The Butchered Body of Christ: Reflections on Good Friday
Spoiler Alert: Jesus Dies!
On February 25th, 2004, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ arrived on the big screen, just in time for the start of Lent. I wasn’t yet a decade into life, but I remember my friends talking about the “new Jesus movie” that their parents wouldn’t let them watch because it was rated R. Over the next several years, some of the more edgy, atheistic, and of course, enlightened among my peers would say jump at any mention of The Passion and say something super clever, like, “spoiler alert: Jesus dies!”
Personally, I wouldn’t see it for another six or seven years. You could say I missed the hype.
It’s been at least a decade since I watched the movie and while I do remember crying at some point I can’t say I remember much else. I remember that it was the first movie I’d seen with subtitles. I think I remember the cat-o-nine tails scene. Oh, I might be wrong, but I seem to recall Satan holding a baby at some point. But for what it’s worth, at the time of writing this, The Passion has a 7.2/10 on IMDb with 93% of Google Users liking the movie. It only has a 49% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I stopped caring about the Tomatometer when it gave Hocus Pocus 38% and The Last Jedi 91%.
With a $30 million budget, The Passion raked in $611 million worldwide (compare that to another Gibson classic, Braveheart, which made just over $213 million). For that amount, you’d expect a pretty big impact on audiences, especially given the sacred hype surrounding the film.
However, a Barna survey examining the impact of the film in the months following its release found that only 10% of viewers indicated that they had influenced their religious beliefs and practices. The most common behavioral change inspired by the movie was praying more often, a result indicated by a mere 9% of viewers. Despite being labeled at the time as one of the greatest evangelistic tools ever, less than one-tent of one percent (<.1%) admitted making a profession of faith in Christ as savior in response to the film. What’s more, less than one-half of one percent (<.5%) of the audience attested to an increase in evangelistic impulse after seeing the film. Despite the intense and emotional immediate reaction to The Passion, it failed to deliver the long-term effect of life-change, devotion, and the desire to tell people about Jesus.
Commenting on the results of the poll, George Barna simply said that “people’s memories are short and are easily redirected in a media-saturated, fast-paced culture like ours.” That was 2004, just before the rise of social media, a time before Twitter and TikTok; how much truer it rings today.
The Death of God
It’s strange for a movie about the suffering of an innocent man to do so well in the box office. Many people purchased several tickets so that they could watch the slaughter of Jim Caviezel over and over again, so I wonder what people were chasing. As a teenage Christian, I know that I was chasing that sweet feeling of weapons grade piety that comes from visceral spiritual experiences. Ten years later, I know that I cried because I went into the movie wanting to cry, because crying is what good Christians do when they think about the cross. As the above Barna study attests, the drug wears off pretty quick.
Despite being the foundation and center of our faith, I don’t think that American Christians spend much time thinking about the crucifixion. You won’t get far in this country without seeing the cross inked on someone’s arm or hung from their necklace, or dotting ditches along the highway, but I don’t know that we spend much time thinking about it. Even on Good Friday (a phrase about as odd as turning a torture device into jewelry), we tend to rush ahead to Easter, but this year has given us several reasons to contemplate the death of God.
In God for a Secular Society, Jürgen Moltmann spends some time meditating on the suffering of the world and what it means to see God “in the victims of our own violence” (20). Now, tabling any evaluation of Moltmann’s divine metaphysics (i.e., God’s ability to suffer), I think he’s onto something here. Reflecting on Nietzsche’s now cliché declaration that humanity has killed God, Moltmann says that it is not in the academy or in the mind of philosophers that we kill God, but in our violence toward each other.
We kill God when we make his image the victim of our violence, for God is in his image. We kill God when we shut out strangers and drive them away, for God is in the stranger. We kill God when we choose death instead of life, and secure our own lives at the price of the death of countless other living things, for God is a living God. Anyone who infringes life, infringes God.
God for a Secular Society, 20
For Moltmann, the crucified God “looks at us with the mute eyes of the street children” (20). That is, God is present in and with those who are suffering. This is rather reminiscent of Christ words in Matthew 25, that when we feed the hungry, sate the thirsty, invite the lonely, and clothe the destitute, we do it all to him, and that when we fail to do so, it is Christ himself whom we turn away.
The Butchered Body of Christ
Whatever Good Friday is, it isn’t supposed to be torture porn. That said, Christians aren’t supposed to be unacquainted with the cross, nor are we supposed to be far from suffering, ourselves. If either Moltmann or Matthew are correct, then the Godman Jesus Christ is present with and in the suffering masses of the world. Whatever Christians were chasing when they flocked to the theaters in 2004, what they found was cinematic, contained, and two-dimensional. While not discrediting God’s ability to work through actors, they saw the passion of Jim Caviezel, not the passion of Jesus Christ, because Christ isn’t suffering in the script. He is suffering in the streets.
Christ is suffering in the COVID wards as the world slowly moves “back to normal”. At the border, he is being turned away, or worse (and more likely), detained and separated from his family. He is counting down the days on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. He is being gunned down in schools, movie theaters, and concert halls. He is choking on dust, debris, and smoke in the alleys of Kyiv and Mariupol and lying dead in the streets of Bucha. All around us Christ suffers, but we have habituated to the sounds of his screaming. That is, if we ever had ears to hear in the first place.
This Good Friday, I’ve been thinking about what it means for to identify with the passion (suffering) of Christ, by which Christ identified with the passion (suffering) of the world. What does it mean that Christ bore the full weight of sin and death? We theologians have no shortage of categories and confessions, but it at least means that Christ is no stranger to the deepest depths of pain. Now seated at the right hand of the Father, he knows what it’s like to endure so much anguish as to be certain that God has abandoned him. He knows what it’s like to die.
Goodbye, Olympus
Of course, these short reflections don’t solve any problems, but for me they offer a different starting place to this three-or-four day weekend. They remind me of the John Mark McMillan song I often sing to my daughter about how in the absence of a satisfying theodicy Christians can offer the only Savior who suffers with his people: “I have no answers for hurt knees and cancers, but a Savior who suffers them with me/ Singing goodbye, Olympus, the heart of my Maker is spread out on the road, the rocks, and the weeds”.
The gods of Olympus may have been emotional, but they did not cry with their worshipers. In Christ, God has dwelt in shadows far deeper than we could imagine. He, too, bears the scars of a world at war with itself. The offensive claim of Christianity is that it is in these scars that we are made whole, that the spear that pierced his side dripped with the love of a God willing to suffer with and for his creation.
Our “celebration” of Good Friday is a reminder that while Christ has been raised, Sunday has not yet come for us. Creation groans for the day when Jesus returns to set all things right. In the meantime, we and Christ groan with it. Let us not be among those who shout “Peace! Peace!” when there is no peace (Jer. 6:14). To be sure, the Christian life is often one of dancing, but let us not forget that Christ calls us to hear the dirge and to mourn (Matt. 11:17). On this Good Friday, let us remember the butchered body of Christ in our midst and ponder what it means to be his nail-pierced hands and feet.
