Why It's So Bloody

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As the plagues abated, Passion piety faded. It has never fully disappeared from Catholicism (why should it, as long as there is suffering?), and remains particularly pronounced in the Hispanic church. But observances like the Stations of the Cross and the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary settled into more balanced harmony with Easter.

Why, then, does Mel Gibson feel that America needs the old medieval recipe? One answer is, perhaps he doesn't. He has maintained that the film was never intended to be commercial but reflects a near suicidal period he survived by meditating on Jesus' suffering. "I had to use the Passion of Christ to heal my wounds," he told an Australian newspaper. The Passion is his personal candle lit in thanks.

And yet recently greater claims have been staked on the film's behalf. Gibson's production company has marketed it to church groups as "perhaps the best outreach opportunity in 2,000 years," and conservative Christian luminaries have embraced it as such. The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, compares the work to that of Michelangelo, who captured the spirituality of a more expansive age. Like the Sistine ceiling, Haggard says, The Passion of the Christ will inspire believers for decades or even centuries.

With due respect for his desire that Christ's sacrifice be understood by all and for the gratitude among Christians that a Hollywood deity has finally made an accomplished and utterly unironical Christian film, one can only hope that he has it wrong. The Christian story includes joy, astonishment, prophecy, righteous wrath, mystery and love straightforward as well as love sacrificial. The Passion of the Christ is a one-note threnody about the Son of God being dragged to his death. That may be just the ticket for some times and for some benighted places where understanding human torment in terms of God's love is the only religious insight of any use. But in a culture as rich, as powerful, as lucky and as open-minded as ours--one might even say, as blessed--it is, or should be, a very bad fit indeed.