**Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ Exceeds Expectations**

For well over a year before its release on Ash Wednesday 2004, Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ was both eagerly anticipated and heavily dreaded. Before a large number of people had had the chance to see the movie for themselves, representatives of the extreme left, both within and without the visible Church on earth, warned against the film and worked for its demise on the grounds that it would fuel anti- Semitism. Following its release and the subsequent widespread revelation that this fear was unfounded, many opponents of the film attacked it based on its extreme violence and gore. Every attack has served to increase awareness of the film, and has contributed to its phenomenally successful start at the box-office.

As a movie, The Passion of the Christ is beautifully made. Filming in Latin and Aramaic helped to avoid the common problem of the stilted, forced English dialogue that often plagues Jesus movies. The language choice, coincidentally, also makes the film more international: audiences throughout the world will see precisely the film that Mel Gibson created. The performances are natural and heartfelt, particularly in the case of Jim Caviezel, who is the first to portray Christ neither blasphemously nor as a cardboard cutout reciting scripture verses in translation.

As a spiritually beneficial exercise for a Christian audience, the film succeeds wildly. A basic idea expressed in the Book of Ecclesiastes is that there is a time for everything. In the Christian life, there is a time to rejoice in Christ's resurrection, as well as a time to dwell on His sufferings and our infinite debt to Him. The Church calendar, which has developed through millennia of Christian experience, provides for different times to emphasize different things. Mel Gibson simply chose to craft a film that would serve as an aid to devotion for a particular time and season. He did not set out to replace the Scriptures with an all-encompassing film that would eliminate the need for the continued preaching of God's Word. He used the two hours allotted to him to bring the story of the atonement for the sins of the world into sharper and more immediate focus than had ever been done through the medium of film. Even given the nature of what specifically he was trying to do, Gibson did include several flashbacks of Christ's earthly ministry, most notably the institution of Holy Communion at the Last Supper, to heighten the meaning of the suffering portrayed on screen. By using such extra-Scriptural additions as Satan's temptation of Christ in Gethsemene to abandon His mission, Gibson makes abundantly clear to any audience that his Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and that His death serves to pay for the sins of mankind.

The violence and gore are intense, but not gratuitous. The "sacred violence" of such great war films as Saving Private Ryan and We Were Soldiers serves rather to instruct and to affect than to titillate. In the same way, though even more appropriately and to a far greater degree, the "sacred violence" of The Passion brings a powerful message home to the attentive audience. For the viewer who believes that he is witnessing a dramatization of the atonement for his own sins, the chief reaction to the gore is not revulsion, but shame. Christ's suffering paid for all transgressions, from such gross and manifest sins as murder to the petty liberties that we may sometimes take for granted as being a part of life in a fallen world. To see a man suffering so terribly on his behalf impresses on the viewer the seriousness of his own sins, and the weakness of his own resolve to do good. Shame is not the lasting effect of the film, however. The last minute and thirty seconds are devoted to an immensely powerful resurrection scene which leaves the viewer, in spite of the carnage that he witnessed through most of the film, overwhelmed with joy and excitement at the sheer potentiality of the triumphantly resurrected God-Man released from the tomb into an unsuspecting world.