I found this film to be extremely meaningful and soul provoking but not in the sense that it pushed me to a protest line to lament the creation of such an abomination. A film like this forces a confrontation between the warring sides of ourselves and gives us room to meditate upon the task from a perspective we may not have considered before. It confronts us everyday and many times gets put on the back burner while we go on with the rest of our lives. The challenge to be everything that God has and wants for me is always a hard one.
I see the struggle to defeat the passions of the body for the sake of the spirit, to lay down my life for others. By allowing the audience to connect so completely with the character of Jesus it highlights the disconnect that there is between who I am as a human and what my expectations of holiness or God are. Perhaps that is the real achievement of the film. I saw myself in his want to run away and live in seclusion. I saw myself in his relationship with Mary Magdalene. Seeing Christ acting so human makes it easy to put yourself in that place and wonder what we would do if it was our task to die for the world. Honestly, if not for the nudity, I would recommend this movie to almost any Christian. Neither for these approaches is where I am personally at but seeing this film definitely had me considering what some of my basic assumptions about Christ and his experience as a human must have been like. Scorsese goes the other way, delving so deep into Christ’s humanity that the Deity of Jesus seems to be the background. It diminishes his humanity and in many ways makes him unrelatable to us. Many Christians tend to look at the hypostatic union (Christ is fully God and fully Human) and sort of shorthand it to Christ is human in that he has a body but in every other way he is God.
One of the reasons that Scorsese is so good at expounding faith concepts is that he is genuinely interest in Christ’s humanity.
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