The Passion: Reviewed

I didn’t want to immediately post my thoughts after seeing the movie yesterday. But rather, I wanted it to sink in. It’s truly a tough movie to watch… painful. Especially so for those of us who consider Jesus our hero. So here’s what I thought…

Filling in the Gaps
The Bible is like an onion, in that, as you read and study it, layer upon layer is revealed and we catch glimpses of what God is really like.

The Passion covers the last 12 hours of Christ’s life. The Bible covers a good number of those events and some dialog, but to cover 12 hours in sufficient detail, we’d need a transcript hundreds of pages long, which the Bible is not.

This opens the door for interpretation and we all interpret things differently. This is because we are amazingly complex beings who’ve had vastly varied experiences. The Passion is Gibson’s interpretation. He takes what is given from the Bible and “fills in” the missing parts to tell the story.

Pain, Pain and Then Gratitude
To me, the moive was a painful experience. Thinking about it, I get tears in my eyes even now, and probably will for the rest of my life. As I consider it, the pain may be proportionate to the depth of our relationship to the living Savior, but that’s just a theory.

Some consider Christ only rarely—Easter, Christmas… a funeral. Others more frequently, perhaps each week. I strive to consider Him daily. On occasion he deems it worthwhile to reveal more of Himself to me and our relationship grows.

So while I watched the humiliation, the completely unjust actions, the unbearably painful torture… it hurt me, to see my friend, my hero, treated like that.

To know that He did it for me, made me love Him even more.

Looking Ahead
And so the film did what I had expected it to do. It gave me a newfound, and as close to permanent, vision of who it was that died for me.

My only complaint was that I had to watch the film in a crowded theater. I would rather have seen it by myself, in some small sanctuary somewhere. Alone with my thoughts, but not really alone.