  This is an op-ed from the NY Times that is more pointed and accurate than most of the media hype about "Passion" urlLink Op-Ed Contributor: Do You Recognize This Jesus?
Watching "The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson's new movie, I kept thinking the following: it is Christians, not Jews, who should be shocked by this film. Mr. Gibson's raw images invade our religious comfort zone, which has long since been cleansed of the Gospels' harsher edges. Most Americans worship in churches where the bloodied body of Jesus is absent from sanctuary crosses or else styled in ways so abstract that there is no hint of suffering. In sermons, too, the emphasis all too often is on the smoothly therapeutic: what Jesus can do for me. More than 60 years ago, H. Richard Neibuhr summarized the creed of an easygoing American Christianity that has in our time triumphantly come to pass: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment though the ministrations of a Christ without a cross. " Despite its muscular excess, Mr. Gibson's symbol-laden film is a welcome repudiation of all that.
" I haven't seen this movie yet of course. But I am wondering what the reaction of the Japanese will be to this film when it comes to Tokyo in May. I think it will be a good correction to the view that many have of Jesus as a good teacher and of the cross as some kind of good luck charm. 
