Open Writing

So it finally happened, just as the faithful had been saying it would for the past two thousand years. On August 1st, 2010, Jesus came back. Seems the scholars were wrong about the month, just like everyone else was wrong about the millennium. Turns out He was a Leo, just like the astrologers, for God’s sake, had been saying all along. The absence of snow during Mary and Joseph’s journey and around the manger ought, in hindsight, to have provided a major clue, but any that picked up on it had been at best ignored, at worst ridiculed.

The year, of course, mattered even less; our Gregorian calendar has never been more than approximate, having been changed more than once in the intervening millennia.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, a well-known liberal and private debunker of some of Christianity’s more fantasy-based tenets, was heard to say, “Bugger me”. The Pope, after hearing the news, sent an e-mail to all his Cardinals, Monsignors, Bishops, Abbots and priests, to every diocese in the world. It said, simply: “Look busy”.

Last time around, JC entered riding on a donkey. This time, to underline the fact that He’d come up in the world, He chose a stretch Cadillac limousine.

A pink one.

Just like Elvis.

In fact, there were some, namely the Church of the Tupelo Mississippi Flash, who said He was Elvis. Or Elvis was Him. Whatever. Something to do with the “King of Kings” tag, or some such loopy juxtaposed logic. But the most interesting thing of all was not the fact that He came again (Christians had, after all, been awaiting that event since the Crucifixion), but rather the place in which He chose to appear.

Not Rome, the headquarters of the Catholic Church, the so-called One True Faith, reputed burial place of Peter, His right-hand man and seat of Christ’s vicar on earth. Not Britain, among the English Anglicans, Scottish Protestants, Irish Catholics and various other prevaricators, nor among their American counterparts, the Protestants, Baptists, Quakers, Amish, Lutherans or even Flip Wilson’s Church of What’s Happenin’ Now. Nor any of the literally hundreds of other small organized - or otherwise - neo-Christian groups scattered around the world. In fact, not among Christians at all. When Christ the Savoir returned, He did it in the place where He began, His old stamping ground, among His own kind: the Holy Land of Israel.

Hoo boy, was He in for a surprise.

Back in the sixties, I once saw a tee shirt with this message: JESUS IS COMING, AND HE’S REALLY PISSED!

When I accepted the assignment to cover The Event for a well-known daily, this little blast from the past for some reason came back to me. What if, I suggested to my editor, He’s not the loving Savoir we have all been expecting? What if, God forbid, He was unhappy with the way we have conducted ourselves in the intervening two thousand years? Maybe this is payback time, I opined tremblingly to any that would listen. What if He’s only come back to kick some serious backsliding butt?

One thing was for sure: He wasn’t going to be too impressed with the way the Children of Israel were behaving towards the others in their part of the world. Talk about Love Thy Neighbour! Nor was He going to be exactly thrilled about the fact that the descendants of those who sent Him to the Cross last time around, His own people, still considered Him just another prophet, somewhere down there with Abraham and Moses, and not the Messiah for whom, at last report, they were still waiting.

Unfortunately for them, the evidence was kind of irrefutable. We all watched CNN as He descended, surrounded by flights of angels, drifting down to earth without any visible means of support. Inevitably, some said it was a trick, that Seigfreid and Roy were probably behind it. This theory was pretty much dispelled when satellite photos confirmed that the Sea of Galilee had evaporated on his touchdown. Not even David Copperfield had ever managed an illusion of that magnitude. After that, everyone pretty much fell into line, and accepted that it was indeed the Second Coming of The Lord.

His entourage was tracked all over the world, moving from one country to another, dispensing love and forgiveness to all and sundry. OK, so He never actually got out of the car, and we never actually saw Him, but Jesus – pun intended – who the hell else could it be?

Amazingly, even in the face of such overwhelming evidence, sceptics still abounded. “It’s a trick” was replaced by “It’s a recruitment drive”. Seemingly, they were saying, “OK, so it’s Jesus, come down to redeem us poor sinners. Maybe there’s a war in heaven, and He’s come down to recruit some celestial cannon fodder, a kind of ‘Grunts for God’ mission. But does redemption have to mean conversion?”
In other words, was everyone but Christians doomed to eternal damnation?

Not fair, cried the sceptics. You’re talking about the majority of the world’s population, they said, more than four billion people. Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Shinto; according to orthodox Christian scripture, none of these would find redemption, far less enter the Kingdom of Heaven, unless they accepted JC as their Saviour.

Most Christians, bless their hearts, were a little uncomfortable with this - except, of course, for the Knights of Racial Aryan Purity, known to all by their unfortunate and, with hindsight, ill-considered acronym, whose thoughtful, carefully reasoned argument went, f... ’em, they’re slopes, who gives a shit? - and felt it would be unfair to exclude someone just because of the way they worshipped. They still believed in a God - well, most of them - and wasn’t that the important thing?

Anyway, there we were, lining the streets of Jerusalem, from the Wailing Wall to the Temple Mount, cameras and tape recorders poised, awaiting the Advent. The sky was clear, the sun baked the dry earth and a hot wind blew down the street like a presaging of things to come. In this portentous setting, I stood surrounded by thousands of the faithful and the curious alike, eager to catch a glimpse of Him.
Ours weren’t the only cameras in the crowd, either. Asian tourists were scattered throughout the throng, festooned with Nikons as we stood in the bright, hot sunshine. Curious Arab citizens of the Holy City, their differences for the moment forgotten, stood beside their Jewish neighbours, who awaited His coming with understandably mixed feelings. The atmosphere, not surprisingly, was heavy with expectation.

Christians they might not all be, but there was one fact that none present could deny: of all the prophets and gods of mankind, Jesus was the only one who’d ever come back. Now that, as my kosher bookmaker said, had to give the Christians the edge in the resurrection stakes.

The sun beat down, the hot wind blew and tempers were beginning to fray when a cry went up, “Here he comes!” We craned and stretched, and there it was, the pink Cadillac.

Flanked by outriding Israeli cops on Harley Davidsons, with Mossad agents trotting alongside, the Saviour’s vehicle glided slowly down the street between the lines of the throng, its wheels barely seeming to touch the ground. As it drew level with each section of the crowd, they fell silent. Nothing could be seen through the tinted windows of the car, and the procession continued amidst an eerie stillness.

No shutters were clicked, no notes were taken, no one spoke in hushed tones into tape recorders, and no earnest-looking correspondents addressed their video cameras, imparting to the waiting world their acute finger-on-the-pulse grasp of the situation. Everyone’s gaze was riveted on the passing car which, it could now be seen, hovered a few inches off the dusty, hard-baked holy ground.

The sacred latter-day chariot continued on up the street, and the people it passed followed in its wake; finally, reaching the temple, it glided to a halt. The crowd surrounding the car became totally still; the breeze died away, the sun baked, and the click of the rear door handle was loud in the silence.

*

No one I have since met who was present that day remembers seeing the flash, or hearing the sound of the blast from the ten-megaton device concealed in the Caddy’s trunk. We just suddenly found ourselves in our various afterlives, blinking stupidly and wondering what the hell had happened. But since then, after running into a few old friends who had passed on before me, and some that came after, I’ve managed to piece some of it together.

Obviously, those who, like me, had feared some kind of retribution had been right, but only partly. Jesus, of course, hadn’t been in the car at all, just the nuke. Those here who have a psychic connection to the world via living mediums say it was the cleanest nuclear explosion ever, no fallout, nothing at all. But the blast completely destroyed Jerusalem, wiping it from the map, leaving behind only the desert surrounding a hundred and fifty square miles of glass.

Why, you ask? Well, around here, the consensus is that the Lord had finally had enough. They think He saw it as the only way the people of the Middle East would ever stop squabbling and learn to get along without setting off a much larger conflagration, that one world-wide. They also think His attitude was, “If anyone’s going to destroy the world, it’s going to be Me”. In other words, to save the world again, He had to destroy a little piece of it. As my old drinking buddy Charlie Foster said, down at The Next World, the club and bar we often frequent, better that than the entire show. And the folks left behind on earth had better take this on board, because rumour around here is, Ireland’s next.

But there is another little nagging notion that I’m trying to ignore. It’s something that still bothers me at night when I’m pretending to sleep, here in this place where no one ever sleeps. In my last moment on earth, when that immaculate sandaled foot stepped out of the Caddy, I could have sworn, just for a millisecond, that it had a distinctly cloven look about it. But I must be wrong; the good guys always win, don’t they, and this place doesn’t look a bit like any hell I’ve ever imagined.

But if Irish poets can be somehow prophetic, and a certain hour did come round at last, maybe it was because some kind of payback was due. And given the alternative, I don’t think anyone here would begrudge the Other Guy his moment. Because wherever we are, there isn’t a single one of us who wouldn’t trade a full-blown Armageddon for something just a little less orthodox.