Editorial Passion and bigotry

There is great furor over Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of The Christ."

Furor that the movie is anti-Semitic, that it falsely portrays the last 12 hours of Christ's life, that it's "message" will reopen old wounds over who is responsible for the Death of Jesus.

To some, Gibson's movie is true to the text of the Christian Bible. To others, it is "Lethal Weapon meets the New Testament."

There are moments of great filmmaking. There are also long stretches of inhumane brutality, and more than human forbearance.

But religious debates raised by movie critics are hard to understand. How can our differences mean more than our similarities when we talk of Jesus?

That Caiaphas and other Jewish priests are brutal and cruel does not show that Jews are brutal and cruel. Roman soldiers were brutal and cruel. It shows that men, even men of religious rank, can be brutal. That they can be cruel.

That men in authority can be brutal and cruel.

It shows that there is something in each of us that can be brutal and cruel.

Neither Gibson's movie nor the Story upon which it is based stand as an indictment of Jews.

They stand as an indictment of man.

Certainly the Catholic Church has perpetrated its own moments of brutality and cruelty in the last 2,000 years. As have Protestants, Hindus, Moslems, as has every religion that had power over the spirit of man from the beginning of time.

Including the "non-religions" of Communism and unfettered Capitalism.

Because we are the race of men. Men can be brutal and cruel. We will use the tools and words and images available to us, even our religions, our authority, to justify brutality, cruelty.

Especially to one of our own, if He causes others to question why we have what we have and they don't, if He tries to show that we divide and not unite, if He threatens our authority and our wealth and our position, we can be brutal and cruel.

Jesus tipped over tables in the Temple, claimed God as his Father and was crucified. This is not an indictment of Jews. It is an indictment of greed in the House of God, of spiritual pollution, an indictment that has reverberated from Jesus to Buddha to Mohammed to Luther and it rings just as loudly today.

Law, even religious law, can be perverted, twisted by greed and power, by all men, by any man. Two thousand years ago, or today.

The death of Jesus demanded by the priests was an act of man against man, or if you will, of men with religious position against a man of God, men against God.

So they killed him. They horribly, brutally, cruelly murdered him.

Accepting that fate, he gave them a lesson of sacrifice, and of love. In the face of cruelty, of shredded flesh, there was forgiveness.

Forgiveness that seems so foreign when the natural, irresistible response is hideous rage and calls for revenge.

Instead, forgiveness is asked, not for the one on the cross but BY the one on the cross for those -- those of us, all of us -- who put him there. Those who stripped him of dignity and flesh and life, he forgives and asks that God forgive.

He is certainly more than man at that point, if not before, if not always.

These gifts: the spilling of silver from the tables, the admonition to love one's enemies, the grace of forgiveness for acts of unspeakable brutality, are paths to freedom, and a universal message.

So it is hard to understand those who feel that it is anti-Semitic. It is harder still to understand that there are others who would use the message to fuel anti-Semitism.

That argument is what the story was about in the first place. Hate is not the victor. Love and acceptance unify us, bring peace. Hate and brutality beget more hate and more brutality.

The magic of parables is they bridge the gap between battles we fight as groups and battles we fight within. They show how our behavior toward others reflects the state of our soul. How modifying one modifies the other.

They show the amazing intersection between the son of men and the son of man, both a mirror and a path out of our individual torment that is more than mere reflection.

Of course, "Passion" is not a parable, it's just a movie. It is also art. Art often tells more about artist than subject. Our reaction tells us a lot about ourselves.