Only Human

The lights go down, and there is a blue-eyed man gazing somewhere off into the distance over my head. Dark hair falling to his shoulders, a wreath of thorns fixed round his brow—he is instantly identifiable and totally unrecognizable at the same time. Internally, I flinch.

The man is Robert Powell, as seen in the television miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. I’ve never felt comfortable seeing actor portrayals of Jesus, perhaps because I never grew up watching those movies. But when faced with the montage of various movie stills at the beginning of class, I wondered exactly what I was recoiling from: The idea of re-enacting an event of such very real and very divine significance? The notion of God as another character to play, on the same interpretive level as any other fictional character in a summer blockbuster? The thought of Jesus’ humiliating death in the first place?

Medieval Christians would not have been disturbed whatsoever—they yearned for the chance to see God and be part of the story, and this desire holds especially true regarding the events of the crucifixion, as can be seen throughout medieval art, plays, and meditations. In his prayer to Christ, Anselm laments that he “was not able to see / the Lord of Angels humbled to converse with men” (95); and in his Meditations on the Life of Christ, John of Caulibus goes into great depth describing (imagining) the events of the passion to such detail that might render his modern readers (i.e. me) rather uncomfortable:

“You will see a fine young man: very noble, most innocent, and very loving, but thoroughly whipped and splattered with blood and bruises...You will see him, with unmistakable modesty, reverence, and blushing, getting dressed again right in front of them, while they keep on ridiculing him, as if he were the lowest of all creatures, abandoned by God and destitute of all help” (249). 

For medieval Christians, being able to imagine yourself within the scene was an important element of devotional exercise, so what makes this scene so unsettling? John was aware of the disquieting nature of this description of abject humiliation; before the aforementioned passage, he instructs the meditator to think, for a moment, of Jesus only as a man. Then, after processing the image of this shamed and degraded man, we are to “[r]eturn now to his divinity and think of that immense and eternal, incomprehensible and imperial Majesty incarnate, bending humbly to the floor” (249). By briefly separating Jesus’ humanity from his divinity, we are able to better appreciate the significance of the humiliation of God.

But is it really so easy to return to the divinity? The human will always be easier to visualize than the divine, simply because it is part of the visible world. So how does one “return to the divinity”? Perhaps medieval Christians benefited from divine revelation or repeated practice, but I cannot see how, having allowed ourselves to visualize the human to the full extent of his humanity, can we ever hope to “visualize” the divine to an even fuller extent. For me, strongly humanizing Christ has the potential of overshadowing his divinity.

In class, we talked about boundaries in depicting the violence surrounding Christ’s death—do they exist, and if so, where do they lie? From a devotional standpoint, is Mel Gibson’s graphic representation of the crucifixion less appropriate than Zeffirelli’s tamer version? We discussed how violence is a crucial element of Christ’s humanity; depicting it via special effects and movie magic gore may seem gratuitous to some, but the real events were no less tortuous than their on-screen depictions appear. The question we then grappled with was when does movie violence cross the line from historical accuracy (or, in Gibson’s case, reifying the medieval devotions) into audience titillation? But I think there is, perhaps, an even greater danger—just as humiliation and pain humanizes Christ, so cruelty and excessive violence dehumanizes those he came to save.

Humans are the bad guys in the story of the passion, vilified by their despicable acts of cruelty. But I would never do such things, and I’m human, so they couldn’t possibly have been human as well. And thus I end up identifying most with Jesus as I visualize him before me; he is a human surrounded by monsters, and I am not a monster. Which I suppose was the point of the meditations in the first place—to feel compassion for Christ and thus nourish our spirit. But we are not God. We are human. And while we might find it impossible to imagine a whip fitting into our hands, the mocking words of the soldiers and crowd could easily find their way into our mouths and hearts.

Perhaps this is why, while I originally thought myself opposed to all depictions of Jesus, I was moved by his representation in play form. In the York Mystery plays, Christ’s physical ordeal is narrated by the Roman soldiers, who describe their every action as they torture, and then crucify, Christ. In “Christ before Pilate: The Judgement,” soldiers “waken [Christ] with wind of our whips” and “fling to this flatterer with flaps” (205). These soldiers are as equally cruel as their cinematic counterparts, but if not for the content, the presentation in alliterative verse could almost be called whimsical. Perhaps the soldiers are cruel, but they are still human. As they mock Jesus, they speak not in the monstrous ravings of blood-thirsty, gore-splattering sadists, but the misguided bluster of humanity:

“1 SOLDIER:...Hail, comely king that no kingdom has kenned.

Hail, undoughty duke, thy deeds are dumb,

Hail, man unmighty thy meinie to mend

3 SOLDIER: Hail, lord without land for to lend,

Hail king, hail, knave uncanned” (207).

This passage expands on the soldiers’ mocking “Hail, king of the Jews” which takes place after Jesus has been sentenced to crucifixion (Douay-Rheims, Mt. 27.29, Mk 15.18, Jn 19.3). In the gospel narratives, the actual violence against Jesus is summarized in brief while longer description is given to his mocking by soldiers, chief priests, passerby, and the crucified thieves.

Why are the gospel accounts so lacking in gore and physical suffering, in comparison to the medieval devotional visualizations? Perhaps the original gospel readers were already aware of the brutality inherent to the act of crucifixion; or perhaps the gospel writers intended to focus more on other aspects of the cross—when we focus less on Christ's physical suffering and more on the mocking nature of humanity in the face of our God, we realize the reality of the rejection that God endured (still endures) without demonizing the Romans as strange monsters from another world, sadistically torturing and slaughtering their victim in the grossest, most repulsive way possible. No, they were all human, just as I am human.

So should we really wish we had been there at the cross? Would we really have believed Jesus? Anselm seems to think he would, and John of Caulibus’s meditation places the meditator alongside Mary, John, and their companions: “...Sister, if you would like to know how to console and comfort [Mary], busy yourself in preparing and serving them something to eat” (265). But for me at least, the more realistic the visualization, the harder it is to see the divinity. And now imagine seeing the crucifixion in real life—how can we be certain that we would have seen Christ for who he truly is, and not just a suffering, disfigured, utterly humiliated and utterly mortal human dangling from a tree? How do I know I wouldn’t have been just another mocker amidst the crowd?

KY

Works Cited:

Anselm of Canterbury. The Prayers and Meditations, with the Proslogion. Translated by Sister

Benedicta Ward, Penguin Classics, 1973.

Douay-Rheims The Holy Bible, Loreto Publications, 2007.

John of Caulibus. Meditations on the Life of Christ. Translated by Francis X. Taney et al., Pegasus Press, 1999.

York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling. Edited by Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, Oxford University Press, 1995.