A film that helps us ‘unforget’

I saw “The Passion of the Christ” last week. I’ll admit that it was more than I could take, and I was too wrung out from literally hanging on for dear life for two hours to weigh controversies.

I never could understand how someone who worships a Jew could be labeled as “anti-Semitic” in the first place. Mel Gibson’s stated purpose was “aletheia” (New Testament Greek word for “truth”). It literally means “unforgetting.” He helped us to “unforget” that a pretty crucifix is one thing, but the thing itself is another. This film actually put us all back in the courtyard, and we had the scourged Christ presented to us, “Ecce Homo!” I was there, too.

The same riot breaks out here and now. “Don’t blame me!” We take the false things personally. It’s false to blame the Jewish people. It was their organized religious leadership that handed Jesus over to the torturers. If the film is anti-anything, it’s anti-organized religion.

But even though I’m a pastor, that wasn’t my role to take personally. I also watched my Italian ancestors inflict unspeakable and interminable cruelties upon my dearest Friend, but I don’t think the film is a message against Italians, and that wasn’t my cameo either. What a morbid new fad! Every brand of humankind is now ashamed for the sins of their ancestors.

It makes us feel virtuous to apologize and make (symbolic!) reparations for things that happened before we were born; we need closure for shame we didn’t cause. But we still shamelessly refuse to leave our own darling sins and hatreds. We are false.

“Whose fault was it?” is a false question. Let’s ask the real question: “Was the Passion about me?” The huge funnel over my head in that theater poured the love of God down from heaven on this poor sinner with every tearing lash and every cruel nail, saying, “My Passion is you, dear heart.” It’s 2,000 years too late to distance myself from it. They were my sins that He carried to that Cross, they were my own “iniquities for which He was despised.”

His mother asked, “When will You choose to be delivered from this?” Not until He “was finished” paying for your way Home, dear reader. And we have no more power to distance ourselves from His sufferings than we had power to put Him there. It wasn’t the Jews who put Him there. It wasn’t the Italians, either. It was the Lord who was “pleased to bruise Him.” “No man took His life, He laid it down Himself.”

I did take one scene personally. Did you hear the crowd calling for my release in the courtyard? I was the one who got away scot-free.

That’s the Gospel. Jesus dies, we go free. It’s the power of God into salvation – “to the Jew first” and then to people like me. Am I offended? How could I be? I worship a Jew.

The Rev. Don Colageo is pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Bangor.