You know, I really didn’t see that when I watched the movie. Are you sure you’re not putting it there by looking for it too hard?

STAN: I didn’t put anything there. Ched Myers wrote this. Ched’s point is that the history of Christian anti-Semitism (shared by Catholics and Protestants alike) goes back to Passion Plays, where the story of torture and execution begins only with Jesus’ confrontation in Jerusalem with Jewish religious authorities, leaving the impression that Jews killed Christ. This motif has tremendous resonance, but it is a motif that doesn’t tell the whole story… just the bloody bits, with comprador Jewish religious authorities in a leading role as heavy (even though this was a thoroughly Roman set-up). The story building up to that is one where Jesus and Friends are themselves reverent Jews who are padding the dusty roads of a (foeriegn) militarily-occupied land. Unless the whole story of the gospels is examined, the meaning of the cross remains not merely untintelligible, but turned into its opposite. The snare that Christ sets for the zeitgeist that was personified as “Satan” was the exposure of Satan’s most effective tool: retribution. If one wants to live a life of discipleship, then the key first step is abandonment of retribution… in every aspect of life from the microcosm of personal relaitonships to the macrocosm of politics. His followers, who all (ahem… except the women) had abandoned him before Golgotha, were confused because they had never quite gotten their heads around this pivotal point within the ministry and movement of Jesus. When the Romans crucified him, he asked God to “forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing.” At that point, there comes an earthquake (a metaphor for what is experienced in the mind of the Centurian who says upon hearing this forgiveness, this is truly The One). I think here of African American Civil Rights marchers confronted by hostile Southern police, asking the police to pray with them in the street. That’s how Christ(ians) can trip up the devil (the spirit [system] that seeds domination and retribution). They call the triune God (which Paul calls Love, Grace, and Fellowship) in to disrupt the cycle with the doctrine of spiritual equality (each and all are children of God, beloved of God, and therefore availed of the possibility of redemption). Oddly enough, even as the Greek scriptures used the masculinized idiom of their day, this is really the ethos of a Good Mother… nurturing, patient, relational, with plenty of start-overs.

STAN: yes