Since I am not Buddhist, I feel the respect due to the beliefs of others but very little personal awe when I read of Buddha, so I suppose that something similar must be in play when those who are not Christian hear of Jesus Christ.

Since, however, I am a Christian, the passion and death of Jesus Christ fill me with awe, wonder and love. Odd as it may seem, Jesus is a daily part of my interior monologue--that frequent, almost permanent inner prayer that any believer has with his or her god.

For me, Jesus Christ is One with the Creator of the stars and sun and moon, Architect of the whole universe, including the enormous cold silence of the galaxies and all the wondrous poetry, music, heroism, beauty and mind that we encounter here on tiny, fragile earth. I know that He is One with His Father. He is the Word in whom, and with whom, and by whom were made all the things that have been made.

To devout Jews and Muslims such assertions must reek of blasphemy. There is only one god, and that Holy One is too great to be imagined in human form, too transcendent to be spoken of except by indirection.

In this light, Jesus Christ is already a figure of contradiction, before one even turns to his life, suffering and death. To some, all-holy. To others, a blasphemer and perhaps a megalomaniac, calling himself the Son of God. A poseur.

The centrepiece of the drama of the life and death of Jesus Christ, whose approximate date of birth has given the West its central point of time for designating the years Before and After, is of course that crossroads city of the three great monotheistic religions of Abraham, Jerusalem, nestled in the hills of ancient Judaea.

And Jerusalem has become in this late February week of the year AD 2004 the city toward which millions of eyes will be turning as the new blockbuster film from Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ, opens today across Australia and other parts of the world. More than 4000 prints of the film have been rushed out in the past week as demand has built.

In Washington, DC where I work, my assistant (seeking tickets for himself and some friends) learned of a man who had bought out a 350-seat theatre in advance, and who was worried that he might not be able to sell all the tickets. My assistant called and was told there were already nearly 1000 requests for tickets. So the original purchaser bought out another theatre for the opening, and was now seeking a third.

In some ways, none the less, 2004 may be one of the worst years for a film like The Passion to appear. A very ugly anti-Semitism has been erupting like multiple boils at many places on the planet at once. Anti-Semitic passion and ugly violence have been appearing in old Europe at a pitch hardly seen since before World War II. Arab media have been spreading teachings of hate and hostility, directed not only at the Jewish nation but also at times toward the Jewish religion. Anyone who remembers from the annals of the past four centuries the evils that sometimes erupted after Passion plays in Germany, Poland and elsewhere can scarcely maintain a high comfort level, with this new film's release.

Still, as one of those few thousands of Americans who have been privileged to attend an advance screening of one of the various rough cuts of the Gibson film in its progress toward completion during the past seven months, I can testify that, for serious Christians at least, the film occasions an overpowering religious experience of quiet, peace and brotherly outreach.

I have never sat in the presence of a religious film with anything like the power of The Passion. At the end, I wanted to weep, to be silent and to commune with my God, on whom my sins had heaped such afflictions. From the opening scene, it is clear that God's will governs the last 12 hours of Christ's suffering and death, and that He is called, not by his own will, but his Father's, to die for my sins. I am not certain how the film-maker achieved this effect, but from the opening instant I felt personally drawn into recognition of my own responsibility for what was to come.

Perhaps it was the impenetrability of the ancient Aramaic language, which put me in a zone of timelessness and culture-lessness, and the sudden alarming appearance of the serpentine presence and power of evil. This drama goes far beyond one time, one place, one people; it is situated in the soul of each of us, where a war is being fought out.

No matter how many times I had heard the Passion story recited aloud, and no matter how many crucifixes I have prayed before, or statues of Jesus after the scourging, or with the crown of thorns causing blood to flow down his forehead; despite all this familiarity, no form of art can compare with the cinema for its power to make one live through real human stories in so total and immediate a way.

For the first time, I felt really inside Christ's suffering, enduring with him, or more exactly enduring like those who loved him then, forced like his mother to be witnesses. I now knew, as never before, the duration of his excruciating pain. Unlike a painting, cinema gives us the pain-filled passage of time.

It was as if, of anything that any human being had ever been asked by his creator to suffer, Christ was taking on his full share, as much as one human could possibly endure. I have never been able to bear lashings shown on camera, hearing the whips strike flesh. In this film, it was often well beyond my capacity to keep my eyes open, without turning away in unbearable pain. Never has cinema shown such a lashing as this, while the Roman soldiers take their time, their pleasure, and exhibit their jesting professional skill in selecting various configurations of flesh-ripping lash.

When I reached home after the theatre, I got out my New Testament and read again each of the four accounts in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Gibson had not been able to record everything and he has had to make choices among the accounts. He had to imagine for himself how best to choose standpoints so as most intimately and powerfully to bring witnesses such as ourselves into the action. I was surprised by how faithful to text after text the film had been.

Gibson's is not a fastidious historian's account--not a film by National Geographic or even by the (increasingly unreliable) History Channel.

It is an artist's rendering. A great artist's rendering. It brings to mind every great painting of the event one has ever seen. It makes one reach for Handel's Messiah and Bach's St Matthew's Passion.

The Passion of the Christ is a wondrously wrought work of art, a kind of prayer all its own. It achieves what I would have thought impossible. It makes one forget art, and think of the Lord and his suffering and one's own sins. It brings one to awe for one's fellow man, fellow sufferer, fellow weakling. And it brings one to one's knees.

I know from talking to many others that this is not merely an autobiographical reaction but a very common one. Perhaps it will only be so for Christians, or work only for Christians who already share a certain felt unity in Christ. For Christians, for certain, this film moves to a realm beyond words. Silence is what one craves at the end. Silence. Awe. Gratitude.

One of the sins I was led to consciousness of during this screening is the sin of Christians against Jews. One could see forming here the historic separation between Christians and Jews. And yet the sins of Christians that followed this separation--the accusations of "Christ-killer"--horribly missed the whole point of Christ's death. They added immeasurably to the sufferings of the Christ. They are an indescribable betrayal and disgrace. They are also, for a Catholic, doctrinally untenable.

If we do not love and care for one another, the immense suffering of Jesus--which as if for the first time is borne into our senses by this film--is in vain.

Michael Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.