Blood Will Tell
By Audrey Stallsmith
“Gods don’t bleed.” That premise cost Sean Connery’s character Danny Dravot his life in the Kipling film The Man Who Would Be King, which probably should have been titled The Man Who Would Be God instead.
Dravot, after all, had been pretending to be a god in a fictional land called Kafiristan where the natives supposedly didn’t know any better than to believe in his deity. But they did know blood when they saw it and rightly concluded that they had been duped.
I initially was unimpressed by the film since I didn’t find the main characters likable enough to root for. However, about a week after watching the movie, in the midst of washing my hair I suddenly said to myself, “But gods do bleed. The real One did anyway.” Yes, it takes a while for a slow thinker like me to catch up sometimes!
The residents of Kipling’s fictional land obviously had gotten their logic backwards. Live things bleed. Dead ones—or those which never had any life to begin with—don’t.
But what those natives probably had been thinking was that gods should be too powerful to bleed or to otherwise show any vulnerability. For their protectors, they wanted gods who couldn’t be hurt.
That, obviously, isn’t Ours. The Bible tells us that, not only did our God bleed literally, but he also still suffers over the suffering of his loved ones. Isaiah 63:9 says of the Israelites what is true of God’s Gentile children as well. “In all their affliction He was afflicted, and He personally saved them. In His love and pity, he redeemed them and lifted them up and carried them through all the years.”
I suspect it is this vulnerability which most baffles Satan because he can’t understand it. He must often wonder “What does God see in those puny and pathetic beings that he made Himself so powerless for them?” We are, indeed, God’s weak point just as their erring children are the weak point of many other loving parents. And he runs to meet us whenever we make the smallest move back towards Him.
As Dallas Willard writes in Living in Christ’s Presence, “to forgive your sins is a load off God’s mind. He is happy to do it.” Willard goes on to add that “The miracle is not that God loves me; it would be a miracle if he didn’t love me, because he is love. That is God’s basic nature. . .”
However, because God has to care about so many of us, some conclude that his affection must be distant and impersonal. But, as Thomas Merton puts it in Love and Living, “Being love, God has given himself without reservation to man so that He has become man.” In other words, He got down in the mud and the blood with us.
Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy asserts that “God does not love us without liking us. . .the heavenly father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it.” In Living in Christ’s Presence, Willard notes that “Normally people think he just marks down the bad things [we do]. That’s a terrible view of God.”
Instead, our Father delights in every toddling step we take in the right direction. Even if we immediately come down hard on our behinds as babies are apt to do.
Of course, when Satan tried to take advantage of God’s so-called weakness at the crucifixion, he would find killing God to be as large an impossibility as ever. Satan is focused on power, after all, and power—as Timothy Keller notes in Counterfeit Gods, “is often born of fear and in turn gives birth to more fear.”
By contrast, Keller writes, “Jesus’s salvation is received not through strength but through the admission of weakness and need. And Jesus’s salvation was achieved not through strength but through surrender, service, sacrifice, and death.” A death which had him screaming out against His being abandoned, even if only temporarily, by his Father.
That definitely wasn’t the kind of death Dravot experienced in the movie, even though he too might be considered a god who was killed by his subjects. Instead, he belted out “The Son of God Goes Forth to War” just before he fell. I suspect he just liked the defiant military sound of that hymn since he had shown no signs of allegiance to that Son before.
Nor did he die as that Son died, but as he thought ex-military men were supposed to—with no sign of fear. Even at his death, Dravot was still playing the god who couldn’t be hurt, afraid to show any vulnerability. He definitely wasn’t one of those who “bowed their necks the death to feel” in submission to the real God’s will, nor did he appear to have any concern for what would happen to his now leaderless subjects.
In stark contrast, the essence of the true God is not a struggle for power. Instead, as Willard points out, “Each member of the Trinity points faithfully and selflessly to the others in a gracious, eternal circle of love.” A circle broken only once, at the crucifixion, when it opened up to all the rest of us who choose to enter.
Once we are infused with its Spirit, we too will bleed for all those still on the outside. After all, as Willard concludes in The Divine Conspiracy, as long as we choose to stay inside that circle “We know that we will be taken care of, no matter what. We can be vulnerable because we are, in the end, simply invulnerable.”