“Love in action,” wrote Dostoevsky, “is a harsh and dreadful thing.” The statement cuts at the heart of what it means to love in a broken world. While most of us would prefer the idea of love as noble and wholesome, real life teaches us that self-giving love more often feels like a lacerated heart, bearing rejection and hatred.
The Passion
The Cross exemplifies this paradoxical reality of a love we cannot bear to look at. This week, Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ is being released once more in theatres, and it is well worth recalling its impact on audiences. No other film had ever depicted the violence of Jesus’ Passion so unflinchingly. Some critics took issue with its unabashed brutality. And yet, the reality was that viewers could not shake free of it. This was the story of love—not just any love, but the radical, passionate love of Christ for souls. There is nothing pretty about such love.
Or is there?
How, one might wonder, does this “harsh and dreadful” story speak of love? And how could Jesus love even those who put him to death?
What Credit is it to You?
When I first saw the film in 2004, long before my conversion, I was startled by the bloodied, disfigured appearance of Christ. As Isaiah writes, he was “marred beyond human semblance.” This did not seem like the face of a hero. And yet, amidst the blood, there remained flashes of beauty which burned my imagination. One scene in particular seared my memory with the almost achingly beautiful depiction of Jesus: a flashback to the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus declares the words we read in today’s Gospel: “Love your enemies. Love those who persecute you.” He then presses the matter with a question: “If you love only those who love you, what credit is it to you?”
The beauty of Jesus’ face, portrayed by Jim Caviezel, still arrests me each time I watch this scene. He pronounces the question with such simplicity, such gentleness in his gaze, that one senses a deep truth coming to light. The question “What credit is it?” forced me to dig deep, and I realized we are called to a love that is not merely reciprocal, but which is poured forth as free gift to those who hate us. Only that undeserved, unnecessary love increases the balance of goodness in the world.
Dreadful and Beautiful
Jarringly, this flashback of beauty is juxtaposed against one of the most brutal parts of the Passion, the nailing of Jesus to the Cross. The contrast begs the question of why: Why such an image of beauty at the moment of horror? Why such tenderness mingling with agony?
These two faces of love lie at the crux of the Christian faith. Loving one’s enemies – loving those who wound us and hate us – is an act both dreadful and beautiful. On our own we cannot muster such love; our nature cries against it. Yet Jesus incarnates this self-emptying love through his whole life, culminating in the crucifixion, when he pleads forgiveness for his executioners even as they hammer the nails through his flesh.
Again, we hear those searching words from Jesus, spoken with grace: What credit is it to you? He has come to bring life to a world of bankrupt souls. His total outpouring of self, his unnecessary love for us, carves out our only release from an infinite debt. So too, out of the wellspring of his love, we can then offer such love to others—precisely when we don’t feel like it—and thus enrich the world.
