Do some streams of Christianity place more emphasis on the crucifixion than the resurrection?
Oh, absolutely. I’m not an expert on this, but I know many devout Christians who are not in liturgical churches who know nothing of Good Friday. They don’t go to church on Good Friday. They go to Palm Sunday, and then they go to Easter Day, and that does it for them. … A professor wrote me by e-mail yesterday and said that he had heard that a lot of evangelicals were going to the movie [THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST] because they really hadn’t known anything about the cross. That was an astonishing thought. Maybe that means that all the emphasis is on spiritual blessing, spiritual phenomena, spiritual manifestations instead of the actual story of what Jesus did and what happened to him. Now as soon as I say “what happened to him” I want to correct myself, because it didn’t happen to him as though he was simply a passive recipient. The word “Passion” is a tricky one; it’s based on the same word that we get our word “passive” from. Jesus, in accepting his destiny, was passive in the sense
