An article by Walter Reich in the Feb. 27 Bangor Daily News (“‘Passion’ gives fertile ground for anti-Semitism to grow”) gave voice to Jewish concerns that Mel Gibson’s remarkable movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” could provoke acts of anti-Semitism.

Reich, a professor of international affairs and director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum from 1995 to 1998, wrote with dismay that “many of its viewers will be believing Christians who, at excruciating length, in slow motion and repeatedly, will watch their Messiah – the gentle and forgiving Lord of love and peace – lashed, pierced, nailed to the cross. And those viewers will see the Jews as the people centrally responsible for that divine, ultimate and excruciating torment.”

Reich is right to be concerned that some people, uninformed about the roots of Christian belief, or uncertain of Mel Gibson’s intentions, might misconstrue the movie’s message – just as some visitors to the Holocaust Museum might think the message to be gained from that memorial is to take vengeance on the current generation of Germans for the sins of their Nazi fathers.

But that is not the point of the Holocaust Museum, the movie or of Passion plays generally. We preserve the memory of the concentration camps not to spark revenge, but to remember how cruel, how unspeakably cruel, men and women can be to one another.

The Holocaust Museum stands as a powerful monument to the belief that we must never forget the consequences of such cruelty.

And we preserve the memory of the details of Jesus’ death for similar reasons. For one thing, it is to keep us from ever fancying that humans can perfect themselves through their own endeavors. When it comes right down to it, we are very flawed and very scary creatures, awash in sins of greed and arrogance that poison almost everything we undertake to accomplish.

Don’t forget; it was the Nazis who argued that they had been shackled for too long by the traditions of Judao-Christian faith.

By throwing off what was termed “the pathetic weakness” of our faith in God, we could become a race of supermen.

At the root of Christian faith is the belief that Jesus the Messiah had to die for the sins of mankind. The Jews of Jesus’ day likewise believed that innocent blood had to be shed for the remission of sin, and to that end, temple priests like Caiaphas would slay the lambs and goats and doves brought as a sin offering to the sacrificial altar of the Temple. It is said the blood ran like a stream through channels from the Temple altar to the Kidron Valley below. Christians believe that Jesus himself was the final sacrifice, the final blood sacrifice needed to cover sin for all time. The story of Abraham and Isaac is the type for God, the Father, and his son, Jesus. Except in Jesus’ case, the killing hand was not restrained.

More than six centuries before Jesus, the great Hebrew prophet Isaiah wrote: “Look my servant will prosper, will grow great, will rise to great heights. As many people were aghast at him – he was so inhumanly disfigured that he no longer looked like a man – so many nations will be astonished and kings will stay tight-lipped before him, seeing what had never been told them, learning what they had not heard before.

“[H]e was despised, the lowest of men, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering, one from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze, despised, for whom we had no regard. Yet ours were the sufferings he was bearing, ours the sorrows he was carrying, while we thought of him as someone being punished and struck with affliction by God; whereas he was being wounded for our rebellions, crushed because of our guilt; the punishment reconciling us fell on him, and we have been healed by his bruises.

“We had all gone astray like sheep, each taking his own way, and Yahweh brought the acts of rebellion of all of us to bear on him. Ill-treated and afflicted, he never opened his mouth, like a lamb led to the slaughter-house, like a sheep dumb before its shearers he never opened his mouth.” (Isaiah 52:13- 53:7)

Christians believe this passage was a prophecy of the coming Jesus, the suffering servant who would take on our sins.

When Christians say “by his stripes [whip-lashes], we are healed,” it brings a whole new light to the power of Gibson’s film.

Yes, the Temple priests and the Jewish mob and the apostle Judas and the Romans did the dirty work – but it was God’s will that it should happen, it was for our salvation that it came to pass.

This is hard stuff, theologically, to contemplate – just as it is in thinking about why God would permit such things as the Holocaust to happen. In fact, we are neither qualified, nor even worthy, to speak about what “God would permit.”

But we must not allow ourselves to forget about it, either. So painful movies like “Schindler’s List” and “The Passion of the Christ” must be made, and made as forcefully as possible. Movies are, after all, a mirror we hold up to ourselves – and sometimes we won’t like what we see. “We can’t look that bad,” we tell ourselves. “Surely not that bad!”

That bad and worse, I’m afraid.

“He was so inhumanly disfigured that he no longer looked like a man,” Isaiah wrote. And Gibson has shown it like it was.

The Rev. Lee Witting is pastor of the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor. The church will be host of the third annual Bangor-area “Passion Play,” based this year on the Gospel of Luke. It opens there for two weekends at 7 p.m. Friday, March 26. Call 945-9798.