Plenty of people are worried that Mel Gibson’s new film “The Passion of the Christ” will provide an excuse for closet anti-Semites to retaliate against the Jewish members of their community.
While anti-Semitism is regarded as unacceptable in the US, it is certainly present overseas, in Europe and elsewhere.
I plan to see “The Passion” this weekend, so my understanding of the role played by the Jewish people in the film is based right now only on other people’s comments.
These have stated pretty universally that Gibson places responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Roman government and the rabbis/institutional leadership of the Jewish populace.
Aside from what some see as the theological necessity for Jesus to be sacrificially murdered, I see his story as an example of the excesses of individuals in positions of power – and we haven’t improved a whit in the last 2,000 years.
The Salem Witchcraft Trials orchestrated by Puritan zealots is an old example. The abject failure of the Roman Catholic church leadership to prevent the molestation of its children by its priests is a recent one.
The excesses of almost every modern government, including our own, is another.
One thing you can bet on, leaders will turn on the people they are supposed to lead, guaranteed, unless there are safeguards on their power.
That’s why protecting the Constitution from narrow political agendas and, not incidentally, why having a healthy middle class are so important to our country.
The Jewish people at the time of Jesus were primarily a peasant class, uneducated and living hand-to-mouth as small merchants, fishermen and semi-skilled craftsmen.
Some believe that Jesus was condemned by the authorities of his time not because he was heretical, but that he was a peasant, claiming a leadership role that was beyond his station in life.
Nowadays, there are those in positions of power – members of the current Administration, corporate executives, media heads and Federal appointees like the Federal Reserve Chairman – who seem hell-bent on impoverishing the American middle class, economically and intellectually.
One wonders if the real agenda of some of these people is to take the world’s strongest democracy and turn in into a banana republic.
“The Passion”, then, resonates with me politically as well as spiritually. It is the story of the excesses of leadership, leading to the hideous murder of an innocent, while an unarmed, ignorant populace was whipped to hysteria by government thugs and a “religious” leadership obsessed with maintaining its position of privilege and authority.
This story is 2,000 years old, but it gets repeated, with sickening regularity, in our own time. It reflects some deep flaws in the human psyche that have nothing to do with “original sin”, but, rather, the wish, at all costs, for group or tribal acceptance, to “get along by going along”.
Our own country’s deep tradition of creativity, personal achievement and independent mindedness is being crushed by macroeconomic forces that exploit that human fear of non-conformity and tribal banishment.
Jesus is one of my heroes because he “bucked the system”, and I can’t help but admire Mel Gibson for wanting to bear testimony to the awful consequences of doing so, not to frighten people, but to inspire them.
Thus, I hope that “The Passion” does, in fact, inspire people to good and not to acts of violence, in all its forms, whether these are acts of sacrilege against Jewish houses of worship, or conformity to the consensus that those in power try so hard to shove down our throats.