`The Passion' stirs deep feelings.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

Only three movies have left me feeling emotionally seared, mildly sickened and slightly guilty - and yet the richer for it.

One is `Schindler's List,' Steven Spielberg's film on the Holocaust. One is `Saving Private Ryan,' his film on a platoon's post-D-Day rescue of a soldier who had already lost three brothers in World War II. And, having seen it Wednesday, one is Mel Gibson's `The Passion of the Christ.'

The critics are right: The latter is, like the others, violent. It is, like the others, a blood-bathed story of good and evil - and, no, I don't believe that evil starts and ends with the Jewish priests in the film.

But let's be honest: Gibson is being stoned because he's broken Club Hollywood's unwritten rules. In a well-secularized movie culture, he dared to dust off the old rugged cross - and did so not with some kitschy Cecil B. De Mille remake, but with the same kind of artful-but-in-your-face approach that's allowable for other "approved" genres.

To discard the movie, as some have, because of its stark realism or its alleged anti-Jewish slant or its limited focus is more a testament to tunnel vision than to supposed film crimes committed by Gibson.

"The Passion" is the cinematic version of the Rorschach inkblot: most will see whatever they choose. But I believe this movie is about far more than the hot-spot issues it has spawned. In subtle facial expressions and masterful flashbacks, it is about relationships - mother and son, leader and followers and, in the case of Pontius Pilate, husband and wife.

It is about the grittier side of love. About either following one's conscience against the masses - see Jesus' refusal to "return evil for evil" - or, given Peter's betrayal of Christ and Pilate's betrayal of himself, about selling out to those masses. And about the willingness to change, manifested movingly by a Jewish man who, though at first reluctant to help Jesus carry the cross, ultimately does so and literally feels his pain.

To be sure, the "Christ-killer' label has unfairly hounded Jews for centuries. I can understand why seeing the Jewish priests, among others, call for Jesus' death might stir resentment. And yet few people, Jewish or otherwise, come across looking noble in "The Passion," particularly the Roman soldiers who brutalize Jesus like rabid dogs. This is not, however, a movie about laying blame, but about reaching higher, digging deeper and facing ourselves.

`The line separating good and evil,' wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist who spent eight years in labor camps, `passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.'

That not only squares with Jesus - "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" - but with history in general. Or have Christians forgotten the Inquisitions, Polish Catholics holding rabbis as German soldiers ripped off their beards and most American churches yawning as Hitler tightened his noose?

History also shows Jesus' crucifixion, like the thousands of others done by the Romans, was, indeed, brutal. This was a culture, remember, where seeing someone fed to the lions was equivalent to our trips to Autzen Stadium. That Gibson dared to show such brutality is as appropriate as Spielberg showing half-torn bodies on Omaha Beach or bullets fired from point-blank range at innocent Jews in Krakow.

Likewise, that Gibson chose to concentrate on Christ's death - though his life is equally compelling - is as appropriate as, say, "Titanic" focusing on the ship's final voyage.

Nobody's forcing anybody to see "The Passion." It is simply one man's movie; take it or leave it. But non-believers so quick to castigate it might consider if their reasons lie deeper than they dare admit. And believers so quick to exalt it might consider, given Christianity's hypocrisy-sprinkled history, if their lives reflect the sacrificial, forgive-others love implicit in Jesus' final hours.

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or at [e-mail].