We cannot excuse the direct agents of Jesus’ death, or absolve them of responsibility, but we must remember that each of us, by sinning, is party to His death.

All of humanity, every one of us, is responsible for this most heinous of crimes: condemning our Savior to death. The sadistic cruelty of Jesus’ torturers and killers, which Gibson so graphically portrays in The Passion of the Christ, reflects the cruelty of our own sins. It is a reflection of the way we, people of the 21st Century, treat God. In the attitudes of Caiaphas, Pilate, Judas and the members of the mob, who shout “Crucify him!”, we can see the sins and the tendency to sin of all of us. All this stems from a false image of God, from our listening to Satan, who would have us reverse the polarity of good and evil, and call good evil and evil good. Judas, Pilate, Caiaphas, and the Roman soldiers represent all of us in our moral indifference, our selfishness and rejection of what God constantly tells us, namely, that the one thing that can make us truly happy is God’s love. Our part in the crime of deicide expresses itself in our living life as though God did not exist, in our constant rejection of the gift of divine mercy. All of this bears fruit in the diversity of our personal sins.

With all its suggestive power, Gibson’s film brings home to us the fundamental truth of Christianity, namely, that in sinning every one of us condemns God to suffering and death, to non-existence in our lives.