By James Wilson
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was first published in 1880. The master work of author Lew Wallace it was acclaimed the most influential American work of the 19th Century. It surpassed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in both sales and impact even though Abraham Lincoln called Cabin the spark that ignited America’s Civil War. Ben-Hur ignited a whole lot more in terms of American faith and social consciousness. It depicts Imperial Rome as the essence of unchained human brutality; it offers the sacrificial life of Jesus Christ – ultimately embraced by the fictional Judah Ben-Hur – as the royal road to authentic justice as well as the peace that passes understanding. There have been numerous film adaptations of the story with the most recent released this summer of 2016. As much as I admire producers Roma Downey and Mark Burnett I have to class their effort as a missed opportunity.
A comparison between their work and the 1959 block buster that netted Best Picture awards for the film and Best Actor for Charlton Heston is starkly revealing. The former work – far more faithful to the novel than the latter – depicts villain Messala as success obsessed and utterly unscrupulous; he condemns best friend Ben-Hur along with his mother and sister – to establish his toughness – and has an elderly servant tortured despite knowing their innocence. With his dying breath he taunts Ben-Hur with the leprosy his mother and sister now bear. This is a man so willfully self-absorbed not even death breaks his concentration on evil. He serves no god (knowingly) but himself.
The 2016 re-make features a villain wounded by life and threatened by institutional – not personal – evil who compromises because he does not see an alternative. He is rejected by his adoptive mother in this one; the Roman governor is injured during an assassination attempt by a zealot harbored in Ben-Hur’s home, and Messala’s own life is threatened by Rome if he fails to punish. He becomes hardened by bitterness but the story ends with the two boys-now-men embracing each other in reconciliation and re-setting their relationship. The point is that Messala is not responsible for his evil; he simply reacts badly to abuse until he can be taught a better way through his suffering.
The ’59 version depicts Ben-Hur as a faith-serious Jew compared to Messala who dances to no music save his own. As Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount a resistant Ben-Hur can be seen leaving the scene in the distance; it is a max-powerful scene that sets up the power of his coming acceptance and newfound ability to forgive. This Jew meets the fulfillment of his faith as he watches Christ forgive from the Cross. In the newer version the Lord is presented as a humanist preaching about fear and mistrust rather than self-centrality being the root of evil. It finishes with a strong message of Christ as Son-of-God and the need to know Him as He is, but it exhorts more a revelation of knowledge than the about-face from a chosen orientation that is called repentance.
The newer version eliminates the meaning of Ben-Hur surviving the shipwreck of his galley and no opportunity is given for him to show compassion to others at risk. In the older one he is deliberately unchained by his commander’s order and then uses his freedom to serve others – including the commander.
The long and short is that 2016 offers a Greek-style tragedy in which all are victims of circumstances beyond their control although – unlike other Greek tragedies – a loving God intervenes with power and the two protagonists respond well. 1959 offers a Christian-style tragedy in which evil is willful and all must accept responsibility – including the relatively innocent – for their circumstances. There is hope even in final disaster – from shipwreck to leprosy to crucifixion – and by choosing well at the end (Messala has unfortunately died in his sin) they are privileged to return to a resurrected beginning of new life. The one is politically correct in a wistful and sentimentally redemptive way; the other presents real life in all its terror and potential triumph in Christ.
The real import of this compare-and-contrast exercise is for the Awakening now underway for those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear. It is best seen from the standpoint of Ben-Hur author Lew Wallace’s life in Christ.
A Civil War general, Wallace was well acquainted with horror and brutality – and the faith that is sometimes seeded in such manure. He became a Christian himself when he realized – while debating an agnostic friend – he needed to fish or cut bait. The man whose literary work upset the 19th Century for Christ and may have sparked the revivals of the early 20th never actually joined a church. Biblical injunctions to maintain fellowship with other believers notwithstanding he always thought himself an outside-the-box believer. His first motivation to write Ben-Hur was fascination with the faithfulness of the Magi – those pagan wise men who traveled some two years to greet the newborn King in Bethlehem. The emergent theme of the novel – compassion and forgiveness triumphs over vengeance – is often credited with re-uniting North and South following war and destruction.
In this current Awakening God is calling on us who are in His Body before He calls on those outside this Body to re-engage the whole of His Word – especially the parts about seeking and saving the outsider rather than condemning. He expects us to re-engage with the whole of His Holy Spirit – the inspiration for Good Samaritans and parents loving their Prodigals rather than contenting ourselves with lifting hands when we sing praises. Above all He waits for us to sacrifice our sacred cows – the legalisms and selective understandings of His revelation that enable us to rationalize the hardness of our hearts. He wants us not on His side but by His side in this season. He wants us to expect His return at any moment and focus our lives on Him accordingly. And He wants us to take seriously the old saw about the Christian community existing for the sake of those who do not belong to it or are alienated from it.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships The Holy Spirit and the End Times, and Kingdom in Pursuit – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at praynorthstate@charter.net
