Today's Easter Sunday. I won't get into theology here; I'll leave that to folks better verse in the field. What I want to point your attention to is a movie most of you know, and a lead actor many of you may have forgotten.
The lead actor is Jim Cavizel, who played Jesus. This experience changed him profoundly, and despite getting the male lead in Person Of Interest it would eventually lead to him coming out of the Hellmouth.
It's very easy to be cynical about this. He is an actor, and a fine one at that- easily one of the best of his generation. The business he is in specializes in illusion and deceit, and it is notorious for using those capacities for illicit and immoral purposes. The enemy he faces has institutional and supernatural expertise going back eons regarding how to do exactly that. It is not unreasonable, for the disbeliver and the unbeliever, to conclude that he is lying to the gullible as a grifter.
Until, of course, you realize that (a) he's not acting alone now anymore than he was on stage or screen and (b) his deeds post-Passion are consistent with a sincere conversion and repentance.
Either he's a better actor than any man in history, or he's the real deal, and even by Fedora-Tipper norms (i.e. Occam's Razor) the reasonable conclusion at this point is that he is sincere and earnest in what he says and does.
Consider that, by undergoing a facsimile of Jesus' bodily death and ressurection, he put himself in a position whereby God may show him the truth of the real thing in a manner most would never comprehend. Consider what profound effect that experiencing a replication of the Passion would have on those with the will and fortitude to undergo it and come out intact. The man that began filming The Passion died during production, and a new man arose in his place, and only those overcome by despair would blind themselves to the proof before their own eyes.
That we are relentlessly gaslit by Empire and its Thralls about what really went down at Cavalry should be a clamourous warning bell to alert us to a vulnerability for us to exploit. There is a limit to the usefulness of cynicism, and that limit is when the evidence of its presumptions being rebutted becomes too obvious to ignore and thus to hold on to them becomes self-deceit.
No, Jim is a sincere Christian. The Passion is the point where that happened, and his life since has been to bring his life on Earth in harmony with God and God's charge to the Church. You need not go to the extreme that Jim, however inadvertently so, went but don't be surprised that you too must suffer a death and rebirth before it finally clicks.
Empire falls.
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