March 23, 2004

Getting to Iraq requires a flight from neighboring Jordan that ends with a hair-raising flourish: a 60-degree “corkscrew” turn into the former Saddam International Airport. “We have a slight missile problem,” said the impish pilot, a white South African, explaining that the tricky maneuver is necessary to avoid getting hit by a ground-launched rocket.

In April the NFL will bless about 250 draftees with a professional contract; the rest will be cleaning out their identities along with their lockers as they make a sharp turn out of football into new lives.

Realistically or not, most of the elite football players who appear on the playing fields of Division I programs harbor hopes of a professional career. Yet in April, the vast majority of seniors will put those hopes to sleep in a transition that is no tailgate picnic.

The Buddha once remarked that understanding his instruction is like “trying to catch a poisonous snake in the wild”: it’s all too easy to get bitten. Among Christian teachings, none are more treacherous than those about Jesus’ Passion (from the Latin passio, “suffering”). Theological ideas have teeth. In The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson ventures out into the wild and gets bitten.

Years ago I was part of a religion class in which students were asked to share their religious autobiographies. I was preceded by a Jewish man who talked about his faith in God in such a way that I thought he was talking about the God I knew through Jesus Christ. How could this be? Up to that point I was steeped in Christian supersessionism—the belief that because the Jews had rejected Jesus, the Christian church has taken over the covenant relationship with God that was once held by Israel.

The American Jewish Committee suggests that Passion plays should take these points into consideration:

1. Jesus must be depicted as a faithful Jew, not as someone opposed to the Torah. He should be portrayed as a pious, observant Jew of his time.

2. The Hebrew Bible, called “The Old Testament” by Christians, must not be seen in Passion plays as either outmoded or replaced by the New Testament. Judaism must not be pitted as a stereotype against Christianity in a battle between a static, overly legalistic religion and a religion of love and compassion.

Every version of the Passion story deviates fundamentally from the New Testament, which contains four divergent Gospels rather than one conflated version. The Gospels also emphasize the life before and the resurrection after the death. The life/death/resurrection proportions, judged by the number of chapters devoted to each part, vary—from a 13:2:1 ratio in Mark to 25:2:1 in Matthew—but a Gospel never sums it all up as Passion.

In the 1927 silent version of The King of Kings, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, Christ is first seen from the point of view of a blind man regaining his sight. It is a masterful touch that adds grandeur to the story. Over the decades, scores of films have been made about Jesus of Nazareth. Many of these productions dripped with Hollywood glitz, while others tackled serious issues of faith. All of them understood that no story about Jesus is complete without addressing the holy trilogy of events: the mystery of his life, the agony of his death and the miracle of his resurrection.

In the compelling story of capitalism the protagonist is the free individual who willingly exchanges his or her stuff for other people’s stuff. The land of capitalism is a kind of peaceable kingdom in which the wolf and the lamb meet voluntarily in the marketplace to engage in fair competition. Even this whimsical image suggests, however, that capitalism depends upon prior rules of what is acceptable and what is not.

Pity the poor business executive.