Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

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

  If he thought Jesus was the new King David, he must have been completely unprepared for watching what would happen next. He didn’t intend Jesus to die or suffer; he intended to catalyze Jesus into starting a revolution. He misunderstood, and perhaps he should have known better. Still, if intentions are what counts, Judas’s ignorance reduces his guilt; he is responsible only for what he intended to happen.

  If Judas was truly unaware that the man he betrayed was also God, we shouldn’t hold him responsible for betraying God, “only” for betraying a man. If he didn’t understand that Jesus would be killed and tortured, we shouldn’t regard him as fully responsible for that either. His ignorance excuses him, although not completely. Even if Judas didn’t know what would happen, the fact remains that he handed over Jesus to the authorities. Furthermore, we might say that he should have known, that he should have suspected, or that he should have made more of an effort to predict it. Perhaps he ought to have looked to heaven instead of hoping for worldly power and an end to Roman occupation. Perhaps somebody who had spent time with Jesus should have understood that Jesus was not a worldly king at all, but something different and better. Indeed, perhaps his lack of understanding was a sign of his too worldly character, symbolized by his interest in money.

  Was Judas a Treacherous Person, or Did He Just Mess Up This Once?

  In reports of trials for gruesome crimes, one of the most damning statements that audiences and juries make about culprits is that they show no remorse. If intentions and outcomes were all that mattered, remorse would be irrelevant. Whatever a killer feels after a murder doesn’t change his intention or the outcome in the least. Yet, we consider remorse relevant because it provides evidence about character. It tells us whether the culprit would have acted differently if he had to do it over again. By focusing upon character, Aristotle provides a third way of thinking about morality which philosophers call virtue ethics. Virtue ethics considers intentions and outcomes too, but it mainly uses them as evidence of character.

  Virtue ethics often stresses the circumstances of an action. Consider Peter’s betrayal of Christ. Gibson’s version makes Peter’s denial of Jesus seem more excusable than it otherwise might have been. Surrounded by an angry mob, Peter is asked whether he is one of Jesus’s followers. Frightened, he denies knowing Jesus three times in a row. Peter’s denial isn’t good, but it is understandable, and it doesn’t cast a deep shadow upon his character for two reasons. First, we think about the circumstances: Identifying himself as one of Christ’s followers would have done nothing to help Christ and might have resulted in Peter’s own death at the hands of the angry mob. Second, Gibson shows Peter drawing his sword, trying to defend Jesus in the garden, and full of remorse soon after the betrayal. Peter’s betrayal appears to be a lapse rather than a deeper flaw. He isn’t a bad guy; he’s a good guy who, on one occasion and under great pressure, did a bad thing.

  Can we say the same about Judas? Imagine if The Passion had shown Judas laughing and spending the money on wine and prostitutes as he watched Jesus being tortured. Then, without hesitation we would have judged him harshly. But this isn’t what Gibson shows us. Like Gibson’s Peter, his Judas experiences regret almost immediately. He tries to undo his action, begging the priests to release Jesus, and he doesn’t keep the money. This remorse suggests that he would have acted differently if he had another chance, and it should make us judge him less harshly. He is not completely bad. On the other hand, we may still have strong doubts about his character. If Judas has always been greedy, it appears plausible that he betrayed Jesus for money, and then his greed wasn’t merely a lapse. This is why the passage about saving the oil for the poor in John and Matthew is crucial. It paints Judas as consistently greedy, suggesting that he didn’t simply give in to the temptation to have thirty silver coins in a moment of weakness; he was a greedy man who lived a life of weakness. And Judas is without the circumstantial excuse that Peter has. Judas didn’t betray Jesus out of fear for his own life; he betrayed him while under no particular pressure.

  Final Judgment

  So how should we judge Judas, and how did God judge him? Surely, the answer must depend upon why he betrayed Christ, whether he understood what would happen to Jesus, and whether he was a treacherous person or only a man who succumbed to weakness at the wrong time. Gibson doesn’t answer these questions for us, and neither do the Gospels. This means that we have no way of knowing how we should judge Judas or how God judges him. Still, I’d like to think that Jesus meant to include Judas in his compassionate plea from the cross: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34).2

  SOURCES

  Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean Ethics, Book 3. Translated by Terence Irwin. Second Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett.

  Boethius. 1962. The Consolations of Philosophy, Prose 6. Translated by Richard Green. New York: Macmillan.

  Jonathan Edwards. 1969. Freedom of the Will. Edited by A.S. Kaufman and W. K. Frankena. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

  Henry Frankfurt. 1971. Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. Journal of Philosophy 68, pp. 5–20.

  Immanuel Kant. 1993. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Sections 1 and 2. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett.

  William Klassen. 1996. Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? Minneapolis: Fortress.

  Hyam Maccoby. 1992. Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil. New York: Free Press.

  John Stuart Mill. 1993. Utilitarianism. In Mill, On Liberty and Utilitarianism (New York: Bantam).

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What other possible motives could Judas have had for betraying Jesus, and how would they affect his guilt?

  2. What is worse, betraying a friend or betraying God? Why?

  3. When is ignorance a legitimate excuse, and when is it not?

  4. Is Judas worse than Hitler?

  5. If Judas had come to the cross, would Jesus have forgiven him?

  1 I’m paraphrasing Gregory Bassham’s formulation of this objection in “The Prophecy-Driven Life: Fate and Freedom at Hogwarts,” in David Baggert and Shawn Klein, eds., Harry Potter and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2004).

  2 I am grateful to Gregory Bassham for several useful suggestions, and to him, John Lanci, and Joel Marcus for bringing my attention to some pertinent secondary literature.

  20

  Resist Not Evil! Jesus and Nonviolence

  GREGORY BASSHAM and DAVID BAGGETT

  The Passion of the Christ has been described as the best movie people don’t want to see twice. It gives horror and slasher films a run for their money. Mel Gibson’s relentlessly graphic depiction of the death of Christ presents us with gruesome violence that goes well beyond anything described in the Gospels. Jesus is beaten by Jewish guards prior to his trial before the Sanhedrin, he is dropped off a bridge, his arm is dislocated during the crucifixion, and he endures an unusually severe flogging and scourging at the hands of sadistic Roman soldiers. What is the purpose of all this violence? Clearly, it is to amplify emotional impact.

  Not often noticed, but equally worthy of attention, however, is Jesus’s non-violent response. At no point does he attempt to avoid or resist it. In the opening scene he reveals his anguish in a remarkable prayer: “Father, you can do all things. If it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. But let your will be done, not mine.” We see a man who seems to know the horrors in store for him, in fulfillment of prophecies he takes as applying to himself. With all his might he wishes he could avoid these horrors, but he senses that such suffering is God’s plan, and so he’s willing to submit to it. Accepting of his fate, he endures the suffering, refusing to resist, obedient to his calling. Indeed, at times he seems almost to invite it, as when he painfully climbs to his feet after his hideous flogging by Roman guards. Refusing to hit back, refraining from complaint, he remarkably endures the pain and shame.

  In these ways the film’s extreme violence subverts itself by showing the ultimate
emptiness of violence in the face of all-conquering love. Indeed, in some ways the film’s depiction of Jesus’s practice of non-violence goes beyond Christ’s teachings, a fact that will prove important for us. Such a vision seems plainly to be Gibson’s faith-based conviction as a Catholic filmmaker. One of the questions that we will consider is whether this belief in the futility of violence can be justified as a reasoned conclusion from evidence that does not presuppose any theological commitments.

  Jesus’s Teachings on Nonviolence

  Jesus’s practice of nonviolence during his Passion remarkably resembles his teaching of nonviolence during his ministry. Several scenes in the film focus specifically on Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence. These include the flashback to the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus preaches forgiveness and love of enemies, which he then later models on the cross himself. Another flashback features Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, while warning them to expect persecution as followers of him, which they must meet meekly and without fear—in contrast to Peter’s vehement denial of knowing Christ when persecution for it seemed likely. Also pertinent is the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ watches sadly as his disciples fight the Jewish guards and he instructs Peter to put down his sword, quoting the Jewish proverb that “all who live by the sword shall die by the sword.” Jesus, far from joining in the fight, instead restores the ear of the guard that Peter had cut off, to the guard’s utter astonishment. Peter’s greater willingness to brandish a sword to defend Jesus than to be persecuted for Jesus was the exact opposite of the harder path to which Jesus had called him. Christendom’s lamentable history of holy wars, inquisitions, and crusades is sad testimony that Peter has too often indeed been its guiding example.

  Admonitions to “turn the other cheek” and “go the extra mile” derive from Jesus’s instructions (Luke 6:27–28; Matthew 5:39–41), and examples could be multiplied. Included among such teachings are “hard sayings”—like “resist not evil”—that Jesus himself put into practice and also expected his disciples to follow, even unto death (Matthew 10:17–22; 10:38–39). What did Jesus mean by these strongly pacifist-sounding sayings?

  The earliest Christian communities seem to have taken Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence and love of enemies quite seriously, refusing military service, declining resort to secular courts, praying for their persecutors, and submitting unresistingly and even joyously to the lash, sword, or cross (Bainton 1960, pp. 66–84). Taken literally, however, these sayings are so demanding that attempts have been made at least since the time of St. Augustine (A.D. 354–430) to limit their scope or blunt their force. Let’s look briefly at five leading interpretations, several of which may contain insight into this matter.

  The Two-Class Ethics Interpretation

  The traditional Catholic approach to Jesus’s hard sayings is to treat them as “counsels of perfection” addressed only to a select few who choose to pursue a higher calling of moral and spiritual perfection. On this view, Christ laid down two kinds of moral directives: “precepts” and “counsels.” Precepts are commandments binding on everyone that cannot be disobeyed without mortal sin. Counsels, by contrast, are recommendations for those who wish to undertake, either for a lifetime or a period of time, a more perfect imitation of Christ’s example (by, for instance, taking vows of voluntary poverty or chastity). Protestant Reformers strongly opposed the Catholic doctrine of super-meritorious actions, insisting that Christ called all his followers to be perfect, as their heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).

  Even if we grant that some of Christ’s ethical directives are counsels, it’s doubtful that his teachings on nonviolence fall into this category, since they occur in the midst of directives that are clearly commands (don’t divorce, don’t swear, and the like). Moreover, some of the ethical directives the Catholic tradition treats as commands, such as the commandment to love God with all one’s heart and mind, are in fact more difficult to fulfill than many of the alleged counsels, such as turning the other cheek or going the extra mile. So the Catholic two-class ethic interpretation is problematic. In fact, as Catholic theologian Hans Küng notes, the counsel-precept distinction has largely dropped out of post-Vatican II Catholic moral theology (Küng 1976, p. 245).

  The Interim Ethics Interpretation

  Another way of understanding Jesus’s radical ethical teachings that makes them largely irrelevant to most Christians today is to see them as short-term emergency legislation for the end-time. On this view, first popularized by the German theologian and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, Jesus fully accepted the “futurist eschatology” endorsed by Jewish apocalyptic sects of his day. Believing that God would intervene immediately and dramatically in human history, Jesus taught a rigorous, perfectionist ethic that makes sense only if one assumes that practical concerns like burying one’s dead father (Matthew 8:22) or giving away all one’s money or clothes (Luke 6:30; Matthew 5:40) are unimportant given that God’s apocalyptic kingdom was immediately at hand. Why worry about hanging on to your coat if there’s never going to be another winter?

  Although Jesus’s ethical teachings may have been colored by his beliefs about the end of the world, it doesn’t follow that those teachings were intended only as short-term crisis legislation or lack permanent validity. Jesus’s commandments to avoid swearing, anger, divorce, lust in one’s heart, showy displays of religiosity, and so forth were clearly intended as intensifications of the Old Law, but there is no reason to believe that Jesus saw these as being applicable only for a few short weeks, months, or years. The same should be said of Jesus’s teachings on non-violence, which are also presented as sharpenings of Old Testament demands.

  The Lutheran Penitential Ethic Interpretation

  Many Protestant theologians, following the great Reformation thinker Martin Luther (1483–1546), argue that the real purpose of Jesus’s demanding ethical teachings was to bring us to our knees by showing us the impossibility of achieving righteousness through good works. In Luther’s view, when Jesus commanded his disciples to “resist not evil” and “turn the other cheek,” he didn’t mean to exclude legitimate secular duties such as protecting one’s family, punishing criminals, and taking up arms to resist foreign invasion or domestic insurrection. Jesus’s ethical teachings nevertheless demand absolute, uncompromising obedience to God’s holy will, a standard of perfection that no fallen human being can achieve. Such teachings, therefore, humble our pride and teach us that salvation comes through faith and grace, not through any righteousness of our own.

  Certainly Jesus lays down a highly demanding ethic and rules out any sort of boasting before God (consider Luke 18:9–14). Recent New Testament scholarship, however, has argued that Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence cannot be limited to purely individual, non-civic actions, as Luther claimed, but have social and political implications as well (Yoder 1994). Further, many of Jesus’s ethical teachings, while demanding, are not impossible to fulfill (don’t swear, don’t pray ostentatiously, and so forth). And as John Howard Yoder points out, if Jesus’s purpose was simply to teach the futility of achieving salvation through good works, it’s hard to see why he offered such detailed ethical principles or felt it necessary to sharpen Old Testament rules that in many cases were already extremely demanding (Yoder 1994, p. 43).

  The Absolute Pacifism Interpretation

  Some have claimed that when Jesus said “resist not evil” he meant exactly what he said: all violence and resistance to evil is wrong, regardless of the reasons, circumstances, or costs. Such absolute pacifism has been defended by Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, as well as by some of the historic “peace churches” such as the Anabaptists and Mennonites. Tolstoy goes so far as to claim that Christ totally forbids armies, police, and criminal courts, since these all involve the use of force and violence (Tolstoy 1940, p. 323).

  Absolute pacifism has implications that most people would understandably find very hard to accept because they grate against deep intuitions. An
absolute pacifist, for example, would have to condemn any use of force, no matter how moderate and restrained, to protect a helpless child from assault, arrest a serial killer, or prevent a terrorist attack that could kill thousands. Refusing to use even minimal force to protect the innocent seems inconsistent with Christ’s teachings to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Mark 12:31) and to treat others as we would like them to treat us (Luke 6:31). Consequently, Christians should not conclude that Jesus commanded absolute pacifism unless this is the only plausible interpretation of his teachings.

  Fortunately, other interpretations are possible. Jesus himself used force in driving the money-changers out of the Temple with a whip of cords (John 2:14–16). At least some of Jesus’s disciples carried swords (Luke 22:49), although Christ would not permit their use to prevent his arrest. The Old Testament clearly sanctioned the use of force in a variety of contexts, and although Jesus heightened the demands of certain Old Testament teachings, he rarely if ever explicitly rejected them. Most of Jesus’s pacifist sayings are focused on individual, self-regarding conduct (“if any one strikes you on the right cheek . . .”), not on conduct involving the welfare or protection of others. And St. Paul, after repeating Jesus’s commandments never to avenge wrongs or repay evil for evil (Romans 12:17–19), urges Christians to obey the governing authorities, since these authorities are ordained by God to restrain the wicked and serve the common good (Romans 13:1–5). In light of these facts, it’s unlikely Jesus believed in absolute pacifism.

  The Implicit Qualifier Interpretation

  None of the four leading interpretations of Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence considered so far seems entirely satisfactory. How, then, should these teachings be interpreted? Perhaps part of the solution lies in two characteristic features of Jesus’s teaching: his occasional resort to hyperbole and his opposition to the kind of letter-over-spirit approach to rules adopted in Jesus’s day by many Pharisees.