The Passion of the Christ – Definitive Edition

Theologian Commentary with Director Mel Gibson (MG), Father William J. Fulco (WF), Gerry Matatics (GM), and Father John Bartunek (JB)

Note from Transcriptionist: I cannot always tell who is speaking. If I cannot identify the voice, I will mark it AS (another speaker) to indicate a change of speaker.

MG: Here we are again. Another aspect. This time it is a theological look at the film. And this is just a jumping off spot because in the time allotted— two hours of the images and sounds about to present themselves in front of you, it is—two hours is inadequate to express the fullness of what would need to be expressed in this story.

Here to help me are three very skilled theologians. Father William Fulco, who is a biblical scholar and professor of antiquity at Loyola Marimount. He also single-handedly translated my script into Latin and Aramaic.

WF: Hi there.

MG: Father John Bartunek, a theologian, scholar and priest of note.

JB: And I am a member of the Legions of Christ. And I wrote Inside the Passion together with Mel, and an inside look at the spiritual and artistic background of the film.

MG: And Gerald Matatics has some very interesting observations theologically to impart.

GM: Hi.

MG: So, without further ado I guess we’ll just, hey, start at the start and see what happens.

JB: That full moon is very interesting because originally the effect was a half moon. And you notice I had to switch it.

AS: That’s right. That’s right. I had forgotten that.

JB: And we knew of course that actually, historically it was a full moon, right? The Passover was marked by the first full moon in spring. So there really was a full moon when our Lord was there. And even here, this is area man. You are seeing Jesus. You are seeing from behind. You know, He is struggling. He is kind of—I thought that was very important for the power message of the film.

AS: Jim Caviezel makes extraordinary use of his hands. You’ll notice there his hand was curving. And in the various crucifixion scenes his hands almost tell a story independently of his voice.

JB: We know historically the most expressive parts of the body are the hand and the face. And they really make use of them here.

JA: I love this scene because they are His right hand men, His apostles, and they are asleep when He needs them. And it shows how, again, how weak we are as human beings. Peter, James and John, the three who accompanied Him most closely.

AS: It was Peter and John, their variations of emotional reactions all throughout the narration of the film, they are different from one another. You’ve got the full spectrum of human reactions to the question of who do you say that I am?

JB: That is an important theme. It is almost as if you can, you can summarize the film as seeing a series of personal encounters with Jesus Christ.

AS: Throughout Jesus constantly has that, with every key player, an eye contact. As if to say, “Who do you say that I am?” And you see with each one of these people some sort of reaction.

JB: Yeah. Although sometimes as he is trying to draw them in. He is trying to invite them to believe in him, to trust in him.

AS: To my mind, though, a striking one that we will see later on is when he has eye contact with Barabas. The personality just changing instantly.

AS: I thought this was interesting. Peter looks up at the moon and then there is a transitional shot of the moon and then it cuts to Caiaphus and there is this parallel in Scripture between Caphus [?] and Caiaphus. And he is almost the replacement.

AS: It is the new covenant.

MG: They both mean rock, right?

AS: Yeah, they both come from the same root.

AS: Here Caiaphus is using covenantal language to talk about the agreement between me and you, he says. And yet they don’t want to—at the same time they don’t want to directly hand off the coins.

JB: One of the things that strikes me about the way that Judas is portrayed in the film—‘cause you know we don’t know too much about him from the Bible. But in the film he is portrayed as someone who can really—in a strange way you can kind of identify with. He is not purely evil. Even now he seems kind of anxious. He is a torn person.

AS: Much more human. In some of the recent portrayals of Judas in films, he is the great hero and Jesus is somewhat in the background. Judas is the one that really knows what’s going on in society. And Jesus becomes marginal.

AS: …how those silver coins kind of glint. It is not—kind of so cold, you know. See how he is falling into temptation and what he can get out of it.

AS: The garden where this is happening, of course, Gethsemane means “oil press.” The oil is from the olive trees that grow there. And the olive tree is a symbol of Israel in the Scriptures, both in the Old and in the New. And our Lord is sort of the quintessential Israelite here. So he is going into the olive press, you might say. He is being squeezed. He is being crushed so that the oil, which of course is a symbol of the Third Person of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, can come forth from the suffering of Christ. The gift of the Spirit can come and bring the gift of new life.

AS: Something that hasn’t been noticed by some of the commentators is that Jesus is praying the psalms here in Hebrew. They are all traditional prayers from the Hebrew tradition.

JB: They call the Psalms the fifth Gospel. Mainly because the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tells us what happened. But they don’t tell us a whole lot about what is going on inside of Christ, in His heart during His life, especially during His passion. Whereas the Psalms, traditionally, are a clue. They unlock his heart. So it was a brilliant idea to have him praying, and especially praying in Hebrew.

AS: The Psalms echo throughout the film.

AS: They deliberately choose vocabulary that is from the Psalms.

AS: That was a brilliant decision.

AS: Because it sheds light.

AS: It gives continuity to the whole history of salvation, I think.

JB: And the continuity comes in here in the garden of Gethsemane which is the reversal of the big mistake that happened in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve fell into temptation. There is the devil. When the devil engaged in conversation and they engaged and they fell.

AS: Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:4 that the devil can appear as an angel of light. In other words, he is seeming to be the voice of reason. And you know, “You don’t really want to do this. Is this really necessary?” That is the temptation here. And of course the same thing back in the garden as you mentioned in Genesis 3, the devil saying to Adam and Eve, you know, “You don’t have to deprive yourself of anything. You can be like God. You can have wisdom. You can have immortality.” In other words, the path to glory doesn’t have to go by way of suffering. And that is where our Lord, as the new Adam—which Paul explicitly calls him in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. He is having to succeed where the first Adam failed the test. And they are both in a garden, as you say, to show the parallel between the two.

AS: This is interesting that just as he is making this complete abandonment of himself to the Father—“Let your will be done”—there is a kind of dark night of the soul, the dark clouds obscure the moon.

MG: Yeah. That is his answer. Yeah.

JB: And he feels abandoned. You can identify with him because there are moment in life where we feel like that. We ask for help and we don’t see God’s presence. And he is going through it. He has been there.

AS: That look is—Ma nehbok [?] Who is your father?

AS: You wonder if this—I always have too, at this figure of how much does the satanic figure know?

AS: The satanic figure also does not know quite who Jesus is.

AS: He doesn’t understand the complete plan.

AS: No, he is threatened by it. Tries to overcome it but doesn’t really understand.

AS: And of course that maggot that you see crawl out of the nostril is not only a preparation for what you are going to see now, the larger serpentine form, the snake crawling out from beneath the devil’s robes, but the maggot shows up later on, of course, when we get to the scene of Judas’ suicide.

AS: Note the motion of the snake because later on it is going to be very significant when we see Mary Magdalene’s motion toward Jesus. So note the snake creeping. It is going to end up being the inverse picture.

JB: The snake of course is another kind representation of evil in the Bible. Trying to penetrate Jesus’ world. Trying to get into him. Just like the devil’s trying to get into his heart and tempt him. And again Jesus, it is hard for him but he resists.

AS: Genesis 3:15 has the words of God to the serpent. The church fathers call the proto evangelian, the first announcement of the gospel, the first prophecy of the redemption where he says, “I am going to put enmity or hostility, a state of warfare, between you—the serpent, the devil ultimately—and the woman. And between her seed and her seed.”

MG: You lay in wait for the heel.

AS: And again, there is a little debate in biblical studies about whether she will crush or he will crush. But in a sense they work together. That is the thing that is the point. Jesus and Mary are working as the new Adam and the new Eve to bring about the defeat of the devil. And so when the serpent is crushed there, you are giving the audience a visual clue—this is the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15, that redemption that was predicted there is now set in motion.

MG: I think it also points out that the Old Testament, all of the Old Testament is completely and utterly fulfilled by the New. And that all that went before it leads up to this.

AS: This question that Jesus asks in this context, “Who are you looking for?” of course becomes a question that is asked to the viewer of the film, to the reader of the Gospel. “Who do you say that I am? Who are you seeking?”

AS: There are, throughout the Gospel, these sort of invitational moments where you are called to make a commitment one way or the other. Christ seems to have left very few people on the fence.

JB: The apostles are looking at him with hate, with anger. Look at Peter. “What are you doing? You are going to betray our master.”

AS: And of course the great irony of it that Peter ends up betraying the master as well.

JB: James. The guards wondering how it is going to come out. But look at how Jesus isn’t looking angry. Isn’t that the contrast to the way he is looking at Judas?

AS: And here is the beginning of the eye contact with Jesus and everyone else.

JB: Yeah, the first one. Right. And it is a kiss that betrays Jesus. The irony of it. He is not angry. He is not resentful. He is sad. Is the first glimpse of Christ’s mercy.

JB: And this is an interesting detail. You know, this scene during the fight. They actually all end up on the ground. During the fight. Which is, the Bible says, when they came to ask who he is was, he said, “I am he.”

AS: They were thrown back.

JB: But that wasn’t on purpose. It just kind of happened the way they choreographed it. It wasn’t—And Jesus so calm in the midst of all this chaos and this violence.

AS: Now I have always found this incident in the Gospels—I mean, I have been teaching Scriptures for over a quarter of a century—endlessly fascinating. And I am sure we still haven’t plumbed the depth of this yet, that this, the high priest’s serpent, we are told in the Gospel that is who that man was. We just know him as Malchius here—has his ear cut off by Peter. In other words, the confrontation between our Lord and Caiaphus is kind of represented by their deputies, you might say. Peter as Christ’s representative or deputy and then this man as the high priest’s servant. The high priest had to have, of course, he was consecrated in the Old Testament, his ear had to be consecrated with blood. And if somebody was defective in that, they could not function as a priest in the temple if they had any defect of their ears or their thumbs or their big toes. And so our Lord is, in a sense, giving a little reprieve here. Because in other words, this man’s losing of his ear there is—the church fathers saw a kind of symbolic disqualification of the high priest here. But the Lord puts it back out of compassion for the man as well. But he is giving the old covenant a little extra lease on life, a grace period, you might say, to see if they will still have a chance to recognize him as their messiah and embrace him.

MG: Well, that is something I didn’t know.

AS: I didn’t want to push too much the discontinuity and yet continuity of between the Old and the New Testament, but I think this ambiguity is very clear in the whole entire passion narrative.

AS: Oh sure. It’s both. It is both continuous and discontinuous. Sure.

AS: No, I totally agree. I mean, Jesus our Lord said, “Don’t think I have come to destroy the law or the prophets. I haven’t come to destroy them but to fulfill them.” That was the opening statement in His Matthew 5:17-18 of the Sermon on the Mount. But the fulfillment, in other words, takes it to a higher level. And you have to be taken to that higher level. To remain at the lower level is to fail to fulfill the deepest aspirations of the old covenant. And to truly realize it and embrace it.

AS: This is great. The moment that our Lord is struck, Mary sits up. You know, is just awakened from a sound sleep, showing again this kind of bond between them.

MG: I specifically wanted the experience of the passion to be shared, as it would be by any mother. But this is more than a mother.

AS: This is a wonderful bit of continuity also with “Why is this night different from any other night?” tying together the paschal mystery with the seder service.

AS: It is a kind of inversion because in the seder service the younger child asks the oldest child. And here you have—the Gospel doesn’t tell us the relative ages—but here Mary Magdalene is definitely younger than Mary the mother of Jesus. And they reverse the dialogue here to show again there is kind of an inversion with the new covenant. It takes the old and fills the page, you might say.

MG: That was Maya’s idea, in fact. And that was like—that’s a great idea. Because, you know, as I say, the Old Te4stament and the New Testament is fulfilled by the New Testament.

AS: And in fact those words, “Why is this night different from any other?” are referring back to the first Passover, of course has a double entendre. They refer to why is this night different because here Christ our Passover Lamb is being sacrificed for us. That’s what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5:8. And we see the fulfillment of the first Passover unfolding before our very eyes here.

AS: It is also very much the theology of the Book of Deuteronomy, which is carried into the New Testament, is that salvation history is not repeated or doesn’t go through phases. It is constantly pulled forward. So that when you have anim nesis [?] for example in the Christian liturgy, it is not repeating something of the past, it is pulling the Pascal event to operate now in the present time. So it is always this night, this night. It is not your children who will see or your parents who did see; it is we who do see right now. A new experience.

AS: So time is like a spiral. It is not like the Greeks thought where it is an endless cycle going around and around like a merri-go-round or a ferris wheel. It is always going forward. It is recurring cycles, but it is always taking you forward in time.

AS: So anim nesis, as we talk about in the liturgy is not just remembering the past, it is making the past effective for us. Just as now, it is seeing the passion is not as a past event, it is an ongoing event of passion and resurrection.

JB: See in the back, the guards, the temple guards are gathering the witnesses for the trial.

AS: Judas can never really escape the significance, the consequences of what he has done.

MG: He is already guilty. And he already almost wants to—he’s sorry. But he doesn’t, as Peter does later on, ask forgiveness for the betrayal.

AS: Or he doesn’t make the chance for himself.

JB: Does it strike you strange that Judas is watching this unfold?

AS: It is strange. What is so marvelous is his changing facial expressions as the torment that is going through him is trying to undo something that he knows he can’t undo at that stage. Once again the die is cast—

AS: Well in fact the Gospels say Satan had entered his heart by this point. John tells us that.

JB: Exactly. Cause now he is trying to undo it kind of on his own efforts. And what he really needed to do was just humbly admit his fault to Christ.

AS: To give the money back is trivial compared to—

JB: It’s not the point.

MG: These trials were at night. Many people have said, “No, they wouldn’t have been at night. It was against the law.” Well yeah, it was against the law and it was a deliberate attempt to be furtive and kangaroo court stuff. And there were actually two trials. The first one at the house of Annas. And then he was brought to the courtyard of Caiaphus. And for the sake of brevity, you know, I have kind of combined the both trials into one.

AS: I have never understood that argument that “Oh the New Testament isn’t telling the truth here or this movie is because there was a law against that happening at night.” Well, the reality of a fallen world is people do break laws! That is what this movie is all about.

AS: Well, and it is certainly reflected in the argument amongst the elders themselves is that this is a kangaroo court.

AS: And the Gospels themselves indicate too that, they hint at the fact that Nicodemus perhaps and Joseph of Arimathea, you know, were not totally on board with what was going on. They weren’t maybe courageous enough to totally stand with Christ. But they certainly, they were closet Christians at least at this point.

AS: And of course it is heavily symbolic because, I mean, “and it was night” meaning not just a physical night but it is a moral night. An inversion of the way things should be.

AS: Especially because in John’s Gospel where he makes that statement, when Judas went out and it was night—John’s Gospel is all about the theme of light. Christ saying, “I am the light of the world.” And you see that in the prologue. You see it in John’s Gospel that you hear at the end of every traditional Latin mass over and over again.

AS: And very long in John’s first letter.

AS:  I guess this is the first flashback of the film coming up here. And I thought these were great because one of the silliest, again, objections I have heard to the film is that it doesn’t give you the context of our Lord’s life. But I think you do that with these flashbacks. In other words, you don’t have to start the movie with his baptism or with his earthly ministry. You can start it with—This movie is called “The Passion.”

AS: After all, one of the most significant things about the incarnation is that we are able to identify our lives with Jesus’ life so that our own suffering is now changed because of the passion and resurrection of Jesus. And if we can’t identify with somebody it makes it very difficult spiritually to fathom the richness of that. And it seems to me a flashback like this, is to see the humanity of the incarnation as extremely important on the level of spirituality.

MG: Oh absolutely. And I, for a very specific reason this is here because you get to see something of their humanness, their relationship just in normal times. And you get to know them a little bit with this scene that is, you know, just kind of hanging out, working, a couple of jokes. As they would have had a sense of humor and enjoyed one another. And it is conceivable that this kind of thing did happen.

AS: Many people have pointed out that this very much of a woman’s movie. What it does for the role of women. Traditionally in eastern thought and certainly in the Hebrew Bible, the women are the ones who proclaim the meaning of events. And that is very strong in this film. The women are consistently there to interpret for the audience.

MG: Oh yeah. It’s the women that are the really compassionate ones here. As they are in life, you know.

AS: Yes. And of course of all the movies about Jesus, this is the most Marian, the one that most connects Mary to Jesus. And so that femininity is there as a filter that the whole movie is shot through.

AS: And that takes you back to Genesis 3:15 too. Because God said, “I am going to put enmity between you and the woman.” In other words, all of human history is being proclaimed by God in Genesis 3, as at some transcendent level, this conflict between Satan and the one who would be called to be the mother of God. And that sort of hostility between them or that parallel between them, that opposition between them is played out very visually in some scenes coming up.

AS: Quite a few spokespeople for the various Christian denominations commented that although they had never appreciated the role of Mary in redemption, that this film caused them to take a brand new look at it. And to develop a new appreciation for Mary that they didn’t have before.

GM: And I think it is one of the most important achievements of this movie. And I say that as someone who was a Protestant minister, who converted to Catholicism later.

AS: This is an interesting parallel. Earlier too, with how Mary awakes out of sleep and sits up suddenly. So again this connects, as father was saying, the women of the movie, now Claudia, again a closet Christian, Pontius Pilate’s wife, sits up as well. She’s been having this nightmare that the Scriptures tells us was troubling her. And she is going to tell her husband not to have anything to do with the condemnation of this man. She sits up. It kind of reminds you of Mary’s sitting up earlier. So it thematically links them. And of course you are going to have an actual face to face encounter later on.

AS: I find it puzzling that some critics of the film objected to the fact that Claudia is very sympathetic in this film. And yet there is nothing in the New Testament that suggests that she was otherwise. What portrayal she does have in the New Testament, which is rather small, does make her rather, as a matter of fact, quite positive in her attitude.

MG: It’s in Matthew isn’t it? Or is it John?

AS: It is in Matthew.

AS: It is interesting we are all silent here because we are, I am sure, all wanting to talk about the historicity of this. And yet this is such a sensitive aspect of the movie for so many people. It almost kind of muzzles us.

AS: Some have objected to the violence. You know, Jesus ends up—they slap him. They spit in his face. This is right out of the Gospels.

AS: Right. It is right out of the Gospels. Exactly.

AS: It is no invention of the dramatic imagination.

AS: Just the whole trial itself and the injustice of it. And the hostility here. This is, again, this has been so politicized and made such a very sensitive issue. We have to be sensitive and yet you can’t—

AS: Well, you can’t rewrite history.

MG: Because it is history.

JB: So many times during the life of Jesus, when he was challenged by Pharisees and by the Sadducees, and even when they tried to apprehend him, he always walked away. But here, finally now, he doesn’t walk away. He lets himself be mishandled here, be—

AS: It is so clear that every time he is struck and the tremendous violence that happens, he is still in charge.

AS: Exactly.

AS: Always in charge no matter what.

JB: Even in his looks. He is not angry. He is not revengeful. He still is composed and in charge of the situation.

AS: This scene is emphasized by the use of language. Is that very shortly Pilate will address him in Aramaic, since he is a local. And we have Jesus answering him in Latin to indicate that “I know your language.”

JB: And he wanted to make sure that Pilate understood him. It was another moment for Pilate.

AS: Exactly. But it throws Pilate off completely. So again Jesus, being in character, is always in charge.

AS: This is interesting the way that Judas is rubbing his mouth here on the stone. That is the first hint I got that the fact that he betrayed Christ with a kiss is a problem that he is—he is not going to deal with in the proper way, the way that Peter does later on as we will see with his denial of Christ.

AS: Two of the Sanhedrin protest the proceedings, and say, “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

MG: Which is from Ann Emmerich.

AS: And the Gospels themselves indicate too. They hint at the fact that Nicodemus, perhaps, and Joseph of Arimathea, you know, were not totally on board with what was going on.

AS: If one discusses how historical is this film, you have to be aware that the film has its own ways of presenting history and the meaning of history.

AS: Absolutely. And they are not the same as the written word. This is a work of art. It is a work of art. It is a means of communication, communicating. With that in mind, this is remarkably faithful to written records as well.

AS: Some of the things that, for example, using the satanic figure throughout or other forms of evil, the Gospels speak of this brooding sense of evil in the background. You know, it was night. How do you convey that sense in the film? You have to use a different type of symbol that is visual and sort of sense it. Again, it is taking something historical and making it palpable in a film sort of idiom.

AS: This is the question of all questions. And it was what—everything stills. Everything is quiet and the camera moves in for his answer. Because your answer to this question is the fundamental answer we give in our lives.

AS: And of course “I am” is a divine claim in John’s Gospel.

AS: Going back to the scene in Exodus 3:14 when God appears to Moses in the burning bush and says, “I am who I am.”

AS: This tearing which Caiaphus feels he is obliged to do because he heard blasphemy, tearing of his garments, I think also foreshadows how the veil in the temple is torn in two at the end.

MG: Indeed. It is the same design. The veil, and he wears a smaller version of that so he rents it on himself and then of course, later on the veil of the temple is rent signifying the end of the old covenant.

AS: The Old Testament makes much of the fact that the high priest, by his vestments and so forth, is kind of a microcosm, a miniature model of the temple itself and its furnishings and its fabrics and so forth.

AS: In Exodus 3 also, you the “I am who I am” but then once that simple answer is simply, “I am.” “I am.”

AS: And as you were saying, father, in John’s Gospel when our Lord identifies himself and he says, “I am” he, in the garden—This movie didn’t show that but they kind of fall back to the ground because it was a revelation of his divinity that has some sort of impact on them.

MG: This is of course Peter’s triple denial.

AS: It is interesting that at Caesarea Philippi, recorded in Matthew 16, when Peter identifies Jesus as the Christ, he says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” that word xohoostas in Greek or Meshiach, Messiah in Hebrew, meaning the Anointed One, really is, he is giving him a three-fold office at the same time. Because there were three officers anointed in the old covenant. There were prophets, priests, kings. All three of them anointed. And then Jesus turns to Peter and the ensuing words in Matthew 16:17-19. And in effect by the next three verses gives him a triple office. That he has a prophetic role to carry out in the church as the supreme teacher. He has a priestly role. He is going to be leading the worship and the sacraments. And he has a kingly role. He gets the key to the kingdom of heaven. So he has a three-fold office and he kind of, in a sense, disqualifies himself three times. And that is why our Lord, when he meets him in John 21, has to reinstate him in his office three times.

MG: Yes. You know, feed my sheep, feed my sheep. Yeah.

AS: This is astoundingly poignant. I think it is so easy to identify with Peter in this role of those of us who love and yet are weak and fail.

AS: We all fail to speak up at times when cowardice takes over.

AS: I remember my father, he as in his 80s at the time, came to visit me when I was teaching in Jerusalem. We went up to the Sea of Galilee. And my father felt very much like Peter, that he had betrayed—I don’t know why he felt that so strongly in his life. But the proclamation of love after the first resurrection narratives. “Peter do you love Me?” My father just sat there and cried and cried. So this whole role of Peter in this film is very special to me too.

MG: This moment here, I think is great that he runs smack into Mary because it is a precursor to the forgiveness for the wrong.

AS: It is the difference between Peter and Judas. Because he does something with his sorrow. He kneels, he confesses it.

AS: He is confessing it to Mary and then he is saying, “No, I am not worthy.” Nunsumdenus [?]. I am not worthy to be touched by you.

AS: The role of women in this film is just extraordinary. It is important. It was very important. And especially it is emphasized in John’s Gospel so much. The role of Mary Magdalene, of Mary. The role in salvation history.

AS: Here again, incredible contrast between Judas’s reaction and Peter’s. Peter, on his knees saying, “I am not worthy. I am a sinner. I can’t believe what I did.” And Judas demanding, with his powers, his own will, to undo what he has done.

AS: And as if taking back the silver would change the momentum.

AS: No, not at all. He is missing the boat. He is not able to take responsibility for his sin, in a sense, to humbly ask for forgiveness. He is trying to fix the situation by his own efforts. Which you can’t do! We need God’s forgiveness. And you see the despair.

AS: Here he is wiping his lips again, trying to remove the stain of his sin of betraying him with a kiss, on the bag and throwing the bag back.

AS: Here you see his lips getting worse.

AS: I think it is important to emphasize in this scene that you have to ask the question: what is going on in Judas’ mind? Or is this external reality? Some have objected saying that, “What are you doing? Are you demonizing little kids?”

MG: No. No, of course not. I mean, it was an accusation of like, “You made these children evil.” But it is not that. It is just that evil took the form of those children to deceive. Which is a totally different thing.

AS: But this is Judas trying to deal with his internal demons. He is projecting this, you are saying, on the children.

AS: Yes, exactly.

AS: He is projecting evil on the most innocent of things, namely children.

MG: And several times in the film I have portrayed evil in wholesome forms, like kids who are innocent, or the image of a mother and child that is wholesome and innocent, or that woman in the beginning in the cape, could be an angel. But you know, you lift the veil slightly and there is something wrong. That is the nature of evil. It pretends to be something else. And the devil has been called the great ape of God. And cannot be original but can emulate.

AS: And yet the irony is that even though Judas is projecting his own inner demons, as father says, upon these children. He is seeing them as demonic when they are objectively not. At the same time, the flip side of that is that our Lord said in one of the passages in the Gospels that he compared this generation that heard him to a man who had been exorcised, had the demon cast out of it. And then it comes back with seven demons. And so the final state of that man is worse than the first.

AS: This is top three scenes for me, this moment where Mary is—Jesus is already in prison and everything. Mary is looking for him and she can sense where he is.

AS: That bonding we were talking about earlier between Mary and Jesus, that she is able to go into the courtyard of Caiaphus and sense his presence there in the dungeon below her and lean down. And she not only knows he is down there, but he looks up. He is aware that she is up there.

AS: The connection between the two is the key to the dynamics of the film.

JB: And yet it is real, when you love someone, especially that bond between mother and son, mother and child. There is a real connection. You know when something is wrong with them.

AS: Judas is being pursued by his—And I think by his conscience.

AS: This is what is going on in his tortured mind.

MG: Overseeing the ceremony is old friend, the angel of light. He doesn’t get a break.

AS: Now his lips are really burnt. In the vision of Isaiah, who is a priest of the old covenant and the first greatest prophet in the order of prophetic books, there is a scene in Isaiah 6 where he sees God in his glory and he says, “Woe is me. I am a man of unclean lips living in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” He is perhaps referring to the fact that he has taken God’s name in vain and now he is seeing this glorious being whose name he has taken in vain. And the angel brings a coal and touches his lips and says, “I have taken away your pain.” So there you have something burning but it heals him. It heals him of his blasphemy. And here Judas is kind of contrasted with that because his lips are becoming ever more blistered because he has kissed Christ, who is again the same God that reveals himself to Isaiah and yet his divinity has been masked.

AS: Here is what I was talking about later on. The one maggot you see coming out of the nostril of Satan in the garden, now is replicated a thousand fold and in this rotting carcass. And this is the Valley of Hittim [?], I guess which our Lord uses as a symbol of hell. He says this is where the people would take their carcasses and dump them and incinerate the trash. And so our Lord talks about it as the place literally where the fires never quench and the worm never dies. And here you see the death of this donkey driving him to despair. He takes the actual halter off of it. I think the Dewey Reeves [?] translation of Matthew’s account says that the rope he took—the other translations don’t catch this—was a halter that Judas used.

MG: He hung himself with a halter, yeah.

AS: We also know from Isaiah that there were child sacrifices in Ghenna, in the Valley of Hittim too. And that gives a strong symbolic background to that scene.

AS: Yeah they would offer their children, burn their children to Molech and other gods.

AS: So many who have objected to the portrayal of Pilate say that he is far too sympathetic and the Romans should be much more guilty. They overlook the fact that Pilate did condemn him to death. Pilate had him scourged. Pilate is not that sympathetic a figure.

AS: Well you know, I think that says more about the people making the objection.

AS: I do too.

AS:  I mean the fact is that Pilate doesn’t have conditions.

AS: He was a manipulator.

AS: He was a manipulator and he was trying to climb the ladder. Very clearly he tells Claudia later on that, “I am in a bad position here with Rome. They are out to get me. I got to figure out something to do here.” So it is really himself that he is thinking about.

AS: He is an ambiguous figure. But even the New Testament clearly paints him as rather ambiguous.

MG: And scared. Fear. You know, he does it for fear that another sedition will start. And he has already been, honestly, he has been dragged over the coals once by Tiberias.

AS: This is neat that our Lord looks up in the midst of all these false allegations and sees this slow motion shot of the dove.

JB: There was a line in the Psalms as well where he says, “I wish I had the wings of a dove.”

AS: I had forgotten about that.

AS: See, the dove is a sign of hope, in a sense. You know, that there will be—that God is still in charge. God is still in charge of this. It is important for Jesus to see that.

AS: I think there is a hint also here of Johanna [?] spirituality here. Whereas Paul speaks of  he humbled to death, even death on the cross. It is a downward motion. Whereas in John’s Gospel it is a upward motion. It is the beginning of the glory being revealed. And the dove emphasizes the fact that this is now something wonderful about to happen not something terrible about to happen.

AS: John says, “I if I be lifted up will draw men to myself.”

AS: And I think the dove also contrasts with the dark bird that you see pecking at, much later on, the thief that continues to mock at him. I will say something more about that maybe when we get to that scene.

AS: Did you see those looks between the religious leaders and the secular leaders? There is all kinds of subtext going on there, historical in a kind of power play.

MG: If you put all the four Gospels together, I believe Pilate endeavored eleven separate times to get him off the hook.

AS: So there is that ambiguity that father was talking about. He is being pulled in two directions, there is no doubt about it. Therefore, I think in a sense, Pilate suffers as a paradigm for us. We are expected to see ourselves in him. You know, do we—what is our attitude towards Christ? Are we going to set him free or are we going to condemn him? You know we are often, in a sense, ambivalent.

AS: There he is speaking Aramaic, right?

AS: Jesus answers him in Latin. And he looks right at him first. It’s like he’s throwing the line. And now Pilate gets confused. He doesn’t know whether to answer in Aramaic or Latin. He goes back and forth. He is remembering the position of power.

AS: He is not about to be foxed by Pilate. I like very much this line—Or as another told you about, it is very much like the post-Paschal appearance with Thomas. You know, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” There is a very interesting parallel between this. Again, this question of who do you say that Jesus is? And you don’t necessarily have to have been there.

MG: In other words, it is a question about whether he would have been able to speak Latin, even amongst believers. And my answer to that is always, “Well, I guess not. But he could certainly stick that guy’s ear back on when they cut it off. Which is harder?”

AS: And of course, even at the level of our Lord’s humanity, laying aside the fact that yes, as God I would say he could do miracles, like healing the man’s eye or speaking. And he gives the apostles the miraculous ability to speak in languages they haven’t learned on the Day of Pentecost. So certainly he is the source of a spirit that comes upon them, is able to do the same thing.

AS: Somebody asked me once, “Do you really think that Jesus could have used the plu-perfect subjunctive?” And my answer to that is, “I am not sure he could, but I could.” And I know how to translate it.

AS: Pilate is trying to play it fast and loose here, right? He didn’t want to take responsibility.

AS: Everybody wants to win this one.

AS: That’s the thing. He doesn’t want to take responsibility for something that could compromise his career, basically.

AS: And obviously with the elders of the people here, there is a contest of power. They were tired of being dominated by the Roman administration. And they were reasserting themselves as having more power than Pilate thinks. You don’t want him to know that, that they can threaten him. And they were threatening him.

AS: I found this portrayal of Herod as kind of the debauched ceaselessly partying guy, very interesting.

MG: He wasn’t very religious, was he? He didn’t have any stock. He was of the secular world. He was a hedonist.

AS: In fact what is interesting, he says, “Are you a king?” and he points to himself. He has his hands in this downward motion. And yet by the standards of the faithful Jewish people of that day, he was not even qualified to sit on the throne of David because he was—King Herod the Great, the one who had attempted to put Christ to death when he was a baby, and then his descendants, the whole Herodian dynasty were Edomians. They were from Edom, or Esau. They were not actually Israelites at all. So you had on the seat of the political power, a usurper. And you have usurpers on the seats of the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well because Caiaphus and Annas were not descended from Zadok. When God made the covenant to David that your descendants will sit on the throne, He also said to the descendants of Zadok, “Your high priest will sit on the throne as well.” So you had usurpers on both seats, both church and state, you might say. To show that this is—The last few hours and years are ticking out on this thing is about to collapse because it has disinherited itself from its covenant promises.

AS: Of course Herod had no real power anyway. He was simply put in as a puppet too. Tolerated by the Romans. He was just a sop.

AS: I love that shot of the leopard because when we give ourselves over to the base pleasures we become like animals.

MG: I felt this scene was necessary to express Pilate’s dilemma. Because indeed it was his dilemma. He had had encounters before. It is recorded in Josephus with the [?] of the standards. Remember that? And he got in big trouble for that.

AS: And again those who few that Claudia is being too sympathetic I think are overlooking the dynamic that woman have amongst themselves too. Because it will come up a little later with Claudia’s relationship with Mary and with Magdalene.

AS: Why is that so offensive to people? Why are they offended at the fact that there are people here who are not wishing to see Jesus put to death? That is an enigma to me.

AS: It is puzzling to me too? I suppose because many would like to see more blame put on the Romans.

AS: But again as you pointed out, father, there are representatives of both those that are for and against him, both among the Gentiles and among the Jewish people. Yes, all the way through. It is not a stacked deck by any means.

AS: What you were saying, though, about Pilate’s inner struggle here is interesting. You can tell that this issue is hanging over him because the very last words out of his mouth when he is with Jesus is “What is truth?” and then you have all those other scenes. And when he comes back to this scene now, that is the very first words out of his mouth again. It is like he hasn’t stopped thinking about it. That question has been echoing in his mind all throughout the time and so he says it now to Claudia.

MG: Things are getting intense. He had backed down to all these guys once before in the matter of the standards, hadn’t he? So he was indeed susceptible to pressure.

AS: We should explain what we mean by that just for the sake of the viewers who might not know the history.

AS: That the Roman soldiers had standards with the empirial eagle on it and they would offer sacrifices, it is by the empirial cult to that. And of course the Jewish people found that offensive because they saw these as idols and they wanted them removed from the sacred precincts of Jerusalem. They did not want those—They want them left outside, left at the door, you might say, so that there was not idolatry inside the city.

MG: And there were people killed because of it.

AS: So often in here where Pilate seems gentle or more concerned, it is of course, fear not concern.

MG: He is afraid because Tiberias told him if another incident like that happens again, you are in big trouble. He is afraid for his own career or his head.

AS: Definitely, definitely. But at the same time he is such a complex individual because I think you see, with those scenes with him and Claudia, he has a great respect for his wife. He trusts her intuition. And I think there is a part of him—He is not just looking out for his own skin. I think there is a part of him that really says, “This man does not deserve this fate that he is going to.” So he is conflicted himself that he is sending him to a fate that I don’t think he’s convinced he deserves.

AS: And that is certainly clear in the New Testament, that ambiguity.

AS: I think the parallel between Barabas here and Jesus is interesting too. They are both in chains. They are both at these two pillars, flanking Pilate. He has got to pick between the two. Even the fact that you portray Barabas here with that whitened eye, that cataract, and our Lord has, of course, his eye closed by the punch, the blow that he received. So there is kind of a parallel there. And of course in the Aramaic here which father—yeah, they are both Bar Abbas. They are both son of the father.

JB: This is another one of those wonderful scenes, too, in the film where the meeting of eyes with Jesus changes somebody. It occurs several times in the film. Almost as a light motif.

MG: Almost every scene somebody—He finds somebody.

JB: His reaction to the look of Jesus is stunning. As it is with everybody that Jesus encounters. Here it is. And Jesus’ look, it’s not accusing. It is not angry. It is not vengeful. It is inviting. Saying, “Look into your soul. I am letting you free.” He is letting him free. Giving him another chance.

AS: It bothers Barabas, that look that he gets. He stops jollification there for a moment and then he tries to break away.

MG: Whether that is a rejection or a rejection with a seed planted for later, we will never know.

AS: I had a run-in with a very famous—I won’t mention his name—radical biblical critic, who took great exception to this scene and said, “You know there could not have been more than six to twelve people there in that courtyard, saying, ‘Crucify him.’” I know father has had a run-in with the same individual. But it is absurd that somebody—you know, again, in an attempt to engage in revisionism—I mean, he wasn’t there with his video camera. How did he know there could have been more than six or twelve people? But he just took exception to this that there were just too many people, you know, in that crowd saying, “Crucify him.”

JB: You know Pilate’s last comment before they started, when he sent him off to the flagellation and he told Eveniter [?], make it serious but don’t let them kill him. That shows that this was actually one form of capital punishment.

AS: Scourging to death was, it was a harsh way to be punished.

AS: There is a dispute in some of the ancient sources, was a tradition that you could only scourge up to forty but not including forty. Was that a Jewish tradition? Was that a Roman tradition? Was it something—The way they handled Jesus was not according to any tradition. And so the question really doesn’t make any sense in this case. They are not trying to fulfill some sort of a nicety.

JB: And you know that comes across, as well, by the way these guys are. What they are like. They are brutes. They are soldiers. They are guys used to—You know, rough guys.

AS: Very rough. You will notice that throughout there are very few subtitles. Because I managed to track down graffiti from Roman army camps. And used those as the basis for the dialog here and some of it is pretty rough. Some Latin scholars have asked, “Is he saying what I thought he said?” Yeah, they did.

JB: You know, that line that Jesus just said was another line from the Psalms. “My heart is ready. My heart is ready.” It gives you the sense that he is praying. All of this, he sees his father’s will in this. He is taking it on freely. Even though it is so painful.

AS: Again emphasizing there is a divine plan.

JB: Yeah, that it is part of the plan somehow. Jesus had to be faithful to his father’s will even when it was really, really, really hard, you know, in order to be our savior. To trust God. To show that he can trust God.

AS: I think a really important theological understanding of this scene, which is such a rough scene—It is a Johanan sort of theology, is that God enters into the human situation and enters into every type of human suffering, even unto death, and transforms it from the inside. And I think that as rough as this particular section is, the scourging, here the priests are distressed by what they are seeing.

AS: No matter what we go through in life, God is within it, and the possibility for salvation and for freedom is right there.

AS: In John’s Gospel Jesus is about to go to the crucifixion, he calls it the hour of glory. He is a grain of wheat falling in the ground. And where I go you must follow.

JB: Yes. It is the whole thing that God doesn’t save us from sin and suffering and from evil, that we are looking at—He doesn’t save us by eliminating it.  XXXX mystery. He comes into it and meets us there and teaches us how to love and forgive, even in the midst of it.

AS: That is the mystery of the incarnation, is that Jesus is the—It is the presence of God in humanity.

JB: In the suffering  union. The union that is subjugated to evil and to suffering.

AS: And I know for the person who has suffered—and I have had some pretty rough times in my own life. You see in the suffering of Jesus, as much as this may be a violent passage, there is something remarkably consoling about it. No matter what goes on in my life, you know, my heart must also be ready.

JB: Exactly. And that God knows, that he is with me in the midst of it. And Jesus looks at Mary, who is his mother but also a symbol of the church, of every Christian, and he is going to suffer for us, so that we know that we are never alone. That he is never going to give up. So he gets that new burst of strength when he sees Mary, when he sees his mother. He is reminded of what he is doing this for.

AS: I like your observation that Mary is representing the church and the body of Christians and her response.

GM: You know, I did not understand when I was Protestant that Mary, as God’s masterpiece, as this first Christian—a Christian before Christ, as many of the church fathers called her—is herself the result of Christ’s saving work. You know, she wouldn’t be that if he had not done this for her. So when he looks at his mother, he is doing this for her. Pope Pious IX points this out in his bull, in Ineffabilis Deus December 8, 1854, where he talks about what the Catholic Church means about the immaculate conception, that Mary is what she is, full of grace, because of Jesus has done his saving work for her, no less than for all of us.

AS: His glances at her and the meeting of eyes also emphasizes what I think is very strong theme of this film, is that the passion is not something that happens to him. It is something that he does. It is his initiative. And of course it culminates in the key line of the film, the key line of the passion: “Behold, I make all things new.” He is not the victim in that sense. It is a passion but it is not passive.

JB: And he makes that point later. There is a passage in one of the flashbacks where he says, “The Father loves me because I lay down my life. You know, it is not taken from me.”

MG: I lay it down of my own accord.

AS: This is why the Johanan perspective, this is a movement upwards and not a movement downwards. This is, we are being liberated at each moment of this passion. Because our passion is caught up in this. And at the end of this is life and resurrection.

AS: Because of this bond between Jesus and Mary, not only is this his decision, but it is also her decision too. She gives that little slight, you know, inclination of the head. When he looks at her. Just that we just saw about a minute ago. He looks at her, when the eyes lock and she nods, like go ahead, let this be. She is saying what she said when he first became incarnate in her womb. “Let it be to me according to your word.”

AS: And more than once she says, amen.

MG: So be it. Yes, she was cooperating with this, salvific work. I tried to make that obvious.

AS: But again, that is something that no one else has done. This is such an enormous and important achievement of this film, that no previous—And I have seen, I think, every movie, silent and talking, about Jesus that has been made. None of them make this point, show the bond between mother and son. Show the participation of Mary in the suffering.

AS: She is sorrowful about it but she is—

MG: Oh, she is suffering terribly.

AS: She is suffering terribly with it, but she is also exceeding to it.

MG: There is dignity there.

AS: And of course this was predicted way back in the Gospels, in the Gospel of Luke when she brings her infant son into the temple and has the encounter with Simeon the prophet who says, “This child is set for the rising and the falling of many. And a sword shall pierce your own soul also.” That is the sorrow that he will undergo, you are going to feel in your heart of hearts as well.

AS: So she knew from the beginning that she would be the one that would be ultimately compassionate, suffering his passion with him, feeling it in the depths and echoes of her own soul.

AS: Maya Morganstern, who of course played, the one playing Mary, is Jewish. And she spoke many times that she so could identify with the role as a Jewish mother with her son suffering. But she also instinctively saw something uplifting and beautiful about this even in the process.

MG: She was extremely generous and a wonderful actor.

AS: A remarkable woman.

MG: This is directly from Ann Emmerich.

AS: But now several adverse commentators have said, “Why”—the giving of the cloth out of compassion, which does not give much value to the way woman relate to one another, at least as I am told. That with subsequently wiping up the blood, with Magdalene and Mary do in the scene coming up very shortly, that is, what is the historicity of that? My goodness, if anyone has been in Jerusalem with a bus blowing up, where devote Jews will come with cloths and get every last bit of flesh or blood because it is the sign of life. It is the sign that life is the presence of God and it is too precious to just leave, it must be taken up and giving dignity. So, it is a very Jewish thing.

MG: No, but the extra understanding that this is sacrificial blood of the lamb of God.

AS: The sacredness of all blood, as father says, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the blood is the life. Leviticus says over and over again, is ultimately fulfilled in this. I mean, this is the quintessentially sacred blood. All that sacrificial blood pointed forward to this blood that would be shed here.

AS: In a famous painting by Chamboya of the crucifixion, the blood flowing from Christ’s side and from his wounds, flows and forms the frame of the entire picture, which is symbolically framing the entire Christian experience. The blood of Christ frames history.

AS: It is the matrix in which all of this takes place. And of course matrix comes from matriex [?]. He received his humanity, the flesh that he could offer, from his mother.

MG: I’ve got more questions about this than anything else.

AS: It is like Rosemary’s baby. As you pointed out so often, what could be more beautiful than a mother and child, until it reveals itself, when evil comes as under the appearance of something beautiful and good. But then gradually reveals itself as frightening and evil.

MG: And he comes to gloat.

AS: Yes. And she of course is the inverse of the Madonna and child.

AS: But that sacramental sense of blood flowing out and becoming the abiding force of salvation. Is—

JB: And it ties in perfectly with this flashback.

AS: Yes, it is marvelous.

JB: You know what he is doing? He is bathing her feet. He is washing them, which is a symbol of washing them of their sin. And what is his blood doing in the scene you just saw? It is going on, even his attackers, it is going onto their feet. He is bathing them. He is washing them in his blood, washing them of their sins.

AS: They are sprayed with it. There are several incidences. In fact, deliberately a couple of the almost crazed Romans you see the blood spray in their face as a symbol of they too are a part of salvation history. And this happens of course at the crucifixion scene.

JB: It is interesting though that in the Gospels, during this scene when Jesus is washing the disciples’ feet, he is not saying these lines. And yet we juxtapose it. We were talking it early. We bring in his lines from later in the last supper, we put them at this point. Jesus  is giving a message.

AS: You notice this line, “If they persecute you, they persecute me” in the filming of this of the Passion, some of the early action was extremely painful to endure. We got a lot of negative reaction, “Who do you people think you are?” and so on. And that line frequently occurred to us. You know, when you do—Jesus is always the sign of contradiction. In the Gospels you are faced with you either change your life or you don’t.

JB: I remember one lady, during this scene, during one of the previews, the showings, she wanted to get up and leave. And she started to get up, but then a though occurred to her, she told us later. “If Jesus suffered this for me, the least I can do is watch it. The least I can do is watch.” And I think there is something to that.

AS: We didn’t get a chance to comment on the colophon [?] that opens the film because we were introducing ourselves then. But that sets the context too. And by the way, that shows how silly are the objections people made that this suffering is never given a context. Why is this happening? Well, it says before you even see the action, you have that quote from Isaiah 53. “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities.” This is why everything that you are about to see is happening. It is to solve the problem of our sins.

MG: Of our fall.

JB: You know, another kind of level of that, the blood that is being spilled, even in the sacrifices in the old temple in Jerusalem, the Old Testament sacrifices, all the blood was gathered up. Not one drop was wasted. And that’s reminiscent here.

JB: In talking to a lot of priests who have seen this film, at this moment when they begin to wipe up the blood, reminds them of the moment during the mass when they purify the vessels after communion. Which is a every last drop.

AS: In the older rubiks [?] it was even more pronounced, the imagery.

AS: Thinking about the crown of thorns that is placed upon Jesus’ head there, all of the imagery—of course later in the Bible, occurs in germinal form in Genesis 1, 2 and 3. In Genesis 3 God predicts because of sin, because of the fall, that thorns and thistles will grow out of the ground. And all of the punishments that are mentioned in Genesis 3, all the curses that sin brings upon us, all have to come upon Christ because as Paul says, he is made a curse for us.

AS: Another one of the Johanan type ironies, fit for a king. Indeed, it is exactly fit for a king. What is uttered in sarcasm is as a matter of fact theologically profound.

JB: Did you notice here that Mary Magdalene doesn’t use one of the cloths? She uses her own veil to wipe up his blood.

AS: As a matter of fact, I did not notice that.

JB: Which was a detail that Mel added wasn’t in Ann Katherine [?] writings where he got the idea. Because it is a personal moment for her. And so then she goes to her flashback. She was the one who was about to get stoned. It was going to be her blood that was shed. Just the moment, when they are about to kill her.

AS: I love the line that he draws in the sand. Sort of putting her on the same side of the line with himself and her accusers on the other side.

AS: Now, remember the snake going forth from the satanic figure in the garden going toward Jesus? Now, if we notice what happens when Mary is there.

AS: This of course may be a secondary addition in the Gospels, identifying the woman taken in adultery with Mary Magdalene is a strong Christian tradition.

JB: Right. It goes way back.

JB: This is the place where Jesus would have said XXX “He who has no sins, throw the first stone.” Of course they all realize, “I am a sinner too,” so they throw their stones down. He gives her a new chance.

AS: But again in the medium of film…

AS: See, the snake. See how it echoes the same…

AS: And even the little quavering of her hand too, again, which links her with Christ. I mean, her sin brings suffering in her life that she brings to Christ.

AS: And certainly there were many church fathers, I think it is a preponderance, unless I am mistaken, that did make that identification. The unnamed woman in John 8 is indeed Mary Magdalene.

MG: It could have been.

AS: It could well have been. And it certainly serves to bring out many of the moods [?] of the passion narrative itself—of forgiveness, of sense of values.

AS: In fact her face there where she was being caught inflagrante delecto, in the act, she has all the scrapes on her face, very much like Judas’ before. But she did something different with her sin and her guilt than Judas did. It drove her to Christ and she found forgiveness.

JB: Seeing Jesus in this scene always reminds me of that line from the Bible where it says, “I am not a man. I am a worm and no man.” He looks almost total disfigured, barely human.

AS: And even Pilate and XXX they were there. They are shocked. They are going to keep their course, but at the same time they are still bothered.

JB: That is important. That’s what sin does. And this is how much God loves us. You can sense the intensity of Christ’s suffering is a direct reflection of the intensity of God’s love. He was willing to suffer to the end, to the crucifixion. So Pilate is torn, you know. And how many of us have been torn. Claudia is essentially his conscience, in a sense. And he betrays his conscience because he is afraid of the consequences.

AS: You notice almost every time there is a moral crisis for him, she appears briefly in the background. Either at the window or in the room.

JB: She is his voice of moral reason.

AS: This statement of Jesus is interesting because although there is plenty of sin to go around as we have been saying many times, there is guilt—You know we are all implicated in the death of Christ. It is my sins. It is your sins. It is all of our sins that made this necessary for redemption. At the same time, when Jesus talks about “He who handed me over has the greater sin” we are reminded of a complementary truth in Scripture. There are degrees of sin. There are degrees of punishment in hell. Degrees of reward in heaven. And you know there is a hierarchy there of degrees of culpability. Some are guiltier than others.

AS: Here again we see Pilate, totally reacting out of fear, not out of great kindness and gentleness. And he does condemn him to be crucified without flinching an eye.

AS: And yet Jesus does say that although he bears a guilt—there is no doubt about it—he doesn’t wash his hands, he doesn’t exonerate himself by what he is about to do here with the basin. But still Jesus says, he bears a lesser burden of guilt.

AS: To whom much is given of them much is required, Jesus says. And so he had less knowledge of what was going on here and therefore a somewhat lesser guilt.

JB: Here is another flashback coming up. Which is very well thought out.

AS: Ah, the waters in the temple from Ezekiel.

JB: Yeah, the waters in the temple. The priests who wash their hands before the sacrifice. Right now with him being condemned—

AS: That’s when the sacrifice begins, him being condemned to death.

AS: It is interesting, too, that when Pilate washes his hands here in the basin, he dries his hands on the same sort of linens that Claudia, of course brings. So there is an equation being made there. In other words, the water that he washes his hands with, he is still guilty of—He is not really innocent of this mans blood. He does send him to his death. So that towel which absorbs that water from his hand washing is equated visually with the towel that soaks up the actual blood of Christ. Both of those saturated with the blood of Christ—one symbolically, one literally.

AS: And of course Jesus’ answer to him makes it clear that again no matter who is guilty, whether it is Pilate or the one who handed him over to Pilate, it is all a part of the divine plan in the first place. This again is Jesus—It is the choice of the Father.

AS: You see those two truths always kept very close together in Scripture. Sometimes in the same breath. When Peter in his sermon on Pentecost in Acts 2:23 says, him—he is referring to Christ—being delivered up by the predetermined council of God, you have with wicked hands crucified and slain. So on the one hand—It is the two sides of the coin. It is God’s will. It is God’s plan from all eternity. He is the Lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world, Peter says in his first letter. And yet our wickedness, it doesn’t let us off the hook. We can’t say, “Well it was God’s will so we’re not responsible.” We are responsible. Human responsibility, man’s freedom, God’s sovereignty, the two work in a complementary fashion. The one does not cancel out the other.

JB: Another line from the Psalms.

AS: Again, although the casual viewer might not notice it, but frequently when he is citing the Psalms to emphasize that it is part of a long tradition. He lapses into Hebrew rather than Aramaic.

AS: So many of the lines between now and the end of the film are directed to us. Why do you embrace your cross, fool? It is not just addressed to Jesus. It is clearly addressed to us. It is not the wisdom of the world. It is—

AS: Yeah, Paul says, exactly father. We preach Christ crucified which is foolishness to the world. The whole idea of worshipping a God who died upon a cross, a shameful criminals death, strikes the philosophically sophisticated Greeks as a highly foolish message. And yet the foolishness of God, he says, is wiser than the wisdom of men. The weakness of God in allowing himself to suffer and die is more powerful than the strength of men.

JB: Here is thinking about the same people who welcomed him into Jerusalem as a victor and king a week ago are now the ones jeering at him.

AS: Here you see that parallel again. You know, Mary on one side of the crowd. But very human. People having to move out of the way. And Satan gliding, you know, effortlessly, spiritually through—

MG: It recognizes it. And it recognizes her. There is a reticence there. There is kind of almost a wary kind of careful, like a danger for the evil one.

JB: A respect for the power of your opponent. Yeah, he fears her. And in fact, she is the only other person in this whole movie that actually sees him, that actually makes eye contact with him other than Jesus.

MG: Jesus never makes eye contact with him.

AS: Oh, he doesn’t? Oh, okay. But he sees him. He knows he knows he’s there.

MG: He knows he’s there. He doesn’t bother to look at him though.

AS: Very interesting. Okay, thank you for correcting that. But he is aware of his presence. And Mary is.

MG: But she is the only one that actually looks and sees and they lock eyes and there is a battle. A spiritual battle.

AS: Someone sent me a letter a few weeks ago saying, “If you do a film on the resurrection, that’s what I will want to see. I will want to see how we’re saved.” I find that so unbalanced. It is precisely by identification with the passion of Christ that we can identify with his resurrection. Because Paul says, you know, we must be baptized. You must go down into the water to emerge from the water. And Jesus himself says, “Did you not know it was necessary for the Son of Man to undergo these things.” Necessary.

MG: Yeah, the grain of wheat.

AS: Yes, it must fall on the ground and die.

AS: We were talking earlier, father, about all those downward steps and that famous hymn of the incarnation of St. Paul in Philippians 2. He had to take all these downward steps. Become a man. Not just any man, but a lowly man. Suffer death. Not just any death but the most shameful death. He had to take all these downward steps to take all the upward ones that result in his resurrection, his exaltation, his ascension to the right hand of the Father. The way up is down.

AS: The contrast being, Paul and John in this regard, I think shows moods of how we understand ourselves. Sometimes when we suffer it is only through prayer and reflection that we see what is actually going on in it. Sometimes if we are in a more Johanan mood we can see from the very beginning that we are identifying with something that is so much bigger than ourselves.

AS: John has very little to say in this film, but his face says it all.

AS: I think that is because he is so contemplative. I mean, he is the one who really—I mean, he is the only apostle that we see sort of keeping company with Mary. And he is getting this, this profound insight because of his contemplation of what is unfolding before him.

AS: I think he represents us.

MG: He was the one who was really the eye witness of everything. He was the only one that had courage to stick around. And it was interesting that he was the last one to write about it.

AS: I like to think that I am the disciple that Jesus loved.

AS: That is why the commentators both Protestant and Catholic, point out that he is never referred to as John in those passages in his Gospel. He is referred to as the beloved disciple. So it is kind of a fill in the blank. So when Jesus says to the beloved disciple what we are going to hear about the cross—Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother. Each of us is supposed to see ourselves in that role. We are to be adopting her, realizing that a relationship with Jesus necessarily entails a relationship with his mother. And that she cares for us because we are one of those for whom Christ died.

AS: This is the most moving, I think.

AS: I think that everyone who sees the film sees this as the most moving scene. I think, having seen this scene many, many times now, it is given a real depth to my own devotion to Mary as mother.

AS: To my mind that is the key line to the entire film.

MG: Sure. It comes from the Acts, doesn’t it?

AS: It comes for the Apocalypse. And what is so interesting is that there Christ is saying it sitting on the throne of glory. Here is saying it, you know, at the lowest level of his humiliation. In other words, the message is that Mary has the insight to see that even though he is not sitting on the throne of glory here, he is undergoing his horrible humiliation and passion, that he is performing the work that he completes when he gets back to heaven. He is making all things new by this—He is making suffering new. He is making it a whole new thing.

AS: This is interesting that this man Cassius—is he called? Later on who becomes Linginus’s [?] baptismal name, is attracted to Mary. He sees—Who is that woman? And it is his being drawn to her that ultimately draws him to Christ. She functions as a mediatrix.

AS: There is a wonderful parallel to the earlier question of who do say that Jesus is. Now, who do you say that this woman is?

AS: That is a wonderful face of that woman. Then again you see in the crowd here many faces that faces that show there is—You know there is no unanimity here among these people as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. There are people that are revelling in this—

AS: There are people who are suffering. There are people who are lamenting it and saying, “This should not be.”

AS: They are not all glamorous or beautiful people too, which I like very much.

MG: I think she has a kind of beauty. Not classical at all. But really, there is something deep about this girl. I love this actress. I think she is great.

JB: This is preparing for another one of those intimate person to person encounters with Christ.

AS: Yeah, obviously she’ll be identified with Christ when, you know, what happens later on when she offers her cloth—

MG: That is not scriptural of course.

GM: No, but it is one of those traditions. I mean, even the Scripture writers remind us that there were many things that John, that father has been mentioning so many times here, says twice at the end of his Gospel in John 20:31 and John 21:25 that there were many other things that Jesus said and did that were not—The world couldn’t hold the books. And of course Luke starts out his Gospel and the Acts the same way too. In fact John says in two of his letters, his second and his third epistle, in 1 John 12 and 3 John 13, he says, “I have many more things I wish to teach you, but I do not wish to do so with pen and ink. I will do it when I come to you face to face.” And that is a verse that really hit me between the eyes when I was rereading the Bible as a Protestant minister, realizing, wait a minute. These apostles did all kinds of teaching about the events of Jesus’ death, the meaning of his death, that they did not put down in the four written accounts. I want to have access to all of it. I want the full message. And I have to read what their successors, the apostolic fathers, wrote.

MG: Well, the written accounts weren’t available for a long time and to most people, even after they were written. So I guess that sort of petered your notion of Scripture as solas.

AS: Yeah, Scripture alone is something the Bible itself doesn’t even teach. In fact Paul said, “Hold fast to all the traditions, whether they came to you written or in oral form.” 2 Thessalonians 2:14. And this, you know, Veronica’s encounter that is coming up here is certainly an example of one of those.

AS: This is a great conversion here of Simon because you see him start out as a man who wants nothing to do with Jesus. It is just a “accident.” And of course there are no accidents in human history. But it is a “accident” that his path just happened to cross Jesus’ on Jesus’ way to Calvary. And so he is pressed into service by the Roman soldiers.

AS: He is so concerned with his reputation. He says, “All right. Just remember, guys, I am an innocent man being forced to carry a condemned man’s cross.” But you see as it continues he wants to shoulder the cross. He wants to help get this man where he needs to go to fulfill his destiny.

AS: There is some beautiful physical contact between the two as the procession of the cross continues. Very tender.

MG: That is all of us, really. Unwilling to drag it.

JB: But you know there is a whole other level. This is the big feast day of the Passover and by participating in this he is being made unclean and can’t participate in the liturgies, which is a —He was pilgrim there just for that purpose. But his life is going to be transformed by this encounter. And we follow him along with it.

AS: And his conversion is intimated in Scripture. All that tradition does is really flesh things out. But it is all there in form. I mean, when I talk to my Protestant friends I say, “Look, I can prove every Catholic doctrine just from Scripture alone. I will meet you on your own terms.” But the fact that the tradition tells us that Simon of Cyrene converted later on, is hinted at in Scripture because Mark, in his Gospel when he mentions Simon of Cyrene, he says he is the father of two disciples that are well known to the Roman church. In other words, obviously this man converted, raised his children in the faith and his two sons are known to the Roman congregation for whom Mark writes his Gospel. He is writing for the Romans.

AS: And truly he and his offspring were fixtures in the early church.

AS: But my point is that would only be the case if he did convert, in other words. So his encounter with Christ was fruitful, as this encounter is here to.

AS: Even this encounter with the woman we have traditionally called Veronica, embodies a real truth. If one empathizes with the passion of Christ, you are imprinted with Christ. So some of these things have a richness to them that are beyond simply questioning whether it happened this way or that way.

AS: You notice she kisses the cloth after it, you know, has imbibed his precious blood. She brings it to her lips, to again show her identification with him. And we are going to see Mary later on kissing her son’s crucified feet on the cross and coming away with the blood.

AS: Yes, a powerful scene.

MG: Tradition has it that he had met her before and she was the woman with the issue of blood.

AS: So there is a beautiful poetic irony there too. And the fact that he who healed her of her twelve years of losing blood, now gives her his own blood, to be a momento of this fateful day, to be a relic.

JB: And Simon was the only one in the film who is actually called a Jew. He is Jesus’ best friend. He is the one who comes to his defense right now. He says, “No, this is unfair. This is unjust.”

AS: And being laughed at and humiliated just as Jesus was.

AS: When you become a disciple of Christ you become mocked like Christ.

AS: And this scene makes clear there is a Roman oppression of the Jews.

AS: In a sense, you know, I think the Bible almost encourages us to draw parallels, to draw some line of connection, to connect the dots, you might say, between people who have similar names or the same names. The Bible clearly does that in its theology. And so it is not, I think, an accident that this man’s name is Simon. I mean, he is doing what Simon son of Jonah, you know, Peter, should have been doing. This should have been Peter’s role, to be with his lord, to be standing with him. And he is not, so here is a substitute Simon. But this man will end up joining the church as well because of his being brought into this close saving contact with Christ.

AS: Isn’t it beautiful the arms crossing there. It is another cross on top of the wooden cross.

AS: This is so neat just to see that—You know, you are just shown it very quickly. Christ again makes eye contact with her. So you are looking at Christ’s face and then you are very generous to the audience to give them a second chance to see what they might have missed the first time.

MG: Third, fourth, fifth.

AS: To see the image of Christ on the veil.

JB: Unique acts of generosity to those who are suffering and to those who are in need, Christ promised that you were doing it to him. And he imprints his love in our own hearts.

AS: There is so much tradition in the Hebrew Bible about wanting to see the face of God. And Job complained that I want to see your face. And then we can answer and speak to one another, you know.

MG: The only day we didn’t have sun when we wanted.

AS: Of course everyone lost the sun later on on that day around noon. I am saying 2000 years ago.

AS: This is an interesting contrast of the leaders. The chief priests coming up on their donkeys, kind of a contrast with Jesus’ entry, triumphal entry on Palm Sunday. Because they are not being acclaimed by the crowds. And you know, with the palm branches and so forth. And yet, I mean, they saw his triumphal entry as a threat to their own desire to be perceived as the experts and the leaders of the people.

AS: This is one of those beautiful scenes, I think, of the whole film. It is a remarkable piece of cinematography.

AS: All the falls of our Lord, every time our Lord falls—

MG: Quite different. They all needed to have a different character.

AS: So many of the comments, really there and also when he is being fixed to the cross, it is clear that the crucifixion is seen as the high point and not the low point.

AS: Even the vocabulary just keeps pointing.

MG: Almost done.

AS: Almost done. The good thing is almost here.

AS: And then of course, our Lord is going to say on the cross, “It is done. It is finished. It is consummated. Tetelisti.”

AS: This flashback is fascinating.

JB: You see him preaching the sermon. And on both sides you see Jesus actually doing it, it brings a whole ‘nother level of meaning to these words. Jesus said, “Love your enemies.”

MG: That is the toughest thing of all.

AS: Yeah. You mean obeying his command?

MG: Yeah. Everything in us wants to get even. But what good is it?

AS: And the neat thing about that flashback is that you are shown again the parallel of the two mountains. That is the Sermon on the Mount, of course, recorded there in Matthew 5. Our Lord is ascending a different mountain. And it is when he sees the summit of Calvary ahead of him, Golgotha, that he has a flashback to the other one. But in other words, it is another mountain, but it is the same sermon. In other words, he is preaching this same message. Love your enemies. He is preaching it now, living it out by hanging on the cross. And of course He will be praying, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

AS: I don’t know if this juxtaposition was intentional, but of course you have the sunlight coming through, the seated high priests there on the donkeys and immediately Christ saying in this flashback, “I am the good shepherd.” In other words, I am the one that is truly the pastor, truly caring for these people. Because he does talk in the Gospels sometimes about those who are not good shepherds, who are not really meeting the spiritual needs of God’s people. In fact the Old Testament has several prophecies you know. Woe, to those shepherds who are not feeding the flock. Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel and so forth. And our Lord certainly has the Old Testament passages in his mind when he says, “I am the good shepherd.”

AS: And then another one of these flashbacks which talks about, I am doing this. I have the power to do this. This is part of the plan.

AS: And again the very strong emphasis, not just in the Gospels but very much in this film, he is repeating over and over: I have power to lay down my life and to take it up again. This is not only something that happens to him, but something that he does.

AS: He is not a victim, in other words.

MG: In one sense, no.

AS: Victim in the priestly sense, yes, but not in the political sense.

MG: Of course the culpability for his crucifixion lies upon all of us. Now the material agents of his death were his own people.

AS: And the Romans of course, who did their bidding too.

MG: Absolutely. Everyone participated. They were the only ones there.

MG: But it is no different. I mean, throughout the Old Testament, what happened to all the prophets? They were either persecuted and/or killed. And that he has claimed to be some sort of exception, that is absurd.

AS: This is certainly underlined in the—

AS: This is great. He goes right down the hill. Simon goes right down and you see Mary Magdalene and Mary and John coming right up. I am sorry, father. Go right ahead.

AS: I was just going to say the mutual culpability of all of us, is certainly shown in the way the Pieta is done in this too. Where Mary looks right out at all of us after the crucifixion and says, “What was your part in this?”

JB: Here is another one of those magnificent moments of locking of the eyes between the mother and the son. He hasn’t gotten up yet. But by looking at her—In fact, interesting, she kneels. She gets down. And obviously in an attitude of prayer and praying for him and that enables him to get up.

AS: Anyone listening to the film will frequently hear the Aramaic word “cum”, which means to get up. And this of course echoes the—It has all sorts of theological meaning. When Jesus cures the little girl, “Talitha cumi.” Little girl, I say, get up. But of course it also is an echo of the passion and resurrection.

AS: The same in the Greek, the word “anastasis” One of my ten children is named Anastasia. It means resurrection. It is a standing up again. Anastasis.

MG:  we had the washing of the hands in the Pascal ritual. And now we’ve got the bread, yes. And the juxtaposition of these two things.

AS: Yeah, taking the cloth off of the bread and now stripping the garments off the one who said in John 6, “I am the bread of life.” You have to eat my flesh and drink my blood if you want everlasting life.

GM: Which is another one of those Bible verses that I, as a Protestant, really wanted to just reduce to a mere figurative language until I really had to wrestle with the implications of what Jesus is saying there in John 6 and realizing, you know, who am I? What authority do I have to turn this into a figure of speech when Jesus, all the indications are he meant this literally.

AS: Of all the New Testament, John 6 is about the hardest to escape, isn’t it?

MG: The idea of transubstantiation staring you right in the face, right?

AS: Clearly all of his audience took him literally. They said, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And they left him for that reason. He doesn’t run after them saying, “Wait, wait, you misunderstood. I was just using a nice little metaphor, a little bit of poetry.” They would have said, “Fine, we’ll come back. We love simile and metaphor and poetry.” The Psalms are full of it. But they understood him literally and he let them go because that was the true understanding. And that is certainly how the apostles took it. I mean, Paul is very clear about that in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11. He says that communion is a communion in the body and blood of Christ, not in something that is a symbol of his body and blood, or represents. In other words, the Bible never says this symbolizes or this signifies my body. This is a representation of my blood. That is something that I, as a Protestant minister, had to impose on. And I realized that the Bible didn’t warrant that.

AS: I think the flashbacks in this film are really excellent in pulling that together. That the Eucharist embodies the passion of Christ. And of course in the words of institution in the anafra [?] that is very much spelled out. But how often do we pay attention to it? Calling to mind the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus in the very act of consecration.

JB: And this is where he says—This is really the message of the passion. What love is. Giving oneself. Giving oneself.

AS: I am almost tempted to have a postscript on the film that said, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

JB: Which is the ultimate message of Christianity. As I have loved you.

AS: That nailing of the hand is a real symbol of what sin is. It is inhibiting God from letting him love us.

AS: I am glad you put this verse in here. I am the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to the Father but by me. Because that just goes, again that is something that people need to hear in an age in which we are all tempted to follow a path of political correctness and say that, you know, every religion is equally valid and salvific. And it is, this is the part of the gospel that goes against the grain of that. And yet it needs to be proclaimed and I am so glad that you have that in there.

AS: That truth is a very rich concept in the Hebrew thinking too. It is not just something that happened in your mind. The truth also involves a love affair, not just an intellectual conviction of something. The heart as well as the mind.

AS: The same thing with the idea of faith in the Scripture. That faith is not just an intellectual assent to a proposition but instead you are being faithful. You know, you are faithful to the covenant.

AS: In John’s Gospel he never uses the word “faith.” He uses the verb to believe into, which implies entering into a union with that person who is the object.

JB: Incredible to have him say that line at that moment. Because you know in the Gospels he says it from the cross.

AS: Here he purposely repeats it.

JB: He repeats it, exactly. It is very clear. Whether it is physical attack or it is just a spiritual attack, he is always he wants forgiveness, mercy.

AS: This film is not about blaming anyone.

JB: It is just the opposite. The whole point, the whole point is it is the mercy, which is an expression of love in a fallen world. And even when he is suffering that much he is able. As even she is suffering in the exact same way.

AS: Yes, her facial—see, is mimicking exactly the same thing.

JB: And you know so therefore she is thinking the same thing. Forgive them, Father. Forgive them.

AS: This is a fantastic image too. Her grabbing up the earth.

AS: That was her own idea, I think, wasn’t it?

MG: Oh yeah. And it worked so great.

AS: I think every single one of the seven words of our Lord from the cross make it into this film. That is the first one. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

AS: What is interesting is that Matthew and Mark only give us one of the words of our Lord from the cross. The words, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” They both mention that one. And those two Gospel writers mention none of the other ones. We get three more from St. Luke that are found only in St. Luke. And then three more from St. John that are again only found in St. John. It is only by putting all of them together that we get what we call the seven last words of our Lord from the cross. And they do not mention, Luke and John do not mention the one that Matthew and Mark do. So, it is just another reminder that God gives us many witnesses, bringing in all their separate perspectives we get the full 360 degree.

MG: Well, that is it. People say the Gospels differ. Well, they do. But what they are really doing is completing one another.

AS: Are you going to comment on this? How when the cross is turned over he is not face down.

MG: Well, that is from Maria Agreda, apparently this took place in her vision. It is just simply not allowed by God that His face should even touch the ground. So you are seeing kind of a supernatural occurrence there.

JB: She gets more strength now. She is reminded, okay, he is in charge. This is part of the plan. Look, she has peace again. And I needed that as an audience member, in a sense.

AS: This is such a wonderful job of interlinking the passion with sacramental life.

AS: Because you see him lifting up the bread. And you see John, at the last supper lifting his eyes. And here the bread of life is being lifted up on the cross, the elevation of the true host.

MG: And the penny just dropped for him.

AS: Yeah, yeah. He realizes, “I have seen this before. This is the most profound déjà vu I have ever experienced in my life,” John is saying. And of course they are looking up, those who have faith—Mary Magdalene, the mother of Jesus are looking up because they see here the fulfillment of that, of the Eucharist.

MG: And you just heard letting go of the earth here. It is just.

AS: John Deputy’s music for this is extraordinary also.

MG: He did a great job.

AS: It is almost another step in her relinquishing her son, is to let go of all that earth. And of course the word for earth in Hebrew “adama” is the word from which Adam comes. He is the man of  the earth, the man of the ground. So there is parallels. God Himself puns on that in Genesis 3 that you came from the adama and so you are named Adam and you will have to return to adama. And Christ is again the second Adam. So here he is being lifted up above the earth. He said in John’s Gospel, “If I be lifted up from the earth I will draw all manner of people to myself.” But Mary, in giving up her son gives up the symbolically lets the earth drop back down out of her hands.

MG: I always think about the Moses parallel here. Where he lifted up the serpent and everyone who looked on it was saved.

AS: Sure. Which John comments on in John 3.

AS: There is also a very old tradition of the church that the place of the crucifixion is the place of the burial of Adam.

AS: That is why it is called Golgotha, the place of the skull, because heads were there.

AS: I am glad you had this. Which is given for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Because I know a lot of people today don’t hear it quite that way. So it is a good refresher on what the Bible actually does say. Because all the Bibles, of course, have the words for you and for many. Every Bible on the face of the earth, Catholic, Protestant, even the Jehovah’s Witness New World translation says that.

MG: Well, of course. The sacrifice was sufficient to save all. But the fact is that not everybody is going to cooperate with that. And he would have reflected that in the word for many. He knew who would be saved and who wouldn’t.

AS: Thank you for that catechism. That is important.

AS: Some have asked why you had various items hanging from—

MG: Well, because they nailed that symbolic thief cup— he still stole a cup or something. He is a thief. The other guy has got a bag of money around his neck. And he has a crown on him. You know,

AS: Although it is kind of neat that Dismus has that bag of money because it almost ends up looking like a big brown scapula. It does.

MG: That is odd, isn’t it. You know, everyone is wearing their crime. With the king and the thieves.

AS: This scene is right from the Gospel. Asking for proof.

JB: When the cross itself is the proof that he loves and that he loves to the end. It is a different concept of the Messiah.

AS: This was good to put this in that, you know, Jesus has love for this man Caiaphus who is turning his back on him and walking away, that he still wills his positive, wills his salvation. That even he is not outside the circle of his love.

MG: That is the first canonization.

AS: And it is interesting that, I mean, “You will be with me in paradise” Paradise again is that word borrowed from Persian meaning an enclosed garden. The movie begins in a garden. Our sins have turned this world from being the paradise it was before to no longer paradise. And yet, the movie is going to end up in paradise again. I mean, because of the work of Christ did here on the cross, we are going to be able to get back in the garden.

AS: A lot of people found this offensive. But there is a passage in the Old Testament that says that the eye that mocks, you know our Father, is pecked up by the ravens of the valley. So I think there is some fulfillment in biblical, of a biblical principle here.

AS: He mocks at Jesus rather than allowing his heart to be made contrite the way Dismus does.

AS: Even historically we know from several sources that—

MG: The birds would come and feed on these guys.

AS: Yeah, the people that were crucified. And the eyes particularly probably succulent to them.

MG: Oh yeah, they go for the eyes first.

AS: You see that in Hitchcock’s “The Birds” too.

AS: You were talking earlier, father, about this being in Hebrew tradition the site of Adam’s burial. And many church fathers talk about how as the blood of Christ trickled down the cross we could just see there that it was actually going down into the limbo spotrum [?] the limbo of the fathers, and kind of being the key that opens up, you know, the prison they are in and setting them free, so that when Christ ascends into heaven he can take those prisoners of war, liberated to their final destination.

AS: Again I mentioned earlier Tim Abouis [?] famous painting of the crucifixion where he does have the blood that flows from the body to the frame and then from the frame it goes into the ground.

MG: Yes, and goes to the skull, yes?

AS: It goes to the skull, exactly.

AS: That is why a lot of Medieval crucifixes actually have  a skull at the base to show that it is the second Adam dying above the remnant of the first Adam to make his redemption possible. A lot of that Hebrew tradition, by the way, is brought—There is a great book that I think Tan Books has kept in print. It is called “How Christ Said the First Mass” by Father James Meagher. And it goes into a lot of the symbolism of the last supper, the first mass, the blood coming down the cross, Adam’s skull being down there. The other, and Abraham’s bosom where paradise was, awaiting their liberation by the Messiah.

AS: And there every year, that awesome place in the Holy Sepulchre—I must say I find it extraordinarily moving experience. To be able to actually reach into the spot and to touch the stone below.

AS: I love the way she kisses his feet and comes back with the blood upon her lips which stays there.

AS: The Marian theme of this film and the Eucharistic theme are so beautifully interwoven that a devotion to Mary and a devotion to the Eucharist really involve each other. They are inextricably intertwined.

JB: And it is all the church which will receive his blood in holy communion through the years. And he is thirsting. What he is really thirsting for, I think, is for people to do what she did, to come to him, to take his blood, to love him.

AS: They give him a drink. He turns it down. That is not the thirst.

AS: No, it was a spiritual thirst.

AS: Flesh of my flesh. Heart of my heart.

MG: Isn’t that from Genesis?

AS: Yeah. But because when Adam sees Eve when she is made from his side, he says, “This is at last flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.” And St. Paul says in Ephesians 5 that the marriage between Adam and Eve reflects the marriage between Christ and his church. And Mary is the church in miniature. She is the perfect, that immaculate bride without any spot, wrinkle or blemish. And so he sees in her what his sacrificial death makes possible for those that would unite themselves to him the way she did.

AS: And here is that part we were commenting on earlier where he is saying to John, “Take her as your mother.” But again it is through John the Beloved disciple saying it to all of us.

JB: A lot of people are intrigued by this prayer as he says, “Why have you abandoned me?” But it is actually another Psalm.

AS: It is another Psalm but I think it has to be taken seriously that he is feeling the disappear—Not the despair but the utter brokenness that human beings feel when they—

AS: Paul says, all things, even unto death on the cross.

JB: And yet, the first half of that psalm expresses that pain. But immediately it comes back to an act of hope.

AS: It comes back to hope indeed.

JB: So that God will not, in the end, abandon him.

AS: So we have just seen all three of the words from the cross that John narrates. I thirst. It is finished. It is consummated, which probably refers back to the Passover itself, because the fourth cup is the cup of consummation. The Passover is being finally, you know, completed here. And then, into your hands I commit my spirit.

JB: And if it is funny that you mentioned it because this last line has been on the lips of how many Christians when they have died? Into Your hands I commend my spirit.

AS: I love this bird’s eye, or I suppose we should say God’s eye view of the whole thing. And then you see it is refracted through God’s tear. The first drop of the storm that is coming.

AS: The root of the word that he uses for it is finished is the same word for peace. The same word that is in shalom and salom.

AS: Oh, in the Aramaic you are saying.

JB: Earthquake. It is a new creation. A new order. Everything is new. The Holy Spirit is there. The possibility that we can love as much as Christ did and the way that Christ did and forgive our enemies.

AS: Just as in the symbolism in the Book of Genesis that preceded the new creation is tohu avohu. It is earth being confused and so on. So now the new creation is also marked by the earthquake and a rattling of the old order as something wonderfully new is breaking forth. It seems like a birth. But this is biblical. The Bible talks about earthquake and the skies and the darkness..

JB: And this the tearing of the veil in the temple. The veil which separated God from people, from men. And now it is torn. Christ has reunited. Jesus Christ has reunited God and man. God and people are together. God is accessible now in flesh and in spirit.

AS: Because they didn’t want the bodies defiling the Passover. And of course when they come for our Lord’s body, he doesn’t have to do it.

AS: And again he looks at Mary as though almost to say, apologize or almost to even ask permission. This is so wonderful the way they are just bathed in the blood and the water flowing from the side of our Lord. St. John makes such theological significance of. He comments on in his first epistle. Again, he says, “There were three that bear witness on earth: the spirit, the water and the blood. And these three are one.” They are all saying the same thing. That from Christ’s side flows the water and the blood, representing the two primary sacraments: baptism and the Eucharist. And of course by implication the whole seven fold sacramental stream that flows from the side of the Savior.

AS: So much reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s hymns. He would have loved this movie.

AS: Here he is crying I guess because he is seeing the way of the holy of holies exposed by the tearing of the temple veil.

AS: We should point out too that earthquakes in the Bible are always—

AS: Oh this is great shot here. He finally realizes what’s happened.

MG: I was duped.

AS: This is so beautiful.

AS: This is an incredibly powerful pieta.

MG: Joseph of Aramethia.

JB: And you notice that Mary and Jesus are surrounded by a Roman soldier, a Jewish leader and Joseph of Aramethia, I think is there, the youngest disciple, John, and Mary Magdalene, the repentant sinner. So you have all of humanity surrounding Mary and Jesus and looking and gazing on this, on our Lord and on Mary. And then she looks out and includes us in that as well, when she looks at us.

AS: And demands a reaction on our part.

AS: And you see the instruments of torture which are really the instruments of glory. And there she goes. She looks right at the camera. But you really see.

AS: I was with some of the groups that we had at the director’s cut of showing it to various groups. And many groups, Christian groups that do not have much on Mary in their tradition, all commented that now they realize why Mary belongs in tradition. Mary’s role in the passion, death and redemption.

JB: Again, David Fitzgerald the co-screener had an interesting comment on this. I asked him what he thought she was saying with that look and he said, “I think she is saying, ‘Don’t forget.’”

AS: Another darkness here, which almost kind of gives us a few moments to think, “Hey. It’s over. It’s over.”

MG: It lasts too long.

AS: There are starting to get at, now wait a minute. There is light coming back into the darkness, the light Easter Sunday. And those Johanan themes of light verses darkness that father has been talking about that we see at the beginning of the movie—again, the struggle between the light, the moonlight trying to pierce through the clouds, and the dark clouds. And now we see this interplay of light and shadow here. So the movie really comes around full circle.

AS: And of course it ends in a garden the way it began. Because it begins with the agony in the garden and we know from John’s Gospel that this tomb was in a garden. John specifically makes that point. And I think he does so deliberately. He sees the importance of the garden imagery. He says, Joseph of Armathea put it in a tomb and this tomb was located in a garden. In fact, when Mary Magdalene meets Jesus, as John records it in John 20, she thinks he is the gardener when she sees him, until she recognizes who he is when he calls her by name.

AS: So he is the gardener. He is the new Adam. Adam was the gardener of the first garden in Genesis 2 and 3, and Jesus is the new Adam, which Paul explicitly says Adam is a type of Christ in Romans 5:14. He uses the very word “type,” a foreshadowing.

AS: I love that scar on his hand there.

AS: Linens are interesting in the light motif that occurs often with film too.

AS: They are always very symbolic.

AS: And the way those collapse that was magnificent, the way you just see them collapsing. In fact, I can’t remember which evangelist it is, mentions that, the word he uses to describe how—oh it’s John. When John says that when Peter looks in the tomb, in John, he says, “When he looked in the tomb he saw the winding sheet was collapsed.” It was collapsed and Christ didn’t have to extricate himself from it by unwrapping himself, the way he says. In contrast with Lazarus. When there are other resurrections in the Bible earlier, they were just really resurrections to the mortal life that we still live now. This is a resurrection of a whole new order. He doesn’t have to be physically unwound. He just can go right through with his resurrection body the winding sheet.

AS: I think of the beautiful Easter hymn, Victi ma pascal elotes [?] it also lays heavy emphasis on the linens.

AS: Monica Balucci said that she felt compelled to be in this film when she had the offer to do it. And when I first met her it was over dinner in La Terra in Italy. She asked the question more than once, she said, “Why should Jesus make a difference to me?” She said, “I know that somehow now he does, but I don’t know the answer to that question.” She repeated that about a year later too. She was in Los Angeles for a publicity. That’s just the perfect question that this film provokes. Why should Jesus make a difference to me?

AS: I love her face in this film. I thought she had a really beautiful, spiritual face.

AS: Almost the kind of face you would expect Mary, the mother of our Lord, to have. So she certainly brought something very spiritual presence to the knot [?] of Mary, and Mary Magdalene and John at the foot of the cross and throughout.

MG: Hardly a word spoken and she was really present there, you know.

AS: I think that Maya Morgenstern, how many ways can you express sadness? She managed hundreds of different ways.

MG: And it was really juxtaposition between the performances really. The three of them had to go through their own experience in witnessing this. You have to have them breaking down and being strong at different times and supporting each other. It was quite difficult to maintain that level, so that you had to find ways to drop back and find different ways of expressing it, which we all explored. And they came through.

AS: Maya had many things that she herself suggested, didn’t she, during the film?

MG: Oh yeah. She is very creative and really participated with full gusto. You know, just that thing where she picks up the earth.

AS: Yes, that was hers, wasn’t it?

MG: Oh yeah. And I just saw that and I went, “Thank you,” because I kind of got it right away. Also for the opening lines from the seder that she introduced. I thought it was just beautiful.

AS: I remember too during the filming of the carpenter shop when she calls Jesus in to eat, that she had sort of ideas there that ended up being incorporated in the final.

MG: She is very giving.

AS: One thing I have never understood is the critics of the film…

[ There is a gap in my recording here. I am not sure why.]

…the impact of the way, Mel wanted us to by making this movie. And so to walk out of the movie saying, “I was upset. I was distraught. I was shaken by this. I was devastated, emotionally devastated,” how is that a criticism? That is in fact, I think, from one sense the greatest compliment that could be paid. Because the film achieved its objective which was to shake them up and to make them realize you cannot look at life from your comfort zone and realize that life is only possible—eternal life is only possible if you commit to yourself to this one who underwent this suffering and death on your behalf.

AS: For every one of these people, when I see their names, I think of what a profound spiritual experience it was for them throughout the filming of the film. Nobody came away neutral. And then with the post-production, the people in the studio, when everything was finished said that—Normally when a film is finished you never want to see each other again. But because of this film everybody wanted to keep in contact. And so far I think that has pretty much happened.

MG: Oh absolutely. Several have become tight friends.

AS: It was a bonding experience for them.

AS: The tremendous humanity of this film, I can identify with very readily.

JB: …distant God, or not a religious abstraction.

AS: I know it brought into focus my own life, my own vocation as a priest, brought it into focus. It is very simple. We have to be like that. We have to love like that and to give ourselves till the end and live like that.

AS: Did I see Wolfgang Amedeus there as one of the music…?

MG: Oh yeah.

AS: Give me a nod, what the heck.

MG: Yeah, we know Wolfie. You know he was a good guy.

AS: It is always edifying, enlightening and strengthening to see the film again. Personally.

AS: Even for the forty-third time.

AS: I lost track. I don’t know how many times I have seen it.

MG: Hey for two hours, I think we have only just scratched the surface really, theologically. You could go back and do it all again and you can have a whole other deeper layer. I guess that’s it.