A Break From the Ordinary

C.S. Lewis or Max Lucado I am not and I don’t pretend to be. But Easter Sunday has come and gone and I would be remiss if I didn’t take a few moments away from sports and focus on what really matters. I hope you enjoy…

As has been my recent tradition right around Easter Sunday each year, I watched The Passion of the Christ the other night. Just like most movies that I watch multiple times, I tend to notice something different each time I see it. While the movie is, and rightfully so, a two-hour barrage of graphic violence and seemingly endless torture, the subtleties of its message can get lost in the brutality. You focus so much on the inhumane treatment of Jesus that you forget about the little things, the often overlooked nuances that only add to the temporary sorrow of the film and the story itself. In my most recent viewing of the movie, I picked up on some of these and I want to share them with you now.

The movie opens with our Hero in the Garden of Gethsemane praying with the type of intensity typically reserved only for the terminal wing in hospitals. But even that metaphor doesn’t do it justice. Maybe this will help: Scripture says that while He prayed, Christ’s sweat was like drops of blood as it dripped off of him and onto the ground below. It was dripping onto ground which I’m sure was not very far from his drenched face.

Now I have read in many different places that this sweat-into-blood thing is an actual existing condition called hematohydrosis, insinuating to me that this occurrence is not only possible, but probable as well. However, I’m not really into this idea that everything can be explained away by scientific rationale. After all, we’re dealing with the Son of God here, not some laboratory guinea pig lying in a gurney having needles inserted into its body every five minutes. Therefore, I’m willing to accept some supernatural influence in this situation. Regardless of whether this is an existing condition or not, the point is made – both in Scripture and in the movie – that this scene in the garden was one of extreme personal agony, one that lasted almost the entire night.

This is the ultimate example of the all-night prayer vigil. My church recently held one of those vigils as we prepare to break ground on our new church building. People signed up for different times throughout the night to pray for the elders, our church and the building process itself. It was a noble effort, indeed. But I doubt anyone was found that night to be suffering from hematohydrosis. This is not a knock against my church or churches in general; our problem as humans is that we sometimes lack that mustard-seed faith which spurs on life-changing all-night prayer vigils like this one.

When dealing with Christ’s all-night prayer vigil in the garden, we are talking about the ultimate in human agony and sorrow. That’s human agony and sorrow. But this is no ordinary human. You have to remember that our Hero knew well in advance what was in store for Him. He knew what was going to happen, how it was going to happen and who was going to do it. He knew the details, not because He was a psychic, but because He was God incarnate. And foreknowing what was going to take place only added to the agony He must have felt.

Hence the sweat turning to blood. Hence the tears. Hence the total reliance on His Father for deliverance.

How many of us – myself included – have ever prayed like Christ prayed that night? How many of us have felt such deep despair that depending on God was our only hope? How many of us have that faith, the faith that trusts completely in God no matter what the conditions are? We pray for God to deliver us from the rough times, but do we trust in Him to help us if He allows us to experience them?

The answer is typically no, and the sleeping disciples just a few feet away from Him are perfect examples of that. Forgive them for their ignorance and seeming indifference (we must forgive, as we are often also guilty of the same thing), they had been on a three-year whirlwind of a ride with a Man who had turned their lives upside down and their heads were probably still spinning from it.

This is another subtlety that can be easily overlooked if you watch The Passion only once. Far from being portrayed as saints, the disciples are shown as imperfect followers of a perfect Christ. Specifically, the movie shows sides of both Peter (“the Rock”) and John (“the disciple whom Jesus loved”) that Scripture may not include, but certainly are believable. Peter displays a sharp tendency toward violence and rage; John is almost completely lacking in the kind of forcefulness and zeal that is so evident in the books he wrote. If we are honest, we realize that we are more like them than we want to admit. We are more like the men who deserted Christ in His time of need than we are like the Man who held a personal all-night prayer vigil.

That’s yet another subtlety of the movie that a simple reading of the Gospels may or may not reveal. Christ was deserted by his closest companions in His greatest time of need. Outside of a loyal few (mostly women I might add), He was abandoned and left to suffer almost completely by Himself. It is safe to say that He suffered almost as much emotionally and spiritually as he did physically. And His despair in the garden during the prayer vigil is a preview of that suffering yet to come. Still, it is the suffering that the movie itself does a great job of portraying, until ending triumphantly with the resurrection and a not-so-subtle glimpse of the nail-scarred hands.

So another Easter has come and gone, but hopefully our focus will not change as the dates do. Some of the Christian world distinguished last week as “Holy Week,” even going so far as to give each day a special name. While all of that is fine and good, it tends to limit the celebration of what really happened to just a few days each year. And that is exactly what should not happen.

The Passion of the Christ has its obvious themes and its subtle points. But there is nothing subtle about the veil that was torn or the body that was raised or the hope that we have.