“A challenge to our imagination”: Could upcoming Jesus films signal a new cultural openness to Christian spirituality?

This week on Soul Search, you can hear Meredith Lake and Adrian Rosenfeldt discuss the significance of the anticipated films on the life and teachings of Jesus by Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and Mel Gibson. Scorsese, who had a private audience with Francis while in Rome, said he is “respond to the pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus.” Notice that Pope Francis’s language appeals neither to dogma nor to history, but rather urges a visceral, evocative, literary exploration of what might best be described as the mythos of Jesus. Malick, I suspect, is more likely to rise to Pope Francis’s hope that artists convey “the mystery and the beauty of promise that transcends narrow perspectives”. Take Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life, which portrays the grief two parents experience when their young son dies by means of a twenty minute exploration of the question from The Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” This sequence visually traces the evolution of life in the universe, from the expansion of galaxies to the fiery birth of planet earth, then to the primordial oceans and deserts and the reign of dinosaurs, up to the advent of compassion and what at one point looks to be “the tree of life”. Or does the fact that Gibson is splitting the sequel into two-parts indicate that he is willing to delve deeply into both aspects, thereby answering the pope’s exhortation: “Keep helping us to open wide our imagination so that it can transcend our narrow perspectives and be open to the holy mystery of God.” The popular reception of all three upcoming Jesus films — by Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, and Mel Gibson — will provide a barometer which may help us gauge whether contemporary Western culture is still uncomfortable with its religious foundation story, or whether it remains open to a new mythos-centred, creative, compassionate form of Christianity.