High Calling Magazine
The official publication of The Francis Asbury Society

To Bear or Not to Bear the Cross

A Meditation on Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”

BY REV. TORY BAUCUM
 

Last Saturday I attended the movie The Passion of the Christ with about 250 members of my congregation.  Afterwards, we returned to the church for Holy Communion following which several people stayed behind for a light meal and conversation.  This meditation resulted from that. 

This is not a review of the movie. It represents my own thoughts and meditations of The Passion of the Christ as I have sparked off others.  Indeed, the Passion is a contemplative movie, a Lenten discipline, and I wonder if strict Protestants not rooted in the discipline of the “stations of the cross” will be able to receive the cinematic richness of Gibson’s message fully.  However, I am not at all interested in defending Mel Gibson or his interpretation of the final hours of Jesus’ life. I am interested, however, in what we think, believe, feel, and do about Jesus Christ and his death for us.

I must make this important disclaimer about the movie.  For me, the most poignant and memorable scenes were not those of Jesus’ scourging or his beating, or even his crucifixion.  Though I think these events were far more brutal in real life, I do wish Gibson would have reined in the violence.  I wish this not because the violence was manufactured or manipulative but rather because it was in danger, for me at least, of eclipsing the true drama of our Lord’s death.  At the same time I do think the violence had a useful function, which I want to mention briefly.

The violence in the Passion is not of the slash and burn variety, where characters maim one another indiscriminately and then move on to the next unknown and random victim.   In the Passion,  the violence is directly personal.  It disturbs.  It haunts. It is intended to shake us out of our complacency. In this regard, I think it is similar to the violence of a Flannery O’Connor story.  Once when O’Connor, the southern Catholic writer, responded to why she characteristically resorted to the same kind of grotesque violence in her stories,  she replied, When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing, you shout; and for the blind, you draw large and startling pictures.[i]  

This movie clearly shouts and startles.  But then again, so did the original story.

In a History of New Testament Criticism course I had years ago, I studied a group of German scholars who described the canonical Gospels as passion narratives with extended introductions.  That particular reading strategy never became the dominant one in New Testament studies, but it has always been one of my favorites, not just because a disproportionate amount of narrative space is given to Jesus’ final hours and days – nearly a third to one half of each Gospel; nor because of the emphasis we Christians pay to the Passion in the church year.  (What other week in Jesus’ life do we follow day by day, hour by hour for the entire week?); no, though these two qualities would be reasons enough, this is not why the Passion is central to Jesus’ own biography (if we can call it that).  I believe the Passion is central to Jesus’ story because it is central to God’s story.  Jesus and his cross are the culmination of God’s own passion: God’s reckless love affair with the human race; God’s unfettered, unreserved redemptive quest for our lives.

I learned to read the Bible from the perspective of God’s passion from Jews, not Christians.  Jewish scholars taught me that the passion, the very pathos of God drives the biblical plot.  For example, Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote: Pathos in all its forms reveals the extreme pertinence of man to God, His world-directedness, attentiveness and concern…The fundamental thought in the Bible is not creation, but God’s care for His creation.[ii]  It is quite natural for Christians to understand that Jesus’ death on the cross is the inevitable consequence of God’s pathos.  The canonical shape of the Bible leads us to read the story this way.

 These provisos lead me to describe the most memorable scenes of the Passion, what I believe to be the very heart of the drama.  They were all scenes of interaction demonstrating the divine care and concern for us: Jesus’ interacting with Peter at his denial; Jesus’ interacting with Judas in his betrayal; Jesus’  interacting with Pilate at his passing the buck; Jesus’ interacting with Mary in her solidarity and faithfulness; and Jesus’ interacting with Simon of Cyrene in his reluctance.  You needn’t see the movie to understand the importance of these interactions because they all appear in the Gospels.  I believe Gibson’s movie enhanced the Gospels at these points, however he may or may not have failed in other respects.

Five scenes (or series of scenes) of interaction both reveal the pathos of God and mediate Christ’s love to me.  Three provoked intense self-examination; two were exultant and inspired hope.  All five scenes revolved around the question will we or will we not bear the cross of Christ?  To bear or not to bear – that is the question.  Three answered ‘no’; two said ‘yes’. 

Not to Bear

As Flannery O’Connor said, you have to shout to the hard of hearing and use wild gestures for the blind.  The graphic brutality toward Jesus is designed to help us to see something critical in our relationship with Christ and his cross.  I believe our tendency is to distance ourselves from this event, our involvement, and our culpability. Yet our involvement is the focus of the story.  Jesus’ passion confronts us with the issue of our choices about God’s concern for us, about Christ and his cross. The passion confronts us with choices, hard choices, choices that reveal our true nature.  I suspect that those of us who know the story watched in profound anxiety as three characters make their choice not to bear the cross, not to identify with Christ in his passion.

Peter, of course, denies he knows the Lord, not once or twice but three times.  In the third denial, Jesus, already bloody from having been slapped around, looks Peter in the eye.   And his gaze pierces. 

 But I watched in dread when Judas made his choices against Christ – from acceptance of the silver to his betraying kiss in the courtyard to his anxious pleading with the Sanhedrin to dissolve their agreement and eventually, to his suicide hanging. 

The least sympathetic choice was the one posed for Pilate. I viewed Pilate as the consummate corporatist – an Enron executive. Not to pick on the laity, he could have passed as a priest or pastor – or better yet, bishop – dressed in his purple sash and seated in his cathedra.  And, as one might expect, all of his choices had to do with not making a choice, until he makes the fatal one, hides behind imperial (or canon) law as if it has the authority of God’s Word, and washes his hands in dramatic fashion as if water is thicker than blood.  It was a hollow ritual if ever there was one.   

Someone in our group later asked if I thought Judas was evil.  I turned the question back on the inquirer: “Do you?”  In truth, seldom have I felt such pity for a character.   No, I don’t think he was evil anymore than I think you or I am evil.  I am not willing to call someone evil that I so clearly recognize in myself. Are you?  I think it is a mistake to see these three choices as alien to our wills or strangers to our own hearts.  They are not.  I am Peter, Judas and Pilate – given the right circumstances and timing.  Do we really think we would do better??? Indeed, I believe that this is the kind of narcissistic, self-congratulatory attitude the violence was designed to startle out of us. 

Let me ask you, are we really that much different from these characters?

• When asked to stand by a friend during a few hours of sorrow or trial, have you agreed – then slept or maybe forgot, simply too passive or lazy to spend yourself or be spent?
• When asked in public, amidst a crowd or maybe a few peers, about an unpopular friend or truth, do we deny that friend or truth? 
• Or when it is time to take a courageous stand for an unpopular position or issue, and the polls and peers are against us, do we devolve that decision to a lower level or defer its resolution to a more opportune time? 

As for me, I have to say, yes, yes and yes.  Christ’s cross is heavy and I’d rather not bear it.[iii] 

To Bear

But the pathos of God bears what we often refuse to bear.  I am coming to believe the most important verb in Scripture is the word to bear.  The word is nasa (asn) in Hebrew.  In some contexts it is translated “to lift up” or “to forgive” – forgiveness being the effect of someone’s having borne our sin.  And all of us are borne up by someone at one time or other in our lives.  A little reflection teaches us that we began life by our mother’s bearing us in her womb for nine months.  Then she went to the very precipice of death so that we might have life.  In his passion, Jesus bore us in our sin, ugliness, and estrangement all the way over the precipice and arose that we might have life.[iv] 

Mary bore Jesus in his cross.  We see it in her gestures:  She grinds the gravel in her fists as he was being scourged. With white linen sheets she cleans the slate floor splattered with his blood.  She presses through the crowds to follow him all the way along the Via Dolorosa.  She stands at the foot of his cross, kissing his blood-soaked toes.  She cradles his dead, limp body at the end of his long ordeal.  She says few words.  She doesn’t have to say more. 

I agree with one commentator that this was the most surprising part of the movie for me: that Mary was so much at the heart and soul of it. Her face is unforgettable, an island of tenderness yet strength in the cataract of brutality unleashed at her son. So central was Mary, so stunningly played by Maia Morgenstern, the Romanian Jew, the film could have been just as easily called the Pieta instead of the Passion.[v] 

I confess that I have never really felt emotionally drawn to Marian devotion; that is, until watching this movie.  I know many Melcontents are out there right now, but I am grateful to Mel for teaching me something I never could understand from theology books alone.  As Jesus bore us; Mary bore Jesus.  I left the movie thinking, “Now, I know why my Catholic brothers and sisters love her so.” 

The last choice was represented by Simon. He was commandeered by a Roman soldier who nastily called him, “you Jew.”  Simon protested in prophetic irony, “Why should an innocent man carry the cross of a criminal?”  Yet as he carried that cross – indeed Jesus himself at one point – Simon was transformed. (I especially loved the scene of their two arms interlocked carrying the cross together, a fitting image, I believe, of the true relation between Jew and Christian.) After Jesus fell for the final time, staggering up, Simon encouraged him, again with prophetic irony, “You are almost finished.”  That’s when I lost it:  I still tear up when I think of that scene; such is the power of this movie. 

Of all the characters’ choices, Simon’s cut me to the heart.  For, I, too, often resist and resent our Lord’s cross; I resent the task of carrying his burden.  I, too, have to be commandeered into carrying it.  At this very moment I resent that my church has forced issues on me not of my choosing and which by their very fundamental nature forbid neutrality.  And I, too, hate it when I or my wife or my daughters are ridiculed for this stand I must surely take. And, I too, complain about this burden.  Indeed, I hate it. 

But as, I too, carry this particular cross, I discover that I draw closer to my Lord.   

I am learning the closeness that one has to Christ in helping him carry his burden is a closeness that one can have in no other way.  And after a while, as I am discovering, the cross isn’t so bad, really.  I am learning that carrying the cross means that one gets to stay close to our Lord. For the cross is not just a sign of forgiveness; it is a sign of communion and grace.  For as we share his burdens we get a foretaste of his victory – and we are ushered into the very pathos of God.      

In addition to those cited, several people helped me formulate this meditation by their helpful questions, comments and reflections, including Connie Milligan, Joe Caudill, Sarah Hey, Whit Whitaker, Brent Van Hook, and Elizabeth Baucum.  Of course, none are responsible for the above reflections.