G minus G is NG

G Minus G = NG

TIME Magazine writer Richard Corliss has a way with words. He said it all in one sentence. (If only we preachers could be as laconic!) Corliss is writing about "The Passion of the Christ," the movie that refuses to die. (Not that it should go away.) The article takes no more than two paragraphs, just a little more than four inches of the page, just a bit off to the right of the main (and earth-shaking) article about college online dating services.

"The Passion of the Christ" rocked movie audiences around the world and now the time has come for it to rock the house because the DVD has been released at Blockbusters and Wal-Marts across the nation.

Corliss notes that there's another version of "The Passion” coming on DVD, an animated version. It has "seven sing-along hymns (and) a blue-Jesus enduring most of his pain off-camera."

But it's the first part of that sentence that jumps off the page and into your eye. As Corliss begins to write about the animated "Passion," he says that it's for "parents who want the gospel without the gore."

There it is! There's what we (not just parents) want - a goreless gospel.

Critics long ago called Christianity a "slaughter house religion," but Corliss's phrase has a ring to it, a ring both at one and the same time catchy and deadly.

The Old Testament begins to allude to gore almost immediately after the Fall of man as God promises one day to "crush the serpent's head," and then, in a PETA-defying act, He clothes Adam and Eve at the expense of blood (Genesis 3:21). The much-ignored book of Leviticus drips with the gore of a sacrificial system that says, "Someone is coming!"

The New Testament authors detail the sacrifice of Christ by referring to gore as they write about "faith in His blood," "being justified by His blood," "the New Covenant in His blood," "redemption through His blood, "draw near through His blood," "peace through His blood, "once and for all through His own blood," "without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin," "the precious blood of Christ," "the blood of Jesus, His Son," "has freed us from sin by His blood," and "with your blood, you purchased men," and "the blood of the Lamb."

A gospel without gore? Impossible! Like Paul said in Galatians 3:21 - "If a law [something we could do, observe, or keep] had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would have certainly come by the law." If there could have been a goreless gospel, God would have given it and spared His Son. But it's like the author of Hebrews says, "without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. . ."

We long for a goreless gospel because gore offends both the aesthete and the proud (I Corinthians 1:23). The Cross delivers a left hook to our sense of aesthetics and our hubris simultaneously. Just as there's no way to make gore pretty, there's no way we can be forgiven without it. Jewelers make the Cross pretty; God didn't.

Paul said in Galatians 1:6-9 that there are "other gospels," which, in reality are "no gospel." A mathematician would write it this way: G(ospel) - G(ore) = N(o)G(ospel).

When Richard Corliss wrote, he was "write-on": we prefer God to forgive us without the gore. But God has an axiom with which we must reckon: G - G = NG.

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor

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