2024-03-28 01:53:45
They were so close to the text of the Gospels that they were even able to include an allusion to Bible festivals. Jesus goes shopping for the Last Supper and picks up five ciabatta and two pizza frutti di mare. What does this remind us of? Right, the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6), where Jesus feeds a large crowd with five loaves of bread and two fish.
Okay, Jesus achieved this miracle well before his Passion, but the allusion served a dramatic purpose on Wednesday evening: there were also many women among those five thousand at the feeding miracle. And by remembering this, RTL was able to make it somewhat plausible during the second edition of the live musical event “The Passion” that, contrary to the Gospels, there were some women among its twelve faithful followers at the Last Supper. And the fact that these twelve then enjoyed themselves with bread and wine and pizzas made it clear that the historical Jesus (here played by Ben Blümel) represented a banquet theology that clearly differentiated the ascetic preachers of the time from those who celebrated community in anticipation of the Kingdom of God.
There was hardly anything theologically wrong with that rainy open-air Passion performance. It offered slightly modified pop songs, film sequences of the most important stages of Jesus’ suffering and death in front of Kassel backdrops such as the main train station with local trains and e-scooters and, on stage, Hannes Jaenicke as a mixture of retelling evangelist, explanatory religious teacher and interpretive preacher. He named the central message of the passion story as “that each of us is loved unconditionally,” regardless of whether we are “climate gluers” or “lateral thinkers.”
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Anyone who wanted to contradict that would have to find fault with pop culturalization as such. But so far there is no indication that God has given the exclusive rights for Passion performances to the Association for Contemplative Minimalism. Rather, popular culture has a definite tradition when it comes to Jesus’ suffering and death.
Think of Mel Gibson’s rather splattery film “The Passion of the Christ” from 2004, the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” from 1971 or the medieval and early modern passion plays and parades, whose dramatic comedy, colorful costumes and loud singing were not present in the 18th century were stopped because of their often aggressive anti-Judaism – which would have been a good reason for the bans – but because those spectacles did not correspond to the taste of the Enlightenment thinkers who came to power.
But speaking of anti-Semitism: RTL advertised in advance that the “documenta city of Kassel” was chosen as the location for the spectacle; The majority of the performance took place at the documenta central location, Friedrichsplatz. Wasn’t there something about anti-Semitism in the summer of 2023? And don’t the passion stories in the Gospels tend to blame Jesus’ death not on the Roman occupying power with the cruel prefect Pontius Pilate, but rather on the Jews, contrary to historical facts? Couldn’t we have reflected on that so briefly?
Francis Fulton-Smith as Pontius Pilate
Source: picture alliance/dpa/Swen Pförtner
The stage of the RTL production “The Passion” on Friedrichsplatz
Source: picture alliance/dpa/Swen Pförtner
Instead, this issue was avoided entirely. Pilate (Francis Fulton-Smith) was sleazier than in many other Passion performances, but here too he had no real interest in torturing the kindly itinerant preacher to death. Rather, according to the Gospels, he opportunistically gave in to an unspecified popular request. This meant that the accusation of the Jews, which was a shame for Christians, was simply avoided by remaining silent.
That was a lazy trick. And what was scandalous was that the armed men who captured Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane used the uniforms and cars of the Federal Republic of Germany police. What now: police officers of the democratic constitutional state should be mistreating henchmen of the Roman terror regiment?
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This is where the limits of trying to transfer old history into the present became apparent. Otherwise it was okay: the disciples slept in an industrial ruin during Jesus’ prayer. Peter (Timur Ülker) denied Jesus in a kebab shop where the first RTL Aktual news of Jesus’ capture was already playing on the television.
And Judas (Jimi Blue Ochsenknecht) sang his inner conflict (“this greed, this addiction”) into the night in a film from the Hercules Monument in Kassel in the most psychological way possible these days. Didn’t the masters of the medieval altars that we admire today also subject the entire body of the Gospels to their own contemporary tastes?
Musically, all eras treated the Passion with their own musical preferences anyway. Certainly, on RTL Nadja Benaissa did not come close to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” in the greatly expanded role of Jesus’ mother Mary. But with “I wish you love without suffering” by Udo Jürgens, which wasn’t entirely appropriate in terms of content, she at least performed a beautiful and touching song.
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So the evening was nothing more and nothing less than the professionally staged private television version of those popping, updating youth services that have been held in both churches for a good 60 years to edify and instruct young Christians. And at times in Kassel things became downright pietistic, even evangelical.
When I was a child in the early 1970s, I went to church summer camps where the most pious people came to the campfire in the evenings and testified about how they had found God and Jesus Christ. Similar now in Kassel: In between, RTL switched to a procession in which a large illuminated cross was carried through the city. In short interviews, the cross bearers (who seemed pretty cast) talked about their experiences with God:
A couple from Flensburg divorced after their husband was unfaithful, but the wife forgave him (forgiveness is the great passion theme) and they married a second time. Another woman says she had an apparition of a figure on her hospital bed after breast cancer surgery. A Hamburg Reeperbahn restaurateur is doing better after personal strokes of fate since he “became a Christian” and discovered that “Jesus gave the best message ever.” This made it clear that private television, as a stronghold of self-disclosure, is very suitable as a religious medium of confession.
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