the passion revisited
i decided to watch the passion again for easter today... and yes i cried again. this was the first time i had seen it all the way through since i originally saw it. i still loved it. the relationship portrayed in the movie between jesus and his mother is beautiful and the jim cavaziel's pleading for the soldiers' and pharisees' forgiveness choked me up.
the film had me thinking again though. why did christ have to be physically tortured? with the (common) lds view where the suffering for our sins occurs in gethsemene, where does the beating and crucifixion fit in? perhaps the answer is that the physical torture and death did not have to happen. it just happened. what christ was experiencing was the unfortunate aspect of life we all experience, sh**. that's right, sh** happens. perhaps what was happening here was the ultimate primer to the question, "why do bad things happen to good people?". usually there is no answer. there is no reason. **it just happens.
there are some things we can take from this though. first of all, **it happens to all of us. nobody is free. god lets **it happen to the best and worst of people. we should not assume, as the man who helped christ carry the cross did, that a person is guilty of something just because **it is happening to them. rather, we should refrain from judging and help them out of **it. second, **it doesn't have to happen. we can stop **it. it is out duty to see that **it does happen, and when it does, it is our duty to help others out of **it. we especially should not be inflicting **it on others.
christ came to redeem and liberate the downtrodden, poor, and oppressed. in the process, he not only took on their infirmities, he became one of them. it should be our duty as christians to follow him and free those around us. it's time to lift others instead of ourselves.
hmmm...it's funny, i don;t know exactly how i stumbled on your blog, but i was reading this entry, and i think the asnwer to your question why did christ have to die in such a violent way was to first of all prove the point that sin is serious and ugly deserves serious, ugly consequences, but also, i think the movie did a good job of making a statement that they could have kept wacking with whips and beating him and whatever else they wanted to do, and at any point he could have saved himself, but the point was that they did not kill him. he says that no man could take his life, but that he willingly layed down his life for us. a history teacher told me that jesus' treatment by the romans was much more harsh than the way they treated regular offenders, and that some historians believe that any other man would have died just from the beatings alone, and not even make it to the cross. who knows if that is really true, but i think that it is. the movie and the bible make the statement that jesus died when he wanted to die, because at any given moment he could have called down leagues of angels to save him.
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