The Craftiness of Christ
by Dallas Willard
I came across this article by Dallas Willard, author of The Divine Conspiracy, that struck me as very perceptive. You will want to read the whole article to fully appreciate it. Here are a few selected quotes to wet your appetite.
~ The Billy Goat ~

"Critics of The Passion have complained about the extent of the violence inflicted upon Christ, as presented in the film. The unrelenting bruising and beating and suffering shown has been rejected as unnecessary, and as undesirable for the viewer. I suspect that these critics come close to missing the entire point of the film, which is the nature of human redemption. Nowadays human redemption is not thought to amount to much, and what little there is to it can be dealt with by education and counseling, and perhaps a law here and there, or some improvement in living conditions. Gibson certainly is much closer to the core of traditional Christian teaching in his vision of the human heart and its world as a reservoir of unlimited capacity to hurt and to harm.

Those currently regarded as "in the know" about human life, with their remedies, have to turn a blind eye to the actual course of human events. Up to today, multitudes of human beings are tortured, slaughtered, and starved on a daily basis by those who have the power to do so, and where lying, cheating, stealing, and sanctimonious hardness of heart is routine in societies which, nevertheless, take themselves to be "better" than others. Through the medium of the events of Christ’s Passion, portrayed as an unceasing stream of wonton violence upon Jesus, tearing his body to shreds, the film communicates a vision of human evil that is off the scale of human capacity to deal with it...

...Satan knows Jesus to be the only truly radical person to enter human history; for Jesus, if undiverted, will refuse to use evil to defeat evil, and will set afoot a new order that does not employ the devices by which evil persons try to secure themselves and get their way. Satan’s project was to stop Jesus from getting to his redemptive act of crucifixion. From the beginning of Jesus’ earthly life, he had tried to destroy him or to deflect him. Now, in the final hours before the cross, Satan tries to break Jesus down by pressuring him with the hopelessness, in human terms ("No man. No man."), of what Jesus is attempting. After the crucifixion and death scenes, Satan’s final appearance in the film shows his total exasperation and despair at having failed to keep Christ from doing the one thing that would open the doors to deliverance of human beings from the grasp of evil by demonstrating the power of good over evil...

...Exercises in imagining another path for Jesus besides a bloody crucifixion are not entirely lacking. We have The Last Temptation of Christ, the book and the movie, and now The Da Vinci Code, the book and movie soon to be. Now try to imagine yourself loving, worshipping, giving up your life for such a person as the Jesus of those books. Imagine a great civilization formed around him. Imagine, if you can, the saints and martyrs that have formed the core of Christian believers throughout the ages living and dying as they did for that "Jesus." Imagine the multitudes now dying for Christ in many places throughout our world doing that. For that matter, try to imagine the authors, Nikos Kazantzakis or Dan Brown, laying down their lives in devotion or in death for the Jesus they present in their writings. But of course multitudes of remarkable and unremarkable human beings have given and will give everything to and for the Christ of Mel Gibson’s The Passion. One has to think that Jesus really knew what he was doing...

...Many individuals have protested that they would believe in God if they had more evidence. It needs to be pointed out, however, that just believing that God exists is not the only issue. What kind of God are we talking about? And is it indeed true that they would then believe? How much more evidence would it take? And would they then be glad there is a God? Would they then believe because they wanted God, wanted it to be his world, wanted not to be God—the ultimate point of reference in their lives—themselves? Would they be prepared to love God? More than evidence is required to bring a person to that point. And is it completely clear that the "more evidence" called for is not already available to those who are willing to seek it? Does the evidence have to be presented in a way that the unbeliever cannot avoid it, cannot not be aware of it?...

...Remarkably, even after his resurrection Jesus continued his low-profiled ways. The human mode would have been to pay a post-resurrection visit to Pilate, perhaps, and to say something like, "Now could we have that discussion about power and truth once again?" Or perhaps to swing by the High Priest’s house, or causally to drop in on the Sanhedrin in session. But no. That of course would have only been to give in to the temptations earlier posed to him by Satan. It would have been the "wisdom" of man, not the wisdom of God. Instead, "God raised him [Jesus] up on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead." (Acts 10:42) And then, of all things, he simply sent his bedraggled little friends out to the whole world to enlist students to him, promising his unseen presence with them. With nothing, to begin with, but his example, words and personal presence, they, to a striking extent, overcame a world of brutality routinely equal to that displayed in The Passion; often dying in the process, but also convincing multitudes of the vision and the ethical idealization incarnate in Jesus and his cross. All of this is simply a fact, as it is a fact that for the last two centuries or so historical force has been against this vision and idealization...

...The philosophical problem of how to develop moral character in human beings, so that they actually lead a moral life, has not been solved today. Indeed, though that problem was arguably the most important matter for moral thought in antiquity, it is now a problem that those known as the leading contemporary moral philosophers will hardly touch or try to relate to their theories. The main difficulty in solving it has always been that individuals and groups must start from a history of evil, and the way to overcome that history has, arguably, never been found outside of the pattern set by Christ and his people. Forgiveness has to be a massive reality in the heart of human affairs. This is available in Christ’s way of crucifixion. If there are other promising ways, of course, they should be fairly and thoroughly considered, and the generosity of Christ is such that, if we can find a better way than his, he would certainly be to first to tell us to take it."

(For complete article, click here.)