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Contents © 2004
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
April 2004

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THE ULTIMATE VIOLENCE

Jesus didn't have to be crucified. He didn't have to be scourged. He didn't have to be crowned with thorns. To accomplish the redemption of mankind, all He had to do was suffer the ultimate violence, the separation of soul from body -- death. And death was the penalty placed upon Adam and Eve for their sin, the sin in which every soul ever after has mysteriously participated. Christ, the God-man, took that punishment upon himself, and because He was innocent, his death sufficed to erase the otherwise unpayable debt man owed to God. Then, because He was also God, He was able to conquer death, and draw all humanity to himself. In Adam, all men sin; in Christ, all may be raised up.

Death is the ultimate violence, but because it is common and sometimes quiet, we may overlook that violence. We talk of dying peacefully. But soul was sundered from body -- what's peaceful about that? Jesus could have died a happy old man, and it would have sufficed for our redemption, but He didn't die a happy old man. He was scourged, He was crowned with thorns, He was crucified. Before that ultimate violence of death, there was lots of preparatory violence. His passion was obviously violent, obviously unnatural, and very public. There is fittingness to this, but not necessity. Part of that fittingness has to do with manifestation -- Jesus' death was meant to be proclaimed to all the world, so that his resurrection might also be proclaimed.

On February 28, novelist Mary Gordon wrote an editorial for the New York Times that was critical of The Passion of the Christ. One of those criticisms concerned the bloody, protracted scourging. "A great deal of screen time is taken up with the flagellation of Jesus. What does this accomplish in an understanding of the meaning of Jesus' life and death? How is Jesus different from any other victim of torture?" Director Mel Gibson answers this question at the very beginning of the film, in white letters against a black screen: "By his stripes we were healed." I would guess that Gibson dwells on the scourging because he regards it as a visual manifestation of our sins. If the beating goes on so long as to beggar belief, so does humanity's persistence in sin. I'm not defending Gibson here so much as I'm saying he had a reason for what he did, and he made that reason clear.

Gordon also asked the film's co-screenwriter (with Gibson), Barry Fitzgerald, why he made the film so violent. Fitzgerald replied that in an age of violence, you had to use violence to make your point. He then related "a story that had been dear to both his mother," Sally Fitzgerald, and to his mother's friend, Flannery O'Connor. The story is about a man who buys a mule, and is told it will do anything if treated with loving kindness. But sugar and the best feed don't get the mule going, and the man takes the mule back. The original owner hits the mule over the head with a two-by-four. "The buyer says, 'But you said he needed to be treated with loving kindness.' The seller says, 'Yes, but you have to get his attention first.'"

So the co-writer of this movie was born into Flannery O'Connor's circle of intimates; Flannery O'Connor, the southern Catholic novelist who has been almost inextricably linked with the word "grotesque," owing to her use of freaks to drive the engine of her excellent fiction; O'Connor, who wrote that the novelist's vision "has to be transmitted and that the limitations and blind spots of his audience will very definitely affect the way in which he is able to show what he sees. This is another thing, which in these times, increases the tendency toward the grotesque in fiction."

The reader's need, writes O'Connor, "is to be lifted up. There is something in us ... that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether and so he has forgotten the price of restoration." Gibson and Fitzgerald may not be O'Connor in terms of their artistic mastery, but when I read of that connection between Fitzgerald and her, I felt I understood the film a little better.

"Psychologically," wrote Gordon in her essay, "the power of the Passion is that it acknowledges the place of suffering, particularly unjust suffering, in human life."

I disagree. The power of the Passion is that it demonstrates the gravity of our offense against God and the love God showed in redeeming us from that offense. The Passion of the Christ wields that message like a two-by-four.

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