A 'moving' icon: Revisiting Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (2004)

It’s Good Friday 2016, and after coming back home from the liturgy of the Passion of the Lord (the only day of the year when no mass is celebrated) I asked myself if Mel Gibson’s film could be viewed as a fruitful means of contemplating the Passion story.  Can it function as an icon, a moving icon that is, to relive and remember an extra-ordinary time and event that shapes the identity of a Christian, a follower of the Christ?  Is this particular film a suitable channel to open up the senses and the heart so that we can grasp the transcendent, through a glass darkly, quoting St Paul and the Swede who wrestled with God?

This question invited a comparison with two recent films that take the Lord’s Passion as their central narrative device but apply it to protagonists that finds themselves walking in the shoes of the Lord:  The Irish Calvary (2014), written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, and the German Kreuzweg (The Stations of the Cross, 2014), directed by Dietrich Brüggemann and co-written with his sister Anna. Like and Andrzej Wajda’s Die Karwoche (Holy Week, 1995), these works approach the human condition from a New Testament premise: What does it mean for each of us individually, that we have been ransomed, literally, by the blood of Christ on the cross?  

In these cases, the point of departure is primarily intellectual, a proposal to the mind first, and the heart second, that creates a parallel with the salvation story. With great cinematic beauty, these films retrace the steps of the Passion, and by building an analogy with present-day protagonists make the Passion as a historical event transcend time and place.  Calvary and Kreuzweg propose an intellectual experience, much like Kieslowski and his screenwriter did with their television series Dekalog in 1989-1990, inviting the viewer to consider the relevance and implications of the Ten Commandments in Communist Poland at the time.

The Mel Gibson film invites the viewer, I believe, an entirely different ballgame.  It functions like an icon, a devotional moving image, that through its visual and sound form transports the Christian believer – and perhaps other viewers of good will - to a transcendental dimension, triggering a religious experience. This Passion helps us move beyond the boundaries of place and time, Palestine in Roman times, to make us see how the Lord’s universal mission comes to fulfillment.  It is a theological lesson, like the sculptures of the cathedrals in the middle ages.

The nature of cinema allows us to be there, re-living with tight shots, parallel editing, expressionistic cinematography and the use of Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, the experience of the twelve hours between the anguished prayer of Christ in the olive orchard his until his death on the cross, from a Thursday evening to Friday afternoon.

The film’s relentless violence is a major obstacle:  one thing is to read the Gospel’s account of floggings, beatings and nails, but something different is to see their gruesome unfolding on screen.   Gregory Wolfe wrote about this in Image magazine in 2004: “The strongest defense for the use of violence in this film is the issue of sacramentality, the Christian belief that the Incarnation hallows our human, corporeal condition.  In the history of the church, Christ is always being etherealized, rendered comfortably abstract, by liberals and conservatives. One of the enduring strengths of The Passion is its use of gesture, touch, and gaze to convey presence”.  He also notes that Gibson’s ‘blood and gusts sacramentality’ has been questioned, asking “But what other kind is there? If God cannot become present in blood, guts, shit, piss, semen, saliva – He vanishes into the ether.  In short, this is not the Messiah of the Jesus Seminar, who increasingly seems to resemble a divinity being graded on a curve.  In his New York Times op-ed on the film, Kenneth Woodward aptly quoted the famous formula coined by theologian H. Richard Niebuhr to criticize the modern therapeutic vision of Christianity: A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”.

Reenactment of the Crucifixion, San Fernando,
Philippines, Holy Week 2013,
Reuters-AFP

Understood as sacramental, the film’s violence can be integrated into the story; its brutality is the necessary condition to understand the magnitude of the sacrifice. I would like to argue that the Hispanic artistic and religious sensibility, grounded in realism, seems better able to handle it: think of the recreations of the Passion in Spain, Latin America and the Philippines during Holy Week. In contrast, when I attended an Easter play in my neighborhood evangelical church in 2004, the Crucifixion barely registered as a quick tableau, en route to the Resurrection.

The Passion of the Christ – 12 years after its release during Holy Week 2004 – still posits itself – daringly – as an icon.  It shows how film language is fully capable to show both the human and divine nature of the Lord. A handful of flashbacks meaningfully link the horror of the suffering with the beauty and depth of Christ’s life and teachings. The essential of the message is all there - the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper – in the crosscutting technique that is at the heart of classic storytelling, from Griffith on.  The camera work and mise-en-scène are designed to implicate the viewer, emotionally and intellectually, whether it is Judas throwing the bag of silver coins to the camera in slow motion or the sorrowful look of the Virgin Mary briefly breaking the fourth wall, from the foot of the Cross. 

The supernatural elements of the film – an artistic license in the spirit of the sacred text, as I see it – are both scary and eloquent bearers of theological meaning: the ugliness of sin and the sordid workings of the devil.  Satan is imagined as an androgynous character, a woman with the voice of a man, tempting Christ in the opening sequence in Gethsemane to question his mission and filiation; and once again, on the way to the cross, cradling a hairy monster dwarf. These are old imaginative strokes to visualize what the Gospel does not describe.

The most stunning marriage of visual and teaching – the theological linchpin of the film, and its dramatic climax – is the point-of-view shot from high up, where a tear is shown coming down from the sky/heaven (the same word in Spanish, cielo), and when it hits the ground, causes darkness, a quake and the veil of the Temple to tear in the middle, dramatically described by Matthew in chapter 27, verses 51 to 53. 

The Passion of the Christ makes the sacred story into an icon for our times, fully modern in its sound, fury and desecrations of beauty and goodness.  And yet it also belongs to a Christian artistic tradition that has depicted the Last Supper and the Crucifixion together, to show us how unimaginably deep is God’s love for us.  

After viewing The Passion of the Christ, I asked a dear friend in Buenos Aires, Suzi Fauth, to paint me an icon from a monastery in Malula, Syria, dated 1778, that makes this theological point with great beauty.