I have watched again as a kind of Holy Week devotion, the grisly Mel Gibson film “The Passion of the Christ”. This movie takes viewers deep into the horrors experienced by Jesus in his final hours. (Too deep, say some critics—A reviewer writing in Slate called it a “two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie” and asks “What does this protracted exercise in sadomasochism have to do with Christian faith?” Roger Ebert on the other hand answered this question; “This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it”).
As if the biblical subject matter weren’t gut rending enough, a disturbing image is inserted into the flogging scene. As the Roman whips rip chunks out of Jesus’ flesh, our messianic torture victim looks up and sees a vision of the oddly androgynous Satan holding a creepy looking baby that has the face of a leering middle aged man.
This image has confused many. Of course, none of the Satan appearances are exactly biblical, though it may be supposed that the forces of darkness were fully arrayed in Jesus’ last moments. Mr. Gibson gave an explanation that sounds as though this scene might have been thrown in merely for its weirdness effect. “It’s evil distorting what’s good,” Gibson told Christianity Today. “What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and a child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old ‘baby’ with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it’s almost too much — just like turning Jesus over to continue scourging him on his chest is shocking and almost too much, which is the exact moment when this appearance of the Devil and the baby takes place.”
I rather liked the image, extra-biblical though it is, as a metaphor for lost humanity. Before God rescues us from sin, humans both collectively and individually are like that stunted disgusting thing that sucks at the teat of evil, drawing a form of power but ultimately being kept from growing into what we were intended to become.
Spiritually speaking we begin life like rather like those miserable Orcs in Tolkien’s famous tale, of whom Saruman the wizard says: “Do you know how the Orcs first came into being? They were elves once, taken by the dark powers, tortured and mutilated. A ruined and terrible form of life.”
Somehow, by what Jesus went through on that otherwise horrible occasion, we have the chance to be reconciled to God and brought back into glory. Another writer concurs: “And there in the background is Christ, on the path to the cross, to break those “maternal” bonds to Satan and replace them with bonds to our true father in heaven.” (in All about Jesus Christ)
We get a second chance to shed our debased orc nature, and become elves again. That is why this day is “Good Friday”.