"Risen" Satisfies but Raises Vexing Questions

I gave up Christianity in my early teens, but I've never lost my capacity to enjoy a good Bible story on the big or small screen. My favorite small or any screen version is Franco Zefirelli's groundbreaking miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.

I don't know what my favorite big screen version is, but it's definitely not Mel Gibson's interminable gore fest The Passion of the Christ, even if its sadomasochistic artfulness can't be denied.

Actually, I can't think of any big screen version that has done all that much for me, at least not since I was a kid, but I've enjoyed some more than others. The Ten Commandments is one, although, come to think of it, I haven't watched all of it since I was a kid. Martin Scorsese's heterodox The Last Temptation of Christ is another.

Upon further reflection, there don't seem to be that many Bible films, and I've seen fewer still. But that's not because I haven't wanted to see more that are worth seeing.

So, when Risen came out earlier this year, it appeared to be promising enough that I hankered to venture to the local cineplex to see it, even though I seldom visit the theater to see any movies these days. But I still waited till it came to Redbox and I received a discount offer the other day I couldn't refuse.

I've read two antithetical reviews in major publications that speak to differing aspects of my own perspective on the film. One, by NYT critic Jeannette Catsoulis, derides the film for the "stiffly skeptical countenance" of its leading character, its "exhausted" cinematography, its "smiling cipher" portrayal of Jesus, and more shortcomings that render the film into more of an inadvertent sequel to Monty Python's Life of Brian than into a commandingly serious treatment of the biblical gospels.

On the other hand, the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle compliments the film's "brand new strategy" of focusing its point of view not on bigger-than-life religious figures and their experiences but on a secular Roman character's experience of the extraordinary events he witnesses. And LaSalle opines that if the biblical events the film portrays really happened, they probably happened a lot more like the film represents, with its unique mixing of the mundane with the sublime, than typical Bible films depict with their excessively etherealized religious figures and scenes.

So, what's the film about? In a proverbial nutshell, it's about a high Roman military official called a Tribune and named Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) who's ordered by Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth) to seal Yeshua's tomb after the crucifixion, to investigate the disappearance of the body after it goes missing, and who subsequently experiences supernatural events he struggles heroically to "reconcile" with his secular Roman worldview and worldly ambitions.

That's the skeletal outline of the story. And I agree with the derisive NYT critic Catsoulis that the scripting and acting of most of the characters, especially including the Mary Magdalene and Yeshua ones, aren't particularly compelling. For while the casting of Cliff Curtis as Yeshua can be and has been praised for being more in keeping with the probable actual physical features of a real Yeshua, Curtis is no Robert Powell, not only in physiognomy but also in acting ability.

But I disagree with Catsoulis' criticism of the casting and performance of Joseph Fiennes' non-biblical Roman Tribune Clavius. I think he does a very credible job of portraying Clavius' conflicted but stoically controlled response to his unsettling experiences.

Unlike the Chronicle reviewer LaSalle, I'd like to have seen the film tip the balance a little further away from the mundane and toward the sublime than it did. The apostles seemed a little too commonplace and matter-of-fact in their demeanor to be the credibly appointed representatives of the one and only Son, and a freshly resurrected one at that, of the one, true creator and Lord of the Universe. And Yeshua was even more uninspiringly unimpressive in demeanor and conduct.

Yet, I'm sympathetic to LaSalle's notion that if Yeshua and his words and miraculous deeds shone in too glorious a light reminiscent of this, it would have been even harder to explain how anyone could resist being instantly, profoundly, and completely transfigured by him and how he could have ended up dying a gruesome death nailed to a wooden cross. The film appears to have largely succeeded in walking the fine line between overpowering hagiography and dusty, ho-hum realism and makes you think, in LaSalle's words, "if all this did actually happen, it probably happened something like this."

Yet, "Risen" raises a key question I've asked many times and to which I've never seen or heard an answer that I find even remotely satisfying. In one scene, Yeshua heals a leper, and Clavius asks his disciples if they've ever had doubts about him. They admit that they have at times. Clavius then astutely asks how they've sustained their faith and purpose, and they reply that miracles like the healing they've just witnessed are the reason.

But I've often asked how reasonable it is to expect people who haven't personally witnessed any such miracles much less many of them to believe in and to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all they strength, and with all thy mind" or to even deeply desire to. And, interestingly, Yeshua himself admits in the film that if it's been so difficult at times for his own disciples, of all people, to follow him faithfully despite all they've experienced, how vastly more so it must be for those who haven't shared in their extraordinary experiences. Yet, isn't this what the Christian God allegedly demands of us upon possible if not certain pain of everlasting torment if we don't comply?

I think "Risen" is a pretty good Bible film, but if it was made to, besides earn money, inspire and strengthen Christian faith, a genuinely reflective viewing of it could end up producing the opposite effect.

Sacramento Pastor Praises Orlando Killings and Urges Even Worse

Last night I saw this video spotlighting the pastor of a local Baptist church who responded to the recent, horrific shootings in an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida by praising in his "sermon" the killings and wishing that all gays in this country would be rounded up by the federal government and executed by firing squads.

My initial reaction was extreme anger, and I immediately took to Google and Yelp to post the following review of his "sermon," even though many others had beaten me to the punch:

FYI, Roger Jimenez, the monstrous example of a "man of the cloth" that heads this church, is on record (which you can find on YouTube) for praising the killings in the Orlando nightclub Sunday morning and for saying that the federal government should round up every gay person in the country, put them against a wall, and "blow their brains out." This makes the late Fred Phelps sound like a sweetheart by comparison! Is this the kind of church you want to attend, and, if it is, what does this say about YOU?

I actually wanted to say far more. I wanted to say things that could conceivably have brought me to the attention of local law enforcement, especially if Jimenez or his church subsequently met with any kind of violence. That's how angry I was at the outset.

But in time I managed to cool down and let my longstanding perspective on human mentation and behavior take hold. This perspective is that everything we think, feel, and do is ultimately the result of interacting biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors we do not consciously choose, and so we are ultimately not "responsible" for them.

Thus, "Pastor" Jimenez's virulently vile remarks against the Orlando victims and against LGBT individuals in general arise from complex internal and environmental conditions for which he can't rightly be blamed and for which he, therefore, shouldn't be despised and vindictively persecuted. Instead, we should feel compassion for him as a victim of those conditions even as we condemn his remarks.

But then how should this condemnation of his remarks play out? That is, how should we voice our condemnation, and what should we seek to accomplish with it?

I think this guy has amply proven himself unfit to be preaching the Christian gospel. But is that my call, as a non-Christian, to make? Should individual Christians and the Christian community as a whole take a public stand against this pastor's words and against his pastoral fitness the way many Christians say that all Muslims should publicly condemn all atrocities and hate speech coming from radical Muslims?

So far, I don't see any Christian uprising against this guy, and I'd be very surprised if I ever do. I asked one prominent Christian apologist in the GOD group what he thinks about this. He may surprise me, but I expect a tepid response from him at best.

Should the federal government, as some have suggested, revoke the tax-exempt status of Jimenez's church, and, if so, under what legal provisions?

I think individual Christians and the Christian community as a whole should condemn this man's virulent message of hate in the strongest terms. If they fail to do so, I'd consider them worse than remiss. I'd consider them enablers of malignant hatred in a Christian guise.

And who knows to what future acts of horrendous violence the propagation and perpetuation of such hatred could lead?

The Resurrection: Myth or Fact?

In 2005, I posted the following to another blog. I'd like to share it here too, because, even though it pertains to the subject of a TV program that aired eleven years ago, that subject is still plenty topical to the concerns of the GOD group.

I watched a 20/20 special last Friday exploring the Resurrection story of Jesus. The program featured comments by leading Christian and history scholars and a tour of the most likely places of Jesus’ crucifixion, entombment, and movements after his resurrection. The overall theme of the program seemed to be that Jesus truly did rise from the dead in some fashion and that we have ample grounds for believing this.

Scholars argued that no one of that time, including the Romans, is on record as having denied that Jesus’ body disappeared from his tomb shortly after his death. Second, all of his disciples claimed to have seen his resurrected body even if they didn’t always recognize him at first. Third, and most compellingly, although most of his disciples were in hiding after his apprehension and during his execution, their lives changed profoundly after claiming to see his resurrected body. From that point on, they and their followers openly declared their faith and risked and, in many cases, had inflicted upon them arrest, agonizing torture, and death for that faith. Finally, quite a number of men lived around the time of Jesus who preached and had followings of their own and claimed to be the Messiah and to work miracles, and they too were crucified. But we don’t know anything more about them, whereas Jesus’ life and story grew into the most popular and powerful religion the world has ever seen. An itinerant preacher for only a year or two (biblical accounts differ on this) who lived only into his early thirties became, after his death, the most famous if not revered person in history. How could all of this have happened if Jesus was not truly the Son of God and did not truly rise from the dead?

I don’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God. I don’t believe that he rose from the dead. I believe that Christianity is based on a fairy tale. I don’t claim to know for sure that it is, but I never cease to be amazed at how otherwise intelligent and sensible people of today can believe the biblical story of Jesus without question and at how an American politician who said he or she doesn’t believe it wouldn’t have a proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of being elected to high office, whereas one who espoused belief in such an equally implausible figure as Santa Claus or a flying saucer God would be mocked and scorned right out of the campaign if not committed to a mental hospital.

I wrote a moment ago of the “biblical story” of Jesus because that is essentially all it is. So far as I know, there is scant and totally unremarkable mention of Jesus by any of his contemporaries other than his followers. Virtually everything believers think they know about Jesus comes from a few books in a religious document designed to spread and reinforce the Christian faith, and even these books were written decades after Jesus’ death. And, interestingly enough, even these books differ in what they say about the matter. Most of our information about Jesus’ life comes from the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Yet, Mark ends with an empty tomb, and the other Gospels differ on important details regarding who saw Jesus’ resurrected body and how and where they saw it. This hardly seems like the stuff of indubitable historical fact.

But even if all these books agreed with one another and told the same story, there would still be serious problems with the story itself. There is the terribly vexing question of why an omniscient and omnipotent God of supreme love and mercy would create human beings with a nature he always knew would sin and require redemption, and why he would decide that the best and only way to provide redemption was to incarnate himself into Jesus and suffer and die on the cross and then require that everyone from that era until the end of the world believe the biblical story of Jesus if they were to be saved. If we are to believe what the Gospels tell us, even Jesus’ own disciples didn’t believe that Jesus was God incarnate whose mission was to redeem humankind by his death and resurrection until they allegedly saw him resurrected. Though they lived with him, heard all his preachings, and saw all of his alleged miracles, they were devastated when they saw him apprehended by the Jewish authorities, and they ran and hid from the Jews and the Romans lest they meet the same fate as Jesus. And when some reported seeing Jesus alive again after his death, most of these same disciples didn’t believe it. As far as they were concerned, Jesus was dead and so were their hopes of him being the Messiah who would deliver their people from Roman dominance.

If even these disciples who knew Jesus more intimately by far than anyone didn’t understand his mission and didn’t believe he was the Son of God and didn’t believe he died for our sins and was resurrected until they allegedly saw his resurrected body with their own eyes, how in the world can we, almost two thousand years later, be expected to believe a word of it? Interestingly enough, one of the scholars, Fr. Richard McBrien, interviewed in the 20/20 program said that he sometimes has difficulty believing it. If a Catholic priest and leading authority on Catholic teachings has this difficulty, how can the rest of us, especially those of us outside the Church and outside Christianity entirely, be reasonably expected to believe at all? Yet we are told that we will suffer forever in hell if we don’t and rise to heaven only if we do. This seems utterly and completely absurd!

Of course, we are still left with the questions of how Jesus’ disciples allegedly transformed from dispirited, terrified men in hiding after Jesus’ arrest to bold evangelists risking limb and life after his death, and how Christianity went on to become the world’s most popular religion.How could this have happened if Jesus wasn’t truly the Son of God who rose from the dead to redeem us?

I admit that it’s difficult to explain, but when seeking an explanation, doesn’t it make sense to pick simpler, more plausible explanations over more complicated and less plausible ones? If so, is it simpler and more plausible to believe that Jesus was what the bible and Christian religion say he was, or that he was a mortal man who died on the cross and that his followers felt so desperate to find justification and meaning for the lives they had led with Jesus and the sacrifices they had made that they succumbed to a kind of collective hallucination and delusion about Jesus’ resurrection that gave them overriding purpose for the rest of their lives? Is it simpler and more plausible to assume that Christianity became the world’s most popular and powerful religion because it’s the true religion, or that Jesus lived in the right place at the right time for his followers to influence Roman civilization to influence all of dominant Western civilization with the Christian message? Does anyone believe that Jesus would have the impact he did on the world if he had been born and executed in Tibet or Mexico?

I would like to believe that Jesus was an extraordinarily wise and spiritually realized man whose biblical story of life, death, and resurrection is a mixture of truth and myth that can have powerful metaphorical and transfiguring meaning for humankind. But I cannot, using the tools of reason and commonsense that God himself allegedly gave us, believe that Jesus was literally what the bible and conventional Christian teachings tell me he was.How can anyone?