Scene from The Passion of the Christ (2004)
The betrayal in Gethsemane stands
once for all time, the treachery of humanity against a God that devised us.
Even of a sense that we may love God, we resist God and even repel God at
times. Judas Iscariot lives in each of us; that fearful, greedy, self-obliging
spirit.
The Passion of the Christ (2004) was released on February 25, 2004. I know because I was
there. It was a poignant time in my life when God had my fullest attention and
obedience. I was both broken and on fire.
It was a Wednesday. The preceding
Monday (the 23rd) had seen me rocked to within an inch of my life — five months
to the day of my very first cataclysmic rock bottom experience — and this event
five months later was worse than anything else I’d experienced. I was at work
in an industrial port location, a leader around many wild men, beside myself in
a panic attack that lasted an hour or more, and on a helpline desperate for aid.
Nothing could assuage the grief I experienced that day. There had been some
conflict, and I had never felt more alone and vulnerable, ever. I took the
opportunity to see the operations manager who was an empathic friend, and he
ordered me to go home; a non-Christian, he even offered to pray for me to my
God! The drive home was twenty minutes of mental Armageddon. I devised a
plan, if you know what I mean. It was a silly plan that would never have worked,
but I was frantic for escape. When I arrived home, I paced through the place in
that living hell, just not able to settle, tormented within. That place
represented death, and death threatened to envelope me.
I was in what felt like Gethsemane,
though without the burden of all eternity’s humanity crushing me.
This experience was the perfect taster
for the days soon to come — to tearfully witness The Passion seven times over a fourteen-day timeframe. I sobbed
throughout each showing, unashamed for what others thought. It really didn’t bother
me.
Jesus meant so much.
He suffered, and was scourged and mocked,
and He bled, and His body was torn apart, and He DIED, for me!
He suffered, and was scourged and mocked,
and He bled, and His body was torn apart, and He DIED, for me!
They brutalised Him.
Only in the unconscionable
is there the witness of a compassion that bleeds love.
is there the witness of a compassion that bleeds love.
What God showed me about Jesus’
passion has stayed with me. It was only as I had been rejected that I came to
understand how beautiful it was that Jesus was rejected. It was only from that
situation — utterly alone but for five humans (my parents and my daughters) who
were inextricably invested in me — that I came to understand how His love equalled
the cross. A sacrifice I too could live. Feeling alone, betrayed, abandoned
helped me relate with a Saviour who Himself had died alone, betrayed,
abandoned.
Jesus’ passion broke Him, and in
this the Father was well pleased, for God’s compassion is resplendent for all
eternity in the passion of the Christ.
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