Frederica Mathewes-Green has written an interesting article on the sufferings of Jesus. (via fluidfaith)
Most of us have yet to see Mel Gibsons “The Passion,” but weve gained one sure impression: its bloody. “I wanted to bring you there,” Gibson told Peter J. Boyer in September 15s New Yorker magazine. “I wanted to be true to the Gospels. That has never been done before.”
This goal means showing us what real scourging and crucifixion would look like. “I didnt want to see Jesus looking really pretty,” Gibson goes on. “I wanted to mess up one of his eyes, destroy it.”
Its a mark of our age that we dont believe something is realistic unless it is brutal. But theres another factor to consider. When the four evangelists were writing their own accounts of the Passion, they didnt take Gibsons approach. None of them depict Jesus with a destroyed eye. In fact, the descriptions of Jesus beating and crucifixion are as minimal as the writers can make them.
“Having scourged Jesus, Pilate delivered him to be crucified,” the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) agree. “When they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him.”
Little more than a dozen verses later he is dead. The evangelists did not linger over his suffering in order to stir our empathy. The account of physical action is so brisk that, back when I was in seminary, I asked one of my professors why we presume Jesus was nailed to the Cross, rather than bound with ropes. He supposed it was because Paul later refers to redemption through Christs blood. (It slipped the mind of both of us that, in St. John’s Gospel, St. Thomas puts his finger into the wounds in Jesus’ hands.)
If Mel Gibson had allotted his time the way the evangelists do, the majority of his film would have been about the swirl of people around Jesus in his last days, how they interact with him and what they do because of him. The scourging and crucifixion would have passed in a flash.
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons