The Passion
I haven’t seen The Passion and probably won’t; I’m not a Christian and The Passion is probably far too graphic for me to watch it as just another movie.
But critics of the movie are missing an important point. As Kevin M. Cherry put it in NRO:
The Passion is supposed to be punishing; the death of Christ on the cross is, for Christians, supposed to leave “a deep, abiding aftertaste.” It is supposed to remind us of the intense physical pain which Christ suffered on our behalf, the price he paid for our sins. It is not simply that Christ became man and died, but that He died in an extraordinarily painful and gruesome fashion. That was the price necessary to redeem God’s prodigal children.…
Without this agony, Jesus would be no more than another prophet, perhaps no more than a provocative moral teacher in the manner of Confucius, Socrates, and Buddha. The death and resurrection of Jesus are the fundamental events of the Christian faith. The moral teachings that came before cannot be understood without reference to the Passion. But more than that, the Passion is the exemplar of what it means to love: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”
That’s certainly a much more important rationale for depicting violence on screen than, say, the plot of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
— PoliPundit