by Michael Spencer
Dear Mel,Well, you�ve gone and done it now. Started making a movie about Jesus. Turns out, you�re a serious Roman Catholic, and you just couldn�t resist taking a shot at presenting the greatest drama, the greatest story, the greatest noble tale of them all: the passion of Christ. I commend you. It is a noble and worthy undertaking.
We should have seen it coming. You�ve always been attracted to the larger than life characters. People of courage and moral vision living in perilous times. Once you�ve really come to understand the story of Jesus, once it�s gotten its teeth into your soul, you begin to see that all those other stories are, one way or another, derived from His story. Every hero, every person who died because he loved others more than self, is in one way or another a shadow of Jesus.
It�s understandable that someone who has been in the shadows, would sooner or later want to tell the one story that is the very light of the sun.
Your movie will, according to what we are reading, tell the story of the last twelve hours of Jesus' life, without subtitles, and using the dead languages of Aramaic and Latin to present the dialog as realistically as possible. You�re right in thinking that most people know this story well enough to not need subtitles or English to explain what is going on. This project is a labor of love for you, and lots of us are cheering for you to succeed in presenting Jesus in a way that honors him and beautifully illustrates the great truths of scripture about the suffering of the Son of God for sinners.
Of course, I am sure you know that this project will not be greeted with much applause from your peers. They will consider it a waste of the power and influence you have accumulated in Hollywood. Now, if you were to use your position to make a self-indulgent film with themes of sexual perversion, religious terrorism, capitalistic greed or general American depravity, you would be applauded, even singled our for recognition. The more indulgent and controversial your choice of a topic, the more you would be hailed as a man of vision.
Taking on Jesus is actually more controversial and counter-culture than any of the pet projects of your Hollywood peers, but they won�t see that. They will act as if you are making a propaganda film for the Bush White House. Look to be labeled divisive, bigoted and intolerant. Especially look to have your traditional Catholicism skewered as some sort of mental illness, driving you to waste your talents on this white whale of a film. The fact that your project is certain to be commercially successful will make no difference. In fact, it will be greeted as proof that you�re not really an artist with integrity.
I doubt if anyone will outright call you a religious fanatic to your face, but the label is already being polished up after �Signs� and the announcement of "Passion". Strange that when we were treated to the bizaare, mentally ill Jesus of �The Last Temptation of Christ�, Scorcese was hailed as brave and brilliant. You, I predict, will be diagnosed as obsessed and eccentric, and if your presentation of Jesus is seen as true to scripture, it will be whispered that you are over-the-edge dangerous and your career will be pronounced over.
You can also expect to have a fair number of Christians denounce your film. Christians have a notoriously difficult time with art, and cinema especially. If you do not adequately serve someone�s agenda or pay service to a particular theological totem, your movie will certainly earn the Oscar for �Best Film Inspired by the Devil.� Who knows, for all your trouble, you may even earn that coveted award frequently given to those making movies about Jesus: a fundamentalist Christian boycott, just to prove a point about who really owns Jesus.
If you made "Left Behind III," you wouldn't have this problem. For that reason alone, I'm totally supporting you.
I guess what I am saying is that you are taking up with the most controversial, provocative, misunderstood person in all of history. Everyone- from traditional Catholics to Gay activists to fundamentalists to atheists- has an angle on Jesus. He represents our longings, our fears, our hopes, and our deepest feelings about ourselves. Just as this film represents your own aspirations and commitments, so it will touch the lives of millions of people who are on intimate, personal terms with the subject of your film.
Jesus is someone we feel like we know, and more importantly, someone we feel knows us. Anytime someone takes Jesus away from the safety of our private interpretations and seeks to present him to all of us through the vision of just one person, we are very defensive, even irrationally fearful that the Jesus up on the screen is somehow going to replace the real Christ. So the mental patient Jesus or the gay Jesus or the hippie Jesus, though they have little if any relationship to the real Jesus of history or scripture, still upsets us. We see in this profane image a desecration of God and, somehow, of ourselves. While most of us aren't all that sure about the exact application of the second commandment, movies about Jesus get close to our sense of disturbing the Holy.
So beware. No matter how close you get, you are doomed to miss the mark. You are going to have to love this project for reasons far beyond what others will think of it to carry it through with the passion and honesty it deserves. And for that, I have a suggestion.
As Christians, we are called to ultimately offer all that we do to God as an offering of gratitude for what he has done for us in and through Jesus Christ. Christians see this as a transforming truth, making anything from washing dishes to painting the Sistine Chapel a worthy act of worship. It also frees us from the slavery to human evaluation, as what is done by the light of eternity, not the dim light of human opinion, comes to be what ultimately matters in any act of creation.
It is my hope and prayer that this truth will be what energizes you. That each act of direction, each frame of film and every detail will provide a place to honor the Lord Jesus Christ. What a worthy king he is! The true Braveheart who gave himself for us. It is the suffering of God in human flesh that is our salvation. (On that we all agree.) I believe it is in your heart, and within your abilities, to present this more powerfully, more worshipfully, than any other director ever has. Do well, as an offering to the one who offered himself for us.
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