No Passion of Christ film or any other film could possibly portray the suffering and death of Christ on Calvary. And in fact I think it only takes away. Do you know that when that film came out there were Christian people the world over, many so-called leaders, and they said this is marvellous, this is wonderful, this will teach people. It doesn’t teach people. It takes away from the meaning of Calvary because you can only depict in this way the human sufferings, the physical sufferings. And the physical sufferings of Christ, terrible as they were, were just nothing, an immeasurably tiny part of his sufferings which were spiritual and in his soul, and the terrible desolation of separation from the Father in his experience as the God-man for us. This was the eternal weight of punishment. Imagine eternal punishment of all the millions and millions and millions of people who would ever be saved, focused and concentrated on Christ for six hours. Why that is impossible to conceive. We just have to bow our heads and say what he suffered for us is immeasurable. No amount of barbarity depicted in a play or in a film can anything like worthily represent that. It can only mislead people, putting them into a very physical attitude of the sufferings of Christ. These are high and these are holy things. Do the film makers not understand that half of the sufferings on Calvary were under cover of darkness to teach us that you cannot portray these things you can only describe them to some extent in words?
Let us be very careful that there is no hypocrisy in us, that we are not partial in our obedience to God’s law as they were. The Jewish leaders obeyed such things from the Old Testament to avoid ceremonial pollution and yet they would murder and carry out injustice freely. In a lesser way we can play the hypocrite. I hope there is nobody here who has desperate moral secret sins. We can be very scrupulous on some points and correct points of moral and ethical Christian conduct and indifferent to others. And that is just the germination of hypocrisy which will grow and grow and ruin our spiritual lives.