “I’m here.” You’d expect a man in that situation to weep, to complain, to lie there in piteous agony. Christ should be broken by now. But he’s not. He encourages his mother with words—amazing words which are so incongruous to the plight he’s in—that explain the whole meaning of his passion: “See, mother, I make all things new.”

  Why on earth would Christ be in a position where he would have to suffer for everyone else in order to save them? Why in heaven would God the Father allow, or even require, such punishment? What sort of logic is behind this? To answer this we have to consider justice and mercy, and consider them from God’s point of view.

  The traditional account of justice conceives it as “to give each his or her due.” The Judeo-Christian Scriptures have it that our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, failed in this. Instead of giving to God his due they robbed him, and they stained their offspring with the same sin in the process. But did they really do harm to God himself? How could that be possible if God is all-powerful and complete in his own being? Well, it is not possible regarding God himself. Rather, they harmed their relationship to God, the harmony that existed between God and his human creatures.

  Why did God make this law, knowing full well that Adam and Eve would violate it? Doesn’t this seem to make God a fickle tyrant playing games with his subjects, teasing Adam and Eve like some dog trainers who dangle meat in front of a dog only to spank it when it goes for it? Hardly. The law regarding the tree stands for all of God’s laws: They are for our own good. They are meant to ensure healthy relationships among humans and between humans and God. Right living, the happy life, necessarily requires regulation, for we can’t flourish except in doing what’s right. But still, couldn’t God just waive the consequences of the offense? Why does he permit the natural consequences of contravening his laws? Wouldn’t simply ignoring our offence be more merciful?

  Well, frankly, no. First of all, it would make a liar of God, like the bad parent who threatens his or her child with interminable groundings or other varieties of “big trouble when you get home!” only to never follow through. Second, it makes a mockery of sin by making it of no consequence. We’ve all felt the weight of wrongdoing, and the desire to “make things right again” with whomever we’ve offended. But making things right again with God is no easy matter, because the force of the consequences of Adam and Eve’s free choice is that they harmed themselves in such manner that they couldn’t live in a proper relationship with God.

  And so here we come back to why Christ had to suffer. He stands in, as the perfect sacrifice, for all sinful humanity. His passion is both a rectifying of all past and future wrongs, and an enabling of all future rights. He not only repairs the disharmony between human beings and God, but he repairs humanity’s wounded nature, making it even better than before we messed up. God needs nothing, but justice is what it is because God is what he is. Justice is always relational, between two or more parties, and it is the relation between human beings and God that is in need of restoration.

  Rather than pointing to a bloodthirsty or fickle God, humanity’s need for redemption points to God’s mercy in several ways. First, it reveals how we are blessed, or some would say cursed, with the burden of free choice. We can choose to harm ourselves and others with our choices, but we can also do great good, and enjoy experiences entirely unknowable to a being not so endowed. Second, it shows that God performs the great honor of taking us seriously. All of us, like Adam and Eve, want something that cannot be ours. We want to be God, but we can’t. When we act in such a manner that we try to take what doesn’t belong to us, God allows us to fail. Finally, God himself gives us the means to be restored to the right relationship with him. He gives the Christ, his very self in the person of his Son, to bear the brunt of the consequences of our own actions. This is a free act. God was not forced to do
this. He could have let us suffer forever the effects of our poor choices. Redeeming humanity does not involve the necessity of compulsion. But it does involve the necessity of the end. If justice is to be repaired, then something has to be done by God to repair it. Could God have found another means besides the passion of his son? No doubt he in his power and wisdom could. But there are better and worse ways to accomplish goals, and it is more reasonable to assume that God chose the best way, one that would heal not only the offense to justice, but humanity itself.

  Who Is This Christ?

  The Christ we discover in The Passion is no ordinary man, he is the God-man. At least, he certainly appears in every respect to be a man, for he looks like a man, eats like a man, speaks like a man, loves his mom like a man, and bleeds like a man. But this man, with bloodied face and his good eye trained on Caiaphas, also claims to be God—He Who Is: “I AM, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Christ could, we might suppose, be a liar. But this would be out of sync with the rest of his actions, all of which exhibit moral excellence.

  But perhaps, we might suppose, Christ was mad. But again, this too would be out of character for the man who so wisely, so sanely, turned back the would-be-executioners of the woman caught in adultery, which Gibson identifies with Mary Magdelene when she recalls first meeting Christ as she sops his blood from the paving stones around the pillar. The same calmness is on display just after Judas betrays the Son of Man with a kiss: guards and Christ’s followers are swirling in a confused frenzy while Christ alone remains calm, admonishing Peter, “Put it down. Those who live by the sword die by the sword,” and commanding a Temple guard to also lay down his weapon. He tends to the severed ear of the guard, Malchus, who is subsequently so astounded–and perhaps experiencing the first moment of conversion–that he remains behind, spellbound. Christ, unlike so many other characters in the film, is presented as calm and in his right mind throughout.