Happy Easter!

I broke down, after having The Passion of the Christ in its cellophane wrapper for over two years, and decided to watch it yesterday. I was sort of shamed into it by one of my students in the 6th grade, whose mother, a rabid anti-Harry Potter fanatic who believes that there are "real magic spells" contained in the writings of J.K. Rowling (she didn't take me up on my offer of a hundred bucks to get one of those "real" spells to work), showed her 11-year-old son (my student) the movie. He saw nothing wrong with it. I'm conflicted, personally.

For years my standard Easter movie has been the 1959 version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, starring Charlton Heston and with a wonderful supporting cast which included Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith, Sam Jaffe, and Jack Hawkins, among many others. It's a timeless depiction of a man's story on the periphery of the story of Jesus, and how they intersect and the man, Judah Ben-Hur, gains a new faith, remarkable after everything he and his family have gone through at the hands of the evil Roman tribune Messala. I believe Ben-Hur still holds the record for Academy Awards, and with good reason. It was the last of the true blockbuster movies from MGM, right at the beginning of the surge of television ownership. A huge movie, with all the stops pulled out, just the chariot-race scene alone took over a year to film.

At the end of Ben-Hur, we see Jesus being whipped and dragging his cross to Golgotha (or Calvary, depending on your preference), and he is crucified. But here the similarities to The Passion become a bit extreme in their divergence. In The Passion of the Christ, one has to watch different implements being tried on Jesus, both front and back, whipping and scourging him until his body seems to be one open wound. My guess is that Gibson got it down a bit more accurately, but it was so intense, and so brutal, that I had to take periodic breaks. It was extremely tough on me to watch, and I was a bit glassy-eyed at the movie's end.

With Ben-Hur, I find myself with tears in my eyes, and uplifted. With The Passion, I have the same tears, but I find myself dwelling on the inhumanity of the gleeful tormenters of Jesus as they shred his body. It wasn't enough just to crucify him; they had to make him look as though he had been through a huge garlic press. There is no disrespect intended with that description; it's about as close as I can come to what he looked like when he finally died on the cross. With the Passion, I feel sorrow. Not very uplifted. Just stunned.

Perhaps I'm wimpy, and I have posted this question on Outcast Conservatives, but is it really appropriate to show this movie to 11-year-old kids when it damn near kills a 55-year-old man to watch it?

I doubt that I'll be watching The Passion again anytime soon. I note that Mel Gibson released a new version, entitled "The Passion Recut," with less of the violence, possibly because he, or his audience, shared the same concerns I have. In any case, one thing it DID do for me: it made it impossible for me to again rationally repeat the words "he died to save us from our sins" as though he just died. Jesus was tortured, mutilated, and slowly allowed to die, hanging on a cross. I'll never just be able to mindlessly gloss over the thought of his sacrifice again, and God forgive me for having gotten used to the idea so that it seems as just another part of the liturgy. If Gibson's treatment of the events of the death of Christ shocked a few people into believing, then I guess the movie did its job. I think I'll revert to the Ben-Hur tradition next year.

Regardless of what you watch, or what you do, may God bless you all on Easter, the celebration of the event upon which Christianity stands or falls: the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. He's waiting for all of us who believe.