Good Friday - The Passion of the Christ

This morning, as I lay in bed, I told the Lord that I would like to spend a good part of the day with Him, but I didn't know how I would like to do that. Our own church, which only has use of a gymnasium on the weekends, would not have a gathering until Saturday night, an Easter vigil, and I had dismissed the possibility of attending a neighborhood church as a visitor.

The thought came quickly and clearly to mind that I should go to our basement entertainment centre where I could be alone, and watch Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ". After having seen it in 2005, I hadn't watched it since, and I had almost forgotten that I possessed a copy of the DVD until I came across it two days ago.

My initial response to the thought was ambivalence. While the idea seemed totally appropriate for Good Friday, I felt a bit of revulsion. The film moved me deeply the first time I saw it. It moved me in the sense that I deeply empathized with His sufferings and experienced it as suffering myself. I had seen it a second time a few months later, and I discovered that it was no easier to watch then.

I almost resolved to do something else with my Good Friday quiet time, but then I realized that I needed to resist the temptation to turn away from suffering. I needed to engage the suffering of my Jesus, if only through a dramatic re-enactment of that suffering. Why? Because to fully embrace His suffering is one and the same with embracing, and thereby sharing the suffering of the world He came to love and save. If He came to partake of our sufferings, then surely I could vicariously partake of His sufferings for 126 minutes!

I prepared everything so that I could experience the drama uninterrupted. As the screenplay progressed, I discovered that I was once again drawn into the suffering with a high degree of sensitivity. What do I mean by that? It simply means that I am aware of how de-sensitized I can be to suffering. If we dare to watch the evening news, we are encountered every few seconds with a new murder, a fatal accident, or some grave injustice. We were clearly not created to endure so much pain, so we learn to somehow distance ourselves from the reality of the suffering and simply receive it as information. Not so with the sufferings of Jesus. Even though He is portrayed by an actor in a drama, nevertheless He is so personally real to me that the symbol became reality and I was swept into the suffering myself -- again! For His sake and for my sake, I wanted the cruelty and the unimaginable torment to end. But it went on and on.

I remember thinking critically at my first viewing of the film, a large but private preview with local church leaders, that the scenes of suffering were excessive, and overdone. I was protesting at the inaccuracy of biblical detail. Thirty-nine lashes does not mean sixty-nine! And why did he fall so many times on the way to Golgotha? And did the Roman soldiers really laugh and take sadistic delight all the way through the scourging and the crucifixion? Where is that in the Bible?

Today, I had some of those same thoughts go through my mind, but they were quieter this time. Now I was seeing another dimension to the drama that I had not fully appreciated before. This time I saw more clearly than ever the demonic power behind the tormentors, and this is what Gibson meant to dramatize. When the leaders of Israel aligned themselves with Rome, saying, "We have no King but Caesar. Crucify Him!" I saw how the dragon and the beast and the false prophet of Revelation were venting their full wrath on the Son of God.

I saw that Satan and his allies would do everything they could to turn Jesus away from total, complete, final obedience to death, even death on a cross. And I saw the determination of my Lord Jesus to take whatever suffering and abuse He had to endure in order to take away the sins of the world and release us from the legal hold of the devil. I not only saw His sufferings, I saw His love. "This is how we know what love is, that Christ laid down His life for us (I Jn 3:16)."

When I saw the film the first time, I remember that it brought me to prayer, but I can't remember what I prayed. When I saw the film the second time, I remember that it also brought me to prayer, but I don't remember what I prayed. Today, for the third time, it brought me to prayer once again. This time the prayer is fresh in my mind. I could only say, over and over again, "Oh Lord, I am not worthy to be called your disciple -- a follower of Jesus. I am not worthy."