THE MCJ

PISKIE PANS PASSION

If you'd like yet another reason why the Episcopal Church can't die fast enough, Bill Cork has extensive quotes from a Salon.com interview with an Episcopal clergyman who just saw Mel Gibson's The Passion:

... Mel Gibson said the reason that he had [his cast] speaking those original languages ... , "If I was doing a film about very fierce, horrible, nasty Vikings coming to invade a town, and had them on their ship with their awful weapons, and they came pouring off the ship ready to slaughter -- to have them speak English wouldn't be menacing enough. ... I almost puked. It was so xenophobic: The good guys speak English; the bad guys speak these other languages. ...I think it was meant to cause confusion and awe in the audience, to have these horrible people speaking either a Semitic or an ancient language like this. ... [In the film, it came off like] nasty foreigners were doing this thing to our beautiful Jesus. So when Mel Gibson said in the interview that the reason for the other languages was to highlight the brutality, that kind of freaked me out. I could see how it would work on an unsophisticated audience. ...

I guess since the ECUSA doesn't have a canon about it, this guy figures Exodus 20:16 no longer applies to him and he can go ahead and draw any conclusion that pops into that empty, Episcopal head of his.  You, "almost puked, it was so xenophobic," did you?  You know for a fact that Mel Gibson was trying to represent, "nasty foreigners...doing this thing to our beautiful Jesus," do you?  Did the possibility that Gibson was trying for a little historical realism ever enter your mind, you pretentious dolt?

In case you're wondering who an "unsophisticated audience" is, that would be anyone who still believes this rose-from-the-dead stuff.  A "sophisticated audience," then, would be anyone who's been to an Episcopal divinity school and had this twaddle educated out of them.

Jesus' crucifixion was made too singular. This was an ordinary event. Jesus was one of dozens of insurrectionists that the local Roman occupiers would have crucified, but [Gibson] tried to make his suffering especially agonizing and horrible. That was the other subtext -- I thought there was an unspoken assumption that somehow, for Jesus' death to have meaning to believers, it had to be more horrible than any other kind of suffering and death. The film doesn't really say that, but that's the idea, and that's why it has an "R" rating -- for the violence. The protracted scourging.

Gibson might have made Jesus' crucifixion "too singular" because that's Who the movie is about.  Just a thought.  And it's interesting that this "clergyman" thinks that the crucifixion of Someone he's supposed to consider Savior and Lord was an "ordinary event...one of dozens."  One more admission that the ECUSA is not a Christian church.

I thought it was sickening. At the screening they were handing out boxes of Kleenex -- they should have handed out barf bags. ... There was no reason for this [violence], spiritually or theologically. ... The violence is literally gut-wrenching. My pious mom was there and she felt a knot in her gut from the violence, but she also felt the movie was poorly made. She called it "plodding." ... She's 76. She was there for the star power. She definitely wanted to see Mel Gibson. That was the other scary thing about the event -- to have 4,500 Christian leaders in one room who were just star struck and gaga....

Interesting how this clergyman makes a point of describing his mother as "pious."  Does that mean he's not?  And I guess there wouldn't be any spiritual or theological reason for this "gut-wrenching" violence if this story were just a metaphor.  If you don't really believe that Jesus died on the Cross for the sins of the world, then this sort of thing would probably be awfully tough to watch.

I don't see the point of magnifying the violence of his arrest, torture and death. I find it perverse and strange and really vulgar. As Ray Brown says, the Gospels are pretty straightforward. They arrive at Golgotha, and then it says, "Then they crucified him." They just say it in a little short sentence. They don't say, "They yanked one of Jesus' shoulders out of the socket and they bounced the cross around face down after he was nailed to it." ...

Dale Price already jacked this hanging curve into the seats:

This criticism, reasonably common, makes no sense after a little reflection. For someone who likes to tart up and trot out his half-remembered historical criticism, he's missing the point--ever hear of sitz im leben? When the accounts were written, there would have been no need to explain crucifixion in any detail--the readers would have known it instinctively. And shuddered.

Two thousand years later, we, who have no crucifixion frame of reference, need to be educated.

Back to me.  Sophisticated Audience saved his best for last:

It's 100 percent Hollywood trash.

An Episcopal clergyman, ordained in a church that has just about completely done away with sin and has never had any criticism whatsover of any of the other truly vile, morally bankrupt movies Hollywood has ever made, thinks The Passion is "100 percent Hollywood trash."  Mel, if, by some miracle, you should read this, that line has just guaranteed that I'll see The Passion multiple times in the theater and buy multiple copies of the DVD.

UPDATE:  Secret Agent Man rhetorically slaps around this fraud, whose name is Mark Stanger of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, more thoroughly than I do here.  Read the whole thing.  There are quotes in the interview that are far worse than the few I've listed. 

Thanks to Matt J.

Posted on 1/28/2004 7:14:02 PM , 33 comments