Loyd Ericson

TH 355 – Latin American Liberation

Prof. Rosemary R. Ruether
May 13th 2009

THE PASSION OF THE BRAVEHEART:

UNDERSTANDING IGNACIO ELLACURIA'S LIBERATION
THEOLOGY THROUGH THE LENSE OF MEL GIBSON'S BRAVEHEART AND THE
PASSION OF THE CHRIST

In both of Mel Gibson's films, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ,1 the

protagonist is portrayed as a hero who is unjustly tortured and killed by his oppressors, and yet

is triumphantly resurrected in the final scene of the move. While the first film is about the 13th

century Scottish rebel William Wallace and the latter film is about Jesus of Nazareth, it is the

former and not the latter that better represents the historical Christ of Ignacio Ellacuria's

liberation theology. Through a comparison of the films, we can see and understand the role of

historical salvation, death, and resurrection in Ellacuria's theology.

According to Ellacuria, the question “'Why did Jesus die' is inseparable from the

[question] 'why did they kill him.'”2 For his death to have historical significance it needs to be

understood in light of what brought about his death. To this latter question he answers that

Jesus “is killed . . . because of the historic life he led, a life of deeds and words that those who

represented and held the reins of the religious, socioeconomic and political situation could not

1 Braveheart, dir. Mel Gibson, Paramount Pictures presents an Icon Productions/Ladd Co production. Hollywood,
CA: Paramount, 1995, dvd recording. The Passion of the Christ, dir Mel Gibson, Icon Productions presents and
Icon production. London: Icon, 2004, dvd recording.
2 Ignacio Ellacuria, “The Church of the Poor, Historical Sacrament of Liberation,” trans. Margaret D. Wilde, in
Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 547.

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tolerate.”3 It is because of this that a discussion of Jesus' death must be preceded by a

discussion of his historic life which led to and provides a context and meaning to his death.

In the film Braveheart, it becomes very clear why the rebel William Wallace was killed.

Although his father and brother were both killed by the English when he was young, Wallace

remained uninterested in joining other Scots to fight against their oppressors. It is not until

Wallace's wife is murdered by an English sheriff that he decides to go to war with the English

to liberate his fellow oppressed Scots and to free them from their suffering. In the process it is

not only the English who fear Wallace as a threat to their oppressive power, but the Scottish

nobles also find Wallace as a threat to their own desires for power, and it is they who, through

their collusion with the English, trap and bring Wallace to the English to be killed.

Contrary to the depiction of a life that led to Wallace's death, Gibson's other movie The

Passion of the Christ provides very little reason to think that Jesus lived in such a way that

would gather any significant distrust or murderous intent from the oppressive powers of his

day. While Braveheart spends the bulk of the movie depicting the life of William Wallace as he

tried to free Scotland, with only the last few minutes of the film depicting his torture and death,

The Passion begins with the capture of Jesus and spends nearly the entirety of the film

depicting his torture and death, with only brief flashbacks to four episodes of his earlier life.

And none of these (a playful scene with his mother, a few lines from the sermon on the mount,

his encounter the prostitute, and the last supper) provide any reasons to understand why the

Roman and/or Jewish powers would want him dead. Only the scene with the stoning of the

prostitute depicts any kind of confrontation, with several Jewish men tossing aside their stones

3 Ignacio Ellacuria, “The Crucified People,” trans. Phillip Berryman and Robert R. Barr, in Mysterium
Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 588.

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and walking away in disappointment—however, this hardly provides any understanding as to

why Jesus was later killed.

For Ellacuria, the type of life that led to Christ's death was a life of what he calls

“historic soteriology.” This is a life that “seeks human promotion or human rights from the side

of the oppressed, on their behalf, and in struggle against the side of the oppressors. In other

words, his action is historical and concrete and goes to the roots of the oppression.” 4 Like

Wallace who was fighting with the oppressed Scots to gain their freedom from their

oppressors, Ellacuria's Christ is foremost concerned with the historical and tangible suffering

of the oppressed. Historical suffering is the suffering of “real poor people who really operate in

history.”5 It is they who are in direct and urgent need of salvation from their pains. Just as

Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible was concerned with the historical and concrete enslavement and

imprisonment of the Israelites, so too is Jesus foremost concerned with the historical

oppression of others. This, for Ellacuria is the Kingdom or Reign of God. It is the present and

historical work to liberate the poor and oppressed from their oppression. To attempt to

spiritualize their historical nature is to strip them of their importance. Ellacuria writes,

It would be a mutilation of the Hebrew scriptures to try to take from them only
their religious spirit without their historical flesh; and to try to keep the spirit of
the Christian scriptures without their historicity, or to sue their sense of
historicity only to support their spirit. In both testaments spirit and flesh, God
and history, are so inseparably untied that the disappearance of one would
disfigure or even destroy, the other.6

And just as salvation must remain historical, so must the sin which salvation is directed upon.

It also “cannot be studied abstractly” for it is also “concretely present in subtle forms that
4 Ellacuria, “The Church of the Poor,” 557.
5 Ignacio Ellacuria, “The Historicity of Christian Salvation,” trans. Margaret D. Wilde, in Mysterium Liberationis:
Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1993), 282.
6 Ibid., 256.

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require more careful theological analysis.”7

Thus Ellacuria writes that “We must ask in all seriousness what the sin of the world is

today, or in what forms the sin of the world appears today.” And to this he answers that “the sin

of the world is sharply expressed today in what must be called unjust poverty.”8 This is the

same today as it was in the New Testament where “the poor themselves, impoverished and

oppressed by injustice, have become the preferred locus of benevolence and grace, of God's

faithful love.”9 It is in this manner that Braveheart's depiction of Wallace exemplifies the

historical sin of poverty and oppression and the historical salvific acts of liberating the

oppressed that is essential to Ellacuria's discussion of Christ. On the other hand the state of the

poor and oppressed and their need for historic salvation plays no role whatsoever in The

Passion.

This does not mean that Braveheart is a perfect depiction of Ellacuria's Christ of

liberation. Though Wallace is skeptical of the Scottish nobles and sees them as just another

oppressive power waiting for their turn to impoverish the poor, he nonetheless uses violent

military power in his effort to free the oppressed Scots. This for Ellacuria is “invalid and anti-

salvific” and is based on the mistaken belief “that salvation must come through power—

military, economic, political, religious, even miraculous power—that is, power shaped by the

powers of this world.”10 While such powers may free the oppressed from one type of power,

they ultimately become and are oppressive powers in themselves. The alternative though is not

to resign to oppression and await a future eschatological moment of salvation. Neither should

salvation be resigned to “the next world, reducing it in this world to purely internal or moral
7 Ibid., 276.
8 Ibid., 278.
9 Ibid., 279.
10 Ibid., 281.

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dimensions.”11

Instead turning to other oppressive powers or setting aside salvation for another time,

Ellacuria argues that oppression and oppressive powers should be overcome with other means

—though perhaps there is no single method by which it should be done. Turning to the parable

of the good Samaritan, he writes that there is one point we can be clear on:

the true neighbor is not the priest or the Levite, who pass by the suffering of the
marginalized and wounded, but the Samaritan, who takes responsibility for him
and offers him material care, thus resolving the situation in which he is unjustly
involved. This apparently profane, apparently natural act, apparently taken
without awareness of its meaning, is much more transcendent and Christian than
all the prayers and sacrifices that the priests could make with their backs turned
to the suffering and anguish around them.12

What this parable shows is that salvific acts and liberation are possible in the present without

turning to power. How this is performed, however, requires what Ellacuria calls

“contemplation in action.” This recognizes that there is a subjective element in how salvation

is achieved—that there is no single way—but that is done in a means that is inspired by and

suited for God, or for the poor, and not for oneself. This contemplation requires both creativity

and understanding to know how one must act.

It is for this reason that Ellacuria says that “contemplation should be undertaken from

the most appropriate place. . . . which is the poor of the earth.” This contemplation “depends on

a spirituality of poverty; . . . knowing how to live with a spirit of poverty and identifying with

the cause of the poor, understood as God's cause.”13 In order to know what it is that the poor

and oppressed need, one must be of the poor and oppressed. One must live as they do and

understand what they experience. It is in this mode that once again Gibson's portrayal of

11 Ibid., 282.
12 Ibid., 284-5.
13 Ibid., 285.

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Wallace better exemplifies Ellacuria's Christ than does Gibson's portrayal of Jesus.

Looking at the Suffering Servant in Isaiah as a model for Christ and others who act as

saviors for the poor, Ellacuria writes that such a servant is one who (among many things):

• is “shattered by the concrete, historical intervention of human beings,” is “accustomed

to suffering,” and “is someone in whom there is no visible merit.”
• is “someone brought low, and humiliated.”
• “appears as a sinner—as the fruit of sin and as filled with sins,” and “has been reckoned
among sinners, because he took upon himself the burden of the sin of so many.”
• and is “in his desperate situation because of the sins of others.”

Far from these descriptions, the Jesus of The Passion prior to his final suffering is seen as

anything but shattered, low, burdened, or desperate. In the playful scene with his mother Mary,

Jesus is portrayed happy and unimpoverished as a young carpenter building a table for a “rich

man.” In the other scenes where Jesus is giving the sermon on the mount, helping the

prostitute, and at the Last Supper, he is handsome, well groomed, nicely clothed, regal and

stoic—hardly the image of one who understands the suffering of the oppressed.

On the other hand, Braveheart's Wallace is certainly shattered and brought low by the

English and Scottish nobles. He is accustomed to suffering and knows firsthand the plights of

the oppressed. Though he was raised and educated by a wealthy uncle, he chose for himself to

return to his people and live among and like them. It was the murder of his wife by the English

that left him broken and truly understanding how the other poor suffered by the hands of their

rich oppressors. And unlike the oppressive royalty and nobility—and unlike the Jesus of The

Passion—Wallace looks and is poor. He is in desperation because of the sins of the oppressors.

And even when he is made a noble himself in an attempt to unify the Scots against the English

rule, he does not vest himself in the raiment of the nobility, but remains in the rags of the poor

and returns to fighting for the freedom of the poor. It is in this last act, the rejection of nobility,

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that almost inevitably leads to Wallace's death.

Ellacuria writes that it “is easy to regard the oppressed and needy as those who are to be

saved and liberated, but it is not easy to see them as saviors and liberators.”14 Those with power

and means want and train us to believe it is they who are able to grant salvation and liberation,

and it is by those means that they are able to maintain their positions of power. According to

him, that Jesus:

was regarded as a blasphemer, one who was destroying the traditional religious
order, one who upset the social structure, a political agitator, and so forth, is
simply to recognize from quite distinct angles that the activity, word, and very
person of Jesus in the proclamation of the Reign were so assertive and so
against the established order and basic institutions that they had to be punished
by death.15

Like the Christ of Ellacuria's liberation theology, Wallace upset the social order and made his

death nearly inevitable. By rejecting the offers of the Scottish nobles to be one of them, he

made enemies with both the English royalty and the Scottish nobility—frustrating the latter's

plan to insert their own oppressive reign and control over the poor under the guise of

mitigating the English rule. Though his death was not naturally necessary, by earning the

threats from both the English and Scottish royalty, Wallace made collusion between the two

against him unavoidable.

It is this inevitability of death by the hands of the oppressors that Ellacuria calls the

historic necessity of Christ's death. According to Ellacuria, “We may admit that the death of

Jesus and the crucifixion of the people are necessary, but only if we speak of a necessity in

history and not a merely natural necessity.”16 Christ's death by natural necessity would mean

14 Ellacuria, “The Crucified People,” 582.

15 Ibid., 588.
16 Ibid., 586.

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that the world was such a way that it is his death by the hands of the rulers would have

occurred by some mytical law. This, Ellacuria argues, “would entail both eliminating the

responsibility of those who kill prophets and those who crucify humankind, thereby veiling the

aspect of sin in historic evil.”17 Rather than appealing to some sort of abstract evil that

inevitably acts in the world, for Ellacuria, Christ's death was a historic necessity that resulted

from his free acts in a world where historic persons also acted. “Necessity in history, on the

other hand forces us to emphasize the determining causes of what happens.”18 Just as Wallace's

fight against the English oppressors and rejection of the Scottish nobility inevitably resulted in

his death, for Jesus the “resistance of the oppressive powers and the struggle for liberation in

history brought [him] persecution and death.”19 Such a historic necessity of Jesus' death can

only be seen “after the fact. Neither his disciples nor he himself saw in the beginning and not

through the reflection on scripture, that the proclamation and victory of the Reign had to go by

way of death.”20

Unlike this historical necessity that Ellacuria writes of, the death of Jesus in The

Passion is simply of divine necessity and occurs for reasons other than historic necessity.

Unlike Ellacuria's Christ and Braveheart's Wallace who are killed by a collusion of the ruling

parties, The Passion's Jesus is sentenced to death by mostly uninterested rulers. Herod is rather

unconcerned with Jesus and Pontius Pilate's actually decides that Jesus is no threat and would

rather set him free—he even turns to scourging Jesus so that he would not have to kill him. It is

only some of the ruling Jewish leaders that want him killed, and they are only able to do so

after going through great lengths and benefiting from happenstance—such as the ability to
17 Ibid., 587.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 586.
20 Ibid., 588.

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choose Barabas over Jesus for freedom. And unlike Wallace and Ellacuria's Christ, Jesus is

shown knowing of and foretelling his death to his disciples in the last supper.

This wholly different approach to the final deaths in Braveheart and The Passion once

again point to the former being a more adequate portrayal of Ellacuria's historical Christ of

liberation. As already mentioned, for Ellacuria the importance of Christ's death is not found

solely in the death itself, but is found in the life that inevitably led to that death. Without this

emphasis on the life that led to death, he says:

An ascetic and moralizing focus on the Christian cross has nullified the
importance of the cross in history and led to a rejection of everything that has to
do with it. . . . The renewal of the mystery of the cross has little to do with
gratuitous representation, which places the cross where one wants it and not in
its real site, as though what Jesus had sought for himself was death on the cross
and not the proclamation of the Reign.21

In The Passion, Jesus' torture and death play that gratuitous, ascetic, and moralizing focus to

the highest degree. It is never explained why Jesus had to die, nor are there reasons shown as

to why others wanted him dead. He simply had to suffer and die of necessity. His death is

perhaps best summed up by his last words on the cross: “It is accomplished. Father, into your

hands I commend my spirit.” His death is the end goal and with it his work is accomplished—

and his life was foremost a means for this end, for his death. This moment of success and

accomplishment by his masochist sacrifice is marked by the depiction of Satan shrilling from

the depths of hell, as if he had been destroyed and defeated, and sin no longer held it's power

on earth.

For Ellacuria, the oppositeextreme to ignore the role of the cross is equally or even

more problematic. He writes, “Even more dangerous is the effort to evade the history of the

21 Ibid., 584.

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cross in those theologies of creation and resurrection that at most make of the cross an incident

or an isolated mystery that mystically projects its efficacy over human relationships with

God.”22 While the suffering and death of Christ should not be understood as an end of some

means (or even as a means of some end), neither should it be ignored or understood as a

contingent happenstance in the story of Jesus and God. Rather the cross should be looked at

and understood as important because it points back to the historically salvific life of Christ.

Because the life of Christ inevitably led to his death by the frustrated hands of the oppressors,

his life and death are necessarily connected and one should not and cannot accurately reflect on

his death without reflecting on his life. As Ellacuria puts it,

Jesus' death is the final meaning of his life only because the death toward which
his life led shows what was likewise the historic meaning and the theological
meaning of his life. It is, thus, his life that provides the ultimate meaning of his
death, and only as a consequence does his death, which has received its initial
meaning from his life, give meaning to his life. Therefore, his followers should
not focus primarily on death as sacrifice, but on the life of Jesus, which will
only really be his life if it leads to the same consequence as his life did.23

Unlike like Jesus' final words in The Passion which marked a finality and end goal by his

death, Wallace's last words before his death in Braveheart point back to his life and the future

need for continual historic salvation. Following his torture before an entertained English

crowd, and right before his beheading, Wallace shouts at the top of his weakened lungs,

“Freedom!” This final word performs two functions. First, it denies the false and oppressive

sovereignty of the English rule. The magistrate governing over his torture and execution

expects Wallace to plea for mercy—a plea which would falsely acknowledge the English

power as a source for salvation from suffering—and Wallace's shout denied their desire.

22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 589.

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Second and more importantly, far from announcing any accomplishment or end goal, this shout

points back to his life of fighting for the salvation and liberation of the oppressed and points

forward to the work that is yet to be done.

It is this last point, that his death marks a continuation of the work, that is once again

shown by the resurrection of Wallace in the final moments of the film. Although there is no

physical bodily resurrection, a narrated voice over claims that after Wallace was dismembered

and his limbs displayed as a warning to others, “It did not have the effect that [the English]

planned.” The final scene shows Wallace's Scottish followers armed for battle against the

English. Robert the Bruce, the Scottish noble who had previously betrayed Wallace, stands

with them holding a handkerchief that symbolized Wallace's historic push for the salvation of

the oppressed Scottish. Addressing his fellow Scots he asks, “You have bled with Wallace.

Now bleed with me,” and with that the Scots rush the English to fight for their freedom.

According to Ellacuria, “Jesus' death is inseparately connected to the eschatological and

historical coming of the Reign, and for that purpose the resurrection means not only a

verification or consolation, but the assurance that this work must continue and that He remains

alive to continue it.”24 Unlike Braveheart which depicts the resurrection of Wallace as a

continuation of the reality of oppression and the work of those who are trying to liberate the

oppressed, The Passion ends with a final scene that solely depicts the resurrection as a physical

bodily resurrection. Along with the shrill of Satan which followed his death, this depiction of

the resurrection (with it's triumphant accompanying score) allows people to “live with the false

assumption that the struggle against sin and death is over with the triumph of the

24 Ibid., 584.

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resurrection.”25 Such a triumph “would leave unfulfilled Jesus' message which predicted

persecutions and death for those who were to continue his work.”26

For Ellacuria, Jesus' embodiment was not just in flesh, but

was incorporated in human history. . . . One could say that the true historical
body of Christ, and therefore the preeminent locus of his embodiment and his
incorporation is . . . the poor and the oppressed of the world. . . . [T]he church
by its very nature is the church of the poor and that, as church of the poor, it is
the historical body of Christ.”27

Because the true historical body of Christ is more than just his physical body, but is the poor

and oppressed who are working for the salvation of others, the true resurrection of the body of

Christ is also more than continued life of his physical body, but is the continued life of the

historical body of Christ as the poor and oppressed who are proclaiming and working for the

Reign.

In a similar vein, Ellacuria's friend and mentor Archbishop Oscar Romero prophesied,

“I have frequently been threatened with death. I must tell you that, as a Christian, I do not

believe in death, but in resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the Salvadoran

people.”28 Two weeks later he was assassinated during mass for his work in seeking liberation

for the poor and oppressed in Latin America.

Nine years later, on November 16th, 1989, Ignacio Ellacuria along with five other Jesuit

colleagues and employees were assassinated by the Salvadoran army. Killed in the process of

editing a collaboration on liberation theology, Ellacuria's life and death poignantly exemplified

25 Ibid., 585.
26 Ibid., 584.
27 Ellacuria, “The Church of the Poor,” 546.
28 Cited in Javier Jimenez Limon, “Suffering, Death, Cross, and Martyrdom,” trans. Dinah Livingstone (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 715.

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his teaching that a life of seeking historic salvation for the oppressed will of historic necessity

place one's life in danger and possible death by the hands of the oppressive class. He, even far

more than Braveheart's Wallace, provides a better depiction of his Christ of historical

liberation than can any film. And while he may not be physically resurrected, through his

writings and through those who continue his work of liberation he continues to live and work

for the liberation of others.

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