At least, that’s how Jesse at Pandagon has described Mel Gibson’s new movie. From all I’ve heard about the movie’s lusty reenactment of the suffering of Jesus, it does seem like the film will arouse a “prurient interest” (a religious, rather than sexual, one of course). Just from the outset, it seems that the whole purpose of this film (and the “passion play” tradition from which it derives) is to wallow in the suffering of Jesus as a way to validate religious faith. I dunno about you, but it all seems kinda morbid to me.

While most of the commentary on the film has been of the “Is it anti-semitic?” variety (on which I have mixed feelings), I think the more interesting aspects are the larger question of the role of the crucifixion in Christian tradition. As far as the movie’s depiction of Jesus’s death, this interview with Rev. Mark Stanger (who saw the film at a screening hosted by Gibson) has some pretty shocking things to say :

Did you feel in the storytelling there were any particularly glaring omissions or otherwise historically inaccurate stuff?

Not really, except that Jesus’ crucifixion was made too singular. This was an ordinary event. Jesus was one of dozens of insurrectionists that the local Roman occupiers would have crucified, but [Gibson] tried to make his suffering especially agonizing and horrible. That was the other subtext — I thought there was an unspoken assumption that somehow, for Jesus’ death to have meaning to believers, it had to be more horrible than any other kind of suffering and death. The film doesn’t really say that, but that’s the idea, and that’s why it has an “R” rating — for the violence. The protracted scourging.

You felt it was gratuitous violence?

I thought it was sickening. At the screening they were handing out boxes of Kleenex — they should have handed out barf bags.

Oo! Oooooo!

There was no reason for this [violence], spiritually or theologically. Do you remember in the movie “Gladiator” that short shot where he comes home to find his wife and family crucified, and there was also a report that she had been sexually assaulted beforehand? It was brutal and ugly and horrible, and you didn’t need 20 minutes of blood flow to get the message across. I thought “The Passion” was really perverse and really depraved. There’s a lot of criticism against the film that it gives a bad picture of Jews — I think it gives a worse picture of Christians. Holding this up as somehow emblematic of something central to our belief — this preoccupation with both sin and blood sacrifice — is just absolutely primitive.
. . .
I think a 5-year-old who has to get cancer surgery and radiation and chemotherapy suffers more than Jesus suffered; I think that a kid in the Gaza Strip who steps on a land mine and loses two limbs suffers more; I think a battered wife with no resources suffers more; I think people without medical care dying of AIDS in Africa suffer more than Jesus did that day. I mean, I don’t want to take away from that, but this preoccupation with the intensity of the suffering, I think, has no theological or spiritual value.

As far as the larger question of “Why is the death of someone who’s immortal a big deal?”, Earnest has a good point :

Take John’s argument that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…” Where does the represent any kind of real sacrifice by an omnipotent being. Had he any motivation in that direction, Jehova could simply conjure up another human as he did Adam, taking his new creation for his son. The key word probably is “begotten” though. The word implies a real offspring, as in the manner employed through Mary. Again, what keeps Jehova from impregnating another woman other than personal restraint? If there were a real sacrifice, it would have to be Mary’s and Jesus’s. Mary had to cope with the idea that she were birthing a person doomed to die. Jesus had to deal with the excruciating pain of being crucified. That still makes affording any devotion to Jesus for that sacrifice difficult. After all, his actions were foreordained– he lacked any real power to object to the proceedings and opt out. At best, you can feel sympathy for Jesus, or thankfulness to Jehova for providing an easy mechanism for redemption, but the act of crucifixion is at best symbolic of what Jehova would be willing to do were he human. The Bible contains several stories of people being willing to sacrifice offsprings’ lives for the greater good as signs of devotion, so Jesus’s death is the ultimate reiteration of what is really a common Biblical story. The crucifixion, then, is not important in substance but in style.

In the end, I’d rather see a movie about Jesus concentrate on his, what many preachers derisively call, “good works” (feeding the poor, preaching tolerance, emphasizing compassion for your enemies, etc.) rather than his magic tricks miracles.