I finally got around to doing something I’d been meaning to for a while. I watched The Passion of The Christ. I figured it was a good time to do so being as it’s the Easter weekend.
Also given my increasing dissatisfaction with organised religion – it was interesting to watch it through my somewhat jaded eyes.
Was it emotional – Yes. How could you watch someone, even in a movie, go through so much and not be moved?
Yes there were things I didn’t necessarily like or agree with, but then no-one this side of heaven knows exactly what happened that day. Anything else is in some form conjecture.
As it stands the film did for me what I suspect it did for many; it reminded me of the sheer bloody magnitude of the cost Christ paid for my life. Some may never really have been aware of it and others of us just do well to be reminded of it.
All this ties in well with thoughts I have been having about communion. I don’t feel we give it the gravitas that it should have. Jesus set communion in place to remind us of his sacrifice and for me recently, it has felt just part of the service, something we do every other week fitted in between the worship service and church news.
If necessary watch the film again. See the bloody pulp his body was made into – injuries it would be incredibly unlikely someone would survive from. Leather or rods snapping against and into the skin, metal digging in and tearing. This is the body we are commissioned to remember; that blood dripping and pooling on the ground is the blood that was shed for us, sprayed over and soaking into the earth.
We take communion like it was at the last supper, not as we should, remembering the events of the dark day that followed where Jesus stepped up and put himself in my place. From the comfort of the upper room hearing the words but not really understanding rather than the foot of the cross as the torn and bloody flesh was secured to the wood and the blood dripped it’s way to the ground.
I have become so shallow, despite my declaration that I’ll still love God even if He does nothing else for me. I still believe but my faith has become something of a side note. I don’t mean that I no longer put it in people’s faces, I never did that, it’s more that it is there when I can be bothered. It is tied too much to what I have problems with and not enough to the man whose death tore the temple of organised religion in two.
Christ rose from His tomb and that is what we remember on this day, so likewise as I face a new day I will bend my knee and life my eyes to the throne, acknowledging my unworthiness and my gratefulness.
