Most of the attention being paid to the message embedded in Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of Christ” is focused on the excruciating suffering Jesus endured while expiating our sinfulness. While that is certainly a valid conclusion to be drawn, it misses the real significance of the Passion (a word that means suffering) – the nature of sin itself.
To be blunt about it, what the knowledge of the unspeakable agony our Lord endured to free us from of our sins really tells us is just how deadly sin is in the eyes of God. So bad that it required the sacrifice of the God Man himself to force open the gates of Heaven shut tight until his death and resurrection. It is a case of the crime fitting the punishment.
So what is sin? Tossing aside all the theological mumbo jumbo that defines it right down to the tiniest infraction, sin is simply a departure from, and defiance of, the Divine will. Period.
What is the Divine will? Well it’s expressed in the Decalogue – the Ten Commandments – that set of rules now viewed as offensive by our secular society and our degenerate courts. Boiled down those commandments, Christ told us, can be summed up as: 1. Love God with your whole heart and your whole mind and your whole spirit and 2. love your neighbor as yourself. Every one of the commandments deals with one or the other. Violate them and you commit sin.
Why is sin so deadly as to require the Son of God to endure such horrendous suffering?
To understand that you have to understand, to the degree our finite minds can grasp it, what it is that God wills. And what God wills is the salvation of every human being – you, me, and everybody else. As St. Augustine put it, God made us for himself. Not to be successful, not to be comfortable, not to gain power, fame or prestige. Just to spend eternity with Him. That’s all He wants, and He requires that we submit ourselves to his Divine guidance in order to reach that heavenly state. In short, only he knows what we need to do to end our lives in his eternal embrace. And he paved the way for us to get there.
Defy God’s will and you defy God’s desire to spend eternity with you. Keep it up, and you commit spiritual suicide. And in God’s eyes that is both an outrage and a tragedy. It is an outrage because when we deliberately defy God’s will we in effect shake our fist in the face of a loving father who wants what he knows far better than we do that which is good for us both in body and spirit.
And it is a tragedy for us because we separate ourselves from the source of all goodness and all wisdom. On this self-chosen path we set out without a road map or a compass or the things we need to sustain us on our journey. We’re on our own,
Sin hurts the sinner in myriad ways. It is the source of injury to others – Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal,’ etc. And it hurts us because it disorders our earthly existence and endangers our immortal souls.
In this pagan age we have either modified sin, or simply abolished it. Crimes against nature, for example, are legalized on the specious grounds that there is no such a thing as natural law. Everything is relative – we make up the rules as we go along. And the rules are designed to allow us to pretty much do whatever we want, even if it ultimately does us either physical or spiritual harm, or both.
We are governed under the law of convenience. If it feels good then by all means do it. To defy our desires – many now defined as “needs” – is to do psychological harm to ourselves. We abandon any responsibilities for guiding our offspring, for showing them what is good and evil, by insisting that there really is no such thing as evil, and good is whatever you define it to be in accordance with your desires and convenience.
All of this behavior is self-destructive and God abhors self-destruction by his children just as any loving father would abhor it when he saw his loved ones putting ropes around their necks.
Sin is a rope around our spiritual necks. And it required that God send his beloved son to suffer as Mel Gibson showed us so graphically, to get that rope off our necks. Nothing else could have sufficed. Sin is that terrible.
That’s the real message the Passion has for us. Are we listening? God hopes we are.