Zetland Park Methodist Church Pastoral Letters
‘Oh, it’s enough to put you off religion for life!’
That’s but one comment that has been made about the
controversial film, ‘The Passion of the Christ’.
Here we are coming face to face with ‘Reality
religion’, as opposed to comfortable, storybook
religion’. It’s easy to interpret our faith
through other human’s eyes, and seek through that a
panacea that will keep our minds, hearts and even lives, from
pain and distress.
Where we create for ourselves ‘a comfort zone’
that we dare anyone else to either enter, let alone destroy.
But maybe, just maybe, that is precisely what this new film
sets out to do. To portray for us all the REALITY of seeking
to challenge a brutal world power [how else can they have
subdued almost half the known world?] ---- Of what happens
when religion and a secular power are in cahoots to snuff out
a light that will undoubtedly expose their evil, underhanded
ways and let the ordinary folk really know what is going
on.
We tend all too often to accept an edited highlight so that
we will not swoon at the blood and gore that is the obvious
result when brute force meets an equally determined force of
good, epitomised in Jesus the Christ.
I believe the filmmaker has portrayed for us a reality that
all too often we walk away from. As a consequence our faith;
our belief; our religion becomes a place where we hide, and
not an opportunity to remind the world that there is more,
much more, to life and its living, than brutality; maiming
and killing ‘just for the sake of it’.
First, there is the betrayal --- the situation none of us would ever find ourselves in [?]
Then there is the ‘running away’ --- something we would never do [?]
Followed by the ‘doubting’, the event and the future --- a thing we never even contemplate [?]
There is the ‘questioning’. Who rolled the stone away? Does it matter? IT HAPPENED, and the Lord of Life had been raised!! But that’s never a question we ask[?]
He appeared even to ----- but am I included in this?
Take a look again at the Cross ….. the EMPTY cross.
Has He ever challenged you about ‘betrayal’; ‘running away’; ‘doubting’; ‘questioning’?
His arms are flung wide, which seek to incorporate even us ---- in all our sinfulness.
In coming to Him, battered, bruised, beaten BUT RAISED we are forgiven!
There is no doubt that our Lord suffered, and suffered
greatly. However, the filmmaker or anyone else for that
matter seeks to interpret it, the point is that Jesus came,
and for our sins gave His life so that we could
live.
Through that brutality, actual or perceived, let us see a
LOVE that is beyond our understanding, and accept it how it
is given -----FREELY.
Let that ‘experience’ of ‘dying to sin, and
being raised with Christ’ be ours this Easter-tide, and
let that love flow like a stream of living water, so that
others too, may be touched and changed .