This Easter weekend, my family and I enjoyed one of our holiday traditions and rewatched the 1959 epic, Ben-Hur, starring Charlton Heston. This movie was the most decorated film in Hollywood history with 11 Academy Awards, until it was surpassed by Titanic (1997) and then the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003). In my opinion, it is the best movie about Jesus Christ that has ever been made. And that is saying something. (Movie historians may not like to say so, but Jesus Christ and Moses are the two subjects most depicted in film than any other subject or personality in history or fantasy.)
This movie is about Jesus Christ, and yet he barely appears in the movie, and when he does appear, the viewer sees His profile from His back. (His front is only seen from far away, and not sharply or clearly.) Without going into all the details of this movie, I must say I was surprised at how accurate it was theologically in its depiction of Jesus Christ and the plight of sinful humanity. The director of this film, the late William Wyler, was one of Hollywood’s most decorated movie makers with 3 Oscars and 12 nominations in his illustrious career. His daughter, Catherine, once said that her father had joked that the best film made about Jesus Christ was made by a Jew! (Actually, three Jews: Along with Wyler, were Sam Zimbalist the producer, and Karl Tunberg, the screenplay writer.) Together they made a story which was not just beautiful in its aesthetics but also theologically, Bible centered.
The story is set during the time in which Jesus lived: Roman-occupied Judea. In the opening scenes, the two central characters meet: Messala the Roman Tribune, commander of the Roman Empire’s garrison in Jerusalem, and Judah Ben-Hur, the wealthy Jewish nobleman. They were childhood friends who separated as they entered the world of the adults and into their respective cultural spheres. Messala comes back as a patriotic Roman soldier. Judah is a world traveled, financially wealthy, Jewish man who is the heir and patriarch of an ancient Jewish family in the Holy Land.
The old friends’ meeting starts with great affection; they even relived a childhood game/competition of target practice with spears, with a cross piece over the door of the armory being the bullseye. Both of them hit the target square in the center. That scene of the first meeting between Judah and Messala ends with a return to that cross piece and the two spears hanging from its center point. It’s the foreshadowing of the motive and ending of this story, a common experience between Jews and Gentiles that will bring them together at that Cross.
On any given day, no matter how successful, how genteel, how educated, how civilized, a situation (or several situations) can happen to a person to throw them into an insanity from which they cannot exit. Messala is heart and soul with the Roman Empire. He believes in it to such a point, he does not have even the slight restraint of Pontius Pilate (also portrayed in the movie) when it comes to destroying any opposition, or rather any that he sees as opposition. And this last includes Judah, and his mother and sister whom he locks up in the lower levels of the Antonia Fortress and forgets about for three years.
Messala knew their innocence regarding an accident during the entrance of the new Roman procurator into Jerusalem (a roof tile from their house collapsed causing the horse the man was riding to rear and slam against a wall, injuring the man. (The Romans thought it was an assassination attempt.) And yet he was condemning them to misery because in his first meeting, Judah would not divulge information about other Jews who were less than enthusiastic about the Roman presence in Judea. A family and friends he had grown with, enjoyed childhood with, people whom he loved once, and who loved him he now treats with cold brutality. Without any semblance of a trial, he jailed the two women while he condemned (also without trial) Judah to die as a convict rower in Roman warships, a punishment where the average lifespan of the convict is barely a few months. (Judah lasted for three years.) Messala does all of this because of the “greatness of Rome.”
Judah himself is a conundrum. He is a Jew who is religious and who is willing to listen to new ideas (including one from a new young rabbi), but situations and circumstances have broken him. When confronting Messala before the trek to the Roman galleys, Judah finds out that his mother and sister were in a cell in the fortress and is reduced to tearfully begging for their lives. But Messala would not hear it. Instead, with scorn and derision he condemned Judah, even as his childhood friend swore by God that he would return to exact vengeance.
Judah Ben-Hur, the wrongfully condemned Jew is being walked, along with other convicts, from Jerusalem to the coastal city of Tyre, to enter the hellish life of being a rower on Roman warships. The trek is a long and brutal one through the Judean wilderness and takes them into Galilee, through the little town of Nazareth. The Roman soldiers who lead the captives are especially brutal to Ben-Hur either by the orders or instigation of their commander Messala (who is the antagonist of the film), looking to break him not just physically (by denying him water) but also mentally (as he is a Jewish noble).
They stop at the well in the center of Nazareth, just right pass the Carpenter’s workshop, before they continue their journey, and the exhausted convicts are crying out for water. The sadistic Roman centurion orders the locals to give water first to the soldiers and horses before the criminals. By this time, most of the condemned are on their knees, barely able to stand. Towns people come running with buckets and gourds to satiate the thirst of as many as possible. When a woman brings her gourd to Ben-Hur, the centurion intervenes and spitefully shouts, “No water for him!” He then grabs the gourd takes, drinks some of the water, and spits out, right in front of the Jewish nobleman.
Charlton Heston’s depiction of the collapse of a man from, not only thirst, but from despair in this scene garnered an Academy Award. Collapsing to the ground, and at the point of death, in a squeak of a voice, he mutters, “God… help me.”
The next moment, a pair of sandaled feet are seen walking toward his head. The person kneels stoops down with a gourd of water in His hand, pours a little of the water on Judah’s face and revives him. He then gently raises his head as Judah drinks down the water in the gourd, just briefly looking at the face of the Carpenter (whom he had seen in passing before getting to the well). The centurion turns and sees the site and reacts with rage. “Did you not hear me! I said no water for him!” There is a whip in his hand, and he unfurls it preparing to strike as he storms toward the Carpenter, except this Carpenter is no ordinary man. He stood up and looked straight at him. The centurion froze, and probably for the first time in his soldier’s life, a life in which he tormented condemned men on their way to final punishment, felt his conscience?
The Carpenter did not appear menacing, nor did he have a weapon in His hand. This was not a Zealot whose vitriol against the Romans would always come with scowls and screams. The centurion’s vileness seemed to have drained out of him, at least for that moment. Maybe even longer. But it is obvious that it was a moment he would never forget. That was true, not only of the centurion, but also for Judah Ben-Hur. (But that’s for another article!)
Three years later, Judah came back, this time as the wealthy adopted son of a Roman consul (after the Roman Emperor, the two consuls of the Senate are the most powerful people in the Roman empire), looking for his mother and sister. “Find them Messala, and I will forget the vow that I made with every stroke of the oar that you changed me to.” As cold a line as has ever been spoke by a man, and he believes that his vengeance and his personal salvation from misery was by Divine Providence! That somehow, God saved his life to execute vengeance on Messala. What many people miss is that at this point, Judah has become radicalized with regards to his hate. For the moment, that hatred was held in check by the benevolence of his adopted Roman father. But it would become fanatical after he finds out that his mother and sister have ended up as lepers in addition to their horrifying three years of neglect and forgetfulness in that Roman dungeon. A fact that was told to him by a physically broken Messala after their legendary chariot race. “What do you think you looking at? There still enough of a man here for you to hate!”
Judah cannot look inward. He knows he’s angry, but he does not want to fathom how much he changed, or rather how vile he has become. There are voices around him who encourage his rage and vengeance against Messala (and later with the Romans) as well as a few who try to provide a counter point, usually talking about the words of a “young Rabbi.” Rather Judah directs that anger on the Romans. They are the evil ones. They corrupted Messala.
Ironically, Pontius Pilate provides a fairly reasonable counter point to his anti-Roman feeling: “Where there is greatness, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great. We progress and mature by fault. But Rome has said she is ready to join your life to hers in a great future.”
A good point, and one that has echoed numerous times through multitudes of other empires in the aftermath of devastating conquests throughout history, including his own Jewish people. But therein comes the troubling fact of history; each conquered people feel the same rage as Judah Ben-Hur. Because of this, as Esther (his wife) tells him, evil will breed more evil. And subsequently, there will always be voices encouraging retribution with retaliation. An ironic combination of the ideas that ‘Might equals Right’ and ‘The End Justifies the Means.’
For me, it always comes back to the famous water scene. That scene is reminiscent of the incident in John 4 where Jesus had a conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well. The scene in the movie at the well in Nazareth did not require a conversation, but rather a special touch. Judah, remembering that moment years later (and not knowing yet whom the person was who gave him water) told his friend Balthazzar, that drink of water did more than just quench his thirst, it gave him the will to survive. In his anguish, he tells his friend, “I would have done better to have poured it on the ground and die. This many years later, I am still thirsty.”
Like the Samaritan woman, it was not a physical thirst but rather the ultimate answer to the problem of Sin which is something deeper, much more profound. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus said of the Sin nature, “If the light in you be darkness, how great is that darkness! That thirst can be equated with the often bandied idea of inner struggle. For the Samaritan woman in John 4, it was her experience with the men in her life, all of whom promised their love, but for one reason or another her life was shattered. For Judah, it was the desire for revenge after severe injustices have been perpetrated on him and his family. The desire was so powerful that it debased a man who was raised in an honorable and loving family with wealth, influence, civilizing influences and gifts, into a monster. Eventually, his wife, Esther, cries out in in terror, “You are becoming Messala!”
The water scene and the Lord’s Walk to Golgotha are the only two parts in which you see the Lord in close proximity, and especially in close proximity to Judah, and as powerful as the scene by the well in Nazareth is, the ending scenes beginning with Judah and Esther looking for his mother and sister in the Valley of the Lepers to the Crucifixion are far more overwhelming in their grief, urgency, sorrow, regret, and even revulsion. (The revulsion had to do with a blind beggar who explains that the reason the streets of Jerusalem are empty today is because of the trial of Jesus. Judah and Esther are carrying his leprous mother and sister in the hopes of finding Jesus and receiving healing from him. While stunned at the news of the trial, other people walking the streets catch site of the leprous women and begin to scream, “Lepers! Lepers!” while hurling rock at the family. The blind beggar hearing the altercation and suspecting that the rocks were hurled at the people who just gave him a coin, turned his little pot to empty it of that coin. In his mind, it was possibly touched by lepers.)
After Pilate condemns Jesus, and the walk with the cross to Golgotha begins, that is the moment Jesus and Judah come into close proximity again, and Judah recognizes him as the Man who gave him water. At the foot of the Cross, he meets Balthazaar:
“This is where your search has brought you, Balthasar. He gave me water... and a heart to live. What has He done to merit this?”
Balthasar:
“He has taken the world of our sins onto Himself. To this end He said He was born, in that stable, where I first saw Him. For this cause, He came into the world.”
Judah:
“For this death?”
Balthasar:
“For this beginning.”
After he returns home to Esther, profoundly changed, he tells her what he saw and heard from the Lord at the Cross:
Judah Ben-Hur:
“Almost at the moment He died, I heard Him say, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
Esther:
“Even then.”
Judah Ben-Hur:
“Even then. And I felt His voice take the sword out of my hand.”
I’ll close with another story, this one happened with personalities in the Entertainment Industry, and it’s recent! A few years ago, Mel Gibson (the man who made the second most famous movie about Jesus Christ, “The Passion of the Christ”) presented friend and fellow actor, Robert Downey Jr., a lifetime achievement award. Downey told the Hollywood crowd about his struggles with drugs and alcohol, and subsequently with the law earlier in his career. It was only by the Grace of God that he avoided prison time. In the aftermath, it was only with Gibson’s intervention that he was able to get back into acting and thereby provide a livelihood for his family and himself. Downey had come a long way from that moment to becoming a blockbuster, Academy Award winning actor and personality. He mentioned that Mel Gibson had told him, his recovery would be like “hugging a cactus.” As terrible as this process was (Gibson told him), he would find his faith (“maybe not in the same religion as Mel’s”) and become a better man.
While I would celebrate the lives and careers of both men, I would have appreciated more if Mel Gibson clarified the point that he made in “The Passion of the Christ” to Robert Downey Jr., namely, it wasn’t a “cactus” he needed to embrace, but the One who hung on the Cross of Calvary. He would not just make a better man, he would save a wounded soul.
This Easter Season, and this month into Pentecost, may God focus our hearts and minds on Jesus Christ, the One who give us Living Water so that we will never thirst again!
Rescue the Perishing by Fanny Crosby
- Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;
Weep o’er the erring one, lift up the fallen,
Tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save.
Refrain:
Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,
Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.
- Though they are slighting Him, still He is waiting,
Waiting the penitent child to receive;
Plead with them earnestly, plead with them gently;
He will forgive if they only believe. - Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter,
Feelings lie buried that grace can restore;
Touched by a loving heart, wakened by kindness,
Chords that were broken will vibrate once more. - Rescue the perishing, duty demands it;
Strength for thy labor the Lord will provide;
Back to the narrow way patiently win them;
Tell the poor wand’rer a Savior has died.