God Is Disappointed In You (19 page)

The birth of Christianity. In which Jesus becomes a promising young street magician, the disciples dole out free health care, and people get nailed to stuff.

The Jews had rebuilt the Temple of Solomon, as instructed by God. Once the temple was complete, they waited for God to make good on his promise by sending the Messiah, who would liberate them from foreign rule and set up the Kingdom of God on Earth. But hundreds of years passed and the Messiah never came. Meanwhile, Israel was passed around like a bucket of chicken from one empire to the next. The Persians took Israel from the Babylonians, and then handed them off to the Greeks, who were conquered by the Romans.
 

The Jews hated living under the Romans, and were sick of being second-class citizens in their own homeland. So every now and then, some brave soul would start a revolt, thinking maybe they were the Messiah the prophets had foretold. When King Herod died, one of his slaves, a tall, handsome man named Simon of Peraea, declared himself king. Israel had a long tradition of sexy rulers, so they figured, “Why not?” To which the Romans replied, “This is why not,” and killed him.
 

Failed Messiahs would come and go. Someone would start talking big, they would lead a revolt, and the Romans would promptly squash them. Afterwards, they would crucify the aspiring Messiahs and plant them next to the road, where they would serve as human billboards, reminding travelers of what a good decision it was to remain loyal to the Roman Empire.The Jews began to wonder if the real Messiah was ever going to come, and if he did, could he avoid becoming a public service announcement?

It was into this world that a baby named Jesus would be born.
 

Jesus was born in a barn in a small town called Bethlehem. Despite his redneck beginnings, everyone seemed to realize that there was something really special about Jesus. Even foreigners noticed it.
 

Following an astrological sign auguring the birth of a new king, three wise men came to Israel to give Jesus some really expensive gifts, including gold, which was the ancient world’s equivalent of a gift card, frankincense, which was a kind of perfume, and myrrh, which was almost the same thing as frankincense. The three wise men were not imaginative gift-givers.
 

Not everyone was happy to hear about the birth of this new king, though. The old king being one.
When King Herod heard about the prophecy that a new king had been born, he ordered his soldiers to kill everyone in Bethlehem under the age of two. Luckily, Jesus and his family managed to jump the border just in time. After living in Egypt as undocumented aliens for a couple of years, they returned home and settled in a small, out of the way town called Nazareth.
 

Jesus worked in the family carpentry shop, but when he turned thirty, he decided that what he really wanted to do was to travel the country and find himself, maybe do a little preaching. So Jesus began wandering from town to town, mostly talking to people about life, God, and love— though Jesus had an opinion on just about everything.

“When you give to the needy, do it because you’re a decent, caring person, not because there’s a crowd watching,”
Jesus said.
“I see these guys in the marketplace who make a big show of throwing coins to a blind man and I think, ‘Shit, why not just bring a trumpet player with you?’ If you need a fanfare every time you do something decent, then you’re probably a miserable human being. It’s when nobody’s watching that God notices us.”

Jesus didn’t have much use for people he thought to be pompous or pretentious.

“Don’t be one of these holy rollers who launches into big, public prayers just to show everyone how religious they are. When people practice their religion in public, it’s more for their benefit than it is for God’s. As far as he’s concerned, you might as well be praying in a cheese cellar.

“And don’t get too hung up on material possessions. There’s not one thing you own that can’t be eaten, stolen or ruined. You should invest yourselves in the treasures no one can ever take from you.”

Jesus also spent much of his time convincing people to drop out.

“The world is full of birds who’ve never had a real job, and yet they all seem to get by all right,”
Jesus would say.
“Work is an empty ritual to convince us that we’re improving on nature. But it’s a delusion. As big a dandy as he was, King Solomon never dressed half as good as a daisy.
 

“I guess I don’t understand why we can’t just accept the possibility that God actually wants us to like it here. When your son asks you to pass the fish, do you toss him a cobra? No? Then why are you so worried about what your heavenly father will pass on to you? We don’t need to worry about starving to death. We just need to learn to ask God to pass the fish.”

Jesus spoke a lot about God as a father. That’s because God actually was his father. Jesus was a mixed-race child, the son of his human mother, Mary, and his father, God. One of the side effects of having God as his biological father was that Jesus possessed magical powers, which often proved useful.
 

He’d see a leper on the street and heal him, saying,
“Okay, I’m going to heal you, but don’t tell anybody, because I want people to focus on my teaching, not my magic tricks.”
 

Of course, there’s no way you keep something like that a secret. Tales of Jesus’ miracles spread across the nation, and soon everyone was lining up so Jesus could heal them, or bring their dead kid back to life.
 

The demand for free health care was getting out of hand, so Jesus deputized twelve of his followers to be his official disciples.
 

He granted the disciples magic powers to heal the sick and sent them on tour to heal people and spread his teachings.

“And don’t charge anyone,”
Jesus warned them.
“After all, I didn’t charge you for your powers. In fact, don’t bother with money at all. We’ll just float from town to town and trust people to feed us and put us up for the night. I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to live without money.”

One man, hearing Jesus speak, stepped up and asked, “What do I need to do to enter the Kingdom of God?”

“Do you obey all the commandments?”
Jesus asked.
“You don’t kill people or cheat on your wife, do you?”

“No, I obey all the commandments,” he assured Jesus.

“That’s great, you’re halfway there!”
Jesus said, clapping him on the back.
“Now all you need to do is sell everything and come follow me!”

“Everything? I don’t know, Jesus. I mean, my portfolio is really blowing up. I don’t have a lot of liquidity right now…Hey, is that a two-headed goat?” When Jesus turned to look, the rich man beat it out of there.
 

“You see?”
Jesus said to his disciples, laughing,
“It is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to live in the Kingdom of God.”

Jesus believed in an afterlife, which was a rather controversial thing for Jews to believe back then. He trained people to look beyond the material world, so they would be prepared to live as a spirit in Heaven after they died.
 

As Jesus described it, Hell is simply a place where shallow people don’t know what to do with themselves because there isn’t a Pottery Barn.
 

One day, Jesus and his disciples climbed a mountain for a week-long spiritual retreat. Jesus went off by himself and it occurred to the disciples that nobody knew where he was. This bothered the disciple Peter, who sort of imagined himself to be second in charge.

“Great,” Peter said, “We’re only two days into our Radical Sabbatical and somebody’s already gone missing.”

Peter formed a search party, and when they finally found Jesus, they were stunned to find him in the middle of a conversation with the ghosts of Moses and the Prophet Elijah.
 

“Who exactly
are
you?” Peter asked.
 

“Who do you think I am?”
 

“I think you’re the Messiah.
And maybe not just the Messiah, maybe even the Son of God.”

Jesus puppy-slapped Peter’s cheek and said,
“Well, don’t tell anyone, okay? At least not yet. I’m not quite ready to reveal myself to the world.”

People didn’t do a very good job of keeping secrets back then, though. Once again, word got out about Jesus, and people started clamoring for this man who was supposed to be the Messiah. The people greeted him like a king and Jesus rode not one, but
two
, donkeys into the city of Jerusalem as people threw palm branches on the ground for his donkeys to walk on.
 

A group of aristocratic intellectuals called the Sadducees were annoyed by the fact that some uncouth hillbilly was getting the rock star treatment. They thought it would be fun to take Jesus down a peg and began pressing him on his belief in an afterlife, an idea which they found to be preposterous.

“So let’s say a woman’s husband dies and then she remarries. When they all come back to life in Heaven, whose wife is she?” one of them asked.
 

“Yeah, Jesus, answer that!”

“The fact that you would even ask that shows how little you understand,”
Jesus replied.
“Nobody will be married in Heaven.
In fact, they won’t even really be people. They’ll be, I don’t know, like angels or something. But is that really your big argument? That Heaven can’t be real because God couldn’t figure out the paperwork?

“You are nothing but a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites! You talk to me about the word of God and the best you can do is try to nail me on a technicality? You have no love, no understanding, all you have is law. You follow God’s laws while ignoring his commandments. You’re like somebody who picks a dead fly out of a glass of water when there’s a dead camel laying at the bottom of the well.”