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Passion 2004 |
C-R-O-S-S-I-N-G-S is for Can Real, Open Suffering Show the Intensely Necessary Goodness of Salvation?
"Passion" means suffering. That is what they see, those who watch the movie of that name. Nor is that the only place suffering is seen. In 2 Corinthians St. Paul parades his! This is a subject of a Seminex chapel sermon of 26 years ago by the late Robert Bertram, a founder of Crossings, whose own passion came to an end a year ago this week. What is disturbing about Paul's suffering, preached Bob, and about all the other suffering in the world, is that it implicates God. But the Good News according to Bob is that God is glad to be involved in human suffering, not to justify Godself, but to justify us. The movie presses relentlessly how God in Christ suffers personally. Says Bob, Christ also suffers, and just as personally, in the sufferings of Paul and other Christians, where Christ is further personally involved in their daily resurrections from defeats and pains.
One of the many virtues of Bob's sermon is that it is thought-provoking. The phenomenon, "The Passion of Christ" has provoked both thought and contentions. I here offer my own reflections. Perhaps some in the Crossings community will disagree with my evaluations. I invite readers to respond and I hope to publish in an upcoming issue differing viewpoints that have been helpfully offered.
tbcm
My lifestyle--it bothers you, doesn't it? That in effect is what Paul is saying to his Christian critics in Corinth. It disturbs you to be served by someone like me, Paul, a perennial loser, an apparent masochist who seems to enjoy sticking his neck out only to get it chopped off again and again. You complain, you Corinthians, that although I may write powerful and strongly-worded letters, still when I am with you my appearance is unimpressive and my speech unconvincing (10:10). Yet perversely I keep coming back for more. People like me come across, don't we, as chronic, tragedy-prone fall-guys. "...We are flogged, sent to prison, mobbed; toiling, sleepless, starving;...taken for impostors...obscure...; said to be dying; ...rumored to be executed...; thought most miserable...; taken for paupers..., ...people having nothing... (6:5-10).
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The truth is, you are objecting not merely to me, Paul, and to my style of operation. No, it is far worse than that, even though you may imagine that that is the extent of your objection. What you are objecting to really is God, to his style of operation. You are offended at the way he operates the world, a world in which people (at least some people) are constantly losing -- "flogged, mobbed, toiling, starving, obscure, dying, miserable, paupers." You resent that about God, who runs that kind of world. Or rather you prefer to imagine that that kind of world could hardly be God's doing.
It is bad enough, you think, that the world is like that at all without, in addition, having someone like me come along, an apostle, a spokesperson for God, who seems almost to go out of his way to ask for the world's beatings. For when I seem to invite that sort of beating, then I give the impression that such treatment comes from God. And that strikes you as a misrepresentation of God. When I keep on incurring criticism and put-downs and closed doors and seem even to accept all that as par for the course, then I give the impression that God personally allows much of the world's suffering -- and worse, the world's sin, which, in a way, God does.
But if so, you protest, how can God be righteous? What kind of righteousness is that for any proper God to have? How, you say, could we ever reconcile a God who is righteous with this sort of world? No, you say piously, God is not to be joined with this world at all. So you concoct your own little ways of harmonizing, or squaring, or reconciling a world of sin with a God who is righteous. How do you do that? By postponement, delay, manana. Someday, you say, God will get it all together -- in the sweet bye-and-bye. That is how you try to get God off the hook and save God's face. And why do you do that? Because otherwise God offends you.
I have news for you, Corinthians -- bad news. It is not you or I who need to reconcile God or God's goodness with the world's evil. It isn't for us to do the reconciling. It is for us to be reconciled. We are the world's sin. The question is, how to square that -- us! -- with God? Stop your blasted theodicies. It isn't God who needs to be gotten off the hook, either in the future or any other time. It is you and all the rest of us. And if you wait till the end, till that sweet bye-and-bye, then you will have waited too long. You don't like it when I say (5:6, 7): "to live in the body means to be exiled from the Lord." For that only calls attention, doesn't it, to how alienated from God we all still are, how far from home?
I have news for you Corinthians. Did I say bad news? Wait till you hear the good news. Remember those things about me which disturb you so, my floggings, my starvings, my offensive appearance, my track record of losing, my weakness? Remember how they seem to be only my floggings, my being put down?
Look again -- still at me, but this time, at me through the prism of the cross. Now whose floggings are they? I mean my floggings; but whose are they really? Right! Isn't that good news? Notice, for that sort of good news you don't have to close your eyes to the world or to people like me or to the present, you don't have to look away toward some world beyond, some sweet bye-and-bye, toward some God-off-the-hook. In fact, it is important that you do see me, poor old Paul, warts and all, because it is my losses, my suffering, my sin precisely which our Lord is bearing -- not his own, mine.
And look again. Just because it is he who is my Crucifer, who is doing this dying of mine with me, don't you see how he is also doing something else besides? Do you need a clue? What was it he did "on the third day"? Right! And now, looking back at me, please, looking at me Christianly, don't you see that going on in my life, too: not just dying but rising -- his rising? "We are in difficulties on all sides, but never cornered; we see no answer to our problems, but never despair; we have been persecuted, but never deserted; knocked down, but never killed." (4:8-9) "...Obscure yet famous; said to be dying and here we are alive; ...thought most miserable and yet we are always rejoicing; taken for paupers though we make others rich, penniless yet we own the world." (6:9-10) Do you see how, despite my losing, I am still around, I am back the next morning, not giving up?
Now you don't seriously believe, do you, that that's merely the result of a good night's sleep, just an ordinary, garden-variety snapping-back, nothing more than my (little old Paul's) hanging in there? Oh no. How did I put it in 4:10: "Wherever we go we carry death with us in our body, the death that Jesus died, that in this body also life may reveal itself, the life that Jesus lives. For continually, while still alive, we are being surrendered into the hands of death, for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be revealed in this mortal body of ours." Isn't that neat?
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| Dying and rising since 1921 |
That is what Paul means when he says "we are the righteousness of God in Christ," and "Christ was made sin for us." We are God-being-righteous. Does that sound theologically dangerous? Does that out-process process theology, to say that our very lives are the processing-out of God's righteousness, and we ourselves are attributes of the deity -- not just righteous but God's very own righteousness? As God is destroying us, in Christ, God is righteously clearing away the rubble and sin of the world. As God raises us back up, each day and hour over again, God is righteously replacing an old world with a brand new one. And all this, not first someday in the distant bye-and-bye, but now. "Now" is the day for being saved, now is when God is reconciling the world to Godself, and right in the middle of our own little lives.
No wonder Paul can say that he does not look at anybody anymore the way he used to, from merely a human standpoint, but now he looks at everyone (at least in hope) as the place where new creation is happening and old things are passing away. And so it is with us, sisters and brothers. Even when we look most like losers to one another, might we not still -- mightn't we then more than ever -- be pantomiming him whose dying and rising again our lives really are?
robert w bertram
The Gospel according to Mel
"The Passion of the Christ" is not like any other movie. Nor is it simply a filming of the canonical passions. Film must make choices where writing does not have to, and cannot say some things that can be written. Still, Gibson is attempting to tell the story. He wants to tell it accurately, accurately enough to include the most important theological events of the story (certainly the minimum for anyone trying to tell the story truly).
But there is one particular aspect of the story that he super-emphasizes. (Granted, SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John also have their own particular emphases that they believed, as do we, were important for their time.) The special emphasis of the Gospel according to Mel is the first thing on the screen, as well as that aspect of the film that provokes the greatest responses in people. Beginning from the quotation from Isaiah 53, Gibson's gospel is, "Jesus the Christ suffered far more for your salvation than you have ever even thought about." What is prominent in Gibson's account is the amount that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate." And it is "in your face."
That "The Passion" is so pointed hints that it is more a confession of faith than a whole gospel. It is Gibson's public testimony that Christ suffered to atone for all sinners and that His suffering was, as the gospels often repeat, "necessary."
Confessions, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are not evangelism, messages to outsiders; they are spoken to the church itself. (Gibson's film is plainly directed at believers, since it has far too little background for those who do not already know the story.) Confessions are first of all positive, taking Christ's side and promoting Him. Gibson's confession has provided many believers a more profound sense than they had ever before experienced of how great Christ's love for them must be, to give Himself so unreservedly for their gain. Confessions, second, are warnings about teachings that cut away part of the gospel. Gibson's gory confession is against those who minimize human sin and God's justice and so make such suffering unnecessary. But the real loss in such teaching is thereby minimizing the love of Christ, the grace of God and the glory of the Trinity, which overcome sin and judgment with forgiveness and mercy.
Is this focus on horrible suffering right? Suffering is central to the gospel, also as it lives in its believers (see preceding sermon). The canonical evangelists, however, narrate without describing. They major in verbs and are extremely sparing of adjectives. They narrate that Jesus was betrayed, manhandled, bound, spat upon, blindfolded, struck, slapped, denied, mocked, beaten, flogged, given a crown of thorns and crucified. But they do not describe his wounds or pain. Cinema, unless it does not show wounds, must show them deep or shallow.
Nevertheless, the central Christian icon is the cross, while for "The Passion" it may be the Roman scourge. The film is off balance in spotlighting physical pain at the expense of the rest of Jesus' passion: shame, isolation, the spiritual agony of being forsaken by God, and His actual death. People will differ on whether that director's choice, opting for physical pain which will create in viewers such a visceral response, is worth the cost.
While the portrayal of agony is disturbing (as it should be), my parishioners are saying that they were profoundly moved by the love of their Savior for them, reflected in His accepting the agony for their benefit. And, I confess, a large amount of suffering by the Christ belongs also to the gospel according to Murken. There is a kind of theological calculus in this, which is implicit (in the gospels' stress on suffering, see above) rather than explicit in the Bible. Namely, Jesus' suffering is horrendous because it had to answer for the full badness of human sin and the full fierceness of God's wrath against human evil-doing. As Luther says, the suffering of Christ is the severest accusation against human sin. But greatest of all, while the Passion displays our sin and God's verdict, it simultaneously shows how unimaginably huge is the grace of God to save us from them at such personal cost. How could the vastness or supremacy of God's love be better tested or vindicated or indicated?
For Gibson's confessing that, and for the increase of faith that such true confession generates, I applaud him, even while recognizing the film has important problems.
tbcm