Seeing TPOTC

We watch “The Passion” together, as Jesus gets slapped and beaten and scourged until his body is transformed from solid to liquid, with loose bunches of skin hanging as if from a reptile trying to molt. We watch His mother, of Hail Mary/lawn statue fame, become a flesh-and-blood mother, unable to help her helpless boy, who’s being tortured, as she’s tortured herself by the knowledge that He’s not helpless at all, that His death is by choice. Norm Linsky and I sit there in the dark, our senses overwhelmed at the sheer viciousness and brutality, and watch Jesus die for our sins. Or, as Norm would probably prefer, we watch Jesus die for my sins.

When the lights come up, I’m pretty much speechless. Norm isn’t. “Whoa! Mel did a good job, glad I saw it for myself.” The depiction of the Jewish priests, he says, is “no big deal”–even though he thinks they looked like they were from “a bad dinner-theater production of the ‘Merchant of Venice'” (the Romans came off as Nazi caricatures from a World War II movie, he adds). Norm whispers that he has a prediction: “There’s not gonna be any rioting in the streets tonight. Get a life, people, it’s just a movie. And a good one.” Norm’s glad he came, he says, because this has people “talking about some core issues about belief.” It has him talking “to the church ladies out in line,” and “a fine reporter from a fine magazine, as opposed to me going to a mindless movie where people are blowing stuff up for the hell of it.”

Norm’s right, sort of. We stick around for a theater-sponsored interfaith panel discussion between clergy. It sounds like the setup to a bad joke: A Lutheran, a Catholic, two Baptists, and a rabbi walk into a movie theater. . .