Online Only: Jesus isn't a ninja

As I was hustling down 10th Street last week, late as usual, I was accosted by a smarmy grin poking a piece of paper at me. "Hey man," the smarmy grin said. "Want a free ticket to a concert next week?" \nEager to make haste, I accepted the proffered piece of paper and plunged on to my late appointment. As I bustled along, I examined my "ticket," only to discover that it was the very same uninformative and ubiquitous advertisement I'd already seen about a million times in the previous days, inviting me to an ambiguous event called "AFTERdark." Par for this course, the "ticket" listed the program's name, date, time, location and little else: no description, campus affiliation or sponsoring student group could be found. Apparently cat-killing curiosity was the intended enticement.\n"Who," I wondered, "would try to conjure up 'the campus event of the year' anonymously?" Having grown up in evangelical Christianity, I had my suspicions. And, sure enough, five minutes on the Internet proved those suspicions right: a Billy Graham-styled Christian rally/rock concert was being promoted in such a way as to draw a crowd that would otherwise shy away from such events.\nI should be clear that I generally sympathize with the goals of AFTERdark and the involved organizations but not this promotional tactic. Try as I might, I cannot convince myself that a deceptive advertising campaign is anything but detrimental to Christianity and the reputation of Christians at IU. What is the culmination of such deception? People are lured into the IU Auditorium, taken by stealth and surprise under the cover of darkness. Is this Christianity? Did Jesus train disciples or ninjas?\nWriting this on Monday, I could only imagine that the immediate aftermath of this promotional campaign would be that Christians at IU will be considered shady, untrustworthy characters, stalking our friends and always waiting to spring a trap on them. But deception is not what Jesus taught; rather he told us that "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." People cannot be conned into the Kingdom of God; rather they must have the straightforward truth, that the holiness of God demands justice for our crimes, and by God's unmerited favor, Jesus bore the penalty we deserve.\nI can only assume that the decision to run a sly promotional campaign was made very high up in the organizations concerned and that most of the well-intentioned students involved never considered the ramifications of such tactics. Let us then remember Paul's exhortation to the Corinthians when he wrote that "by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God."\nJesus has always been a hard pill to swallow. He called himself "the stone the builders rejected" and said that "he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed." We shouldn't deceive ourselves either: No cunning spoonful of sugar will help this medicine go down.