Theological Trends
EMBRACING LIFE, EMBRACING THE CROSS Edward Schillebeeckx and Suffering Kathleen McManus ’ In his construal ‘Wof Christ’s passion, Mel Gibson presents a bloody, lacerated HY DO YOU EMBRACE YOUR CROSS, YOU FOOL?
Jesus as taunted with this question. Gibson’s intent was to dramatize the suffering that saves us. A fuller reading of the Gospel, however— and of reality—reveals that it is love that saves us, a love that embraces the whole of human life and therefore its sufferings, but a love that is fundamentally positive. As Jesus puts it in John’s Gospel, ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (John 10:10). Some time after I saw Gibson’s film, I was walking on a wild, empty beach, and I experienced one of the Spirit’s jarring juxtapositions. The film’s disturbing interpretation of Christ’s sufferings broke across another, more vibrant picture which the iridescence of the sea had recalled to my mind: that of a young woman reclining on a boat and looking out on a similarly sun-drenched sea. The camera was at her back, and a panorama of sea and sky lay at her feet—the world as it were awaiting her embrace. It was, above all, her delight in the prospect that the photo was conveying. The woman was nineteen year-old Kelly Jamison,1 and the picture had first captivated me when it was hung on the wall of her hospital room. She had been hospitalised for months after being struck down by a hurtling boulder during a college mountain-climbing expedition. Other students had escaped, but the boulder struck Kelly in the back,
1
Names have been changed for the purposes of this article. The Way, 44/1 (January 2005), 61-73