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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 11 The Earthly Lesson of Jesus' Crucifixion And Why His Secular Teachings Live On by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR March
26, 2007 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. -- Jesus of This
column was begun (and then set aside, unfinished) two years ago in
response to Henry Lawton’s “The Obedient Son Sacrificed: Mel
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ” in the Spring 2005 edition
of The Journal
of Psychohistory. I
see these topics very differently. Indeed, I believe the most powerful,
important, and universal elements of Gibson’s "The Passion"
– and of the story of Jesus generally – have been largely overlooked.
These elements are non-supernatural in character. Some cannot be
well-conveyed in abstract language, for they are of lower levels of
consciousness; of feeling rather than reason. Nonetheless, they are the
essence of every true religion, and are critical for the emotional health
of both societies and individuals. I
begin with a discussion of Jesus’ story and its implications, and then
briefly outline ways in which Gibson's film accurately dramatizes this
material. -
1 - Stripped
to its basics, and considering only the real-world, non-supernatural
elements, Jesus’ story is this: A
man begins a ministry in the Completely
at odds with this harsh reality, Jesus preaches love. He does so in a
manner that seems deeply felt and sincere, at least from what we can know,
given the materials available to us. Preaching love is not a marketing
tactic for Jesus; we can easily believe, reading the New Testament, that
Jesus means every word. Jesus goes so far as to assert that those
who love others are his followers. From The
Gospel According to Saint John, quoting Jesus:* Jesus
extends his love to children (and insists
his followers do the same), and makes an astonishing claim: that the This,
in a society which – like most others, past and present – practices
neglect and cruelty to children as a matter of course. These
and other passages from the New Testament—about love and about
children—amount to an open war on neurosis. They suggest that one
way to see the kingdom of heaven is as an emotionally healthy world, here
on Earth. Jesus makes this point very directly in a well known passage
in Luke: The
emotional impact of this short sentence on Jesus’ listeners must have
been profound. Note that Jesus not only says clearly where the kingdom is,
but in doing so he defines the Furthermore,
in Luke 17:21, Jesus admonishes
his followers to look nowhere else
for the kingdom: "Neither shall
they say, Lo here! or, lo there!" If
this seems at odds with much of the symbolic and supernaturally-oriented
material in Jesus’ teachings, it is nonetheless clear and direct.
Compared with much of what the New Testament reports of Jesus’ comments
and parables, the passages above, and other passages about love and about
children, seem less symbolic and more real. Jesus often speaks in parables
and with great care and cleverness – apparently, in some cases, to avoid
or postpone his prosecution for blasphemy, treason, or any of the other
pseudo-crimes he knows he could be charged with for teaching that compassion
is more important than political or religious law. When he speaks of
love, however, Jesus seems to speak without artifice, guile, or defense.
When Jesus talks of love and compassion, he speaks directly and from the
heart. -
2 - Given
our innate, universal hunger for love and compassion, it is no surprise
that Jesus gains a large and growing following. Likewise,
given the threat to individual defenses (against pain) and to political,
social, and economic power that Jesus’ teachings and his following
represent, it is no surprise that local religious leaders, wealthy
merchants, and others begin searching for a way to neutralize Jesus. Nor
is it surprising that many ordinary people join the mob as it becomes
clear that a blood spectacle could soon be played out, with Jesus as
victim. The
weapon used to arrest, torture, and murder Jesus is the coercive state –
murder being its most characteristic activity, and coercive
power in general being the essence of coercive government itself.
Given that the wealthy and influential outside of government have so often
bent government power to their own ends, it is hardly surprising that
government’s power to kill without legal consequence is sought and
granted in this case. For
the crime of advocating love and compassion (and of course for developing
a large following based on those teachings), Jesus is arrested by agents
of the Roman empire – at the behest of local merchants, religious
leaders, and others, including, ultimately, a growing mob. He is accused
of blasphemy, but had he not been preaching love and compassion, and
gaining a huge following as a result, he would never have come to the
attention of the authorities in the first place. In any case, Pilate
washes his hands of the matter and simply gives Jesus over to the mob
rather than pronouncing him guilty of any crime – indeed, Pilate defends
Jesus’ innocence: “And the governor said, why, what evil hath he done?
But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified.” (Matthew
27:23) -- which Pilate then does. Roman
soldiers lead Jesus away, mock him and torture him (ripping flesh from his
back with a scourge), and finally nail him to a wooden cross, leaving him
to die slowly, in agony, between two common criminals who are also being
crucified. All this, in plain view of the locals, including children. -
3 - Every
child comes to life needing love and compassion, only to find a world of
neurosis and pain. Almost every child is ultimately broken into accepting
the shadow existence that society allows. The parallels are unmistakable:
Jesus came preaching the need for love, only to be broken and murdered on
the cross. Our
real, deeply-feeling selves are murdered, or at least bludgeoned into some
level of unconsciousness, by the traumatic infliction of pain from many
sources; Jesus was murdered for championing
that real and healthy self within each of us. Among
the most important details of the Christ story, then, is this: Ultimately,
Jesus was murdered for preaching love, and for clearly identifying and
defending the real self. -
4 - Not
a random killing, this one. Not a mugging by some petty criminal. Not the
act of a violent drunk in a tavern. No: despite the famous “washing of
hands” by Pontius Pilate, this horrifying, gruesome murder was at least
semi-official policy, like so many millions of other murders by empires
and democracies and tin-pot dictatorships throughout history. Jesus was
murdered by Roman soldiers, and in such a way as to drive the point home
to all who saw it, or who even heard rumors about it: We
can do this to anyone we want, anytime we choose, and talking about love
is as good a reason to kill you as any – especially if others start
taking you seriously. We are in charge of your life, and the
penalty for forgetting that is death. Fear us and obey, or die. -
5 - Another
important detail (and lesson) of Jesus' story, then, is that coercive
government is fundamentally at odds with love; it is anti-life. That
should be no surprise, because coercion is a crime, no matter who is doing
it or what the excuse. Coercion is all it takes to turn sex into rape, or
a bank withdrawal into armed robbery. Coercion is among the central
components of child abuse. Coercion replaces voluntary cooperation with
violence and threats of violence. Gandhi, for one, put this clearly: “One
who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is
inhuman.” The
society-wide use of coercion that defines “government” is a major
element in the ongoing cycle of emotional damage to children, who grow
into emotionally damaged adults, who in turn inflict emotional damage on
others, including upon the next generation of children, and so on. It is
important to be clear on this point, if we ever hope to improve the human
condition: Emotional
damage in adults is the primary cause of child abuse, and coercive
government is the most powerful tool for inflicting and
perpetuating that emotional damage.
War
is the most obvious example of damaging government behavior – what other
institution kills by the millions, on purpose, repeatedly? What other
institution orphans as many children, maims and cripples as many children
and adults, destroys the homes and livelihoods of so many families, and
otherwise ruins as many lives – as does government in war? The
surprise, for most people, is that governments actually kill even more people by simply murdering their own citizens than they do in
war. From Genghis Khan to Idi Amin, from Stalin to Castro, the
“leaders” of coercive governments have seldom failed to torture,
starve and murder “their” citizens whenever it suited their fancy.
Governments continue this even today in genocides, in gulags and work
camps, by firing squads and hangings, by torturing victims to death, by
creating needless famine, and in a hundred other ways. Allow
me to expand on that with a quote from Death
by Government by R. J. Rummel, professor at the "In
total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170
million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed,
burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive,
drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways
governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and
foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is
as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And
indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not germs." (Page 9) All
that, in addition to millions of
war dead in the 20th Century. Rummel has recently updated his estimate for total government
murder during the 20th Century to 262 million. That
averages to roughly 7,178 murders per day, every
day, for one hundred years. And for every murder, a stunned and
grief-stricken family; a shattered life for sons or daughters; a
traumatized group of friends and neighbors. For every murder, many more
who were “only” maimed or crippled or imprisoned or tortured or
gang-raped (by guards or soldiers or inmates) or otherwise harmed, but not
actually killed. If 262 million were murdered, and many tens of millions
more killed in war, how many more were “only” assaulted in some way or
other? A billion? Two billion? How much emotional damage, to those victims
and to others who knew and cared about them, was done in just the past
century? Rummel
is not the only researcher to have published such material. The Marxist
authors of The
Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard
University Press, 1999) estimate that Communist governments alone murdered
roughly 80 million to 100 million people in the 20th Century.
The book’s Foreword is titled “The Uses of Atrocity” and the
photographs alone are enough to create nightmares. -
6 - The
secular story of Jesus is, among other things, a reminder of the
essentially violent, cruel, and deeply unhealthy nature of coercive power.
It is the story of Power’s hatred and mortal fear of the real
and the healthy. The story of Jesus tells, in clear language, of Power’s
willingness to inflict any atrocity, to murder any number of innocents, to
tolerate or instill any corruption, and to do whatever else is necessary
to retain control and privilege. Power
is threatened by love, by compassion, and by open, healthy access to
feeling – characteristics of young children and of healthy adults –
and it will not tolerate them. Power’s
most devastating and subtle deception has been to corrupt the story of
Jesus and to incorporate it, along with the human desire for a
compassionate world generally, into Power’s own justifications and
machinery. -
7 - In
"The
Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson focuses on the cruelty and
violence directed at Jesus by those in power. Gibson was predictably
attacked for doing so. “All that violence; how distasteful! How
disgusting that a film director would sell a movie about Christ with blood
and torture and murder!” And so on. Yet “Passion” is defined
as “a. The sufferings of
Jesus in the period following the Last Supper and including the
Crucifixion. b. A narrative,
musical setting, or pictorial representation of Jesus's sufferings.” (The
American Heritage Dictionary, third edition). In
fact, the violence, torture, and murder are essential elements of the
Christ story; without these elements, there IS no story. Without these
elements, there would have been no need for Jesus to champion love and
compassion at the cost of his own life. Without these elements, Jesus
would have simply lived a healthy, compassionate life among his family and
friends, dying in bed at a ripe old age, and two thousand years later we
might never have heard of him. The
emotional damage of Jesus’ contemporaries, and their cruelty –
especially as empowered by coercive government – formed
the milieu that Jesus lived in,
and this milieu was the reason for his ministry in the first place.
The New Testament details some of the unhealthy, violent, coercive, and
corrupt aspects of life that Jesus was working to change. Jesus was
willing to die on the cross – he knew that he would,
in all likelihood, be murdered in that exact fashion – because he felt
and believed that every person needed and desired, with all their heart, a
compassionate and healthy world, instead of the corrupt, violent,
hate-drenched world of coercion and pain that every new child of his time
was born into. That reality was clearly so painful to Jesus that even the
threat of his own death could not keep him from starting a ministry aimed
at changing the world for the better. Of
Mel Gibson’s other films, "Braveheart"
in particular parallels "The Passion" in that Braveheart’s
hero, William Wallace, knowingly risks his life (eventually losing it,
after being tortured in public) for the sake of a better world – in
particular, for love and freedom. -
8 - This
linking of love and freedom is
another powerful insight on Gibson’s part. Love and freedom truly are
linked; indeed, like Yin and Yang, love
and freedom are two sides of a
central duality in human life. To champion Love is to oppose coercive
Power, which is to side with Freedom. Love and freedom must be kept in a
reasonable balance, and at high levels, for a healthy society. By
spending $30 million of his own money on a film about Jesus that nearly
everyone thought would fail, and which (to no one’s surprise) brought
Gibson much criticism and even insults, Gibson showed hints of the same
willingness to risk himself for what is right
that made his protagonists interesting and positive figures. Because he
does not live in China
or some other country that murders or tortures or imprisons people for
their religious beliefs, Mr. Gibson was probably never in physical danger
for producing a film about Jesus’ last days, but Gibson was not treated kindly in much of the press, and this was surely
something he knew would happen before starting the project. Furthermore,
despite complaints to the contrary, I do not believe that "The
Passion of the Christ" shortchanges Jesus’ message. The brief scene
in which the doomed Jesus tells his followers to love one another would be
enough, by itself, to convey the essence of Jesus’ teachings. (“So
love one another” reads the English subtitle). Keeping this scene short,
poignant, and without distractions gives it all the more emphasis. Also, the
official trailer for the film**,
which includes that line, also includes a text panel reading: “His
message was love.” The film makes that message clear in a variety of
ways, mostly by the actions and demeanor of Jim Caviezel, the actor who
plays Jesus. Jesus’
message of love was hugely appealing to the masses, and this message,
combined with the large following it attracted, was, as I have already
said, also the reason for Jesus’ perceived threat to the power elite of
his time. Conclusion As
someone with no interest in the supernatural elements of any religion, I
am focused on what I see as the cornerstone of every
true religion: the importance of love and freedom in human life. Because
love implies and requires
freedom, this can be abbreviated to "the importance of love" –
exactly what Gibson highlights, correctly, as being Jesus’ Earthly
message. Cruelty
and tyranny are not what we want
out of life, and they make for harmful, unhealthy environments. The mark
of any true religion is the attempt to minimize cruelty and tyranny by
maximizing love and freedom. Supernatural elements are optional, in my
view: an afterlife, a deity, reincarnation, or an eternal soul, for
examples. I have no quarrel with those who believe in such elements; to
each his own. But the core importance of love
is, in my opinion, far more basic, more in
the present, more real, and more important. It
is no surprise that the most positive and healthy religions oppose both
cruelty and coercive power generally (if often obliquely in regards to
government coercion, given that direct opposition is quickly stamped out
by those in power) while focusing on the importance of love. Jesus'
teachings about the importance of love
will live on, long after the common desire for an afterlife has
disappeared – as I believe it eventually will. Those same teachings
about love will be widely comprehended
if and when the world begins living up to Jesus' teachings about children: Matthew:
18:1
At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the
greatest in the kingdom of heaven? 18:2
And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of
them, 18:3
And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as
little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 18:4
Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is
greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 18:5
And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. 18:6
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it
were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that
he were drowned in the depth of the sea. No
one who spanks, belittles, or otherwise offends
a child is following the
teachings of Jesus. The Old Testament may say otherwise; others quoted in
the New Testament may say otherwise, but Jesus
himself clearly insisted that children
were the examples for adults to follow, not the other way around.
Jesus is direct and passionate in Matthew 18:6 that offending a child was
among the worst of crimes. Given what we know today about the life-long
and severe damage caused by childhood trauma, Jesus' insistence on
loving treatment of children seems absolutely prescient. Certainly his
attitude towards children was emotionally healthy. The
fundamental importance of love;
the understanding that a loving world requires better
treatment of children, and the flat assertion that "the
kingdom of God is within you" are what I see as the most real and
powerful of Jesus' teachings – or of anyone's
teachings. These three teachings are the best short summary of human
wisdom I have ever seen. Jesus
knowingly added a fourth
teaching – of Power's hatred for
all that is loving, decent, and real – by arranging for and allowing
Roman soldiers to arrest, torture, and murder him. By the most vivid and
courageous example possible, Jesus thus taught that the
coercive State is an evil almost beyond imagining. While
reflecting upon Jesus' teachings, life, and sacrifice, please do not
overlook the Earthly, here-and-now lessons that Jesus gave his life to
burn into human memory. Please do "Love one another" – and
follow that most central of Jesus' teachings wherever it leads for you. -
- - - - *
We can only know Jesus’ words as reported by others, of course. Then
(centuries later), these reports were translated into English and other
modern languages – a process with more difficulty and less precision
than one might wish. For the purposes of this essay, I am assuming that
the verses quoted here are authentic and accurately reflect Jesus’
views. Certainly, these verses fit well and coherently with much else that
Jesus is reported to have said – although not with everything, which
suggests (among other possibilities) that some of the material was meant
symbolically or that not all of it is authentic. In any case, we cannot
“replay the videotape” or otherwise directly verify anything Jesus
might have said or done. (This footnote was taken from my Three
Teachings On Compassion, which includes other relevant notes and
further discussion of topics in this column). ** Several trailers were put out by the studio; this is the trailer I saw in theaters before the original version of the film was released. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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