Previous Post – No Greater Love
When Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” came out six years ago, it caused a great deal of stir. One frequent question that came up, at least to me, was about the scene (pictured above) where Satan walks around the place where Jesus is being scourged carrying a “baby” that turns out to be a dwarfed adult. Many were confused by what the reason was for this bizarre image, but it powerfully impacted me.
What I saw was the image of the Madonna and her child twisted and distorted into something lifeless, passionless and dark. It mocked an image held deeply sacred by billions of Christians, not least Catholics such as Gibson. This understanding was later confirmed when I read his explanation for the scene:
“…it’s evil distorting what is good. What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old ‘baby’ with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it’s almost too much…”
As alien as this image might have seemed to many people, the reality of what it portrayed so vividly is all too common in our own lives. All too often, in the face of our need for love and redemption, we turn to cheap and twisted substitutes for the love and grace of God. We seek to fulfill our longing for acceptance and value through casual and fleeting sexual encounters. We seek to satisfy our hunger for justice by claiming it through force and violence. Each twisted example is a cheap proxy for the only source of salvation and satisfaction, mimicking the truth like a shallow affectation.
Consider, for example, the challenge of gossip. As we face interpersonal challenges in our relationships, we seek out others to whom we might “vent”, indiscriminately giving unqualified voice to our frustration to others who, in the name of being “supportive” or “comforting”, feed the fires of anger and validate the lies and half-truths (still lies) that cloud our true need. Bitterness becomes entrenched and shared with others, furthering its path of relational destruction.
This kind of gossip reflects, in its distorted way, the deep need for which we should be hungering: confession. This is where Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7:1-5 is so critical. We are warned not to try to take the speck out of our brothers/sisters eye until we have removed the plank from our own. In our culture of individualism, though, it is easy to read Jesus’ words as suggesting that we all must fix ourselves before helping others. This is impossible, as the analogy of the plank and speck demonstrates. After all, if we are to help our sister and brother remove the speck from their eye, it stands to reason that we are also dependent on our sisters and brothers to help remove the plank from our own eye. Therefore, the humble mutuality of serving one another in our shared brokenness is further established. This is where the discipline of confession emerges in all its difficult beauty. Stanley Hauerwas writes:
“The disciples are not to judge because any judgment that needs to be made has been made. For those who follow Jesus as if they can, on their own, determine what is good and what is evil is to betray the work of Christ. Therefore, the appropriate stance for the acknowledgment of evil is the confession of sin. We quite literally cannot see clearly unless we have been trained to see ‘the log that is in [our] eye’. But it is not possible for us to see what is in our eye because the eye cannot see itself. That is why we are able to see ourselves only through the vision made possible by Jesus- a vision made possible by our participation in a community of forgiveness that allows us to name our sins.”
Confession, like many of the other beautiful but difficult disciplines of faith, all too often get left behind in exchange for the easier, immediately less costly substitutes of self-serving and sinful natures. It is critical that we look at our lives and behaviours in order that we might identify and change those patterns of compromise.
What other substitutes have you seen in your life and/or your community’s life? How have you addressed them?
Tags: confession, Missional
Hey Jamie. I can relate to the examples you list and the way you obviously see evil at work in our lifes. However, I somehow have a hard time matching this to the image you posted. I wonder if this is really the kind of Satan we should focus on. Doesn’t it say more about us and our brains? You know… as far as I understand what we experience when we look at this image is due to the way our brain works. When we see an image of a mother breast-feeding a child from behind and then the camera turns round and we see that the baby is actually drinking a milk-shake, we find this humorous. This is because we are led to expect one thing and are then presented with something surprising and obviously obsurd. It “tickles our brain” because it plays with our thought patterns and deliberately falls outside of them in a creative way. In a similar but also very differen way, when we look at the image you posted, we are creeped out. Because we see something that seems to fit our patterns but at the same time does not quite fit because something is wrong. This is the material of horror movies and nightmares. It is the dream many have as a child, where you enter the room where your parents are and suddenly realize, they are not really your parents but something else although they look like them. It is the fear of the other. While this might be a good fear at times, it is also the fear that singles out “freaks”, that makes us afraid when people are not fitting our patterns. In this way it is also the theme of redemptive stories like “Beauty and the Beast”.
However, the evil I see portrayed in the Gospels and rebuked by Jesus is more an evil of conventional wisdom. It is the evil that singles out freaks. When Satan tempts Jesus in the desert, the temptations are not slight distortions but are quite obvious appeals to power and the “way of the world”. Isn’t that what we should be more afraid of?
Again, I agree with the bottom line you came up with in your article. And yes, the image you posted creeps me out as well. But it also made me think.
Tobias,
Good points. I should have been clear that I was not affirming or approving Gibson’s use of the imagery, but rather pointing to how it reflected something to him- and from that, using it as a parallel for the substitutes we often have in our own lives. Thanks!
Peace,
Jamie
I loved this post. The first thing I said out loud when i saw the picture above the post was ” this is too weird, I can’t keep looking at it”. Thank you for this post though, it’s made me question some things in my life that i “twist” to make it more comfortable.
Thanks Adam. If only we would have the same reaction (”I can’t keep looking at it!”) with our own substitutes, eh?
Peace,
Jamie
I feel myself settling for a lifestyle in which we talk about sacrifice and give a few dollars…then spend big $ on lunch. Obviously the gift was not a sacrifice, just a cheap substitute for it.
Hard truth, Trevor. True of many of us. Thanks.
Peace,
Jamie
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