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Warrior's Spirit
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SOUNDING
THE TRUMPET: THE PROPHETIC VOICE OF MEL GIBSON By Garry J. Moes Occasionally, in scattered seasons of human history, things unexpected and groundbreaking arrive with the potential for changing everything. Great ideas. Great innovations. Great art. Great warnings. These come often in times of great threat to the moral progress of human history. They are the prophetic soundings that produce the great awakenings, opening windows of divine mercy and proferred opportunity to turn again and be redeemed. They usually come in unexpected places and by unanticipated means — means born from the spirits of unlikely men touched creatively by the hand of God. We may be witnessing such a phenomenon in the utterly remarkable art and passion of one Mel Gibson, a suffering servant of the Man of Sorrows “who was wounded for our transgressions and by whose stripes we are healed.” A movie actor once named the “sexiest man alive,” a cinema director whose bold successes have brought him to the top of his “game,” Gibson is also a once-tortured private man who, like the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, found no peace in anything under the sun, including his own success and fame. By his own account, his emptiness was either going to become complete through suicide or it was going to be filled by something Immense from Beyond himself and this finite world. By God's grace, he testifies, he found his peace and fulfillment in the Word made flesh, revealed in the Word written. And there, he found the Christ — the Messiah of the Atonement. “My wounds were healed by His wounds,” he has told numerous interviewers. “I had to tell the story of those wounds.” The telling of that story burst with all possible ferocity onto the cinema screens of the world on Ash Wednesday 2004 in Gibson's astonishing film The Passion of the Christ, a self-consciously and singularly focused experience of the violent wounds that redeemed a violent race mortally wounded by its own violent rebellion against Heaven's Prince of Peace. The Passion of the Christ is not entertainment, though it employs a medium used almost exclusively, until now, for that purpose. It is art, but something beyond art — living art, reflective of the living two-edged sword we call the Scriptures . . . art that demands a response in the way we live after we have been exposed to it. Art that leaves one without excuse if one responds inappropriately.
This film, depicting perhaps like never before in our civilization the agonizing cost of human redemption, cannot be “reviewed” in any traditional journalistic sense. It can only be meditated upon, then discussed — in deeper tones, as one discusses the meaning of other deep things. It must be internalized and personalized, perhaps because it is the personalized vision and interpretation of one artistically skilled, creative man burdened by God to tell his own story through the suffering of his Redeemer. Incredibly much — the negative portion of which is mostly nonsense — has been said about this controversial film. It will be debated for a long time, it is hoped. It has been and will be analyzed from platforms of political ideology, racism, moviemaking, secular moralism, and theology. Arrows launched from each of those platforms have and will continue to mostly miss their mark. The nearly unprecedented, vituperous and personal attacks of Gibson's critics arise mostly, however, from none of these platforms, but from the history-long thread of godless men's antipathy toward their repudiated Creator, Lord and Judge. As Gibson has said, “Their quarrel isn't with me; it's with the Gospels.” It is, as one of the central Latin-language themes of the film emphasizes, against Veritas — the Truth. As a proclamation of that Truth, The Passion of the Christ is a prophetic voice to a lost generation which has all but snuffed out its connection to the Truth. Our present headlong plunge into the abyss is accelerating geometrically day by day. This film may be another of history's many calls from a long-suffering God to turn again to Him and be saved from the wrath to come. Gibson testifies that he was moved throughout its production by the Holy Ghost. If so, it can be — must be — concluded that it is a move of God, who never does anything without eternal purpose. Before each historical episode of divine judgment upon an evil society or perverse culture, God has patiently and graciously raised up watchmen to sound the trumpet of warning. Gibson has not indicated anywhere that he sees this work in such a light, but its resounding message of atonement may well serve that purpose anyway. One cannot view the Savior's agony as depicted in this film without releasing abject shame for one's causative role in that agony. It is not without reason that virtually every viewer is reduced to tears and stunned silence and that many have found it necessary to retreat into solitude and meditation before God after leaving the multiplex or when the rolling credits fade to black. Further random observations:
Nineteenth-century hymn writer William Rees perhaps best summarized the heart of this film's message when he wrote: Here is love, vast as
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