An interesting excerpt:

"Do You Recognize This Jesus?" by Kenneth L.
Woodward, excerpted from the NEW YORK TIMES op.ed
page (2.25.04)

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.

THE PASSION OF CHRIST is violent - no
question. Although Mel Gibson the believer
identifies with a traditionalist movement that
rejects Vatican Council II, Mel Gibson the artist
here displays a thoroughly Catholic sensibility, one
that since the Middle Ages has emphasized Jesus as
the suffering savior crowned with thorns. Martin
Luther, too, would have recognized in this film his
own theology of the cross.

But there is a little twist here. In his prerelease
screenings, Mr. Gibson invited mostly conservative
evangelical clergy. They in turn responded by
reserving huge blocks of movie tickets for their
congregations...

And what's so strange about this? Unlike Mr.
Gibson's film, evangelical Protestantism is
inherently non-visual. As spiritual descendants of
the left wing of the Reformation, evangelicals are
heirs to an iconoclastic tradition that produced the
"stripping of the altars," as the historian Eamon
Duffy nicely put it. That began in the late 16th
century, when radical Protestants removed Christ's
body from the cross. To the Puritans, displays of
the body of Jesus represented what they considered
the idol worship of the Papists. To this day,
evangelical sanctuaries can be identified by their
lack of visual stimulation; it is rare to see
statues or stained-glass windows with human figures.
For evangelicals, the symbols are all in sermon and
song: verbal icons. It's a different sensibility.

For this reason, I think, evangelical audiences will
be shocked by what they see...