I am hoping to see Mel Gibson’s new film, “Passion”, when it’s released later this month.
I respect him for not sanitizing the death of Jesus, as it seems so many Christian denominations have.
Christians believe that the sacrifice of Jesus, half divine/half human, was necessary for forgiveness of sins.
Since the day I learned that crucifixion is a torturous death by slow suffocation, a crucifix symbolizes to me the execution by cruel and unusual punishment of an innocent at the hands of his country’s occupying military authority.
The new book sensation, The DaVinci Code, explains that the “traditional” cross which we see in all Western churches was rejected by some Christian sects in favor of a version of the Maltese cross, 4 parts that are equal in length. A cross of this design could not have been used for execution, and is, thus, a symbol of Jesus’s ministry rather than his death.
I find few if any matters more worthy of consideration than one’s relationship to God, and instinct tells me that Gibson is a deeply religious man who made this out of a wish to tell Jesus’s story accurately and with poignance and empathy.
I’m sure this film will do brilliantly at the box office, and I hope it inspires the telling of other journeys, particularly of those spiritual leaders whom we perhaps don’t know as well as the Carpenter from Nazareth.