Of The Passion of the Christ

Christ struggles with his capacity to be the sin-bearing Son. This is the point of the devil’s attack. The seventeenth-century French thinker Blaise Pascal has one of the most acute phrases on this aspect of the Passion, and I suggest that Gibson’s film will not be properly understood without these words: “Jesus suffers in his Passion the torments inflicted upon him by men,” he writes in the Pensées, “but in his agony he suffers the torments which he inflicts on himself. He was troubled. This punishment is inflicted by no human but an almighty hand, and only He that is almighty can bear it.” What we see, then, in the rest of the film, is the weight of the world’s sin being placed upon Christ – by human beings certainly, but also “by an almighty hand” (the Father’s) and by his own (almighty) hand. This is how one divine man bears the sin of all.