Well, now I can know what everyone’s talking about.

Saw TPOTC on Saturday, as it turned out. Michael came up with the idea of me and Katie seeing it at the big AMC theater in Newport, KY, so he could take Joseph to the Newport Aquarium, all in the same complex, Newport on the Levee, during our absence. Good idea.

Much has already been written about this, and I suppose over the next few days, I’ll talk about various aspects of it with you all.

First, I’m glad this film exists, for a lot of reasons. It reinvents and reinvigorates the genre of the Biblically-based film and gives new life to films that seek to take spirituality seriously. Why? First of all, because it’s fearless. That, of course, is what drains the life of any potential treatment of faith-related issues on film: fear. Fear of bad box office, fear of offending the wrong people.

Drains the life out of any film, any work of art, as a matter of fact.

But Gibson, in his own mind, had nothing to lose, so this film holds little back – and I don’t mean in terms of violence, but rather in terms of what, from his head, ends up on the screen.

It’s probably in vain, but the existence of this film, bolstered by its apparent great financial success, sparked some faint hope within me that perhaps a path has been cleared for more work of this kind, not just to be conceived, but also born out of the film industry and its satellites – work that expresses the breadth, depth, diversity and passion that drives faith …and doubt as well.

As I watched the film, and reflected on the imagery and the violence, everything I’d heard said about it before I saw it, and what I was viewing, it came to me quite clearly that what hardly anyone seemed to understand was what this film was basically about..

Which is sin.

This is what sin is, and this is what sin does. It devastates, shreds and kills. It separates human beings from each other and divides them within. Innocents are laid waste and mothers weep. Gibson is saying – this is what I have done, this is what you have done, and these are the consequences. In telling the story of Jesus, the Passion tells this story through the story of one innocent victim. Which, of course, is the point, Christians say.

So yes, the violence was horrific, and part of that emerges from Gibson’s penchant for gore. But the way it works, in the context of this film, is as an unflinching gaze on the consequences of what we have done and what we have failed to do on our humanity, so loved by God he took it as his own.