Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 3, 2013.
Note: I wrote this post before The Seattle Times reported on Mars Hill Church’s senior pastor Mark Driscoll’s spiritual abuse in 2014, and long before the 2021 release of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast by Christianity Today. After I read the victim’s stories describing Driscoll’s demeaning statements about women, it’s not surprising that his version of Jesus is domineering, hypermasculine and heartless.
For centuries, churches have used various mediums in attempts to recreate Biblical stories, to make them come to life.
But the crucifixion is the story most frequently reenacted, usually with vivid, graphic detail.
From medieval Passion plays to modern productions like New Life Church’s The Thorn to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, we in the audience revisit the torture of Jesus over and over.
I have seen many forms of the story — theater, film, and dramatized radio theater. Although the same story is retold each time, the techniques employed by the scriptwriters, actors, and directors can potentially lend a new perspective, but with so many adaptations, it’s hard to tell the story in a new way.
Mars Hill Church, a megachurch based out of Seattle, made their own “Good Friday” film in 2010, and released it online in spring 2011. Since I was curious to see what the filmmakers did with the story, I watched the 30 minute short film last week.
The opening scene is chilling. A small child swings in the dust on a rope, then pauses to look at three empty crosses, which seems to embody lost innocence.
Mars Hill Church’s senior pastor Mark Driscoll gives a solemn introduction. He encourages viewers to continue “somberly, as if you were watching a funeral.”
Mars Hill produced “Good Friday” through partnerships with Universal Studios and a makeup artist from The Passion and No Country for Old Men, which was evident in some of the film techniques, such as close ups of Christ’s hand gripping dirt in Gethsemane and then releasing it and flash forwards to the impending scourging.
The gory detail is unflinching, especially the scene in which Jesus’ bloodied body falls into the mud after the beatings.
Yet despite attempts to draw the audience in with these graphic depictions, the acting falls short, rendering most of the special effects meaningless, particularly with the casting of the main character.
The actor portraying Jesus fluctuates between stoicism and bitterness, which feels like he is lacking love. He foretells his death and betrayal at the Last Supper without almost any emotion. He seems angry and disappointed with Judas and Peter, defensive with the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, enduring the torment with strength, but without love, which is the essence of the real Jesus.
The gruesome beating in a torch-lit underground dungeon reminds the audience of a sinister horror film, in stark contrast to the scourging scene in The Passion where Jesus whispers to his Father that his “heart is ready” even as the torture begins.
Also, the actor playing Jesus looks like just any guy off the street randomly wearing a tunic. Even though I have my own conception of what Jesus looked like, I can accept an actor of any description playing Christ if he is rooted in the role. But this Jesus doesn’t have the passion to adopt the part.
Perhaps this lack of love is partly due to the focus of the film.
In both the film’s introduction and the church’s blog post about the film, Driscoll said he wants viewers to realize that “the cross is something done by us: we murdered God. Then on Easter Sunday, we remember that the cross is something done for us: God died in our place to forgive our sins.”
While that idea is a central part of penal substitutionary atonement, which is also the dominant theological view of salvation in American Christian evangelicalism, I think we need to not divide what we did to God and what God did for us into separate events—the two are concurrent and inseparable.
The Mars Hill film also attempts to distinguish itself from its predecessors by focusing more on theology than history.
“Whereas The Passion may have tried to tell the story with chronological and historical accuracy, we’re trying to make the theological weight of the event—the substitutionary death of the Son of God in our place for our sins—as vivid as possible,” Mars Hill Church media relations director Nick Borgardus said in an 2010 interview with the Christian Post.
But theology is not a cold, hard exercise. Theology may be based on logic and philosophy, but because of its focus on spirituality, it should also be inherently emotional.
When love is removed from sacrifice, the sacrifice becomes a nauseating, guilt-ridden experience. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Without love, I am nothing.”
When the central theme is removed from a central event of a religious worldview, only dead men’s bones are left.
The Biblical Jesus knew pain in its deepest forms, but he never lost love. The Mars Hill Church Jesus seems to have lost the meaning behind his sacrifice.
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