While on a trip to Peru, I visited the main Catholic Cathedral in Lima. As expected, inside the cathedral was a large cross from which hung a life-sized image of the crucified Jesus near (or at) the moment of death. While I had seen many representations of Jesus on the Cross in
Europe and North America (as well as explicit illustrations of the martyring of the Saints) I was unprepared for the image presented. The carved Jesus’ wounds were deep and horrific. White ribs stood out underneath ripped flesh – a glistening heart and lungs were just visible within the dark hollow deep within his open chest. Blood seemed to flow fresh and warm from the many punctures and tears that had ruined what was once a perfect body. Beneath a crown of vicious thorns, Jesus’ face was a bloody pulp. The image of the flayed and dead Jesus rendered in such medical realism nearly overwhelmed me, and I stared in fascination and revulsion. Why would such an image be produced? The answer, I was told by a cathedral guide, lay in the daily experience of the local Indians centuries ago. They had suffered such violent treatment and torture at the hands of their conquerors that the usual depictions of Christ’s sufferings did not impress them. It was decided by the Church of the period to exaggerate the wounds and suffering so that it would seem beyond the native’s own. How else would the Indians accept that He gave His life so they might live under the whip of their Masters?
Expedient exaggeration of the violence done to the body of Jesus aligns Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) with the intentions of the makers of the carved Jesus in the Lima Cathedral. How else to convince a secular audience steeped in the violent images found in films such as Braveheart (Gibson, 1995) and Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) that Jesus’ death was such a monumental act of self-sacrifice that he absorbed all the sins of Mankind? And absorb is exactly what The Passion’s Jesus does, willingly accepting the impossible violence done to his body as necessary for the greater good.