Judaism was historically a patriarchal religion, and in Jesus’s time women did not have much independence; they were certainly not rabbis. But the historical conditions of women within early Christianity were more open and flexible. Many women who became followers of Jesus accompanied him in travels along with male believers. After his death, some of them continued to work with men in spreading the new religion, and some even went off on missions of their own. It was not until several centuries had passed and the new religion was seeking to consolidate its power and doctrine that an “official” line was arrived at denying women key roles (such as serving as priests). As a conservative or traditionalist Catholic, Gibson would no doubt agree with such a position. Whatever one’s opinion it is important to realize that the tradition itself has a history and was modified over time.
And there is another tradition about Mary Magdalene that is more radical, which has recently been popularized by the bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown’s book makes sweeping and provocative claims about Mary Magdalene. Through his characters in it he asserts, for example, that the Magdalene’s burial site is actually the Holy Grail sought for centuries. This fact was suppressed or hidden by its reinterpretation as the chalice of the Last Supper. The Da Vinci Code also advances the more controversial claim that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s wife and mother of his children. The book’s title refers to Leonardo Da Vinci’s alleged membership in a secret society that knew the truth about all of this. Leonardo supposedly symbolized Mary Magdalene’s importance in his famous “Last Supper” painting. He placed a significantly feminine-looking person at Jesus’s right hand—and no chalice.
This is not the place to debate the accuracy (let alone literary merits) of The Da Vinci Code. To set Dan Brown up against Mel Gibson as offering the only two interpretations of Mary Magdalene in early Christianity would be silly. Gibson’s claims to some special historical accuracy and realism in his film can be challenged by better sources than Brown. Despite boasting of near-literal adherence to the Gospels, Gibson inevitably presents his own interpretations (as does Brown). There are significant alternative accounts of Mary in the Gospels, especially in John, which Gibson relies on least of all. Numerous scholarly studies, some feminist and some not, show that the Bible was an evolving text with a variety of authors, sources, and a complex and rich history. For several centuries members of various early Christian communities knew of and accepted alternative Gospels, such as those of Philip, Truth, Thomas, and even Mary. The fact that these did not become a part of the canonical New Testament requires understanding the complex cultural conditions and politics of early Christianity. Viewers of Mel Gibson’s film who wish to use rational methods of studying religious questions should pursue the scholarly sources for themselves, starting with Elaine Pagels’s very readable book The Gnostic Gospels.
Passion and Blood: The Savior Who Nurtures
What might be a feminist position on Jesus’s passion? To witness the movie is itself to suffer, since it is a very painful film to watch. The scourging scene or the one where nails are pounded into a man’s hands and feet seem so realistic, viewers may flinch from the screen. The sound track does not permit escape by closing one’s eyes, since we still hear the amplified horrific sounds of whips tearing flesh, agonized screams, and squirting blood. In the Jewish Scriptures, physical suffering was the lot of all humans, specifically women in childbirth, as punishment for Eve’s “sin.” Gibson, like many film viewers, accepts a particular view of Christ’s suffering as voluntarily undertaken, but also required by God, so that Jesus can purify humans of this sinful status. But this view of Christ’s passion is not the only possible one in a Christian context. As Pagels explains, Gnostics during early Christianity favored an alternative view according to which Christ was a spiritual and not physical being who actually laughed as he hovered over the cross. The Gnostics and other early Christians did not interpret this as martyrdom, and were critical of Christians who chose martyrdom. Such people were even portrayed as choosing a self-serving route because they thought it would guarantee their salvation.
For the early Church Fathers who denounced Gnosticism as a heresy, Jesus’s physical suffering had special meaning. This is also true of believers now: his blood is sacred, and it is symbolically drunk in the holy rite of communion. Gibson underscores this point with numerous cross-cuts between Jesus’s final agony on the cross and scenes of the Last Supper.
Images of blood evoke associations between women and the flowing blood of menstruation and childbirth. In this film, women are comfortable with blood. That is, though they weep when it is shed, they soberly work to clean it up (even great pools of it!). During the final moments of Christ’s time on the cross, Mary approaches and kisses his pierced feet. Her chin and mouth get smeared with blood, which she ignores. She holds and caresses her son’s besmirched body in a rather graphic rendering of Michelangelo’s famous Pietà. In Biblical times, it was women who tended bodies of the dead, cleaning and preparing them for burial. By undertaking traditional roles of giving birth, nursing young children, caring for the sick and cleansing the dead, women show an ability and willingness to address life as it is lived, not idealized life. They cope practically and lovingly with the messy details of embodied human existence.
The Christian doctrine of the Eucharist also associates Jesus’s blood with nourishment for the soul. Symbolically, this amounts to a kind of feminization of his body. His wounds are often shown in medieval art, as in contemporary Mexican retablo paintings, spurting out blood that is precious enough to be gathered by angels into golden cups. Sometimes believers are even shown sitting below the cross, drinking the blood that flows from his pierced body, like infants nursed at their mother’s breast. This strong imagistic association between Jesus and the maternal body was reinforced in medieval art by frequent inclusion of a pelican above images of the crucifixion. Pelican mothers were held to strike their own breasts so as to offer blood for their young to drink to survive.
Macabre as these images might seem to us now in the U.S.A., they were and are not uncommon in other times and settings. Mystics like St. Teresa of Avila in sixteenth-century Spain spoke lovingly about Christ’s wounds and even dreamed of being absorbed into and sheltered by them. In a remarkable and provocative essay about female mystical language, “La Mystérique,” the contemporary French feminist Luce Irigaray suggests seeing Christ’s body, opened with wounds and flowing with blood, as very much like a female, maternal body. She explores the language and imagery of female mystics who saw these wounds as womb-like “nests” where they could find love and safety. Perhaps Irigaray’s picture of Jesus’s suffering body as “feminized” would strike Mel Gibson as outrageous, even blasphemous. Caviezel, the Jesus of this film, is strong and virile. His is not the slender, delicate body seen in many crucifixion paintings, but a modern lithe one, with corded muscles in his thighs and arms. Other commentators have noted that Gibson’s earlier roles as heroes who endured tremendous physical torture foreshadowed his depiction of the suffering body of Christ in this film. Caviezel’s performance in the physical challenge of this role is admirable, but the character’s endurance of such extraordinary physical torture seems unbelievable. Even the most sadistic Roman guards express awe at this Jewish prisoner’s apparent appetite for more punishment, as he rises again and yet again from his suffering under their whips to “take more, like a man.”
Is Mel Radical Enough?
My point here has been first to show that while The Passion of Christ seems to admire the key women in Jesus’s life, it also idealizes them in a way that reflects traditional gender stereotypes. They are not shown as having any significant interior life or moral development, or as able to think and choose for themselves. They seem so essentially kind, caring, and empathic that it appears to flow from their very nature. But faith, whether in God’s choice of your destiny or in a new Messiah, is surely more complex than this.
The historical Jesus appears to have been more wi
lling to challenge the accepted “truths” of his culture about appropriate male and female behavior than Mel Gibson is in this new movie. Another movie with the same subject matter, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1966), succeeds far better at portraying Jesus as a revolutionary moral leader and teacher. Through its exclusive focus on Christ’s passion Gibson’s movie fails to explore the potentially radical moral and social implications of Christianity, a religion that denounces wealth and power, rejects violence, promotes caring and love, embraces ethnic difference and radical equality, and accepts women into discipleship on an equal basis with men.
SOURCES
Dan Brown. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday.
Caroline Walker Bynum. 1984. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Los Angeles: Publications of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA.
Carol C. Gilligan. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Susan Haskins. 1994. Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor. New York: Harcourt.
Luce Irigaray. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Karen L. King. 2003. The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle. Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press.
Nel Noddings. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel. 2004. The Da Vinci Hoax. Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Elaine Pagels. 1979. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage.
Sara Ruddick. 1999. Maternal Thinking. In Marilyn Pearsall, ed., Women and Values: Readings in Recent Feminist Philosophy. Third edition (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1999), pp. 110–131. Originally published in Feminist Studies 6, 2 (1980), pp. 432–467.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How did you react to the suffering of the two key women in the movie, as opposed to Jesus’s suffering? How would you compare them?
2. Do you think that a “virgin-whore” double bind still exists for women?
3. Do traditionally female activities like mothering and caring for others involve thought? What sort of thinking is involved? How does it compare to the more abstract sort of thinking of scientists, engineers, or lawyers?
4. Most Christians believe that women like Mary Magdalene did play a key role in Christianity. What role was it, and what differentiates it in your mind from the role played by Jesus’s male disciples?
5. Is it offensive, intriguing, natural, or surprising to you to consider Christianity a “female” ethical outlook, and Jesus’s body (especially during the Passion) as being “feminized” by his suffering?
IV
Why Was Christ Killed?
14
The Craftiness of Christ: Wisdom of the Hidden God
DALLAS WILLARD
The Passion of the Christ is a work of art. This means that it utilizes a medium to convey a vision of some serious aspect of the human condition. The medium in the case of a film has several levels: the roll of celluloid that can be produced, maintained or destroyed like any other physical object; the visual and auditory images that appear to the viewer; and the events represented by means of those images. It is a mistake, often repeated, to take the events presented as what the film is about. That might be true of a strict documentary, if there is such a thing. But even a “home video” is not just about the events recorded, but about the life, the “happy family,” and so on, which is seen through the events.
The events depicted in The Passion are those of the agonies, torture, and death of Jesus Christ. Those events are depicted in a certain way by the one who created the film, Mel Gibson, in an effort to project his vision of the human condition. This is just the sort of thing an artist does. The events selected, and how they are presented, determine which vision of the human condition is, or can be, shared by the artist and the viewer. Although the interchange between the artist and the viewer is very intricate, subject to many influences and liable to misfire, in the ideal case the viewer would “pick up” the vision which the artist had in creating, and which he has successfully embodied in the work of art. Then the viewer would, in a manner, experience the experience of the artist, and thereby have a new and more profound grasp of what the artist “sees.”
The Vision of Human Redemption
In the case of The Passion, the vision is one of human redemption according to one traditional Christian understanding. This involves two parts: the condition of human lostness and evil, and the act or process by which deliverance from that condition is made possible. The first part in turn has two elements: the appalling evil actually present in human life, and the effort of Satan to keep humanity from escaping its disastrous condition. The second part, the act or process of redemption, goes precisely contrary to anything that might be imagined from the human point of view, with its regard for power and its acceptance of the evil that is always “required” to make human power work. It is an act that allows corrupt humanity, ruled by Satan through its most exalted institutions, to have its way to the utmost extent, to do its “damnedest,” without moving a finger to resist it.
The felt absence of God from the scene of the crucifixion in the movie—“Why hast Thou forsaken me”—is the ultimate point of “non-resistance.” And the prayer for the forgiveness of the immediate perpetrators of such an evil and injustice—because they “know not what they do”—indicates the complete hopelessness of those in the grip of evil. Together, by contrast, the acts and words of Christ affirm the presence of another world—the world of truth and not power, of the kingdom of God—from which redemption and deliverance from overwhelming evil into goodness is possible.
Too Much Violence and Brutality?
Critics of The Passion have complained about the extent of the violence inflicted upon Christ, as presented in the film. The unrelenting bruising and beating and suffering shown has been rejected as unnecessary, and as undesirable for the viewer. I suspect that these critics come close to missing the entire point of the film, which is the nature of human redemption. Nowadays human redemption is not thought to amount to much, and what little there is to it can be dealt with by education and counseling, and perhaps a law here and there, or some improvement in living conditions. Gibson certainly is much closer to the core of traditional Christian teaching in his vision of the human heart and its world as a reservoir of unlimited capacity to hurt and to harm.
Those currently regarded as “in the know” about human life, with their remedies, have to turn a blind eye to the actual course of human events. Up to today, multitudes of human beings are tortured, slaughtered, and starved on a daily basis by those who have the power to do so, and lying, cheating, stealing, and sanctimonious hardness of heart are routine in societies which, nevertheless, take themselves to be “better” than others. Through the medium of the events of Christ’s Passion, portrayed as an unceasing stream of wonton violence upon Jesus, tearing his body to shreds, the film communicates a vision of human evil that is off the scale of human capacity to deal with it.
Indeed, as the word ‘evil’ has tried to edge its way back into public discourse in recent years, the academic mind in particular finds itself threatened, precisely because the word suggests something that is beyond any human remedy. It is an affront to human pride to think that there is something about our condition that we could not fix—given the desire to fix it, and enough time to tinker with it. The Passion, by contrast, presents a humanity that takes delight in hurting people, that does not even want to “fix it,” and a humanity that chooses to implement its will through permitting or perpetrating deeds of the most heinous quality. The unremitting violence depicted in the film is highly effective in forcefully presenting a vision of this aspect of the human condition.
The Demonic Dimension
Satan is essential to this vision. Perhaps this is what the contemporary academic mindset sens
es. His presence accounts for the seemingly unlimited extent of human wrongdoing. He has humanity in his grasp through the ideas and arrangements he has developed throughout history, and he wants to keep them there. His tools are gratification of desire, impressive appearance, and physical force. Recall how he tempts Jesus to use these in the three temptations of Jesus in Chapter 4 of the Gospel according to Matthew. Satan’s focus in the film is upon Jesus, the one who, alone, can break his grip on the human world, devoted as it is to power and deceit, and can deliver human beings from the mire of sin and evil in which they flounder.
Satan knows Jesus to be the only truly radical person to enter human history; for Jesus, if undiverted, will refuse to use evil to defeat evil, and will set afoot a new order that does not employ the devices by which evil persons try to secure themselves and get their way. Satan’s project was to stop Jesus from getting to his redemptive act of crucifixion. From the beginning of Jesus’s earthly life, he had tried to destroy him or to deflect him. Now, in the final hours before the cross, Satan tries to break Jesus down by pressuring him with the hopelessness, in human terms (“No one man can carry this burden, I tell you. No one. Ever.”), of what Jesus is attempting. After the crucifixion and death scenes, Satan’s final appearance in the film shows his total exasperation and despair at having failed to keep Christ from doing the one thing that would open the doors to deliverance of human beings from the grasp of evil by demonstrating the power of good over evil.
Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy Page 19