BLEEDING CHRIST VS. EMPTY CROSS – BY UWE SIEMON-NETTO

The odd thing about Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ," is this: It is successful even though it flies in the face of two distinct American theologies: iconoclastic evangelicalism and Protestant liberalism, both marked by the image of the empty cross, though for different reasons.

You can't in fairness accuse the former of promoting "Christianity light," as do liberals, whose creed H. Reinhold Niebuhr described sarcastically thus: "A God without wrath brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without cross."

Still, it is astonishing that evangelicals who, following the Reformed Protestant version of the Second Commandment, will not allow "any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above" in their sanctuaries, should pour into the theaters to watch this film and be thoroughly shaken by it.

What is going on here? Ministers, who will not make the sign of the cross when blessing their congregations, buy for them tickets wholesale to see for themselves the quintessential image of God, scourged, bleeding, hanging from a cross!

Are we, in a sense, experiencing the end of the second great iconoclastic controversy in church history? Has the crucifix won out over the empty cross — or the absence of the cross altogether, as in some mega-churches that do not wish to trouble squeamish post-modern contemporaries with the harsh reality of Christ's suffering?

Moreover, does the "Passion's" impact on Americans, which is already huge, suggest something even more profound, namely, that there is divine purpose in the denominational differences within Christ's one church?

As the Rev. Aldo Giordano, secretary-general of the European Catholic Bishops' Conferences, said, "The Protestants have taught us to take Scripture more seriously." And as the Rev. Fred Anderson, senior pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan admitted, "The Catholics have always faithfully pointed to the cross to remind us of the cost of our sin to God."

There is much hullabaloo both in the United States and already in Europe, where the "Passion of the Christ" won't be shown until Maundy Thursday, over the extent of the film's violence. Must a work of art be so drastic? Could it no be a little less troubling, you know, more of a politically correct balsam to the soul?

Must we really know what it looked like when the Romans scourged people about to be crucified? When they beat them with whips whose leather strips bore metal balls that dug deep into the victim's muscle tearing out chunks of flesh and exposing the bone beneath, as biologist Cathleen Shrier of Azusa Pacific University describes this procedure?

"It is as it was," Pope John Paul II is reported to have said after previewing the film. But is this reason enough to show this to a society that, in the sarcastic words of Boston University's church historian Carter Lindberg, "doesn't want to have crucified people hanging around"?

Is this the proper form of edification, for example, for feminist theologians constantly attempting to re-imagine Christ to the point of trying to do away with "bleeding men dangling from a tree," as one of their leaders opined a few years ago at an event where they "consecrated" a Eucharist with milk and honey to celebrate female body juices?

It is of course sheer coincidence that Gibson's movie opened just days before that Sunday in the year when Eastern Orthodoxy commemorates the final restoration of icons in 843 A.D. after the iconoclastic controversy that had ravaged the Greek Church for over a century.

Orthodoxy, too, has also always known the empty cross, Gabriel Jay Rochelle, one of its theologians, explained. But this is only so in the Easter procession when the crucifer turns the cross he carries around so that the congregation does not see at first Christ's body.

Gibson does nothing new in showing Christ's passion in its utter grisliness, Rochelle said. He simply uses contemporary means to do so. The ancient Eastern icon of the gaunt Christ figure standing in a coffin has doubtless had the same effect on the faithful centuries ago. It is called "extreme humility," a term that Gibson would presumably also accept for his Christ.

Where, other than the fact that this happens to be a movie, is the qualitative difference between "The Passion of the Christ" and the haunting images of Matthias Gruenewald's Isenheim altar (1515 A.D.), where the blood flows from Jesus' feet as abundantly as in the film?

Where, too, is the difference between the ugly mobs and sadistic Roman torturers in Gibson's "Passion" and the frightening rabble taunting Jesus in Hieronymus Bosch's famous painting, Christ carrying the Cross (ca. 1450)?

Princeton Seminary church historian Paul Rorem finds it remarkable that evangelicals suddenly discover their interest in images, an interest the Catholics, Orthodox and Lutherans have always had simply because it was God the Father who superseded the Second Commandment of Judaism and Reformed Protestantism by presenting us with the definitive image of himself — in Christ.

It seems that just as Protestantism rendered an enormous service to Catholicism by guiding it back to Scripture, Gibson's Catholicism is now doing faithful Protestants a favor by showing them a dreadful sight none of us really relishes: the harshest truth of Christian faith.

This may not fit into the mushy climate of post-modern pussyfooting. But perhaps the time has come to end all that and put the crucifix and the empty cross back in their proper order — there is no resurrection before death.

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