Word: christe
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...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...
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...
...starting in the 1300s that the Passion truly bloomed. Scholars located details of Jesus' suffering in allegedly prophetic verses in the Old Testament. Mystics built devotions around his scourging after a Cardinal returned from the Holy Land bearing the pillar to which he said Christ had been chained. Flagellant lay groups clogged the streets, seeking bloody identification with the flayed Christ. So dominant grew the Passion, writes Catholic historian Gerard Sloyan, that believers felt "meditation on [it] alone could achieve unity with Christ and yield some share in the work of redemption he accomplished." It came to overshadow not just...
...inexplicable. It derived in part from the everyday misery and terror facing average believers. However badly they suffered, they thought, Jesus must have suffered more. If they dedicated their torments to his, others concluded, it might lend sanctity to the senseless. Little wonder that one mystic reported that Christ had told her, "I was beaten on the body 6,666 times; beaten on the head 110 times; pricks of thorns in the head, 110 ... mortal thorns in the forehead, 3 ... the drops of blood that I lost were...
...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...