Jesus and The Green Mile

In the story The Green Mile, an innocent and child-like man with incredible healing power is sent to the electric chair. Through a sympathetic prison guard, this healer named John Coffey had an opportunity to escape his capital sentence. Yet Coffey chose death, for he tired of sensing the evils of our brutal world. His way of describing this psychic awareness was that it was like "pieces of glass, stabbing (him) in the head" each day of his life—his own allegorical "crown of thorns." When strapped to his own wooden instrument of execution, Coffey states: "I'm sorry for what I am."

Although Stephen King routinely depicts the villains in his novels/ movies as fanatical Christians (such as in Carrie and The Shawshank Redemption), The Green Mile seems to give an appreciative nod to advanced Christology. Unlike ET and Starman, which use certain Gospel narratives as plot devices, The Green Mile touches on many underlying currents found in the Gospel depictions of Christ's persecution. Although long and overdone in places, the movie does a good job in illustrating it's own "Passion Story."

Case in point: Other criminals sent to their execution make apologetic comments such as: "I'm sorry for what I did." John Coffey had no such crime to apologize for. He was misunderstood in the extreme. He was a gentle healer who didn't belong in our hate-filled and bigoted world. As such, he is executed for who he is, rather than for what he did.

This is exactly the situation with Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospels illustrate how Jesus' claims of Divine/ Messianic authority shocked and threatened the Jewish Sanhedrin to the point where they delivered him to the hands of their hated enemies, the Romans. The Romans, ignorant of the type of "kingship" Jesus ascribed to himself, took the claim seriously and convicted him of treason (whether or not a mob chose Barrabbas over Jesus, in a last-minute loophole Pilate found—in order to appease his powerful wife). Thus we have the incongruity of a rabbi who taught non-violent cooperation with Romans (and their dreaded taxation) being executed by those very same Romans.

Many readers at this point can charge that these last perspectives are solely dependent on the Gospels, and that the Gospels are far too unreliable to be trusted—even with "non-supernatural" accounts. This would ignore the fact that ancient non-Christian references to Jesus reinforce the Gospel's perspective.

A reference from Flavius Josephus, written about 93 AD (and divorced from later Christian rewritings), describes how Jesus "led away many of the Jews and the Greeks." Josephus also records how "chief men" from the Jews delivered Jesus to Pilate. Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (116 AD) reported that "Christus" was executed under Pontius Pilate, during the reign of Tiberius. In the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a, ancient Rabbinic tradition records how they found Yeshu (in the Greek, "Jesus") guilty of "practicing sorcery" and "leading Israel astray." So these three historic references to Jesus correspond nicely with what the Gospels report.

Some revisionists have postulated that Jesus may had been more of a political revolutionary than of a rabbi, and being a zealot he naturally met his end with the brutality of Rome. There is a big problem with this perspective. The earliest Christians would have emulated the model set by their founder, and would have been recorded as conducting "Crusader" type battles. Tacitus instead records how these early Christians endured torture and execution in Nero's "circus," and like their founder they were like gentle sheep led to the slaughter. They did emulate Jesus in this regard.

"I'm sorry for what I am." Ironically, it was Jesus' "I am" discourses (which related him to Yahweh, the God revealed at the burning bush) that threatened the Sanhedrin the most. It was an unspeakable blasphemy to even speak the name of Yahweh, so one can imagine the reaction identifying oneself with Yahweh would bring!

Did the screenplay writers of The Green Mile (Stephen King and Frank Darabont) insert all this Christian theology into their movie intentionally? It’s hard to say. I simply am appreciative that the film gives an appreciative bow to "The Greatest Story Ever Told."