On the Frames That Make the Sacred Approachable
Part III of The Frame and the Work
This essay continues the Ergon/Parergon series that began earlier on this blog. It moves into different territory – Christian theology, iconography, devotional practice – but the underlying question remains the same one: what is the thing itself, and what merely surrounds it?
The first two parts of this series moved through the Mona Lisa and the Rosetta Stone, through university credentials and institutional prestige, arriving finally at a Blake lecture in 1992 and two Greek words that have travelled ever since. This third part turns the same lens on theology – specifically on what happens when a filmmaker removes the devotional frame from the Crucifixion and thrusts a Christian audience face-to-face with something closer to the historical event.
A Film That Shocked the Life Out of Me
In 2004, Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ. I went in as a believer. I came out disturbed in a way I could not immediately name.
The image of Christ on the cross that I had carried since childhood was what I can only describe as clean. Three nails, one spear wound, the halo, the composed face tilted slightly downward. The familiar geometry of sacrifice. An image so well-defined by devotional repetition that it had become almost geometric in its precision – a visual grammar so internalised that it functioned less as image than as sign. When I saw a cross, I did not need to see it. I already knew it.
Gibson’s film did not give me what I knew. It gave me something I was not equipped to receive. The figure on screen was barely recognisable. Scourged to the point of disfigurement, bleeding from dozens of wounds simultaneously, collapsing repeatedly under the weight of the beam – this was not the Christ of my devotion. And my reaction was not intellectual disagreement with Gibson’s theological choices, though that disagreement exists. My reaction was visceral, embodied, prior to argument. I did not want to look. Far be it to touch or even kiss – as Mary does in the film.
That instinctive recoil is what this essay is about. Not the film itself, not Gibson’s choices, not the theology of atonement. But the specific structure of that recoil – what it reveals about the frames through which we encounter sacred reality, and what happens when those frames are stripped away.
The Icon and Its Gold Ground
Look at the painting reproduced here. It is a crucifixion panel in the Italo-Byzantine manner, almost certainly thirteenth or fourteenth century, executed in the tradition that art historians call maniera greca – the Greek manner, meaning the style transmitted to medieval Italian painters through Byzantine devotional art before Giotto broke decisively from it.
Christ is crucified. The nails are there. The wounds are visible. Three figures hang on three crosses under a gold sky. There is no attempt to suppress the fact of suffering. And yet notice what the painting does with it.
The body is composed. Even in death, the posture retains a kind of formal dignity – the curve of the torso has been deliberately arranged into something closer to a gesture than a collapse. The face holds an expression that is less anguished than inward. Around the crosses, angels move in attitudes of grief that are stylised into something approaching liturgical gesture. Below, the crowd of witnesses – Mary, the beloved disciple, soldiers, mourners – are arranged in a composition that is clearly theological rather than documentary. Everyone is positioned in relation to what is happening at the centre, not as a crowd of bystanders might actually arrange themselves at an execution, but as figures in a sacred drama who understand their role in it.
And then there is the gold ground. This detail matters more than it might appear. In Byzantine and Italo-Byzantine iconography, the gold background does not represent sky or space. It represents eternity. It is not a setting but a statement. The figures depicted do not exist in historical time and geographical place; they exist in the eternal now of theological significance. Christ does not hang on a cross outside Jerusalem in AD 33. Christ hangs on the cross – the act that is contemporaneous with every moment of Christian prayer and contemplation, the event that is always simultaneously past and present.
The icon, in other words, is not attempting what Gibson attempted. It is not asking: what did this look like? It is asking: what does this mean? The suffering is not suppressed. It is transfigured – held within a frame that transforms historical horror into theological truth. The gold ground is doing exactly what Derrida’s parergon does: it is not merely decorating the image. It is constituting how the image is to be received.
Which Christ Is the Real Christ?
Gibson stripped the gold ground away. That is the most precise description of what The Passion of the Christ did.
He approached the Crucifixion as a filmmaker committed to historical and physiological fidelity. The reconstruction of Roman scourging was based on what we know of actual practice. The wounds were researched. The physical mechanics of crucifixion – the collapse of the lungs, the impossibility of breathing without pushing up on the nailed feet – were rendered with what Gibson considered appropriate seriousness. He removed centuries of devotional framing and attempted to restore the ergon. The event itself. The raw historical fact before theology got hold of it.
The question this raises is one that cannot be answered simply: which Christ is the real Christ?
There are several available candidates. The historical Jesus – whatever the disciplines of archaeology, textual criticism, and ancient history can tentatively reconstruct. The theological Christ – the Second Person of the Trinity as defined by the Council of Nicaea and elaborated across sixteen centuries of Christian thought. The Christ of the Gospels – four accounts written decades after the events, each shaped by its author’s community, audience, and theological purpose. The liturgical Christ – encountered through Eucharist, prayer, and the church calendar. The devotional Christ – encountered through personal prayer, iconography, and the particular tradition in which one was formed. And the Christ of childhood – perhaps the deepest frame of all, pre-theological, pre-intellectual, formed before we had the conceptual vocabulary to interrogate it.
Gibson’s Christ was one answer to the question. The icon is another. My childhood church’s Christ – the Risen Christ, the living Lord, the figure before whom Sunday School children are invited to feel joy rather than terror – is a third.
Each is simultaneously Christ and a framing of Christ. None possesses unmediated access to the reality it represents. The historian’s Jesus comes through the limited and contested evidence of antiquity. The theologian’s Christ comes through councils, controversies, and the politics of empire. The icon’s Christ comes through a tradition of devotional painting that made specific choices about what to show and how to show it. Gibson’s Christ comes through a filmmaker’s decisions about what fidelity requires.
There is no position outside all frames from which the unframed Christ can be observed. This is not a statement of scepticism. It is a statement about the nature of encounter with the sacred – or, more broadly, about the nature of encounter with any reality that exceeds our capacity to hold it directly.
The Touchable Christ
What my recoil in the cinema was telling me, if I am willing to be honest about it, was not primarily theological. It was relational.
The Christ of my formation was touchable. I could sit with Him in prayer. I could bring my fears and questions to that composed, dignified figure and feel that He received them. The devotional relationship I had cultivated across decades had been built through and with a particular visual and liturgical grammar. The icon’s Christ, the hymnody’s Christ, the empty cross’s Christ – these were not abstractions. They were the specific forms through which I had learned to love and be loved.
Gibson’s Christ disrupted those forms. Not by being theologically incorrect. But by being physiologically overwhelming. The brutalised figure on screen was not someone I could sit with in prayer. The emotional pathways through which I had always approached Jesus were blocked. The very realism Gibson intended as an act of reverence produced, in me, a kind of devotional paralysis. The more graphically real the suffering became, the more unreachable the person became.
This is philosophically interesting. It inverts what we normally assume about realism and intimacy. We tend to assume that more accurate representation produces closer encounter – that stripping away idealisation brings us nearer to the truth. Gibson’s film suggests the opposite is possible. Radical historical fidelity, in this case, created distance rather than proximity. The attempt to show exactly what it cost produced a Christ I could not approach.
There is a parallel here with the experience of the Rosetta Stone facsimile explored in Part I of this series. What I mourned, when I learned the stone was a replica, was not information. I already knew what the Rosetta Stone looked like. What I mourned was the sense of contact – the feeling that I was in the presence of the actual thing, trailing its history behind it. The facsimile was visually identical and experientially empty. Gibson’s Christ presented the opposite problem: too much presence, too much physical reality, too little of the frame that made approach possible.
Both experiences point toward the same conclusion: the value of an encounter is not determined solely by the accuracy of the representation. Something else is doing essential work. Something the parergon carries.
The First Witnesses Had No Icons
Here is the irony that is hardest to sit with.
The first Christians – Mary, John, the women who accompanied Jesus to Golgotha, Joseph of Arimathea, those who took Him down from the cross – encountered something considerably closer to Gibson’s Christ than to the icon’s. They did not have the protective mediation of devotional framing. They had only the unbearable fact. The specific physical details that Gibson reconstructed from Roman historical sources were the details these witnesses lived through and could not unlive. They had no gold ground. They had only blood and wood and the smell of death and the specific grief of having loved this person.
The Christian devotional tradition emerged, in part, as a response to that unbearable ergon. Icons, crucifixes, hymns, liturgy, theological language, church architecture – each of these is a form of frame built, gradually and collectively, to make the horror approachable enough to contemplate. Not to conceal it. Not to deny it. But to make it possible for human beings who were not there to draw near to something that, in its raw historical form, might be too terrible to approach at all.
Understood this way, the devotional tradition is not a distortion of the Gospel. It is a mercy extended to those who came after. The icon says: come close. It provides the gold ground, the composed posture, the theological arrangement of figures so that a worshipper in Byzantium or medieval Italy or a South Indian church in the twentieth century can stand before the Crucifixion and receive it rather than be annihilated by it.
Gibson removed this mercy. He regarded the devotional tradition as having obscured something that needed to be seen. He was not entirely wrong. There is a real danger in a Christianity so thoroughly cushioned by comfortable imagery that the costliness of love never fully registers. The sanitised Christ, the permanently serene Christ, the Christ who is always already at a safe aesthetic distance from suffering – this Christ can become a form of evasion. The icon, if misused, can become a way of not looking at what is actually being depicted.
But Gibson may have underestimated the degree to which the devotional parergon is not evasion but access. The question is not which is true – the icon or the filmed reconstruction. The question is which truth each makes available, and at what cost.
The Empty Cross
Our church tradition has made a specific choice that is worth examining as a theological argument in its own right.
The central image in our churches is not the crucified Christ. It is not an empty tomb. It is a cross – empty, unoccupied, bearing neither the body of Christ in suffering nor any other figure. Wood or metal, sometimes plain, sometimes ornate, but always vacant.
This is neither the choice of Eastern Orthodoxy, which tends toward the triumphant Christ, sovereign even in crucifixion, already implicitly conquering death from the cross. Nor is it the Roman Catholic choice of the crucifix, which keeps the suffering explicitly before the believer as an ongoing claim on their attention. The empty cross is a Protestant instinct, and the particular tradition in which I was formed belongs to that lineage.
At first glance, the empty cross might appear to be the most austere of the three options – stripped of figuration, almost minimalist, offering the structure without the body. But the theological argument embedded in that absence is anything but minimal. The empty cross holds two statements simultaneously. This happened. And this is not where the story ends. The wood remains as permanent witness to the event. The absence of a body proclaims the Resurrection not as adjunct to the Gospel but as its culmination.
From an ergon-parergon perspective, the empty cross is a parergon of extraordinary compression. It frames everything – the entire narrative of Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection – in a single image that achieves its meaning through absence rather than presence. The empty tomb and the risen body are present in the image only as implication, as what the vacant wood points toward and demands to be understood in light of. The cross does not say: here is the suffering. Nor does it say: here is the victory. It says: both of these are true, and they cannot be separated.
There is a question worth pressing: is the empty cross a convenience or a mercy? Having been a Sunday School teacher, I am not neutral in my answer. When you explain the Gospel to children, you do not begin with the mechanics of Roman execution. You begin with God loves you. Jesus is alive. Death is not the end. This is not dishonesty. It is pedagogy – the wisdom of knowing where finite human beings, and perhaps especially young ones, can enter a reality that will later disclose its fuller depths. The empty cross participates in this pedagogical mercy. It provides a point of entry rather than overwhelming the entrant at the threshold.
But mercy is not the whole account. The cross is still there. It is not a stained glass window of the Nativity, not a dove of peace, not a lamb in a pastoral scene. The instrument of torture is retained even as the suffering body is absent. The empty cross does not permit its viewer to forget what the symbol designates. It holds the horror and the hope in permanent tension – insisting that neither cancels the other out, that the path to resurrection runs through and not around the cross.
Convenience would have replaced the cross with something easier. Mercy kept the cross and removed the body. That distinction matters.
The Wounds That Remained
There is a scene in the Gospel of John that the empty cross seems to be in conversation with, even if that conversation is implicit rather than announced.
After the Resurrection, the disciples are gathered behind locked doors. Christ appears among them. He shows them his hands and his side. The wounds are not healed. They are not erased by resurrection. They remain as the marks of identification – the specific, physical evidence that this risen figure is the same person who was crucified. When Thomas, absent at the first appearance, refuses to believe the other disciples’ testimony, the answer Christ offers him is not theological argument but direct encounter: put your finger here, and see my hands.
The wounds remain. Death does not. This is the precise tension the empty cross is trying to hold. The Risen Christ is not a Christ from whom suffering has been cleanly removed, leaving a kind of celestial serenity. The Risen Christ carries the marks of what He endured. What has changed is not the past but its final word. The suffering is not denied; its finality is.
In the context of our ergon-parergon argument, the Resurrection wounds are deeply interesting. They function as a parergon that has become part of the ergon – the frame of suffering has been permanently incorporated into the risen identity. The wounds do not remain because Christ could not be healed. They remain, the tradition suggests, because they are part of what He brings back. The marks of love given at cost. The evidence that this is not a different Christ than the one who died, but the same Christ whose dying and rising are inseparable.
Gibson’s film could not show this. A film committed to historical fidelity stops at the death. The icon anticipates it – the gold ground reaches past the historical event toward the eternal reality beyond it. The empty cross assumes it – the absence of a body is only meaningful if something happened to that body other than burial. Each frame reaches differently toward the same truth that none of them fully contains.
On Approaching What We Cannot Hold Directly
What the Gibson experience revealed, and what the icon and the empty cross each illuminate from a different angle, is something that extends beyond Christian theology into the broader epistemology of sacred encounter.
Human beings cannot approach certain realities directly. This is not a failure of nerve. It is a condition of finitude. There are events – the death of a loved one, an experience of radical beauty, an encounter with genuine holiness, any moment in which we are met by something that exceeds our capacity to contain it – that require mediation. Not because the thing itself is unavailable, but because we are not constituted to receive it without some form of frame.
The parergon, in this reading, is not a distortion interposed between us and reality. It is a form of grace. The liturgy that transforms grief into lament, the icon that transforms horror into contemplation, the empty cross that transforms an execution site into a sign of hope – these are not evasions of truth. They are structures that allow finite creatures to approach truths that would otherwise shatter them.
This is also what the best art does. The novel about a death can allow us to experience grief at a bearable distance. The poem about loss can give suffering a form that makes it possible to hold. The painting of the Crucifixion gives the event a visual grammar that the event’s raw historical reality does not possess. In each case, the frame – the parergon – is doing more than decoration. It is making approach possible.
The danger Gibson identified is real: a faith so thoroughly cushioned by comfortable imagery that the weightiness of love and sacrifice never fully registers. That danger is genuine. The icon, misused, can become a way of looking at the Crucifixion without ever fully receiving it. The empty cross, misunderstood, can become a pleasant symbol that has forgotten what it is the symbol of.
But Gibson’s solution – radical removal of the frame – carried its own cost. For many believers, myself included, it did not produce deeper encounter. It produced devotional paralysis. It replaced one partial truth with another, offered the ergon without the parergon and found that the ergon, unframed, was too much to receive.
The wiser answer, if there is one, is not to choose between the icon and the film, between the gold ground and the forensic reconstruction, between the empty cross and the wounds in the Gospel of John. It is to hold all of them – knowing that each reveals something the others conceal, that the truth of the Crucifixion exceeds every frame offered for it, and that the multiplicity of frames is itself a form of honesty about the inexhaustibility of what is being framed.
The icon says: come close. The film says: look at what this cost. The empty cross says: do not remain here. Each is true. Each is partial. Together, they describe something that no single parergon can fully carry – and perhaps that is exactly as it should be.
End of Part III