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I Couldn't
Find Jesus at the Box Office
A Review of The Passion of Christ
By John Sankofa
All
blood and gore. Thin plot. Sadly, it seems that most
commentators, caught in the powerful emotions around Jesus'
violent death, make little mention of the fact that Mel
Gibson took a rather shallow look at the remarkable life of
a man who committed himself to fighting against so many forms of
human oppression: poverty, hunger, sickness, prostitution, as
well as political, religious, and cultural domination.
Of
course, Gibson knew that the theological tradition of today's
Christian society is not exactly the love-thy-neighbor focus of,
let's say, Rev. Martin Luther King, but rather an
individualistic (i.e., American) focus characterized by personal
salvation and personal satisfaction--or, what some Christians
like to call, a "personal walk" with Christ, as
opposed to a liberating walk with the downtrodden masses. You
know, the way Jesus did.
So
we barely hear any mention from commentators about Gibson's
mammoth oversight: the life of Jesus. Aptly, one
commentator did notice that the brutal violence Jesus endured,
which Gibson recreated in his blockbuster film with an almost
perverse and sadistic attention to bloody detail, was hardly
unlike (and possibly even less severe) than that of other
punished (i.e., tortured) humans during the Roman era.
Although most commentators seem to miss this disturbing
historical reality, I suspect that Jesus, given his passion for
alleviating human suffering, certainly must have caught this.
Jesus
would probably also notice that the vicious flogging of runaway
slaves in antebellum America, or the countless gruesome
lynchings of the South (where mobs of white onlookers gathered
in droves, not unlike at Jesus' own well-attended lynching) or
the horrid truck-dragging of James Byrd down a Texas road until
his head rolled off, or the blood-soaked body of Amadou Diallo
convulsing in an unholy hail of 41 NYPD bullets are all
classical examples of later versions of old-fashioned
Roman-style torture and crucifixion. And by the way, speaking of
race, why was Jesus—a man with bronze skin and hair like wool
who grew up in the Middle East, not Europe, and who was brown
enough to be hidden as a baby in Egypt (North
Africa)—portrayed as a white guy?
Gibson
is apparently a creative historian with a penchant for fiction,
omission, and the colors blood-red and money-green, but not
black. This all brings me to my final point:
It
is not the film's gratuitous violence (which is as American as
apple pie and Gibson surely revels in this) but rather the
film's historical amnesia and the deafening silence around our
society's failure to replicate—or apparently even
portray—the profoundly liberating life of a brown-hued Jesus
that makes this film so noteworthy. Of course, films about
liberating the poor, the hungry, and the oppressed masses don't
exactly make smash-hits at the box office. Blood and gore
does.
And
Gibson apparently knows this macabre American passion all too
well.
If you like this review consider making a donation
John Sankofa is a Washington, DC–based
freelance writer whose work has previously appeared in over 45
African-American newspapers nationally, including the New York
Amsterdam News, Final Call News, Los Angeles Weekly,
Houston Times, Atlanta Voice, and the Washington Informer.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
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The White Masters of the
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W. E. B. Du Bois’
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Ancient African Nations
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