Ever wonder what it would be like if Jesus actually came back? You don’t have to be Christian or even religious to chew on this one. But to do so reveals quite a lot about the lunacy of the human mind.
So let us assume for the moment that The Man returns. How would you know? When pressed most folks don’t have a clue or they murmur something about there being no mistake because Jesus will make things clear for all to see (except the blind, I guess – they’re still going to need an interpreter).
So how would you know? Does he come screaming across the sky in a fiery chariot? Cool, except that this particular revelation would only be available to those in the immediate vicinity. Or, he’d have to do a Santa-style circumnavigation of the globe, being sure to hit every neighborhood and that everyone is awake and watching (you aren’t really going to take someone’s word for it, right? You want to see this first-hand).
Ok, so maybe he shows up in one place but the media gets there and starts doing what it does best – filming, interviewing witnesses, and offering up panelists of experts to explain what we’re supposedly seeing. If you’ve read any message boards you know that’s going to convince at most 50% of the population and the rest are going to veer off onto every kind of tangent.
Actually, that figure is even less because an awful lot of people in this day and age are going to assume some kind of digital shenanigans (“It’s been Photoshopped!”).
Let’s not forget to consider what Jesus looks like. So many of us are so fixated on the packaging that he’ll have a hard time winning converts from those he doesn’t look anything like. White, black, brown? What if his eyes are sloped? What if he is – gasp! – a she? One could just picture the hair-pulling of priests, imams, rabbis, and other religious leaders questioning the Jesus with a vagina.
Ok, so let’s continue to play along and assume, for argument’s sake, that we’ve all bought in. Jesus has managed to show himself in some kind of United Nation’s-approved hue to every living soul and he’s also pulled off an incredible miracle (or, again, multiplicity of miracles since one won’t cut it in a global village this big – he’s got to go on tour doing miracle after miracle until everyone has had a taste).
How long do you think that impression will stick? What I mean is, the human mind is fickle and forgetful, which is why you can walk out of some emotionally-stirring film ready to be a ‘new me’ and within minutes find yourself enraged at a jackass for cutting you off in traffic.
In other words, life goes on and Jesus isn’t really going to be with you every minute of every day. He’s going to be busy.
You still get toothaches, your kids still frustrate you, your job still feels like work, you still don’t have enough cash in the bank, and so on.
Picture the lines! People who win the lottery often are said to be made miserable by every engagement with family and friends suddenly taking the form of a request for handouts. Now multiply that by 7 billion.
Every disease needs to be vanquished, poverty eliminated (who’s going to want to pick up trash or clean toilets now that Jesus is back to balance out all the iniquities?). Death itself must be done away with, which is going to lead to a fairly substantial growth in population unless we all give up sex (and yeah, that’s going to happen).
Fortunately Jesus is fairly sophisticated about such things and one would imagine that he’s not going to be answering all of these ‘prayers.’ In fact, I suspect in a lot of ways nothing is really going to change at all.
Which is where Jesus is going to find himself in a lot of trouble.
Lots of people are going to get pissed off, feel aggrieved (why did he come back as an Inuit? What about MY people?), take issue with his teachings, need some refresher miracles (memory is a fuzzy thing).
And at some point we know how the rest of the narrative plays out. Jesus gets shot or nailed to a tree (again) or imprisoned and soon enough his memory is made sacred, his final death posture immortalized in art, and we start to wonder when he’s going to come back again (third time’s a charm!).
Or, we tell ourselves we’ll just wait for death where we’ll forever be united with Jesus and ‘live happily ever after.’
And what does that look like again?
