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Jesus at Midnight:
'The Passion's' portrayal of
Christianity as a Cult of Death
WorldNetDaily
Exclusive
By Rabbi Shmuley
Boteach
Posted: March 5, 2004
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
I finally went to see "The Passion of the Christ" the other day. The movie
ended and the audience walked slowly outside the theater in stony silence.
Everyone seemed somewhat meditative and contemplative, that is, everyone
except me. I was too busy ducking behind my jacket, paranoically focused on
my resemblance to the deicidic rabbis portrayed in the film.
"Man," I thought to myself, "surely the people who are walking out are going
to think that I was the one who did it." From behind the safety of my jacket
I asked an African-American woman walking alongside me tears in her eyes
what she thought of the film. She responded, "It rips you apart inside. It
made me think. But you probably wouldn't understand." She was referring
innocently to the fact that I was wearing a yarmulke and had a rabbi's
beard, and perhaps could simply not fathom the impact that the death of
Jesus makes on Christians.
But maybe she was right, that I cannot understand, because I personally
found the film to be a gross defamation not just of the Jews who were
portrayed as having demonically demanded the death of Christ but
especially of Christianity which is portrayed as a religion of blood, gore
and death, rather than of blessing, love, and life.
The pagan religious cults of the ancient world were focused almost entirely
on death. Ancient Egypt, with pyramids as temples of death, its worship of
the god Hades, and its mass embalming of mummies saw the purpose of life as
gaining entry into the afterlife. Tom Cruise's film "The Last Samurai"
accurately portrays how Shintoism in Japan emphasized a good death over and
a good life. Similarly, modern-day Islam with its emphasis on the heavenly
rewards for martyrdom is about gaining eternal paradise not by one's
actions while living, but by one's actions in dying. In Hinduism, death is
so central a facet that up until about 100 years ago, when a man died, they
put his living widow on the funeral pyre with him.
Judaism, and its daughter religion Christianity, were a radical departure
from the earlier cults of death. Both emphasized the idea of moral and
righteous action on this earth. Both were based on the Hebrew scriptures'
demand for moral and righteous action and the need to perfect the earth in
God's name. Even in the New Testament, the passion of Christ occupies at
most a chapter or two in each of the gospels, while the life of Jesus is
spelled out over about 10 times that number.
But Judaism and Christianity must therefore be supremely careful not to
emulate their pagan predecessors and become religions that put the focus on
death rather than on life. I have often criticized strands within modern
Judaism for using the Holocaust rather than the Bible, the Spanish
Inquisition rather than the Sabbath, the pogroms rather than Passover, to
engender Jewish commitment. Jewish children are often taught courses on
anti-Semitism as a means by which to inculcate Jewish identity. They often
learn far more about how Jews were burned at the stake for their faith
rather than how Abraham's faith in God burned with a fiery intensity. The
message of Jewish history becomes that while the Greeks philosophized, the
Romans ruled and the Italians painted, all the Jews ever did was die.
In the wake of Sept. 11, Judaism and Christianity now find themselves
heavily at odds and under attack by forces within Islam. In a world where so
many are being encouraged to die in the name of God, it behooves
Judeo-Christianity to inspire the faithful to live in the name of
God. This is something that Mel Gibson, in his wearisome, monotonous and
numbing depiction of endless blood and gore, fails at utterly.
There are two ways to understand Christianity. One is as a religion of life,
the other is as a religion of death. The former focuses on emulating how
Jesus lived, the latter homes in exclusively on how he died. The former
looks at the incomparable ethical teachings of Jesus from the sermon on the
mount, the latter focuses on the horrors of the crucifixion on the cross.
The Christianity of life concentrates on what Jesus taught his disciples
about to how to living virtuously, the Christianity of death distills the
Christian message into the single maxim that Jesus died for mankind's sins.
The Christianity of life emphasizes the idea of personal accountability in
our relationship with God, the Christianity of death emphasizes that
reposing faith in Jesus is all that is needed in order to gain salvation.
It is clear where Mel Gibson's convictions lie. In this insulting film, he
virtually ignores the entire life of Jesus, preferring instead to tell us
that what made Jesus special was not that he lived righteously and meekly,
but that he died bloodily. Many critics have already panned the film for its
excessive violence. For me, the violence became so intense that I began to
think that Mel Gibson's intention was to make Jesus into a Jewish-mother
stereotype whose principal message to her children is a guilt trip: "There,
now do you see how much I've suffered on your behalf. Now, are you finally
going to love me?"
Perhaps it is not surprising that Mel Gibson has
focused on this aspect, given that he has told many interviewers that he
came back to Christianity after being so miserable about his life that he
wanted to kill himself. Death seems to be a large part of his personal
pantheon. But that does not explain why so many Christian groups would play
into the stereotypes of Christianity being a religion of death rather than
of life by promoting "The Passion" as an evangelism tool.
In the 19th century, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the leader of German
orthodoxy, responded to vicious Christian attacks on Judaism by delineating
the differences between the two faiths. Christianity, he argued, inculcated
the feeling of absolute dependence on a Higher Power, and aimed at showing
man his impotence, his frailty, his weakness, his death and his decay. He is
shown the bestial forces which overwhelm him so that he will clamor for the
higher power that, through "faith," will save him from their fetters.
Christianity, Hirsch argued, shows man the nocturnal spirit of passion and
evil in his own breast so that he becomes frightened of himself and, in the
horror of night, seeks salvation at the altar of Christ. For this reason,
said Hirsch, Christianity likes to build its temples over the tombs of
death, celebrates its holy mysteries preferably at night, and its fervent
prayers are a cry of distress from the power of the "evil" in the world and
in one's own heart. It ties man to the Divine by passiveness, by the fear of
human existence.
My reverence for Rabbi Hirsch notwithstanding, it seems that he was exposed
to a Christianity that was perhaps prevalent in Germany but radically
different to the life-affirming joy of the evangelical community that is so
strong in the United States. The Christianity that even I as a Jew so love
and admire today is about raising children who practice chastity and love
God, sending missionaries around the world to fight poverty and disease,
giving considerable charitable contributions to the poor and downtrodden,
strengthening the institution of marriage and family, and supporting Israel
through its harassment at the hands of enemies intent on its destruction.
So where did the great Rabbi Hirsch receive so a dark vision of
Christianity? No doubt, it came from tortured souls like Mel Gibson who
emphasize the death of Christ to the exclusion of all else. What other
conclusion than that Christianity is a religion of the deep night can be
garnered from Mel's blood-and-gore flick where Jesus is butchered and
bloodied almost passively, as if he were a character in televised
professional wrestling.
But whatever dark demons are haunting Mel's soul, the question returns: Why
would evangelical and Catholic groups, who love their faith and wish to see
it strengthened, get behind this film as a means by which to promote the
Gospel? Is that really what they want the world to know, now that Jesus
lived an inspirational life by which the faithful should be roused, but that
Jesus died a horrible death for which the faithful should feel responsible?
Rabbi
Shmuley Boteach is the best-selling author of 14 books. Recently named by
Talkers magazine as one of Americans 100 most important talk-radio hosts,
his newest book is "The Private Adam: Becoming a Hero in a Selfish Age"
(HarperCollins).
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