Oh, Jesus!

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

I love staring at the Atlantic. The best time is in the morning as the earth slowly turns Tybee Island toward the sun. This morning, the first day of April, I wended along the rim of sand and sea: alone, alert, seeking likenesses as Walt Whitman sought over a hundred years ago on a northern shore. A gusty wind blew coldly beneath a sky billowing with swollen, dark clouds. I stepped among pea sized seashells and over seaweeds sandy tentacles. Terns skittered about the beach on twiggy trident feet. Dawn slowly dissolved into memory.

I sought healing. My soul felt trampled as if every army that ever existed in the world had battled there.  My mind had been torn-tossed between having the courage to quit my job or having the guts to remain. I teach English in the lowest circle of educational hell known as corporate alternative school.  Future leaders of the criminal underworld, scores of unruly teens, and a few good students bully and berate each other constantly when they are not menacing the staff.  Some select students, whom I dubbed the Feral Five, are so bad I often wish they would stay home.

Such were the antagonistic feelings and thoughts roiling within me as I sought peace in one of the loveliest places in Georgia.

            I lifted up my eyes to the horizon. An object approached from a great distance over the sea. At first I thought it was a barge lugging lazily toward Savannah’s harbors. They come from Europe stacked high with orange, green, and brown cargo crates as big as hotel rooms. To my amazement, I realized after a few minutes that I was looking at a man, an enormous man, as huge as the Tybee Island Light House. Indeed, that would make him the same size as those super crosses that churches erect in towns across America. Glowing seagulls encircled his head. His long brown hair and dark beard trembled in the wind. His eyes were fixed upon me.    

            I was afraid, but not enough to flee. Who could he be?  Jesus?  Maybe, but a magical being such as I beheld could just as well be Poseidon. If he were the Lord, then the prayers of my youth, the ones I had surrendered to scientific and theological sophistication, were coming true!   I began to doubt, to look around for a camera crew just in case I was seeing an apparition projected by a new special effects technology.

His feet sloshed the waves aside as he stepped onto the shore. I could have parked my wife’s minivan inside one of his footprints. His white robe flapped in the breeze. He wore brown sandals with soles that came up to my ankles.

            He said in perfect Elizabethan English, "Be thou still and hearken unto me." 

The words nearly knocked me to the sand, not because of some unseen power, but because he was loud, with a volume that drowned out the ocean’s surge—that and I stood just below him. I stepped back about ten yards. What should I say?  I had read enough scripture to know the customary response was to admit unworthiness.  I decided to shout the first thing that popped into my head.

            I yelled, “Oh!  Wow!  Jesus!  Is that you?”

            He waved his hand, as if to silence me. He said, “Thou art a sinner.”

            That was disappointing, but at least I knew he was not Poseidon.  He would have spoken with an earthquake.  Then Jesus said something I did not expect.

            He said, “Thou art ignorant, too.”

            That seemed harsh, but I could handle it. I had lost an argument with my wife about that very thing the night before. Besides, I studied philosophy in college.  Nothing reveals how ignorant a man is more than philosophy, or a wife.

            He smiled in an odd way, and his eyes lit up.  They scrutinized me with eyes as blue as chrysocolla, and as clear the sky above a boundless, smog free plain.  His white skin manifested such purity that the foamy wave tops turned beige.  Jesus looked more European than I did.   

            “Are you Jesus?” I shouted.  I did not want to be impolite.  It made me uncomfortable to think that Jesus would expect me to recognize him.

“Take thou my hand,” he said. He knelt, stretched forth is right hand, palm down, and waited.

The moment was awkward. His finger was as thick as an oak, so I could not “take it” in a conventional sense.  I did take it in with a good long look for as much time as I dared without actually staring.  His nails arched evenly over his fingertips. There were no calluses, no warts, and no tattoos on his wrist. His fingerprints were normal. I squeezed his index finger between my hands.

I do not know why I did it, but I sensed Jesus wanted to stand up.  I clamped myself onto his finger with my arm and legs as if it were a branch. He did stand, his hand going up a few feet with him, and I hanging on as if to eternity.

“Let thou go,” he said, shaking his finger.  I obeyed and fell onto my back into the sand.  

“Ouch!” I said.

“Thou art not hurt,” he said.

“I art,” I replied. “My spine hath a withered disk.”  I threw in the Bible word, hoping he would offer to heal me.

            He stood up and dusted the sand off of his robe. I watched with curious fascination. I said, “Lord, may I ask you a question?”

            “Ye do not have to ask. My answer is this: the hour of my return has not come to pass.” 

            Ignoring the slight flutter in omniscience, I said, “Actually, uh—I was wondering if…”  I could not believe I was about to ask God’s son this question. “Uh--could I have a sample of your blood?”  I waited. He watched me silently. I continued, “One drop, Lord, to put under a microscope, for—uh—comparison—uh --immortal with mortal blood cells.”  He frowned slightly as I hastily said, “Do you have cells?” 

After a long pause, he said, “Hast thou a needle and a vial?”

“Verily not,” I replied.

“If you did, would you have me give more of my blood to thee?” 

“Uh--for science?” I said, “Maybe.  I mean, a fingernail would do the trick too.”  He stared at me for such a long time, and I felt so foolish, that I said, “Never mind.”

“Then hear me speak the good news.” 

It is easier for a rich man to go to heaven than it is for a needle to pass through the hide of a camel.” 

“Uh…Okay…Really?” 

“A fool lives only by the sword. The sage buys a gun.” 

“What?  No way!”

“I am the Way!  Thou shalt not ‘no way’ me.”

All this time, Jesus shrank as he spoke. He diminished imperceptively at first, like the movement of an hour hand on a face clock, but when he said, “If you smite the cheek of your enemy, turn his other cheek so that you can smite it more mightily than the first,” he dropped in height by several feet. 

“God is love of money.”   Down he came.

He was as tall as President Obama when he began to explain his parables in ways I never heard before. The Samaritan was lynched, the Prodigal Son perished on the streets, and the grape farmer sent his son with mercenaries to put down a worker rebellion. He and I were eye to eye when he said, “Cursed are the weak for they shall be trampled underfoot.”

I said, and I could not hide the emotion in my voice,“None of that makes sense!”

As quickly as if he were reciting the Sermon on the Mount he proclaimed new beatitudes touching on the issues of the day.  I listened in horror as I heard that everything Jesus said proved that I had deceived myself in thinking I ever knew him.

He loved war.  “The war the merrier!” he said.

He despised women who believed they possessed such a thing as choice in all things except coupons.  He said every time he saw gay people he wanted to blow up a planet.  America is a Christian nation.  Muslims are his mortal enemies.  Liberalism, evolution, and the germ theory are lies straight out of the pit of hell.  He also had some vitriolic things to say about the primacy of Mark and Q in synoptic gospel scholarship. 

Jesus kept shrinking as he shattered everything I hoped and lived was truth.  Miraculously, as he shrank, the volume of his voice did not decline one decibel. 

I felt myself becoming smaller too.

Finally, he stopped dwindling after he said, “Go ye and believe likewise.”  He was about the size of G.I. Joe.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.  I would have fallen to my knees, not in shame or remorse, but in disappointment that I had sought to emulate a Christ less grand than a broken toy piano. 

Then, something wondrous happened. He started to grow again.   He grew from G.I. Joe to  Danny Devito’s size in a few seconds. Now, I am not a very tall man, a little less than average height, so imagine my surprise when he stopped growing just below my chin.

I held my breath waiting for some final word. He said nothing.  Instead, he grinned strangely as his hair shortened, his beard vanished, and his face changed one by one into the faces of the Feral Five, and then the faces of every student I ever taught, of students I never taught, of those whom I loved or hurt, of those whom I loved and hurt, of my friends, my relatives, my children, and my wife.

“Who are you?”  I said.

Slowly, he transformed into a man I had never seen. His eyes turned brown like a camel’s eyes. His hair shortened, becoming black and coarse. His olive brown skin looked hard and dry. His jaw appeared bruised and swollen. He hardly had a beard at all. He smelled of fish and sweat.

            "Are you the devil?" I asked.

            “Verily not,” he replied, “I’d be a lot less fun if I were.”    He winked, tousled my hair, and then ascended up into the sky.

            Jesus left his footprints in the sand, some as big as a mini-van, others as small as G.I. Joe’s, as I watched him vanish into the clouds. Suddenly, I heard laughter and seagulls. I looked and beheld men, women, and children walking on the beach.

            I ran as fast as I could to my car.  I ran so hard that I tripped more than once and fell into the sand.  Once I got into my car, I tried to phone my wife, but my cell phone crackled, and then died. After a few miles toward home, I began wondering what had happened.

All of a sudden, my radio blasted on by itself. Peals of distant hysterical laughter poured out.  I pressed all my preset buttons.  I pressed my tuner and watched the numbers change.  There was only one channel, the mirth channel, and only one song of laughter.

            “This is crazy,” I said. I changed the radio to my CD player. There were no songs, only laughter on each track.

            “What in the world…?” I shouted.

The laughter stopped. Moments of muffled snickering passed.

A voice said, “The turn the cheek bit was a tad over the top, don’t you think?”

A second voice, sounding all the world like George Burns, replied, “So it’s April Fool’s Day. Next time, hire a writer.”

“Hello!” I said. “Is someone there?” 

The George Burns voice said, “April Fool, Billy Boy!” and it started raining inside my car.

Blessings...