The Passion of the Christ
In Adrian Plass' collection of fictional church bulletins, A Year At St. Yoricks, there is the following announcement:
The St. Yorick's Youth Club will recommence its meetings in the church hall at 7:30p.m. on the third Friday of the month. This month the video ‘Confessions of a Deranged Sadist’ will be shown, to be followed by a discussion in which we shall be asking ‘Should we have watched it?’
It's the kind of discussion you feel like having after watching The Passion of the Christ. Two hours of (very realistic) bloody violence and torture is not entertainment, despite the popcorn—so what is it for? Even if, as the Pope said, “It is as it was”, what is the goal of showing us in graphic detail the pain that Jesus endured?
I haven't been following the interviews with Mel Gibson so I won't presume to know his purpose, but many Christians may be thinking something like this: seeing how much Jesus suffered will help us understand how much it cost him—how great the burden of sin was. But there's an assumption here: the physical pain that Jesus endured was the way in which the sin of humanity was “borne”. That is, an assumption is being made about how the atonement works.
Does Pain Save Us?
As Biblical scholar Dr Paul Barnett said in a recent interview1 with Jana Wendt, “the Gospel's account of the crucifixion of Jesus gives no details at all of the horrors of crucifixion.” This is the biggest difference between the movie and the gospel accounts: the movie gives us the horror of the physical agony, the gospels don't.
The gospels' near silence on the “painfulness” of the pain leads us to think that perhaps the pain is not the point. Maybe sin is not dealt with by the sheer amount of agony that The Passion of the Christ throws at us. But most Christians want to say that Christ suffered instead of us. So what is the alternative?
A Mathematical Atonement
If physical pain is not the point, some Christian thinkers want to argue that it is the inner, spiritual agony that matters. I have heard it claimed that at the cross the Trinity was torn in two and that the real pain of the cross was Jesus being separated from his Father.
Convincing reasons are given for this claim: if it was only the physical pain that Jesus was to endure, why was he so terrified in the Garden of Gethsemane (the opening scene of the movie)? As bad as it was, we don’t hear of other condemned criminals sweating drops of blood.
It also answers the question of how Jesus' suffering and death was different to any other person who suffered the scourging and crucifixion. While in the movie, the criminals crucified with Jesus seem to made it to the cross without a scratch, we can assume that people have died in worse ways than Christ. If the mental anguish is what counts, maybe that is what atones for sin.
To me, this looks like high school-style speculation, or to be more specific: algebra. It seems that what we’re looking for is something equivalent to the terrible eternity of hell. The physical pain doesn't seem to match up, so it must be internal; hell is (too simply) defined as “separation from God” and hell must be what happened to Jesus on the cross.
The proof-text for this equation is Matthew 27:46—the extent of my Aramaic before seeing the movie—“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” My problems with this as a proof-text start with the fact that if Jesus was expressing a real separation from the Father, he would know exactly why it was happening—he's been predicting it for years. Rather, his quote from Psalm 22 may indicate a trust that God is with him despite the impossibly awful situation he is in, and despite the mocking of those around him.
So What Is It Then?
If the gospels say little about the physical pain during the passion narrative, they say far less about any internal “separation from God”-type goings-on. In fact, the New Testament never claims that bizarre spiritual things going on in Jesus head are what “paid” for sin. Rather it is his death that is time-and-again described as the “ransom” and the event that achieved reconciliation with God and made forgiveness of sins possible and available.
What does this mean? I think it at least means that we need to give up mathematical theories of how the atonement works. Jesus did not suffer the equivalent of an eternal hell in order to save us; that was not the price. In my skim-reading of the entire New Testament this weekend, I found that Hebrews is the only book which even attempts to give an explanation of how the atonement works, and it is all in the Jewish terms of a spotless, perfect sacrifice being offered by a perfect priest, who can be a priest forever because he lives forever.
Not surprisingly then, in my quest to understand the atonement, reading the New Testament is not enough. To understand the atonement I need to understand the categories of the Jewish law, and then the themes of Jewish history, and then the content of the prophecies about salvation. If God waited hundreds or thousands of years after the fall to redeem some people and crush the serpent, I suppose it makes sense to look at what he did in the meantime.
But do we need to understand how the atonement works? When we hear the gospel do we need to hear an explanation for how Jesus' death can deal with sins? Next week's article will look at that question.
By the way, I thought the movie was great.
Notes
1 Sunday, February 22nd 2004 (View Transcript)
Ben Beilharz
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