It's not uncommon for Christians who take cinema seriously to parallel secular films to the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. While the results can be rather odd—I'm sorry, Mr. Bronski, but I cannot see the groundhog as Christ—there's certainly an underlying rationale: All great art, including all great cinema, highlights or undrapes at least a bit of universal truth, and given the dozens upon dozens of universal truths underlined by Jesus during his life and through his resurrection, finding overlap between the two sets of truths is not difficult. So it's disconcerting to watch The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's hyped-to-the-heavens Jesus film, and notice that nearly every decision Gibson makes hides this plethora of truths he could have applied from Jesus's life, except for one: Pain hurts.

In spending ninety-five percent of the running time traversing that tiny parcel of the Bible that stretches from Mark 14:35 on one end to Mark 15:41 on the other, Gibson pointedly ignores—except for a few flashbacks—all of Jesus’ life prior to the events leading to his arrest. "Who is this man that the Jews and Romans so hate," The Passion asks, implicitly, by showing scenes of their abhorrence of Him, "and why do they hate Him so?" Gibson’s avoidance of all but the last day of Jesus’ life ensures there is never a cinematic answer. There are whippings and lashings and blood puddles and the interminable tearing of skin—all no doubt mostly accurate, but also seemingly pointless without Mark 1:1 through Mark 14:34. Claims that the film is anti-Semitic must stem from this lack of background: Given The Passion as a sole information source, one would have to assume that 0^th century Jews had an irrational dread of this pleasant, unassuming, uncontroversial man. Even Christians’ own Gospels make it clear that he was often none of those three adjectives.

Of course, those of us who spent every adolescent Sabbath listening to Bible stories in a cramped church classroom know who Jesus was. If you went to my Sunday School in the ‘80s, you knew the Michael W. Smith song with a chorus that summarizes Jesus’s subversiveness succinctly: "He broke the old rules steeped in tradition / He tore the Holy Veil away / Questioning those in powerful position / Running to those who called His name / But nobody knew His secret ambition / Was to give His life away." It’s must be those of us who grew up in Sunday School that the film is meant for—it must be, since to people with no previous knowledge of Jesus it must seem incoherent—so shouldn’t the film be judged on that intent? To a degree, yes. But without a historic milieu, The Passion’s Jesus is so indistinct—actor James Caviezel is required to do little except writhe, wail, and look forlorn—that there were times when I literally forgot that the character on screen is the man I consider my Lord and Savior. The Passion of the Christ, with its focus on the temporal pain of Jesus to the exclusion of everything else, is forty minutes of judicious cuts (and the reshooting of one scene, of course) away from being the eighty-minute-long The Passion of One of Those Guys on a Cross Next to the Christ.

Gibson’s idea for limiting The Passion is marginally successful, however, in how it ignores for most of the running time Christ’s role as God to focus wholly on Christ’s role as man. It’s often comfortable to focus solely on Christ’s spirituality and forget that, as a physical being, he also thirsted, hungered, slept, made tables and chairs, peed, threw up, felt physical pain, felt emotional pain. There are worse ways to understand Jesus than to segregate His two roles, and if Gibson's film only portrays the emotional and physical pain of Christ, that pain is, after all, still part of his human nature. (Further, the one shot that shows Jesus as God, symbolized by a tear from heaven, is by far the most inspired moment of the film.) But imagine, as I suggested earlier, if The Passion of The Christ were about someone else who was crucified, and if he were shown (without any background) tried, convicted, flogged, beaten, thrashed, and put up on a cross to die. What sorts of parallels would you find between the protagonist's story in that film and the universal truths underscored by the life of Jesus? Beyond obvious story similarities and some hubbub about how Jesus, like all humans, felt emotional and physical pain, I dare say you'd have better luck with the groundhog. It’s shocking, but true: Mel Gibson’s Jesus has less in common with the whole Christ and the truths he revealed than many seemingly ridiculous Jesus proxies.