It is a rare thing to see God working through Hollywood, a place whose allegiance nine films out of ten seems to lie squarely with "The Other Guy." But as Mel Gibson has just shown us in his The Passion of Christ, God is able even on Sunset Boulevard to raise up children to Abraham. Indeed, it might not be hyperbole to say that The Passion will likely become to the medium of film what Michelangelo's Pietá, Mozart's Requiem, and Dante's Divine Comedy were to the media of sculpting, poetry, and music, respectively. We rejoice to see a Catholic physiognomy and thoroughgoing supernaturalism untinged with any modernist reservations. Paid for out of Gibson's own pocket, filmed entirely in Aramaic and Latin with English subtitles, and scheduled for public release on Ash Wednesday, The Passion is the perfect meditation at the perfect time for what is, by any reckoning, the central event of human history.

Casting a pall over it is the whole frightful fuss being made in the media over charges of anti-Semitism. I find it strange, though, that these charges were being made long before anyone had seen the movie. Using what prophetic powers did the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) Civil Liberty and the Anti-Defamation League know in advance that this Jesus film was a racist atrocity? After all, they were not grieved over the Brooklyn Museum's Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung, or the homosexual Jesus of Corpus Christi even when those charges were evident. How is it, then, that they have seen fit to vilify The Passion when the charges are not at all evident?

Having recently become politically incorrect, Gibson is at least in good-no, divine-company. You can't really seem very "correct" to the politicians, you know, if they end up by nailing You to a stake of wood.

Of the picking out of golden aspects, such as Jim Caviezel's matchless portrayal of Jesus, there could be no end. Neither lessening Christ's humanity with an otherworldliness meant to punctuate His divinity, nor sacrificing His majesty with a trite sportiveness and jocularity meant to make Him accessible, Christ, in him, is every inch a man without being any less the God. The Virgin Mary is refreshingly not just a mute, pious, absentee doll. Instead, she looms large throughout the whole film, being called "Mother" by all the disciples, and cradling Christ at the end in a soul-stirring Pietá recreation. Satan is disturbingly real: the scene in which he has his demon-children herd and cuss the apostate Judas onto the corpse of a decayed lamb, whose bell-rope then becomes the instrument of his suicide, shows evil's sick, unsmiling parody of the good. The Lamb dies to give us life; in Satan's hands, it deals out to Judas his death.

The immediate effect that The Passion has is one of spiritual shell shock. When we see its Christ hanging under the murderous heat of the Palestinian sun on the inaugural Good Friday, and hear Satan scream with all the fury of Hell at love's triumph, then there is no doubting that something has changed inside of us. We are not quite the same person we were when walking into the theatre, nor will we be, come Monday morning. Superlatives and prediction are risky business, but we may say without exaggeration that The Passion is a masterpiece that beggars comparison. It is a god among the insects of secular films, and the crowning glory of all biblical productions. All future ones will doubtless be measured by the Passion.