Easter Greetings!  As an individual who has been searching for true faith, one can
readily understand  why I was in a theater with my wife and daughter viewing 
Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ on the first day of its release (Ash Wednesday).
And not sharing my personal opinion of it immediately after viewing it, was not
because I wasn't favorably impressed or without  emotion; it was because it has
taken me all this time to sort out my feelings.   Quite simply, I was overwhelmed
and emotionally affected, but in truth, I didn't  want to come across like a 
self-ordained evangelist.   Was our Lord's last twelve hours of mortality 
accurately depicted?  Or, were the eleven minutes of viewing His torturous 
journey to crucifixion overdone?  I do not think so.   In short, I believe that
the attitudes that pervaded that period, coupled with the brutal  means that
ancients used to dispose of their enemies, suggest that it may have been underdone.

The massacre of 1,500,000 Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks or 
the 6,000,000 Jews who perished at  the  hands of Hitler's Nazi Germany, more
than confirms the fact that in spite of God's sacrifice of His only begotten
Son, Jesus Christ, more than two thousand years ago, reenforces the fact that
treachery and brutality, along with the Four Horsemen  of the Apocalypse, are
still alive and doing well in our unstable world.   I believe what the Passion
of Christ reflects most has been the erroneous way that  Christ's sacrifice on
the Cross has been interpreted.  

To begin with, since Christ died on the Cross, thousands of Christian faiths have 
appeared with each of them trying to out-interpret the other.   I suppose the only 
exception to that theme is  our own divided Armenian Apostolic Church.  They don't
try to out-interpret each other.  In fact, they claim that we are "religiously 
one."  In doing so, however, they eat the same food from separate tables.  And as 
for their justification for doing so, even they can't give a good reason for it.   
Recently, we have seen the  Four Horsemen riding among us again.  And though the 
humanists among us have been trying to keep the venom of hate from spreading, they 
don't seem to have much success  in doing so.  Because of this, and for the sake of 
our tired old world, it is my fervent hope that sanity prevails.   But it won't be 
easy because for true sanity to prevail, it would mean that instead of choosing 
sides, as our war lords would have us do, we must all strive to find that all-elusive
common ground.  We talk the talk, but we don't walk the walk.  And perhaps the best
place to start for our North  American Armenians would be to bring our "religiously
one" Armenian Apostolic circus  under one tent.   Fact is that the Passion of 
Christ movie has inspired many of us to start praying again.  Accordingly, our 
Christian churches are starting to see better turnouts for their Sunday services.  
But we shouldn't stop there--we should try to parlay this sense of community and 
love throughout our entire world.   

Joseph Vosbikian

Note: Incidentally, I wonder if those who saw Passion,  recognized the duduk 
playing Le Le Ahman (or Dle Yaman) during the eleven minute crucifixion sequence.  
I'll bet the duduk player was an Armenian.