A Reflection on The Last Temptation of Christ

I watched Martin Scorsese’s controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ last Sunday and have spent much of the past week wrestling with it. I’ve been peripherally aware of the film, and the controversy surrounding it, for many years. It’s a film around which passions run high, but my attitude towards it has tended to be one of mild curiosity and mild wariness. I understood why it was a subject of controversy, wondered if there might be more there than its critics gave it credit for, and never felt a strong desire to find out for myself – less for reasons of piety, I confess, and more because I often find film versions of Bible stories quite dull. I chose to watch the film now because I heard it was a key influence on not one but two of my favorite films to come out in the last few years, The Green Knight and Dune: Part Two; because it was written by Paul Schrader, whose First Reformed recently moved me quite powerfully; and because it was seasonally appropriate a little over a week after Good Friday. Although I’m about 35 years late to the party and there may not be much left to say about the film, I felt it required a response from me.

I said above that I often find film versions of Bible stories quite dull. Cinematically speaking, The Last Temptation of Christ is not dull; it is, in fact, quite strange, and its strangeness is often arresting. The starkly beautiful magical-realist cinematography by Michael Ballhaus and the jarringly percussive score by Peter Gabriel drew me into an experience that was more like a timeless dream than a conventional first-century period piece. I think that’s crucial to understanding my response to the film – but we’ll come back to it, because the first question on any Christian’s mind when it comes to The Last Temptation of Christ is, are the theological elements of the story up to snuff? Does the depiction of Christ Jesus cut the mustard?

The simple answer is no.

It seems to me that there is a great deal of room for open questions when we try to imagine how the two natures of Jesus interacted during His time on Earth, especially before His resurrection. What does it look like to be both fully God and fully man? The Last Temptation of Christ strikes me as an extended and serious attempt to meditate on this striking passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews:

Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. For every high priest taken from among men is appointed for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins. He can have compassion on those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is also subject to weakness. Because of this he is required as for the people, so also for himself, to offer sacrifices for sins. And no man takes this honor to himself, but he who is called by God, just as Aaron was. (Hebrews 4:14-5:4)

What does it mean for Christ to sympathize with our weaknesses, to have been tempted in all points as we are? I find that this claim opens up profoundly challenging mysteries. To say that Jesus never committed a sinful act is easy enough to grasp – but does “sin” not also include sinful inclinations of the heart? And if the heart of Jesus was never inclined to sin, what does it mean for Him to have experienced temptation? If Jesus never sinned, how can He really know what it is like to be tempted in the way that I am tempted, where the temptation derives much of its force from lifelong patterns of sin that have been entrenched in my soul by habitual practice? None of these questions seem to me to admit of easy answers, and I am open to imaginative attempts to work through them. The catch, though, is in the last phrase of Hebrews 4:15: “yet without sin.” These mysteries cannot be resolved by saying that Jesus was a sinner just like me.

To put it simply, then, the character played by Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ – a character who is a sinner, and believes himself to be in need of forgiveness – is not Jesus Christ. Although the character is named Jesus and lives through a version of the story of Jesus’ life, he is too different, in ways that are too fundamental, to be straightforwardly accepted as an accurate depiction of Jesus.

All of this is to say that if we take the film to be making theological assertions about the real, historical Jesus Christ, it is, by definition, heretical: it makes claims about Jesus that a Christian cannot affirm to be true and still be a Christian.

So why do I nonetheless find myself so powerfully drawn to it?

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton compares dogma – those theological truths which are not up for debate – to a fence around the edge of a cliff. The fence is not there to oppressively constrain; it is there to create a frame within which freedom can be safely enjoyed. Can The Last Temptation of Christ be interpreted and responded to in a way that does not take us off the edge of the cliff? Is there anything about the film that can be brought within the fence and have a legitimate place there?

The answer to these questions is, I think, in what I said earlier, about the film feeling more like a strange dream than a period piece. If we take the film as a work of historical and theological revisionism, in which this character named Jesus is presented as an essentially accurate depiction of the real Jesus, replacing the Jesus of the Old and New Testaments, the Creeds, and the Church, it is heretical – but I do not think it is mere hair-splitting to say that that is a real if. What if, instead, we take the film on its own terms, as it sets them forth in an opening disclaimer – as a “fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict” between the spirit and the flesh, one that does not pretend to be “based upon the Gospels” in any straightforward way? What could possibly be the value in such an exploration?

Put yet another way: who is the strange, dissonant figure at the center of this film, this character who is at once like Jesus and profoundly, startlingly unlike Jesus?

I think I know who he is. I recognize him.

He is me.

The character played by Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ talks about love a lot, but he seems to find it a great strain to actually love the people around him most of the time. He is brittle and impatient when his message is not understood, lonely in the middle of the night, haunted by gloomy self-absorption, tormented when he considers the death God requires of him and the life he would rather have instead. It is conceivable that he might, in the end, refuse his mission and come down from the cross. Part of him certainly wants to. Even beyond doctrinal disagreements, speaking purely in terms of personality and temperament, he is not very much like the Jesus I have encountered. But he is a lot like the person Jesus encounters when He is with me.

As Christians, we see the life of Jesus as both a historical reality and, in C.S. Lewis’ phrase, a “true myth” after which we seek to pattern our own lives. We seek to follow Jesus and, in following Him, to become like Him – to become, in another of C.S. Lewis’ phrases, “little Christs.” I take The Last Temptation of Christ to be at least as much about the life of the Christian as it is about the life of Christ; I understand it and respond to it as a kind of dreamlike projection of the Christian’s struggles onto Christ. The character played by Willem Dafoe fitfully and imperfectly reflects the reality of Jesus – as I do. He is both like and unlike Jesus – as I am both like and unlike Jesus. It is this very dissonance, between this character named Jesus and the real Jesus, that makes the film meaningful to me. It can be understood as a fictionalized, “mythic” exploration of the dissonance between the spirit and the flesh – which is to say, the dissonance between my sinful self and who I am in Christ.

Early in the film, the character played by Willem Dafoe lies on the ground and says, in voiceover:

“God loves me. I know He loves me. I want Him to stop.”

This line shocked me and took my breath away – not because it was scandalous, but because it cut straight through so many layers of spiritual red tape to echo my own internal voice in the weeks leading up to Good Friday this year. The real Jesus could not say that and mean it. But there is a part of my heart that does, and part of the unsearchable mystery of Good Friday is that the real Jesus chooses to be in solidarity with even that part of me. He has not hidden His face from it, so that it need not remain estranged from Him. To hear the cry of my own heart in the voice of this Jesus-who-is-not-Jesus helps me to imaginatively enter into the hope that the real Jesus stays with me even when I feel most far from Him, that He loves even the part of me that is most resistant to His love, and that He mysteriously enjoins Himself even to the part of me that is most unlike Him.

For further reading on The Last Temptation of Christ, I recommend this carefully considered assessment by Catholic film critic Steven D. Greydanus, whose reviews I have been reading for over a decade. Greydanus ultimately takes a very different stance on the film than I do, but I take his theologically thoughtful opinion seriously – much more than I would respect any review that blithely waved away doctrinal concerns. And I also recommend Greydanus’ recent homily on Good Friday, which shows that what he and I have in common runs far deeper than our different responses to Scorsese’s film.