at the centre of my fantasy world, but I dare not put it into practice single-mindedly for fear I should be in collision with authority”. Nor is it any good a man saying, “I know I must put my fantasy world into practice to preserve my mental health, but it would be inconvenient to put God at the middle of it”. Christ's claim, right or wrong, was that only one kind of life in the end measured up to reality, and that was his kind of life. If he was raised from the dead, then I should have thought that it was pretty obvious that he was right. If that story is just a pack of lies, then I should have thought he was unwise not to have used a little more political discretion. But if one looks at things through Jesus' own eyes, all he had to guide him was his conviction that this was the right way to live, and no question of using more political discretion ever arose.
Once it is grasped that Christ's whole life was, from his point of view, a gamble on whether God, whom he called “Father”, would justify or vindicate his life, it becomes possible to analyse more closely the mechanism by which his mind decided how to behave. I want to make two things clear. First, by using the word “gamble” I am not questioning the complete trust that Christ claimed he had in God; I am merely reminding the reader that there were moments on the cross when Christ thought he had failed, in other words, when his trust and courage were bankrupt. Second, I am not offering any comment on whether Christ was right, or not; I am solely concerned with his frame of mind; and lest any reader is so ignorant as to think this presumptuous, may I silence him once and for all by reminding him that Paul told us all “to put on the mind of Christ”? How can a man do that, without knowing what Christ's mind was like?
In my opinion the greatest gift anyone receives is not his life, his mere existence, but his spirit. The spirit that Christ received was the Spirit that enabled him to become the Redeemer; after all no-one else has moulded…