The Passion in Perspective

The main action in The Passion of the Christ consists of a man being horrifically beaten, mutilated, tortured, impaled, and finally executed. The film is grueling to watch — so much so that some critics have called it offensive, even sadistic, claiming that it fetishizes violence.

To understand the brutality of Gibson’s Passion within the film’s own redemptive context, one must begin a full hour before the first blow at the pillar falls, in the opening scene in the garden of Gethsemane.

As imagined here, Jesus’ agony in the garden harkens back to two earlier events in salvation history: the temptation in the wilderness, and the Garden of Eden. The agony in the garden and the temptation in the wilderness are the two ordeals at either end of Christ’s public ministry in which he was ministered to by angels, but Gibson’s film, like other recent dramatizations (e.g., The Miracle Maker), omits the angels, instead depicting Satan returning to tempt Jesus, testing him on the eve of his passion just as he did at the outset of his public ministry.

This opening image of Satan there in the garden, tempting Jesus, the second Adam, recalls another scene from the opening chapters of the scriptures, the temptation of the first Adam in another garden, Eden. Gibson even uses a literal serpent, strengthening the Genesis 3 resonance — and also, perhaps, alluding to what is probably the only other film to use a literal serpent in depicting Christ being tempted, namely, The Last Temptation of Christ.

It may seem strange to think of the traditionalist Gibson alluding to Scorsese’s notoriously controversial film, the last major Jesus film before The Passion of the Christ. However, The Passion does seem to be consciously aware of the earlier film.

If Gibson did consciously re-use the serpent image, it wasn’t as an homage to Scorsese’s film, but as a rebuttal of it. The most striking thing about the two serpent scenes is how they highlight two utterly antithetical ideas of what it meant for Jesus to be tempted. In sharp contrast to Last Temptation, where the confrontation between Jesus and the serpent is inconclusive, The Passion brings the temptation to a decisive end with Jesus quite literally putting his foot down in an unmistakable allusion of Genesis 3:15, a verse sometimes called the "protoevangelion" or "first Gospel": "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he will crush your head, and you shall strike at his heel."  To be continued...