As a child, I was told in Sunday school about what crucifixion is like. You do not die from the nails in your hands. You die from suffocation. You cannot hold your head up.
I was very impressionable (or, I prefer to think I was just imaginative, trying to empathize my way into other people’s shoes) – but that image of Jesus suffocating haunted me. Even more so than imagining your head being cut into with a crown of thorns, or the nails in your hands and feet. It was the suffocation that terrified me. I lay in bed agonizing over it. I kept trying to imagine what it was like to have your body dragging your head down … your little spindly neck trying to hold your head up …
And so, Mr. Gibson, I do not feel that I suffer from a “lack of reality” in terms of my (albeit cursory) understanding of what Jesus went through.
I would sit in church, and stare up at the placid statue of Jesus, imagining his head being dragged down.
This was before they replaced the statue with a post-modern rendition of the crucifixion, so post-modern that Jesus doesn’t appear in it at all! It’s now a shiny wooden sleek cross, and way up at the top, wrapped around it … is a thin silver crown … but we all think it looks like a basketball hoop.
But when I was a kid, Jesus was on the cross, his body bent to one side, but his face was placid, serene. It was not one of your blood-and-guts Catholic churches. We were a University campus congregation and so a bit more progressive. We had youth masses. Daisies were sometimes handed out. There was a little hippie-ish band, who played guitars, and the drums. And sang: “A—a–amen…A—a—men….A-men, A-men, A-men…” Not exactly from the Catholic hymn book.
In the middle of the hippie-dippy mass, I would stare at Jesus’ placid face, and literally feel, in sympathy, as though my head were being weighed down.
I don’t know why that image or vision took such a grip on my imagination, but it did.
I do feel I need to see Passion (I am going tonight) because it’s an important event. It’s an important event, and I want to see it for myself so I can decide for myself.
