Dr. John C. McDowell, Divinity Director of Undergraduate Studies and Meldrum Lecturer in Systematic Theology, New College, Mound Place, University of Edinburgh

Abstract

Gibson’s Christ has a body, and a body of hope at that.  However, this Christ is little more than a bare body, a body made naked without its without a full covering of life (or rather it is a body reduced to barest life), and therefore a body that lacks the multiple extensions in space and time that characterise bodies and their being available to and for other bodies.  This paper seeks to trace Gibson’s series of losses and their political implications, three of which are not only particularly important but are interdependent.  Drawing metaphorically on the terms of the C4th Trinitarian theologies, this is argued to constitute something of a deadly tri-unity of threefold bodylessness, a perichoretic (interdependent co-inherence) perversity which triply enforces the terror against bodily (con)textuality.  This sense of bodily loss flows directly from the nature of the abstraction involved in the film’s selected focus, and manifests itself triunely in the “Jewish-problem”; the life of the Christ; and the nature of the saving achieved by the sufferings of the condemned Jesus. 

Tragic Totalising of the Christ-Body

[1] In his 1994 tribute to the late Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, George Steiner claims that Donald MacKinnon was a man who has made Auschwitz the measure of his world.  “Donald’s genius,” Steiner asserts, came in terms of his post-Auschwitz fascination “by pain,” by which is not meant some theological masochism but rather MacKinnon’s refusal to evade the painful interrogating dimensions of the tragic.[1]  It is this notion of the place of the tragic, educated by the diverse body of plays classed under the umbrella term “Tragic drama,” that is particularly intriguing in relation to MacKinnon’s construal of the health of theological reflection.  This, the Scottish moral and philosophical theologian argues, is something Christians too frequently have missed to their cost.  They lack the courage to read the Gospels in the light of tragic drama, and ultimately anaesthetise any sensitivity to the tragic by converting history into what he calls, following Bishop Butler, a ballet-dance of ideas.  This process is detectable in strategies of theodicy (attempting to justify God before the bar of those suffering) with their unwarranted attempts to resolve the intractable problem of evil.  Among the numerous problems with this particular form of “apologetic eagerness”[2] is the detectable self-deceit in the actions of one who

fashion[s] a God whose role it is to write a happy ending to the human tale.  So evil, the macabre and secret source of human waste, is trivialized; so the burden of human existence is lightened by the banishment from our ethical vocabulary of such solemn words and phrases as “irrevocable,” “too late.”[3] 

His plea is at least that one should honestly attend to the complexities involved in the event (and, indeed, in all events) with an honesty appropriate to the occasion itself, and this is something he finds all too rare in Christian discussions of the cross. 

[2] Can Mel Gibson’s masterful cinematic Passion play be read as suitably dramatising these types of theological concerns?[4]  Perhaps a good start on this path could be made by observing that the Australian director consciously sought to make as brutally “realistic” a movie as he could manage.  The blood flows, and the gore horrifies audiences worldwide into shocked attention, somewhat mutilating in the most brutal vision all spiritualities that anaemically transform Jesus into the clean, wholesome, and inoffensive moralist.  And yet for all those claims of realism, and also for all the claims of Gospel truthfulness made about it, something does not quite feel right, and here not only to those critics whose reviews are accused by Christians of not having a feel for the Gospel itself.  In particular the question of “where is the hope?” hangs as a millstone not only around its theological vision–and not only around its own but likewise around cultures that have supported this project as a clear expression of the “Gospel truth.”[5] 

[3] But surely, one could respond, the film is filled with hope–the hope of those for whom Christ died.  Here, however, is precisely where the problem begins to surface.  Gibson’s hope, as will become clear later, seems to be located precisely in the moment of violence, transcribed onto a body violated and brutally abused.  MacKinnon’s talk of the tragic texture of the cross, among many other things, wants to return hope-talk to the complex concreteness and irreducible specificity, in other words of the body, of the One crucified.  Put another way, MacKinnon attempts to do justice to the embodied way of God’s grace in the body of the world.  It is here that Gibson’s cross stands in marked contrast, for The Passion appears to precisely evade a MacKinnon-type demand by misplacing the body (by which I mean that which is essential to “the human”) at three key points.  Gibson’s body may be a forgiving body in a sense (that sense is will be questioned later) but it is far from being a transformed body and therefore being a body among, and open in honest hope for, other bodies.  Instead, one has to wonder just where The Passion’s hope for every-body went.  Indeed, the question of who stole the body is in much broader terms itself an important cultural question, although the fruit of an exploration of that can only remain hinted at and implied in this particular paper. 

[4] Surely, though, Gibson’s Christ has a body.  Unlike the sanitised “body” of the kinds of docetic portrayals of the “flesh” of Christ that plagued those dualistic Gnostics of the earliest centuries of Christian reflection, he is graphically exposed to the most brutal and bloody of assaults.  Nevertheless, this Christ is little more than a bare body, a body made naked without its without a full covering of life (or rather it is a body reduced to barest life), and therefore a body that lacks the multiple extensions in space and time that characterise bodies and their being available to and for other bodies.  That observation highlights a grave problem with Gibson’s project–it advocates (wittingly or unwittingly) precisely a form of bodily escapism, and thereby constitutes a serious flight from the range of bodied contexts.  The complex bodies that are required to enflesh reflections on a life, and in this case the “life” (or rather, the death) of Jesus the Christ, are misplaced, indeed displaced and replaced.  So while this is not so much a case of a docetic denial of the body (since, in a way, Gibson’s Christ does indeed have a body), it has the feel more of the constrained incarnation in an Apollinarian loss of the fully enfleshed human soul.  This paper seeks to trace Gibson’s series of losses, three of which are particularly important and are interdependent.  Using metaphorically the language of C4th Trinitarian theologies, we might rhetorically describe these as exhibiting a deadly tri-unity of threefold bodylessness, a perichoretic (in their interdependency or co-inherence) perversity which triply enforces the terror against bodily (con)textuality.  This sense of bodily loss flows directly from the nature of the abstraction involved in the film’s selected focus and manifests itself triunely in the “Jewish-problem”; the life of the Christ; and the nature of the saving achieved by the sufferings of the condemned Jesus. 

[5] The implications of such a significant series of losses are serious:  the Gibsonian can lean toward a further instantiation of a macho Christian tradition that fetishises a world-weary sensibility, a politics of death[6] that can be expressed in a heroic politics of killing, and a consequent narcissistic and totalising self-assertion of the powerful right of unself-critical might.  What kind of culture does Gibson’s Passion grow out of (for it itself is a cultural product as much as a vision of one man) and just what does it generate (since it in turn becomes a sign to others)?  After all, an audience’s viewing of a piece of culture such as The Passion, the believing of not only Gibson but the societies that have shaped his belief, and the life of society that are maintained and aided in the way they see, believe, and live are intricately imbricated.  So when we ask what difference it makes to ask critically reflective questions of The Passion we are forced to admit “precisely all the difference in (or rather to) the world we are in.”  Since it is by our bodies that we are persons “made available to other persons’, Gibson’s displaced bodies direct a lived displacement of public, ethical and religious bodies, bodies that consequently become ungraced in this process of muscular mel-adjustment.[7] 

Who is My Neighbour?  Superseding the Semitic Body

[6]When speaking of the tragic texture of the cross, one aspect that MacKinnon expresses a profound sensitivity to is “the terrible sequel to the story of the cross”–in particular, the open-ended horror of anti-Semitism, as well as the fact that Jesus appeared to abdicate any responsibility for influencing the arrest of the Jewish move to self-destruction in 70 C.E.  Here the cross takes on imperial significance, becoming illuminated from heaven by the inscribed words of “by this sign conquer,” and forcefully allowing this cross to rule the consequently excluding and supplanting relations with Jewish peoples.  The executed (those who died with Christ) now become the executioners so that at various intensified occasions the Jews come to die “for us and our salvation.”  Testimonies of cataclysm, Langbein observes in a subversion of Hebrew cultic atonement imagery, bring us to the point of admitting that “I live, because others died in my place…”[8]  Jews are “sacrificed,” offered up for their guilt, sent out in exclusion as “scapegoats” for the sins of Christendom, and denied their own subjectivity by being made “victims.” 

[7] Gibson’s piece, as his meditation on the cross, reflects many of the tensions that the stauro-morphed (cross-shaped) church lives under in its relation to the Jewish people.  The bulk of the controversy surrounding the film has been generated by concerns over cinematic anti-Semitism.  But the unwary “reader” of Gibson’s brutal piece should exercise some caution in that the brutalising of the imaging of the Jew is not laid bare.  Thence there are several features that could possibly restrain a politics of anti-semitism (or perhaps more properly, anti-Judaism).  For instance, while Pilate is disturbed by the tragedy of his predicament, his underlings are perversely energetic in their torturous enthusiasm.  The Jewish leader thrown out of the religious trial of Jesus for proclaiming its illegality declares that not all the requisite Jewish leaders are present.  This, of course, suggests that there are several sympathetic to Jesus who been deliberately been excluded.  Gibson puts the infamous speech of Matthew’s crowd (Matt. 27:25, Jesus’ blood “will be upon us and our children”) into the mouth of the high priest, Caiaphas, but is suggestively left without subtitles by Gibson, and this largely as a concession to the scholars who protested when previewing the film.  Finally, one should not forget the Jewishness of Jesus, his family and his followers.  In fact, Mary the mother of Jesus is played by Jewish actress Maia Morgenstern, whose father was a Holocaust survivor. 

[8] But this is all very strained, and a question of the subscription or underlying generative drive of the passionate body’s very trajectory is vital, the blood that courses through the veins of Gibson’s Christ.  So apart from the ritual handwashing before the last supper, the produced display is dislocated from the Old Testament imagery used by the Gospel writers, and this serves to scythe the important links between Christianity and its Hebrew heritage.  Christianity, it would seem, has already displaced its originatory body.  As a result, Jesus’ threats against the temple look somewhat out of their proper place when not drawn into the corruption of the temple courts; the rich imagery of the peripatetic prophet announcing apocalyptic judgment and redemption, in the tradition of Elijah and, Amos and the like, is lost to view (see Matt. 21:33-44); and similarly misplaced is the notion of Jesus as the fulfilment of the Hebrew Law and the prophets (Matt. 5:17).  The Matthean account of Pilate’s washing his hands of the guilt of Jesus’ death (see Matthew 27:24) is also overplayed, and this perhaps has even greater significance in the context of the movie. 

[9] The problem is made all the more problematic by the Pilatean politics.  Strongly siding with a difficult historical reading of the truth of the matter, Gibson sensitively and poignantly portrays the governor struggling with his options in what amounts to a Realpolitik of tragic choice–condemn this innocent man and risk a revolt by his followers, or free him and risk a revolt by his Jewish enemies (see Matt. 27:19, 24).  The trouble is that this way of exploring the psychological conditions of the choice to execute Jesus by Pilate is suggestively not extended to the Jewish officials.  As Mark Goodacre recognises, “Where John at least depicts Caiaphas too as being in something of a fix (John 11:47-53), there is little indication in The Passion that he is anything other than a bully.”[9]  Leaving their complex motivations undeveloped (see John 11:50) paints, in contrast, these religious leaders all too easily in very dark (demonic) colours, what looks like a product more of the medieval imagination than that permitted by the Gospels.[10]  They (along with the Roman torturers) are too simply made the object of the audiences’ disgust.  Pilate is himself forced to ask of them, when first casting his eyes on a physically beaten Jesus, “Do you always punish your prisoners before they are judged?”[11]  Undoubtedly this is particularly resonant for a post-9/11 victim culture, with its own presidentially uttered rendering of a Manichaean-like “us”’ versus “them” theology, a stripping away of the veil of sin in the Bushian politics of animosity against “evil men,” and the temptations toward sheer belligerent shaping of international politics with its imperial-looking imposing policy of self-interest that can and has resulted.[12]  The problem, above and beyond the deeply problematic construal of Pilate,[13] is that whether Gibson is serious or not in disclaiming the intension of indulging in the “blame-game,”[14] the manner of his presentation scars the body of Jewish leaders in a way that is worryingly overdone.  The gentle humanisation of Pilate and his wife stoutly tends to dramatically absolve him of guilt, and that, of course, has the consequence of shifting its weighting elsewhere.  So Corley and Webb sum up the reaction of many scholars:  “One definitely comes away from the film with the understanding that it was primarily the Jews who are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.”[15] 

[10] John Dominic Crossan is one who thinks that the movie’s exclusions are damning in comparison with the editorial choices made from Anne Catherine Emmerich’s (1774-1824) text.[16]  “There is,” he argues “no reference to those sympathetic non-Christian Jews except for a single fleeting protest during the trial before Caiaphas … Emmerich has at least possible echoes of the Gospel accounts’ insistence that the general crowd was in favor of Jesus in the days before the crucifixion.  Where are those pro-Jesus elements in Gibson’s film?  In the film, the crowd is uniformly hostile, always anti-Jesus.”[17]  It could be argued that the problem overall, then, is not so much the possible anti-semitic sins of commission but of omission, although these are no less significant for being that.  The film, because of its abstracted period of focal reference leaves little sense of Jesus’ compassion and inclusive love for his Jewish people.  Its silence over the Jews here may well constitute an evasion of responsibility for preventing, on the basis of precisely the person and life of Jesus, the portrayal of Jesus the victim at the hands of Jewish victimisers, the role long played by the Jew in the Western imagination.  The film just does not provide enough markers against anti-semitism as precisely a defamation of the Gospel; nor does it test the context of the Gospels’ own presentation of the Christian-Jewish relation, texts that themselves are shaped in their own reading of the life and work of Jesus Christ in a milieu of seriously strained relations.  But, and perhaps this is a more serious reminder again, Gibson chooses simply to ignore the elements in the Gospels which make some sense out of the opposition to Jesus on the part of the Jewish temple authority.[18] 

  [11] That is just the point–this shallow film loses Jesus’ context, and leaves itself open to a politics of ignorance, to the ignorances of the audience’s readings of it.  The very fact that it is accused of anti-semitism certainly says as much about the film’s “readers” and about the lingering politics of exclusion operating through a condition of Christian-Jewish relations so historically blighted by a decontextualising of the Gospel occurring in a predominantly Gentile church that wanted to announce independence of its Jewish mother–an independence that soon was defined in competitive and supercessionistic terms.  Put plainly, Christians have been all too prone to forget how to read Jesus the Jew, Jesus the Jewish Messiah, Jesus the son of God as being the son of David.  As important as the later reflections on the relation between this man and his God were as readings of his universal significance, the talk of Jesus as the Christ (often forgetting that this is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew), of son of God read too neatly in terms of the concept of God the Son, play with this abstraction and enforce it in the Christian imagination. 

[12] Certainly, Gibson cannot be made to stand on trial for the sins of Christian anti-semitism.  But he does, as with each and every Christian, face the question about particular moral responsibility for being complicit with a supercessionism which still runs strongly through the air churches breathe. 

[13] To claim, as is frequently done, that the film is “close to the Gospels” is to evade several levels of difficulty and instead make an assertive positioning of one’s interpretive power–a take it or leave it because I say so.[19]  To claim, as Gibson and others have, that this is just the way the Gospels are, despite his other comments admitting it to be his meditative interpretation,[20] is itself a power-full enactment of self-identification–the givenness, an immediacy of presence to writers, and the writers then to us in a contemporaneous doubling of the originatory transparency.  And yet, what does it mean to read what the Gospels say without dealing with the various layers of embodiment that come with any act of literary composition?  The writers have their times and places, and, moreover, this sense of plurality is important to recognise.  Gibson’s homogenising rendering of Gospel differences is an act of hegemonic interpretive assertion, a power wielded over and against the very texts themselves.[21] 

[14] Moreover, what could such a statement of faithfulness to the Gospels mean when the film involves numerous moments of “artistic licence” that do much more than pad out a handful of biblical verses; a sensationalist emotion-generating and mood-determining score from John Debney; and several revealing additions that come straight out of the visionary experiences of Emmerich?  Even without these, it would seem that Gibson, like so many biblical literalists, has not learned that the truth of an event is more than what can be observed by anyone there at the time.[22]  The author of the Fourth Gospel, looking distinctly back though the lens of resurrection-faith, recognised that we need rules for reading, and for this reason provided a prologue to his Gospel to shape the very way the subsequent material is to be read (John 1:1-18).  And, of course, as any thoughtful comparison of the Gospels can discover, each Gospel seems to make selections of material to be used (see John 21:25), even differing on chronologies, and so on.  In other words, the Gospels already embody acts of interpretation on the Jesus-story, and even make it clear what their evangelistic purposes are (see Mark 1:1; Luke 1:1-4; John 20:31). 

[15] Certainly it would be a mistake to criticise Gibson for failing to do the complex work of a biblical historian, as Goodacre rightly warns, especially when his cinematic text has a devotional quality to it.[23]  Nevertheless, Gibson on several occasions displays his failure, or perhaps unwillingness, to even consider the role of this historical work for his reading of the Gospels.  So on one particular occasion he exhibits this ignorance publicly when lambasting “adherents to something called the historical critical method which removes the divinity and looks at the natural level.”  These historical critics, he continues, “talk about the biblical Jesus and the historical Jesus, [but] what’s the difference?  Please, tell me where’s the difference?  John was an eyewitness–is that not history?  Matthew was there, is that not history?”[24]  In fact, it is Gibson’s deliberate refusal to listen to the critical interactions, as will be demonstrated below, that raises the question of his power wielded over the text and its long history of interpreters. 

[16] Gibson cannot be tried alone for the failure to attend to the complexities of reading texts, especially ancient texts like the scriptures.  Nevertheless, again like others he has to squarely face up to the abuses of careful and discerning reading.  For whatever reason, his own reading practice disavows several of the very sources that could help in this regard, and in that respect his reading, like those of many Christians, become events dislocated from the communities of readers, communities past and present, local and worldwide.  A set of colourful comments reveal much about this.  Speaking of scholars he asserts,

They always dick around with you, you know?  Judas is always some kind of friend of some freedom fighter named Barabbas, you know what I mean?  It’s horseshit.  It’s revisionist bullshit.  And that’s what these academics are into.  They gave me notes on a stolen script.  I couldn’t believe it.  It was like they were more or less saying I have no right to interpret the Gospels myself, because I don’t have a bunch of letters after my name.  But they are for children, these Gospels.  They’re for children, they’re for old people, they’re for everybody in between.  They’re not necessarily for academics.  Just get an academic on board if you want to pervert something![25] 

[17] What does this say about readers’ accountability to one another, to the tradition, to the realities of the historical contexts of texts being read?  Moreover, what does it suggest about honesty and integrity, and the rigour necessary for good and responsible reading?  It seems that Gibson, like so many others, has chosen for himself the broad road, the quick and easy path of reading.  As Rowan Williams argues, lack of integrity is primarily a political matter.[26]  One steps back from the risk of conversation into a position of (imagined) invulnerability by securing the subject matter via power-relations (propaganda, totalitarian coercion and manipulation, certain apologetic strategies) in a strategy for the retention of control.  This produces what Williams terms “the tyranny of a total perspective,” that which subsumes all knowing into a framework laying claims to comprehensiveness and finality.  Such a perspective claims normative permanence for that which is “provisional and transitory,” and consequently becomes idolatrous by claiming for itself a viewpoint “that is quasi-divine.”[27]  In contrast, at their best, one could argue, scholars are not those who even claim to possess the truth, or even the true reading, but rather those who have been forced by the very nature of texts to understand that reading is a slower, much more laborious, communal and more provisional enterprise.  Scholars are, when working at their best and most honesty, devoted to a never-ending task of discovery, conversation and ongoing renewal of insight.  By virtue of this, they are in a good position to forcefully oppose readings and rhetoric that reduce the complex nature of things to the politicised strategies of putting “things in black and white”, to cite Karl Barth’s words.  Barth here is speaking of propaganda, the type of power-relations it uses, and the total perspective or absolute truth it assumes to have grasped.  He continues,

What they have to push systematically is their own excellence and usefulness, and by way of background they must show how utterly valueless and harmful their rivals and opponents are.[28] 

[18] There is something deeply disturbing, then, about the authoritarianism involved in the Passion’s promotion.[29]  But it would seem that this is no accident, something to be pinned on controversy making publicists for the sake of raising market profile.  While there are occasions in which Gibson himself self-consciously admits that his is an interpretive offering, the weightiest comments are those identifying his reading with the Gospel accounts.  It is precisely this sensibility that numerous Passion apologists and several members of the production team echo when claiming that dislike of the film is tantamount to an aversion to “the book,” understanding the movie to be a test-case for Christianity in the Western-world.  In similar vein, the movie-accompanying publications of the Christian Publicity Organisation do not seem to be even either aware or interested in the possibility that there is a critical gap between Gibson’s Passion and the Gospel traditions.[30]  Whose interests does such a powerful political rhetoric serve, and who and/or what is being excluded in the process, become the far from idle questions of those merely lacking passion for Gibson’s Christ who may well become an idol of his frozen gaze.  As with the politics of patriotic power, the ability to engage in critical, and that includes necessary self-interrogation, conversation concerning meaning and the history of finding and fashioning meaning is here dangerously curtailed.  At the heart of this powerful imposition is the absolutising of the particular perspective, the refusal to entertain the provisionality of divine presence, and the inability to imagine the pervasiveness of the disruptions and distortions of persons under the conditions of what Christians and Jews call “sin.”  It is little wonder, then, that numerous voices have clamoured the worshipful opinion that “this man [Gibson] teaches with an authority greater than Moses.” 

[19] But when it is the loudness of the voice that displays authority, just what is it that is lost in the noisy process?  There is in The Passion no sense of the vision, talk and thinking of Christians as “penultimate,” of their way as one of humble witness, or of their theology under conditions of sin as necessarily “a work of critical revision and investigation of the Church’s proclamation in view of the divine verdict.”[31]  Telling stories of God’s ways with this world is a hazardous enterprise in itself, risking (but certainly necessarily and consciously risking) what Nicholas Lash terms “bondage to … unacknowledged narrative[s].”[32]  Precariousness and vulnerability are part of the price paid for being honest, MacKinnon argues, a necessary dis-ease that refuge in tradition, Christian culture, or our claims to finality of metaphysical explanation tempers the sense and tranquillises the pain of.[33]  Gibson’s threefold bodily denial (of the Jewish body, the relational body, and the hope-filled body of life), in stark contrast, serves to make for a profound ignorance, and ultimately the self-assertive inability to be honest in one’s reading, of self, Gospel, and world. 

Who Do You Say I Am?  Thinning the Christ Body

[20] Gibson, it was argued above, presents a rather a-Jewish body that emanates from certain ways of negating the particularity of the body of Jesus the Jew.  Therein problems are generated for the “body” of God’s so-called people as Church and Israel together, in whatever manner that oneness be construed.  Gibson’s way of dealing with that loss through highly assertive body-language rhetorically overpowers the complexities involved in speaking of a body of biblical readers, especially a body of scholarly readers of biblical texts; and he further ignores the Jewish particularities of the complex body of Gospel texts themselves.  In comparison with this, the second main abstraction of the three we have identified may at first seem to be less theologically significant and more aesthetic, and certainly we will spend less time directly reflecting on it than on the other two. 

[21] Apart from occasional flashbacks, the film begins in Gethsemane and, despite a rather strange brief look inside the tomb on the first Easter Day,[34] largely ends with the decoupling of the lifeless body from the cross.  At the very best, this character portrayed “from nowhere” might find it difficult sufficiently to provoke the emotional sensibilities of the audience any more than any other person enduring such torture would have done had the viewers intruded on the final moments of his/her inglorious end.  Of course, one could respond, the audience is primarily one familiar with the Gospel traditions, and thus the sign of the cross is never a free-floating signifier.  The knowledge and understanding is assumed.  In that case, the spectating done by one largely outwith that knowledge is aided by the evangelistic programmes developed by Christian groups around the movie’s screenings. 

  [22] Moreover, it would be a mistake, this respondent could continue, to understand the performance of The Passion without reference to precisely the series of flashbacks.  There are moments when these give to Jesus some kind of humanity–such as when filling out a little his loving relation with his mother (and these scenes with his mother are arguably the most poignant and sensitively handled in the movie); and there are other occasions when this device is used to hint at Jesus’ ministry of forgiving compassion, such as the footwashing taken from John 13.[35]  Yet the usefulness of this device needs to be tested further.  One reading could insist that these scenes as practised are less than unhelpful in providing a matrix of meaning, or providing a context for the sign of the cross, precisely because they are too thinly informative, and require the audience to “fill in the blanks”–in which case too much weight is laid upon reader-response, more weight than readers can bear perhaps.[36] 

  [23] I said that “at its best” this is a problem, and the problem remains precisely because of the way the flashbacks are handled, and the fact that they largely abstract the Christ-figure from the stories of the coming of the Kingdom of God.  This could be put another more general way in terms of human identity.  Persons are known (indeed they are formed) by the company they keep, by the relations they have with others.  It is a mistake to essentialise personhood thus abstracting it from its agency, as if acts were not the acts of persons revealing (and also revealing a hiding) something of who they are and how they understand themselves, or, concomitantly, as if persons were prior to and not engaged in acting.  Given that this is so, although it is controversial in the context of the essentialising anthropology of modernity,[37] construing the relation between Jesus and his acts is not possible without regard to the stories that depict the types of relations he had with others– with God, with the excluded and marginalised, and with those who understood themselves to be the social, religious, and political norm.  And what do those relations reveal?  Not anything about some abstract God, but about Israel’s God who identifies the coming of God’s rule with the performative witness of Jesus the Christ, transforming notions of God and world in and through the compassion that flows freely and inclusively from the love of God for God’s chosen people (and radically those whom they call “enemies’), the pneumatic- (Spirit-)conditioned joyful openness of hospitality, and the resistance to all those features and relations of the world that pervert or destroy these in any way.  A focus on The Passion of the Christ without the hermeneutical lens provided by these narratives of divine welcome in and through the ministry of Jesus Christ risks not merely distorting the careful weighting of the substance of the Gospels but also misshaping the very substance of the theological witness of those Gospels.[38]  In other words, Gibson’s rather disembodied Christ can reveal a very different type of God and human being from those identified as being performed in the life and witness of the Jesus of the Gospel narratives. 

  [24] Thus, at its worst, and this is where the point about abstraction imprints its theological importance, the Jesus of the film is but a body, a body victimised and assaulted–and it has particular difficulties indicating the means for resisting such an abstraction.  There are very few hints as to why he should be so victimised, why he has become the object of such abject hatred and loathing to the point of the opposition contriving an execution for him.  The two suggestions given have to do with Jesus’ “blasphemy” against God and the temple, but even that Sanhedrin trial scene is muted by the sound of the impact of the film’s blows inflicted upon him, and the meaning and significance of the charges is left unexplained.  Reflecting on what is lost at this point to the construal of grace leads us into considering just why it is that Gibson’s Christ is thin–and that thinning has serious implications for Christ’s ecclesial body, suggesting that at its heart is the eating disorder of those who transform Christ’s life-giving liberation into a passion for death.  It is this which suggests that Gibson’s is a not-so-innocent text awaiting the reader’s imposing form on its shapeless mass, but instead pre-empts and directs the conditions of possible readings, readings when arising from numerous appreciative Christian communities since The Passion’s cinematic release which consequently sound as if they are performed through the uncreative mouth of the ventriloquist’s dummy. 

Go and Do Likewise!  But Just How Much Healing Can the Muscles Give?

[25] Most important perhaps in this respect, and almost in spite of the actions of the various characters in the film, is Jesus’ own determination to die.  “For this was I born,” says Jesus in a statement not present in the Gospels (texts themselves written post-Easter in the light of Jesus’ resurrection).  Yet Luke’s Gospel records Jesus as saying that “the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10), and this talk of seeking and saving comes in the context of Jesus’ life and ministry not an atoning death as such.  In other words, the weight of the theology of Gospels is that Jesus is sent to live most humanly.  As Herbert McCabe argues, “The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human.”[39]  But Gibson’s Christ, as already described lacks humanity at several key points, and essentially his shadowy form becomes a body of death in contrast to the Emmanuel of the Gospels’ body of life. 

[26] Yet, one will protest, surely Jesus gives us life through his death.  That much seems to be clear from various metaphors used in the New Testament to reflect on the saving significance of the passion the Christ underwent.  Nevertheless, one can at least in theory (whether the texts allow this is another matter) maintain that our life is secured by a death and nevertheless continue by differentiating that from the reduction of all the significance of the person who has died to her death.  So, for instance, a martyr can “die for us”; one can sacrifice her life so that others do not have to die (e.g., a soldier diving on a grenade); or someone can value a mission or the good of others before her own and subsequently put herself in harm’s way (e.g., a nurse voluntarily working in places plagued by contagious diseases).  Their deaths have a certain saving quality, and yet their meaning as persons is not absolutely reducible to the moment of their deaths, even if those be acclaimed to give them a significance for the existence and memories of future generations.  So there is something odd about contracting the significance of Jesus or the meaning of the so-called Christ-event to the very passion and crucifixion.  The question of the saving value of Jesus’ life, healing ministry, teaching, and practice of social inclusion in the name of the coming of the Kingdom of God, is deflected and subverted.  And, of course, the loss is telling–not merely in that little sense can be given to Jesus’ death without attending carefully to his life and teaching, nor also merely in the sense that the opposition he incurred by the performance of his identifying his way with the coming of God’s Kingdom, although these in themselves are vital losses.  Rather, the loss of the person of Jesus to the “work” of dying (can it be called a “work”?) is the loss of the meaning of One whose way is to create conditions for peaceable relations, space for forgiveness and friendship between enemies, for the cultivation of virtuous life shared with and given for others in obedience to the redemptive purposes of their Creator.  In other words, the loss has the potential for distorting the very way of Jesus Christ as the way of life-giving healing, the way that draws others in to its divine-ordered trajectory.  This distortion is deadly, literally, in that it gives up its christoform (Christ-shaped) resources for life and replace it with an inability to see what occurs in cultures of death. 

[27] Numerous critics perceive precisely these losses as blighting Gibson’s Passion.  Notice in the first place the theology of suffering.  There is a sense of control– Jesus is ultimately in control of his own destiny (echoing John 10:17-18), and that raises tough questions left unaddressed as to the importance of the action of the executors and the notion of Jesus as innocent victim.  This, then, plays from a particular opening reference to Isaiah 53:5:  “he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; … and by his bruises [‘stripes’, AV] we are healed.”  The sufferings and the death themselves, it would seem from this film, are what redeem–the body abused and victimised is what is saving.  This can be seen through various features of its drama. 

  [28] Most notably, the biblical imagery is striking on occasions, but the way it is read is pre-eminently directed by a popular western “Christ as victim” theology, building on the sacrificial cult.[40]  In other words, it is this that directs the little sense there is of the person of Jesus–his life and death and resurrection–as being redemptive.  There is here no reading, nor can there be if this motif is overplayed, of Paul’s Christ as the Second Adam (see Rom. 5:12-21), the New Man, or of Paul’s baptismal imagery of dying and rising–dying to sin, and rising to new life (Rom. 6). 

  [29] Moreover, the way of Jesus before the sufferings inflicted is illuminating:  what is most noticeable is the sense of resignation, or quiet acceptance of the suffering intensified and reinforced by the manner of Jesus’ super stoic bearing of it.  In one incident, he receives horrendous blows from the canes of his Roman floggers that knock him motionless to his knees.  Yet within moments, he rises defiantly, undefeated and unbroken, surprising the Romans by his sheer strength and endurance–in a sense, Jesus “asks for” the abuse of the cat-o’nine-tails.  Jesus subsequently has to endure a beating (graphically, almost psychotically, and relentlessly detailed by the film-maker) that would have killed any ordinary human being–but Gibson’s heroic sufferer is no mere mortal. 

[30] In another incident equally bodying forth a forceful revelatory significance, a severely beaten Jesus, weakened and very slowly stumbling with both his cross and the continuing blows delivered under the whipping of the Roman police, utters the words to Mary when they meet again (the mother-son relation was for me the only really poignant thing about this film), words not recorded in the four canonical Gospels:  “mother, behold, I make all things new!”  At that very moment, Jesus finds renewed strength, lifts himself up under his burden, and triumphantly strides determined to die.  This is not too far removed from a bravehearting of salvation, an unreconfigured salus (salvation or healing) by sheer straining of the muscles.[41]  It is the muscular endurance willing suffering and death for himself that counts for more here than the refusal to betray the new life of the Kingdom by taking into his hands the power of his persecutors, thus violating the good life with his own violence against others.  His resistance is to the ability to give up suffering or to collapse under its weight, but his resistance to that which causes suffering has been denied to him through a docile politics.  As a culturally generative sign to others just what kind of effect could this presentation potentially have?  Ched Myers argues:  “While no one thinks that we will see an increase of overt acts of anti-Semitism [for example] in North America right now, the shaping of prejudice [and assumptions of righteous violence] is incremental and mysterious, and this film influences in the wrong direction.”[42] 

[31] The Passion of Gibson’s passionate Christ, then, may be able to eat up all the suffering that Jesus chooses to endure, and even come back unsatisfied for more, but it is much less clear how he becomes the Eucharistic body given for all in order to transform their bodies into lives of a just compassion–where “Compassion is the determination to oppose [others’] suffering.”[43]  Take one incident, as it impacts Mahlon Smith when complaining about Gibson’s truncating of Jesus’ message of loving even one’s enemies.  Gibson, he argues,

has Jesus urge his followers to love their enemies, but only in a brief flashback that presents just a truncated fragment of the argument of Jesus’ sermon (Matt. 5:43-48, Luke 6:27-36). Moreover, the ethical effectiveness of that paradoxical instruction is immediately placed in question, as Gibson’s camera returns to focus on a bloodied Jesus falling under the weight of his Roman cross.  Only a masochist could love the one who is whipping him.  Thus, the viewer is left with a vivid impression that Jesus’ ethical ideal is powerless to counter the excruciating pain of harsh reality.[44] 

[32] Of course, one may respond, the point is exactly to demonstrate the radicality of Jesus’ love-command when one sees the intensity of bestial hate in the world.  If this is the case, then Gibson has made an important point, and Jesus’ prayer from the cross for his persecutor’s forgiveness could direct the attentive concentration onto this again.  Yet the discomfort Smith experiences suggests that the dramatic weighting does not work well.  Gibson refuses to develop the theme of the eschatological inbreaking of God’s healing and liberating reign in the life and work of Jesus the Christ, thus disabling the audience’s ability to see the power of love in active resistance to the distortions of sin.  It is here that the resurrection is so vital to a proper sense of the cross–among other things, it is the manifestation of God’s remaining faithful to Jesus and also to the creative project which is uttered as the blessing on the works of God’s hands in Genesis 1 (e.g., Gen. 1:4). 

[33] This leads to the asking of a highly significant question:  what does this heroic endurance of suffering say about suffering itself, about the injustice of much sufferings inflicted in the world, and about one’s ability to contest and resist the infliction of unjust suffering?  This is possibly the point where Gibson’s Passion is most disturbing, finding it difficult to resist theologies unable or unwilling to draw the appropriate differentiation between salvation and suffering.[45]  The two become too easily identified thus, as we observed before, issuing in suffering, or at least the sufferings of Jesus, as saving per se.  Into this comes a further step which then fails to understand Jesus’ ministry as an opposition to all that causes unjust suffering–that Jesus opposes the exclusion of the weak by those in power, the poor by those who are rich, and so on, and in this challenge radically transforms human relations from the very conditions and character that make both victims and their victimisers.  After all, the Roman cross as instrument of death reserved for those denied their humanity by Rome (slaves, political dissidents) is the cap on Jesus’ identifying solidarity with those denied their humanity by their societies (lepers, prostitutes, poor, tax collectors, and so on).  Moreover, it, as an instrument of torturous punishment manifesting “the demonic character of human cruelty and bestiality,” is the expression of social and political self-securing enacted as retributive “lust for revenge and … sadistic cruelty” against opposition that makes for docile citizens.[46]  Gibson’s admitted aesthetisation of the violence looks distinctly ugly in comparison.[47] 

[34] It is not insignificant that many positive responses to Gibson’s Passion read it in purely religious and spiritual terms and not, then, as the manifestation of the power of Godforsakenness in all that blights human beings, their relations with themselves and one another, and the systems or organised bodies that they create and that in turn create them.  Possibly that is why the attention at Golgotha was almost exclusively on the crucifixion of Jesus to the virtual avoidance of the other two “victims.”[48]  So, for instance, the Christian Publicity Organisation’s booklet entitled Experience the Passion of the Christ reduces the Christ-event to what might be called a therapy for the individual’s soul–it deals with the lack of experience of love, the overwhelming experience of guilt, the need for forgiveness, and the feeling of brokenness, in one’s life.  None of these are set in the context of Jesus’ challenge of the social order and its constituting of the identity of persons, as displayed in his table fellowship with all kinds of socially and religiously excluded peoples, his refusal to play the violent game of imperial politics and those reactionaries it spawned, and so on.  The texture of the human relations that came to oppose the challenge Jesus laid down, or the sufferings “we have arranged” for him,[49] is significantly smoothed over, and the sense of the exposure of their performance as sin at the cross, something so fundamental to much of the Christian tradition, is unwittingly covered up.  Put starkly, the Gospel’s making the world that God creates to be for and with God is potentially suffocated in the typical individualising frame of Western Christian tendencies, and therein lies an extensive curtailing of the grace that is redemptive of even the powers and authorities (see Col. 1:16) and unmasks the ways of sin in and through those powers and authorities.  This loss is intensified in the bodies suffering that disease so that numerous Christian spiritualities come to encourage the acceptance of sufferings (depicted without any differentiation into types or causes) as God-given, educational and to be endured.  It would seem that there has been the insufficient build-up of resistance to disease among those who identify themselves with his pneumatic-led body, the Church.[50]  At this point, it is worth attending to St. John of the Cross’ identification of Christian “enemies of the Cross of Christ.”[51]  The Spanish Carmelite complained of those who “attain not to detachment and poverty or selflessness or spiritual purity” but instead “prefer feeding and clothing their natural selves with spiritual feelings and consolations … This is not self-denial and detachment of spirit, but spiritual gluttony.”[52]  Those involved, wittingly or unwittingly in such bloated spiritual self-indulgence and self-concern come to sense little of the continuing healing discipline of the medicine of self-denial and other-(all others) concern?[53]  These spiritualities, we could postulate further, are unable to appropriately distinguish between the ethics of voluntary suffering when done for the good of others, and involuntary suffering that is imposed wholly on a victim precisely, because they are primarily determined by self-love that seeks one’s own glory in and through suffering. 

[35] Thus, in cultures where there are the abused bodies of those denied their subjecthood and rendered victims by suffering poverty, the silencing of having someone’s else’s voice imposed upon one’s self-identification, and the being violated by destructive violence, to portray the Christ-body as heroic in its suffering silently is to lend weight to a Christian escapist fantasy.  The fantasy is escapist because it evades its responsibilities to the life God has created, perhaps slipping into dreaming of another life elsewhere; and it is fantasy because it is a world removed from God’s recreative uttering again of the blessing upon creation in raising the body of Jesus and which enables Christ’s disciples to live differently in this world.  So De Giglio-Bellemare recognises that “Dolorism, from the Latin dolor (pain), is an expression used to define a spirituality of resignation to pain and sorrow.  Unfortunately, it is this kind of spirituality that has been deployed within Christendom to keep the poor and marginalized in their place.”[54]  Moreover, in cultures fevered by sensual narcotics, to portray the Christ body as dealing with individuals’ guilt, shame, sin, and so on, is to be conformed to the egoistic Zeitgeist. 

[36] In The Passion new life seems to be directly linked to Jesus’ sufferings and death–the life and resurrection (the raising of Christ’s body for us) of Jesus are not redemptive events.  Serious attention to Gibson’s resurrection yields some concerns here, such as whether it has been rendered unnecessary by the superhuman capacity of Jesus to bear suffering (but how does that make Jesus different from numerous other martyrs?).  The oddness of it as almost an uncomfortable postscript to the main drama of suffering would seem to further justify such a worry.  Jesus has something less than a life-giving body, one that has been divinely vindicated in its being raised, and demarcated as the eschatological or ultimate blessing of the divine creativity around the cosmic significance of this man.  To be fair, one could admit that the imagination has no way of portraying eschatological significance.  The problem is, however, that it is difficult to see how Gibson’s Passion even tries.  The resurrection adds nothing, soteriologically speaking, to the passion victoriously undergone–Jesus has already endured redemptive suffering, and in his death Satan has been cast down.  Like many of the Western traditions that slip into stauromonism (or, perhaps, salvation-by-the-cross-alone) the features of the resurrection are textured without saving relevance–that has occurred at the point of the cross.  For Gibson, it has occurred at the stations of the cross.  One critic observes that “Instead of a richly ironic story, in which even Jesus’ enemies are caught up in the symphony of grace, we get a Manichean [eternally contrasting absolute good with absolute evil] morality play, in which evil is not so much transformed by God’s love as merely beaten by it.”[55] 

[37] Now this critique is very different from one which can too unselfconsciously speak of a “non-violent atonement.”  Under the conditions of the violence, and the disruptive relations created by sin it does not make sense to speak of the active confrontation of grace with gracelessness as non-violent atonement, if not heavily qualified.[56]  As McCabe claims, “We have made a world in which there is no way of being human that does not involve suffering.”[57]  The atoning provision of God assumes conditions that are not at-one, disruptive and disrupting, conditions which God in turn disrupts with redeeming grace.  Gibson at least brutally forces us to refuse the all-too-familiar anaemic, sanitised and domesticated Jesuologies.[58]  But at what cost?  The cost may well be in implicating Jesus in the type of violence that violates the humanity of others, making him complicit in his own execution rather than as the One who makes for a living resistant to this type of violent performance.  Jesus becomes something less than the paradigmatic and constitutive image of the economy of the Gift of the Triune God’s body of grace, freely vulnerable to finding healing ways of providing for the multiple needs of all others, transformative of the very conditions that make and mould humans’ identities together, and engracing human beings as essentially hospitable to one another.  Always the temptation seems to be that we will want to evade the circumscription and multiple responsibilities of being bodily, to close off in finality in a way that evades the conditioning of finitude, and of rendering the particular absolute.  But if one succumbs to that, one misses the ability to confess that we are one with our bodies only when we are ourselves taken up into the inviting divine (where divine means that pertaining to the God who is Triune fellowship) expressibility which is simply richer, more comprehensive, dynamic, openly available, truer and sociable than anything sinful selves might create. 

Conclusion:  Mel’s Bodily and Bloody Disgrace

[38] I commenced this paper by explaining that Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is involved in what I called a threefold bodylessness in which the body is either misplaced or replaced.  The threefold forms are:  the “Jewish-problem”; the life of the Christ; and the nature of the saving achieved by the sufferings of the condemned Jesus.  The reason that these were initially explicated via a metaphor of Trinitarian perichoresis is that they all flow from one another and each are bound up together, in this instance as expressions of an abstracted body, a body that is theologically unrecognisable as human body because it is without its own (Jewish) particularity, the particular relations it had, and the creative life-giving relations that makes relations well (for instance, by opposing exclusion, and making a people-together). 

  [39] Throughout I have attempted to suggest that the implications of this are far-reaching and politically disturbing, especially in relation to the body and power abstracted from the kind of life-generating “power” that is the theological fruit of texts like the so-called early Christ-hymn of Philippians 2:6-11.  Significantly, however, Gibson is by no means alone in this bodylessness or, better, body-lostness.  In his paper entitled “The Worldview Clash,” Evangelical New Testament scholar Don Carson makes the following striking comment: 

It is crucial that we learn the gospel and proclaim it.  But it is also vitally important to understand that the people to whom we speak bring with them their own particular prejudices, backgrounds and biases. … [W]e must address the cultural presuppositions of our hearers so that we do not unwittingly obscure the gospel.[59] 

[40] The main problem with this kind of rhetoric is that it seems to misplace any notion that Christians too are culturally embedded, and that the way the Gospel is heard, received, and then proclaimed to others is consequently coloured by that embeddedness.  The church is too close to, and bound up with, its host cultures for it ever to be able to declare itself (its truth and truthfulness) over against those cultures. 

[41] Carson’s statement would seem to be an instance of the perennial temptation that Christians have to surmount the limits of their creatureliness, a creatureliness that the Christian discourse of “original sin” (perhaps the closest Christians get to the tragic sensibility) adds a new kind of layer onto.  This is an example, in the words of Fergus Kerr, of a transcendence that is chaffed by its finitude –[60] the constraints that there are on human knowing are prematurely surmounted in what can only be described as a floating free of the contingencies (associated with dwelling in particular times and places) that make up the mess or complexity involved in claims to “truth.”  Moreover, because of the nature of this such a theology can become prone to theologising that is apolitical to its core, thus providing an abodily-determined theology that masks before others, and perhaps even obliviously before itself, its own politics of power-relations.  After all, aboldily-determined theologies are fundamentally immediately authoritative bodies without temporal or spatial extension.[61] 

[42] In a further securing of the position of power, it is often suggested that it is almost sacrilegious to criticise a film that has non-Christians talking about Jesus, and Christians claiming to be more reflective and enthused after viewing this movie, a movie that has, in other words, made Christians hopeful about evangelistic success.[62]  There are stories of criminals-on-the-run giving themselves up in the United States, people reading their bibles for the first time in years, and so on (there is also a story of a man from Maine who heard God tell him toward the end of the film to be crucified, literally).  But, adapting David Hume’s critique of the “design argument,” one should ask who decides which series of events are revelatory of the significance of the movie?  After all, one so rarely hears of incidents of failure but only of success, and it is on stories of the latter that salespeople, politicians, religious bodies, and so on, make their public evaluations of themselves.  Here is a further controlling strategy for dishonesty 

[43] As mentioned earlier, Gibson’s cinematic text does appreciate the way awareness of the violence inflicted on Jesus may now unfavourably judge the brutal sentimentality and hollowness of the way Christians are all too prone to sanitise and garland the cross, and domesticate Jesus into a purveyor of good clean and wholesome values.  This trivialising tendency misplaces the particular body of One abused and assaulted to the point of a humiliating execution. 

[44] Even so, Gibson does not visually confront his audience with the truth of the Gospel hope in any real sense.  In fact, there is little Gospel (which means “good news’) here.  Why are the terrible sufferings of this man universally redemptive (there is an unexplored catalogue of hints, particularly drawing round the assertion that Jesus is saving, that he is the way and the truth and the life)?  What are the sins and their forgiveness that are spoken of all too briefly on a few occasions? 

[45] Moreover, the question uncomfortably remains:  what kind of hopeful edification is appropriate from meditating on the passion of Jesus Christ to the exclusion of pretty much everything else about Jesus’ life?  Several critics liken Gibson’s meditation to a medieval passion-play, a moment in self-flagellation much in the tradition of the Philippines who mercilessly flagellate themselves in the ritualised violence of re-enacting Jesus’ sufferings.  Moreover, is it “gospel” to induce shame if it is not learned precisely through and in grace, as with the worst traditions of the hell-fire and damnation sermons?  While there are some generally undeveloped hints and suggestions of meaning, there is little redemptive life and depth to the film to be worthy of sustained reflection.  The body is largely separated from its life, its life before God and before others as lived in multiple layers of compassionate relations with and for them, the being of one called out of God’s people to be their Messiah and the hope of the world (arguably the sparseness of the tender scenes involving Mary are exceptions which prove the rule–after all, the “family values” expressed in these undeveloped moments remain largely apolitical in their impact).  This ‘separation” may well enable the preservation of a religious halo around this particular piece of violence and injustice, and Christians–judging from the hysteria of assertive support for Gibson’s project–seem unwilling to test any problems with that.  Something of the mechanisms of Christian self-deceit and control, and the impatience with the painstaking and ongoing work of (self-) critical understanding done in conversation, are illuminated in the very production and reception of this movie. 

[47] Graham Ward questions whether theology has or owns a voice of its own.  Rather, “Doing theology, acting, writing, functioning theologically is … to be voiced; to be spoken, not a speaker.”[63]  It is to be given a voice that is not its own, and therein to be set on its way.[64]  Gibson, however, seems to too closely associate, or at least be unaware of the problem, his own voice and that of God’s.  His God without gracious embodiment, the gracefully transformative eschatological body, can become without mediation the God of Gibson’s Passion:  a God who legitimates self-assertion, power that violates the need for the disciples of conversational self-interrogation, the theological possibility for sensitivity to the brutalising othering of others, and even the affairs of grace for being in this world together.  Not merely the content of the piece but its very manner of performance advertises an inability to perceive the Gospel as in any way a hope-filled challenge to the despair-making dominating pathologies of assertive cultural exchange expressed as they are in various myths of redemptive violence.  It is difficult to imagine just where The Passion’s challenge to the culture of death and life-giving and playfully celebratory witness to the natality of human flourishing in God’s created world could begin.  Gibson’s Passion has the feel more of a last meal, in contrast to the Gospels’ anticipating the hospitable feasting of the eschatological gift of Shabbat Shalom.  Another way of saying this is to suggest that a proper theological account of the threefold body of Christ, as the circumscribed body of Jesus Christ, as the Eucharistic body shared in for the peace and feeding of all blessed as “children of God,” and the social body called Church that will be spotlessly presented as the redeemed community sharing together, is needed and will radically reconceive the relations of God, Christ and world of which Gibson has trouble preventing the distortion. 

[47] The defleshed bones of Gibson’s Christ need a lot more life breathed into them (otherwise they will become idolatrous), the life of God as breathed mediately through the very person of Jesus Christ, God’s anointed One from Nazareth who lived, taught, ate with sinners, healed the sick, exorcised demons, was crucified and raised, God’s eikōn (Col. 1:15) and the body of hope of the world.  Otherwise, they may not only remain as an unresurrected decomposing frame, turning to ash in our grasping hands, but we may even bizarrely and mistakenly seek the living there.  It may be passionate, but we might well be eating and drinking damnation on our world (cf. 1 Cor. 11:29).  And that would be deadly indeed!  If the eschatologically healing Spirit of Jesus Christ is to be known, Gibson’s Passion needs to come with a Spiritual health warning:  “give up all hope all ye who enter here!”