What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (16 page)

The man who deftly avoided trouble with elusive answers to loaded questions finally gives up the soft sell. Some of the religious authorities regard this statement as a threat. But the destruction of the Temple isn’t the end of what Jesus claims the corrupt priesthood has wrought:

“For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places, there will be famines; this is but the beginning of the sufferings.” [Mark 13:8]

 

“For in those days there will be such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation of which God created until now, and never will be.” [Mark 13:19]

 

Yow!! He’s talking about tribulations
worse
than the wars and mass slaughters of Moses and Joshua? Worse than Sodom and Gomorrah? Worse than the Great Flood!?

Welcome to Doomsday—a belief inherited from the Old Testament prophets and which we’ll see again in the book of
Revelation
. These verses are called “the Little Apocalypse” and they are part of what will turn out to be one of Christianity’s most potent recruiting tools—scaring the hell out of everyone.

But now comes a challenge. The whole expectation of The Messiah had been of someone who would vanquish Israel’s enemies and create a holy realm of the chosen. Great. With a living messiah now on tap, it’s time to start remaking the world into God’s kingdom. Isn’t it?

The Second Coming

Well, not so fast. You see, according to the plan, Jesus must first die and then come back from the dead on some future day, and
then
he’ll fix everybody’s little red wagon. Frankly, this sounds like a carpenter talking—he keeps promising he’ll come back to finish the job but he never tells you when. The Hebrews have waited a millennium for a messiah to free them, and now here’s another delay. Instead of eliminating their oppressors, this savior will allow their oppressors to eliminate
him.
Who came up with this plan? If George Washington had this defeatist attitude, we’d all still be speaking English.

Jesus assures his followers that his
second
appearance will be much more impressive than his first:

“At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from…the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.” [Mark 13:26–30, Matt. 24:30–34, Luke 21:27–32]

 

Wow. Most Jews just want him to send the Romans packing. Now he’s promising to return as king of the cosmos. That’s great, except, why must he go through the trouble of dying and coming back? Do it now and be done with it! He can’t save himself from the executioner today…oh, but
next
time he’ll conquer the universe and make it all better? Miss America wants to bring about world peace, too, but until she does she’s just a babe in an evening gown. Bold promises are great, but I’m not seeing much follow-through, especially after Jesus proclaims:

“Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place.” [Mark 13:30]

“This generation?” Here we are 2,000 years later, the generation of Jesus is long gone, and none of these events have taken place. What happened to “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”? Jesus is doing the same thing the Old Testament prophets did—declaring the Day of the Lord is coming soon to a planet near you but never delivering on the promise. Somebody needs to explain the word “soon.” And please don’t give me the old, “To God, a thousand years is like a day” routine. He’s not talking to God; he’s talking to us. The Lord keeps pledging he’ll settle accounts any day now but, whenever he shows up, it’s always, “I’ll catch you next time.” He acts like a guy who owes us money.

Apocalypse When?

None of the harrowing prophecies he spells out in these verses have come true, or, if they have, nobody’s seemed to notice. So, to rescue Jesus’ reputation as a prophet, his supporters sift through history to find events that might match his Doomsday prediction.

A favorite nominee is the Roman sacking of Jerusalem and the defeat of the Jewish rebellion in A.D. 70. Couldn’t this count as the end of their world? Well, time out. The destruction of the Temple and the scattering of Judean Jews into the Diaspora was a historic catastrophe, but it was hardly the worst tribulation since Creation. The earth didn’t quake and the stars didn’t fall from the heavens. If this was the Apocalypse, Jesus really oversold it. Further, the event might actually have helped the Christians’ cause because they no longer had Jewish authorities impeding their evangelism. The only ones left in charge were the Romans, who generally didn’t give a damn about religion.

What’s more, since the author of Mark probably wrote his Gospel the same year Jerusalem was sacked, A.D. 70, the war was a current event for him, not a future one. So, whatever he wrote about it can’t count as prophecy.

Jesus says the day in question will see “the Son of Man coming into his kingdom.” So far this isn’t on YouTube. Let’s be honest. The Apocalypse
didn’t
happen before that generation had passed.

So, how do we deal with this unfulfilled prophecy?

“…of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.”[Matt. 24:36]

 

It’s a classic rule of prophecy: No timetables. This is a copout that, at least for some, gets Jesus off the hook for a bad call. But it doesn’t negate his prediction that Judgment Day would come within the lifetime of his audience. So, Christians are stuck with two choices: a) they backed the wrong horse and the real messiah is yet to come, in which case they’re all suddenly Jews, or b) Jesus didn’t mean what he said. Some claim words like “this generation” really mean “this era of history” or some such double-talk. Apologists do this all the time. They’ll insist the story of Noah’s flood be taken literally, but when Jesus plainly forecasts the End of Time within a generation, it’s just poetic license. This is another reason why being a literalist is so tough—you have to tie logic into knots and then act like it’s perfectly reasonable.

Between evasive answers, blasphemous claims of raising the dead, the moneychangers outburst, and the diatribe he levels at the Pharisees, Jesus has dished out as much as the priests can take. They’re worried that the controversy he’s creating will have the Romans on their case. They want him arrested.

So, they recruit a mole—Judas Iscariot. Regarded as the most craven skunk in history, his name is synonymous with betrayal. He accepts 30 pieces of silver (a sum Matthew borrows from the Hebrew Bible) in exchange for revealing where Jesus is camped out for the night. It’s then that the Pharisees make their move.

Passion Play

While the label given to the final episodes of the story sounds like a romance, “The Passion” actually comes from the Latin word for suffering. These are the most critical events of the whole saga and much of it is lifted directly from the Old Testament books of
Isaiah, Psalms
and
Wisdom.
For believers, the similarities between the Passion and the Old Testament verses are proof that Jesus was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. For skeptics, it suggests the story is a legend assembled from hand-picked lines of the Hebrew scripture.

The Last Supper

On the eve of Passover, in a room within Jerusalem’s city walls, Jesus has his final meal with his disciples and a few others. During the supper, Judas slips out and makes his arrangement with the plotters. But when he returns, the boss is on to him:

And as they were at the table eating, Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” [Mark 14:18]

 

It’s a prediction apparently borrowed from
Psalms
:

Even my bosom friend in whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, has lifted his heel against me, [Psalms 41:9–10]

 

He then passes around bread and wine, and says something truly strange:

“… unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life…” [John 6:53–54]

 

Most of his followers hear this and back away, probably creeped-out by the statement’s cannibalistic flavor, so to speak. Only the Twelve Disciples partake.

The Eucharist

The Last Supper is the basis for the ritual of communion, a.k.a. the Eucharist—the consuming of tasteless wafers and dishwater wine at the altar because they allegedly turn into the flesh and blood of Christ. Paul launches this idea in
1 Corinthians 11:24
when he breaks bread and then quotes Jesus (the only time he does): “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

This miracle-in-your-mouth is called Transubstantiation, as if a big word made it more credible. But believers are not kidding about this. It’s regarded as a way to achieve a kind of intimate oneness with their savior. (As a burger aficionado, I shudder to think of all the cattle with which I’ve achieved intimate oneness.)

If this cracker-to-Christ transformation really does happen, why don’t we take a sample of it and run a DNA test? Heck, we could clone Jesus. I wonder if he’d be a copy of Mary, because he had no biological father, or would we have God’s genetic code? Could we clone God? Wow…spooky thought. Somebody’s got to try this, or at least make a movie about it for the SyFy Channel.

As with many Christian traditions, the Eucharist was not unique. In the Egyptian
Book of the Dead
, the deceased ate gods to acquire their powers. In the
Bacchae
, the Greek writer Euripides called bread and wine the “two powers that are supreme in human affairs.” Even Justin Martyr, an early Church father, admitted that subscribers to Mithraism practiced this ritual.

Inevitably, Christians were accused of cannibalism, and it’s kind of understandable. The Roman philosopher Cicero, less prone to superstition than most, couldn’t believe that anyone took this stuff seriously. “Is anybody so mad as to believe that the food which he eats is actually a god?” Answer: Yes—they call him the pope.

How strange that a religion which prides itself on rising above the barbaric sacrifices of primitive faiths has, as its central icon, a dead man on whom worshippers occasionally snack. Yes, yes, Jesus calls himself “the bread of life.” [John 6:35]. But come on, it’s a metaphor! Maybe he was human. Maybe he was divine. Maybe he was both. We can’t say. What we
can
say is that he wasn’t wheat, rye, or pumpernickel.

One final note about The Last Supper before we move on. There’s no mention of a Holy Grail in this scene, or anywhere in the Bible. A cup is mentioned, but that’s it. It’s totally unimportant. The obsession with artifacts like the Grail really took off during the Crusades, when Christian soldiers stormed into Jerusalem, hot for relics from the Holy Land. The Arabs knew a sucker when they saw one and they quickly sold the Europeans any artifact they could link to Jesus with a tall tale—vials of his tears, hairs from his head, holy shrouds, and enough splinters from the cross to rebuild London. To its credit, the Catholic Church placed no importance on the Holy Grail. Most of the stories we know about it spring from more recent legends about King Arthur anyway.

Arrest

When a posse bearing swords and clubs shows up at the disciples’ hiding place, Judas identifies Jesus with a kiss. Nicely ironic, but a little dumb. He could just point and say, “That’s the guy!” And why did the authorities have to pay anyone to identify Jesus anyway? Didn’t that public dustup with the moneychangers make him recognizable to everyone?

The Gospel of Mark then offers a truly bizarre verse about a man who follows along after Jesus is apprehended:

And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked. [Mark 14:51]

 

The elusive streaker is never mentioned again, nor is he arrested for public indecency. Some claim this character symbolizes Christ’s ultimate escape from his captors through death and resurrection. Maybe the guy was pledging a frat. Believe me, there are theories more fantastic than that—including one elaborate claim that says the mysterious figure was a homosexual lover. Seriously. People go nuts with this tidbit.

Once Jesus is arrested, his disciples deny knowing him and they immediately flee. What a pack of wussies. You or I might be forgiven for a lapse of faith in the face of threats because we get this whole saga fourth hand. But the disciples actually
saw
Jesus walk on water, feed 5,000 with a couple of fish, raise the dead, and glow in the dark next to Moses! What does it take to convince these people?