During my last year of seminary Mel Gibson's movie the Passion of the Christ was released about this time of year, right around Holy Week. I had read reviews and I knew I probably wouldn't like it, but I felt if I were going to critique its theology, it would probably be good form if I saw it. So I went by myself...just me and a few others scattered in the theater.
The movie began with a techno-Arabic/Hebrew/Semitic musical score...an eerie otherworldly chanting the backdrop for one of the most gory movies I've ever seen...slow motion torture in strobe-like rhythm...and more blood than one can imagine...I left after about thirty minutes; and I thought about the pervading theology of the Passion, the crucifixion of Jesus, in our western culture: the theology of Substitution, that goes something like this: God loved us so much in spite of our innumerable sins as humankind that he sent his son to be tortured and killed to pay the penalty for all of us; Jesus' death the ransom for all of our sins so that we may have eternal life...What kind of God would that be? As I left the theater whatever remnant of atonement theology still around in my consciousness, I left there in the seething dark.
God does not require blood. The crucifixion in the Gospels is an unveiling of the brutality of power gone wrong...an unveiling of imperial injustice...the murder of an innocent man. God does not require blood. God requires passion for our world...Jesus the model...Jesus the archetype. Jesus and the community that followed Jesus cared so much for their world, cared so much for changing the world for the better, cared so much about calling out the injustice that beset them... that it got them in trouble, got many of them killed...So the theology rightly goes like this: God so loves the world that God calls all people of conscience, as God called the Christ, to love passionately their world even if it means risking one's life...That we live solely for our sister...that we live solely for our brother...that we live as God lives...in an utter predisposition of sacrifice....sacrifice that saves; sacrifice that brings eternal life in earth...eternal life meaning living in the presence of God here and now... not in some otherworldly supernatural existence...but living our lives as they are truly and forever meant to be...to live in the presence of God is to be fully human...fully human like the Christ....fully human...passionate for our world.
Like our brother come before us, we are called to go with Passion into the Jerusalems of our world...into the places of indignity and dispossession, loving our neighbor, which we are told is the same as loving God...let us go not counting the cost whatever that cost may be....then will the sin of the world be cast off...we, the people of passion, the living atonement of the created order....At our coming then will even the rocks and stones cry hosanna in the highest...blessed be the coming of the Lord.... at last.
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I was going to respond with an argument that the film doesn't necessarily require a substitution theology reading any more than the Gospels do. I think that theology (any theology, for that matter) works as an interpretive lens, just as any literary theory does.
Personally, I think the merit of the film is its violence. It has its problems, but I think we've developed a rather sanitized and desensitized, even romanticized, image of the crucifixion, and the film reminds us that this was a brutal act of execution.
However, I didn't meant to say even that much. I really intended just to share a new poem...
a poem for the [ir]reverend jim flowers in honor of his birthday
once we forgot
that all gods
and deities reside
inside the human breast
we created a god
in our image
and confined him
to imaginary realms
and thus forgot
the proper place
and function of god
is human communion
then jesus came
to tear down empires
and institutions
built on our forgetfulness
to write new worlds
with imagination and love
and so new institutions
bearing his name
and an imperialism
of empiricism erected
in error new empires for
their imaginary god
but all jesus wanted
was simply to remind us
that the only way to
the kingdom he spoke of
is through creative
acts of the imagination
the mind doing
the work of the heart
the mind and heart
in their rightful roles
building the kingdom
of god within us
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