Why I won’t be showing my youth group ‘The Passion of The Christ’ this Easter

This morning I accidently flicked toothpaste into my eye. It was stupidly painful and more than a little humiliating. That, however, was not the reason for the toothbrush or the toothpaste – I wanted to clean my teeth! The 2004 Mel Gibson film, The Passion of The Christ – in some odd way – is much like my unfortunate brush with the toothpaste. A significant emphasis on pain and humiliation that largely loses the reason behind the story.

I first watched The Passion of The Christ alone in my brother’s room when I was seventeen. I had a pretty mature Christian faith, and I was plugged into a good youth group. The initial post-movie shock lasted me about three hours. I remember guilt, fear, gratitude, and floods of tears. After that it took over my mental processing for weeks. There were just aspects of it that I couldn’t work out or square away.

On the whole, I believed it was generally a more helpful than unhelpful experience at the time. And that’s the thing – I wouldn’t say that The Passion of The Christ is a bad film, or even – on the whole – unhelpful for a lot of Christians. There are some very precious parts of the film that were handled with real grace and care. The question today, however, is whether we should show it at our youth clubs to groups of 11–18-year-olds? And linked to that question – does it honestly display what really happened to Jesus in those last days of His life?

A youth club staple?

I’m part of an online forum of youth workers who addressed this very question just last week: Should you show The Passion of The Christ at youth clubs? The debate drew very strong opinions from both sides. One person said the film was ‘manipulative and traumatizing’, to which someone else responded ‘you should try the source material sometime.’ Ouch! A parent raised concerns too, saying ‘absolutely not… I have a daughter that would be traumatized.’

Although this was just last week, it is an old debate. The argument usually goes back and forth between, yes show it, it’s important to see with accuracy the pain that Jesus went through; and no, don’t show it, it’s too violent, and it’s inappropriate for young people.

I have sympathy for both of these views. I think it is important to know how much tragic pain, violence, and humiliation the cross inflicted on Jesus, and for young people to be able fit that into their faith language. However, that should be done with 1) accuracy, 2) necessity, and 3) sensitivity as measures. Unfortunately, I think these are all found wanting in The Passion of The Christ.

Accuracy

The Passion of The Christ promotes a myth of accuracy though claiming loyalty to the Bible as its source material and historical meticulousness. There are, however, plenty of accuracy issues in The Passion of The Christ, from the clothes and beards to the languages and customs, to the off-kilter presentation of both the Jews and the Romans, to the reoccurring (and frankly creepy) anthropomorphised images of the devil. Sorry, I’ve got a soft spot for Christian mysticism, but 40 year old baby-Satan was just weird!

There are just far too many details that are inaccurate to take the film as solid history. However, it’s not just a case of ‘if you can’t get the small things right…’ There are also a few much more significant problems. For this post, I’ll focus on just one – and it’s a big one!

The film’s particular and extended image of ‘scourging’ – repeated lashes with something akin to a cat-o-nine tails embedded with pieces of bone or metal – does not come from either the Bible or historical authorities. As archaeologists Berlin and Magness comment ‘there are neither descriptions, pictorial representations, nor physical evidence for the brutal implement that is used at length and to such horrific effect in The Passion’s “scourging” scenes.’[1] In fact, the only implement the Gospels’ mention is a ‘reed’ (Matt. 27:30; Mk. 15:19), and the only example of a weapon anything like what’s displayed in the film is ‘the whip’ used by Jesus to drive people out of the temple (a ‘φραγέλλιον’ in Jn. 2:13 ). This, however, was a collection of leather chords, not a metal-encrusted torture device.

Although the image of a torture weapon with multiple chords and chains and with bone or metal hooks is widely shared in Bible studies and on the internet, in reality there is very little evidence of the Romans using anything like this in the time of Jesus. The closest thing we have from archaeology is a ceremonial instrument carried by pagan priests (which wasn’t used for torture) or a 4^th Century ‘plumbate’ whip, which wasn’t around in 1^st Century Palestine. It wasn’t really until the 15^th or 16^th Century that the Church began to speculate on this kind of torture weapon. Our understanding of the ‘cat-o-nine-tails’ scourge is, in reality, an invention of medieval art, not Roman antiquity.

In the film, however, Jesus is lashed, flogged, and scourged across several positions, with several embellished tools, around one-hundred times. If the film is correct, and Jesus was tortured in such an unprecedented and remarkable way – and one that diverges so much from Roman custom – you would have thought that one of the Gospels would have mentioned it?

Going back to the youth workers’ forum I mentioned earlier, one person said, ‘If anything [the film] doesn’t show half of what suffering our savior went through!’ and another, ‘[The] Passion of the Christ doesn’t hold a candle to what actually happened but is the closest thing to it.’ Sorry guys, I appreciate your passion, but if you’re using either the Bible or historical record, then the scourging scene was overdone, exaggerated, and largely fabricated.

This isn’t to make light of Jesus’ flogging. By no means! But it is a matter of focus. Whereas the Gospels focus on the teaching and person of Christ without overly concentrating on his physical pain, The Passion of The Christ completely reverses this emphasis. It dials up the torture to a degree that is indefensible from either historical or biblical evidence – and loses the purpose or person of Jesus behind it. There is accuracy in some of the drama presented, but much of it is heavily embellished.

Necessity

My second issue is contextual balance. Theologically, the film places so much emphasis on the physical, human-flesh suffering, that it loses the eternal battle for souls almost entirely. It’s mostly important that we know that Jesus died for us, and then it’s definitely meaningful to remember that that was an intense and unfair death. But the pain experienced is not the point! When we super-over-hyper focus on any single aspect of the gospel to this extent, we throw the perfect balance of the story out of whack, and we lose the narrative power of the whole.

If you put rocket fuel in Ford Mondeo, you’re not left with a faster, cooler car. What you actually have is a very messy explosion! Even if The Passion of The Christ was mostly an accurate depiction, the severe overemphasis on Jesus’ torture and death without any explanation or context loses the wider story of His incarnation, crucifixion, atonement, resurrection and ascension.

The most glaring issue throughout the two-hour violent depiction of Jesus’ torture and death then, is that at no point does the film address the question why? For what reason did Jesus die? If you’re going to use The Passion of The Christ as an evangelistic tool, then that’s a really significant hole. And considering the intensive emotional state that your young people are going to be in after watching it, are you going to be able to then explain what’s missing? You might get a positive-looking immediate result (“they were speechless!”), but you also might be unpicking it for years to come.

Put another way, if you’re going to justify over-emphasising  gratuitous violence for theological reasons, you’d better make sure your theology is on point. This is especially true if you’re working with vulnerable young people.

Sensitivity

Entertainment Weekly ranked The Passion of The Christ as ‘the most controversial film of all time.’ I’ve heard Christians say this is because the gospel is offensive and divisive, but that’s not the reason the magazine gave. It was ranked this highly because of its extreme depictions of torture and violence. For context, they ranked this ahead of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a film for which the phrase ‘ultra-violent’ was invented.

The question that comes to focus here then is why do you want to show it to your young people in the first place? Because of the extreme violence and gore, it’s an 18-Rated (R in America) film that has been deemed unsuitable for younger audiences. This means you would need a very good reason to show it to them. If that reason isn’t accuracy or necessity, then what do you have left? My fear is that it stylises Jesus in such a way that invokes a response – and if we were really honest, that’s why we show it.

Even in a teenage world of ‘Call of Duty’, ‘The Hunger Games’, and ‘Game of Thrones’ our responsibility to safeguard the development of our children should not be dialled down. Even if they are exposed to violence in the media, it is not an excuse for us to jump on the same bandwagon and attempt to disciple them pastorally by exaggerating the violence of our own tradition. While a wide range of gruesome violence exists in the Bible, taking in a movie laden with visual effects and featuring real actors is an entirely different experience.

Coming back to the true cross

We must teach Jesus and we must teach the cross. There is nothing more essential for us to do! But let’s begin and end with the real Jesus and draw them to the cross of the Bible. It’s there where true power is found, and a lifetime of passion is fuelled.

The cross was a violent, gruesome, humiliating, and unfair treatment of our saviour. It was an incredible amount of suffering! However, we do not need to embellish the details, bypass the facts, ignore the theology, or neglect context to tell this story. It’s important that we share the fullness of who Jesus truly is.

Good youth work doesn’t rely on easy wins. Rather than depending on these intensive (and insensitive) ‘jumpstart’ moments, let’s instead do the real work of building relationships with young people that will draw them close to Jesus with integrity, love, and longevity – rather than guilt, fear, and confusion.

It’s not a terrible film, and some of it I really value, but I won’t be showing it to my teenagers this Easter.

[1] A. Berlin & J. Magness (2004), Two Archaeologists Comment on The Passion of the Christ. The Archaeological Institute of America. Available at: https://www.archaeological.org/pdfs/papers/Comments_on_The_Passion.pdf

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash