By Reuven Koret
February 27, 2004
The poor lady in Kansas who suffered a heart attack and died as Jesus was being scourged may be the first to die from The Passion of The Christ, but I doubt she'll be the last. Of course, there's no proof that she was killed by the sickening display of mortified flesh for unending minutes of Mel Gibson's latest splatter flic, but then, there's no proof for just about anything that appears in the movie, except that there was a city called Jerusalem conquered by the Romans, ruled from Rome, run by a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate who had a peculiar penchant for pinning up Jews on a cross.
The Christian faithful believe the Gospels, but everyone knows that they were written a generation after the events they are supposed to describe. At best, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were recording hearsay. At worst, they had their own motives to make the Jews look bad, not least of which was that the Jews were not buying in to their message that Jesus was messiah, and the gentiles -- Romans, Greeks and other foreigners -- were not relishing the idea of being circumcised. The solution was to make it easy for the Gentiles to accept Jesus without accepting the Torah and traditions Jesus lived by: just believe that he died for your sins and you will be saved, while everyone else will go to Hell.
I have no objection to those who believe in every word as the Gospel Truth. Most Christians perceive the Jesus of the Gospels was first and foremost a Jew and a Rabbi, living his life by the Torah and educating his followers to a faith in the power of love, tolerance and forgiveness. I respect those who draw strength and faith from that.
But Mel Gibson set out to kill this Jesus. Not just crucify him -- and we now know that it was Gibson's hand which drove through the spike -- but to torture him, to flagellate and eviscerate him, to flay him alive. He did so to shock and to fascinate the viewer, to fascinate with this gratuitous blood and violence, to traumatize. This poor innocent, so brutally murdered, for what? We're not really told, because it is taken as a given that he is the Son of God. What is important, it seems, is "who done it." And here Gibson stacks the decks and makes it clear as day that the Jewish priests pushed and manipulated and howled for Jesus to be killed and tortured.
Gibson's public statements that all mankind sinned, and that Jesus took all those sins upon himself, and that this is a movie about love and forgiveness, or that he is just telling the truth -- well, that may sound good to Diane Sawyer, but it doesn't wash, especially as he hands Pilate the film's sole three-dimensional role.
And yes, if it was foreordained that Jesus should die, then everyone was just playing their part in this passion play and no one should be blamed. That may operate for those of deep faith, but that is not the director's intention. No, this is a movie about bloody premeditated murder: a murder of Christ by the Jews. As The Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver so lovingly put it, on opening night, in a sign it posted opposite the local movie theater: "Jews Killed the Lord Jesus."
Romans killed a Jews (one of hundreds of thousands killed as they conquered our homeland, raped our women, and enslaved those who remained) and now a Roman Catholic rich boy says, contrary to what the Church decided forty years ago, after nearly two thousands years of crucifixions, persecutions, inquisitions, and exterminations, that it was the Jews who did it, after all. Poor Pilate was just a pawn of the bloodthirsty Pharisees. The Satanic Jews, with their demon children, howl for the death of this poor innocent guy. That is the message, even if it is absorbed on a subconscious level.
Christian critics wondered why the resurrection scene was so short, why the redemptive power of Jesus was hardly touched upon. Easy answer: the redemption for the butchering of Jesus is yet to come: someone is gonna pay. We're not talking about the twenty million bucks Mel's Icon Productions made on Day One, or the tens of millions more he'll make in the weeks and months and years to come, not to mentioned the Aramaic coffee mugs and pewter crucifixion spikes that will be sold to the legions of the faithful.
No, this movie is designed from day one to advance the theology of the cultish sect of retro-Catholics to which Mel and his wacked-out, hated-consumed mother and father belong. This is his Braveheart-heroic attempt to overthrow those too-liberal encyclicals of the Popes (anti-Popes, his dad calls them). This is his attempt at payback for those Hollywood Jews who resisted his idea, and the anti-Christian (i.e., Jew-dominated) Media. This is his defiant answer to the Jews blamed the Catholic Church for contributing to the Holocaust that his father calls "mostly fiction."
This is the special effects-enhanced celluloid version of the classic medieval Passion Plays which Medieval rabble-rousing priests used to inspire the masses to riot and kill Jewish men, women and children because, it was said, "they killed our Lord."
Consider the business about the famous line: "His blood be on us and on our children." Gibson left it in but "generously" didn't add a subtitle. He didn't need to: he ensured there was so much press coverage, attracting attention not only to the line but to the Jewish efforts to remove it, that he fixated viewers on finding the Aramaic curse and on Jewish "censorship" of that "truth."
The Passion, from start to finish, has been an exercise in Jew-baiting, and Jew-hating. The idea is to tease the Jews, provoke them, deny any bad intention, and play the innocent injured angel. Mel tries to portray himself as the poor victim of the Jews, persecuted for his Christian views, crucified for daring to reveal the truth.
The truth is that Mel's technique -- inducing trauma and fixation to that trauma by the use of violence -- is a famous method acted out not only in his previous bloody films but also in the historical indoctrinations of his unreconstructed Church. Violence imposes submission, and the pleasure of submitting to a higher authority, relieving one of personal responsibility, so that one can proudly say that "Jews killed Lord Jesus" and feel exalted.
Many reviewers have talked about the almost pornographic quality of the whipping and scourging scenes, the over-the-top excessiveness of the pain. Mel has whipped all this anger and left the audience with "nowhere to go." But the memory of that extreme visual and aural trauma is now part of them, part of their memories, along with the howling mob of Jews. When Gibson has Jesus tell Pilate "It is he who has delivered me to you who has the greater sin," the audience gets it. No need for the subtitle about the blood of the children.
So Jews are stuck between a rock and a hard place, between the crass and the cross.
Many who see it will know that the movie is a piece of anti-Semitic incitement but will fear to offend Christians - family, friends and neighbors - who find it a moving testament to their faith. But no longer is remaining silent an acceptable option.
It's a straight line from the Damascus Road to the Damascus Blood Libel, to the Dachau Camp to Denver's Lovingway Church and Cineplex. Mel with his Passion has proved himself his father's son, doing with cinematic sadomasochism what his addled dad does in the privacy of his own home, prattling about hanging Alan Greenspan or calculating how much fuel it takes to burn a Jewish corpse.
When well-meaning Christians emerge from the movie strengthened in their faith that Jesus died for their sins, let them realize too that the Gospels, of Mark and of Mel, try to obscure that Jesus was a Jew killed by Gentiles. The story-tellers, ancient and modern, blame the Jews so they can feel some relief for betraying and distorting the faith to which their presumed Savior belonged.
But that so-called salvation serves to conceal and excuse two thousand years of anti-Semitic savagery and hypocrisy which continues unabated to this day.
Christians should say not "everyone sinned against Christ, and I am a sinner too" because that conceals, in the shadowy spirit of Mel's Jesus whispering to the not-so-evil Pilate, "but not, Praise the Lord, as bad as the Jew." Besides, the good Christian is tempted to say, "I accept killing God, and therefore am saved, whereas the Jews do not, and therefore are damned." That is the very essence of Christian anti-Semitism.
Rather they should consider: "Christians have historically turned against the people of Jesus, the people of his God, have killed them cruelly in every generation, and I must struggle within my soul never to do so too and to confront with courage those who do." That, for a Christian, takes a brave heart.
But that, needless to say, is not Mel Gibson's intent. The Passion of the Christ, amplifying and embellishing the inherent anti-Jewishness of the Gospels, is a real-life Lethal Weapon 5, already at a theater near you, and aimed straight at the nearest Jew. Daddy must be proud.
Views expressed by the author do not
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