Another thought on The Passion. It seems my bible is missing the verse everyone is talking about where it says that all of Jesus physical sufferings were tiny compared to the pain of separation from God. I guess I need to look harder.

Let me expound that just a bit. The sufferings Jesus experienced physically WERE the sufferings of God's abandonment. God rules the world. God was perfectly capable of stopping all that happened. If Jesus suffered, that meant that God the Father decided to let him suffer. If your child starts to drown and sees you with the power to save him, the act of drowning and the pain of abandonment are not two separate things, rather they go together. This is why the gospels (and, of course, the film) showed Jesus being mocked. If he was really God's chosen son, then obviously he couldn't be taken away and crucified. This could tie in to discussions of how honor claims worked in mediterranean culture, but I'll leave that alone for now.

Surely I'm not the only person who realizes this.