Reply #11: Hope it goes as well as Orlando's First Baptist Crucifixion... [View All]

[tomreedtoon]

This happened at the First Baptist Church in Orlando about ten years ago. They had a big, pretentious Easter celebration with wooden crosses and full orchestra and chorus. The only problem was the pegs on the cross where the actor playing Jesus was to hang on. They weren't glued in properly.

Although it was broadcast live, a quick engineer switched to a backup tape of the rehersal, so most people didn't see the whole thing. But this is what people saw live:

The drums rolled. The pretentouus announcer said on the backlit stage something like..."and the creator of the universe...was DESTROYED by His own CREATION!!!" The lights come up. The chorus sings.

And Jesus falls off the cross, almost in a swan dive.

The poor guy playing Jesus slowly lifts himself up from the wooden flooring of the stage, clearly bruised and hurting. None of the other people around the foot of the cross bother to help him. How could they? This wasn't in the Bible! Their tiny minds were incapable of responding to a real, hurt human being. It wasn't even a matter of "being good actors and being true to their part" - it was that their minds couldn't grasp that what the Bible said might not be literally true, and they couldn't breathe a hint of that.

If that were to happen to a Gibson-staged event, and there was no "protection video" like there were in Orlando, it would be so appropriate...


(The video of the un-edited Cross Dive used to be floating around the TV control rooms of Orlando, but I haven't been able to find it. One person even put a "trolley song" to the video, with the trolley bell "DING" at the same moment Jesus hits the floor.)