[IP] Op-Ed Columnist: Not Peace, but a Sword
Op-Ed Columnist: Not Peace, but a Sword
March 1, 2004
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON - The word "passion" is rooted in the Latin for
"suffer." Mel Gibson's movie about the torture and agony of
the final hours of Jesus is the bloodiest, most brutal
example of sustained sadism ever presented on the screen.
Because the director's wallowing in gore finds an excuse in
a religious purpose - to show how horribly Jesus suffered
for humanity's sins - the bar against film violence has
been radically lowered. Movie mayhem, long resisted by
parents, has found its loophole; others in Hollywood will
now find ways to top Gibson's blockbuster, to cater to
voyeurs of violence and thereby to make bloodshed banal.
What are the dramatic purposes of this depiction of cruelty
and pain? First, shock; the audience I sat in gasped at the
first tearing of flesh. Next, pity at the sight of
prolonged suffering. And finally, outrage: who was
responsible for this cruel humiliation? What villain
deserves to be punished?
Not Pontius Pilate, the Roman in charge; he and his kindly
wife are sympathetic characters. Nor is King Herod shown to
be at fault.
The villains at whom the audience's outrage is directed are
the actors playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid
Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval
"passion play," preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at
Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as "Christ
killers."
Much of the hatred is based on a line in the Gospel of St.
Matthew, after the Roman governor washes his hands of
responsibility for ordering the death of Jesus, when the
crowd cries, "His blood be on us, and on our children."
Though unreported in the Gospels of Mark, Luke or John,
that line in Matthew - embraced with furious glee by
anti-Semites through the ages - is right there in the New
Testament. Gibson and his screenwriter didn't make it up,
nor did they misrepresent the apostle's account of the
Roman governor's queasiness at the injustice.
But biblical times are not these times. This inflammatory
line in Matthew - and the millenniums of persecution,
scapegoating and ultimately mass murder that flowed partly
from its malign repetition - was finally addressed by the
Catholic Church in the decades after the defeat of Naziism.
In 1965's historic Second Vatican Council, during the
papacy of Paul VI, the church decided that while some
Jewish leaders and their followers had pressed for the
death of Jesus, "still, what happened in his passion cannot
be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then
alive, nor against the Jews of today."
That was a sea change in the doctrinal interpretation of
the Gospels, and the beginning of major interfaith
progress.
However, a group of Catholics rejects that and other
holdings of Vatican II. Mr. Gibson is reportedly aligned
with that reactionary clique. (So is his father, an
outspoken Holocaust-denier, but the son warns interviewers
not to go there. I agree; the latest generation should not
be held responsible for the sins of the fathers.)
In the skillful publicity run-up to the release of the
movie, Gibson's agents said he agreed to remove that
ancient self-curse from the screenplay. It's not in the
subtitles I saw the other night, though it may still be in
the Aramaic audio, in which case it will surely be
translated in the versions overseas.
And there's the rub. At a moment when a wave of
anti-Semitic violence is sweeping Europe and the Middle
East, is religion well served by updating the Jew-baiting
passion plays of Oberammergau on DVD? Is art served by
presenting the ancient divisiveness in blood-streaming
media to the widest audiences in the history of drama?
Matthew in 10:34 quotes Jesus uncharacteristically telling
his apostles: "Think not that I am come to send peace on
earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." You don't
see that on Christmas cards and it's not in this film, but
those words can be reinterpreted - read today to mean that
inner peace comes only after moral struggle.
The richness of Scripture is in its openness to
interpretation answering humanity's current spiritual
needs. That's where Gibson's medieval version of the
suffering of Jesus, reveling in savagery to provoke outrage
and cast blame, fails Christian and Jew today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/01/opinion/01SAFI.html?ex=1079172035&ei=1&en=03af1accd49de4f9
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