God Is Disappointed In You (20 page)

But winning his freestyle battle with the Sadducees came at a price. These men ran the temple and the Sanhedrin, Jerusalem’s religious court. Jesus had run afoul of powerful men, and he knew the jig was up. He took his disciples aside, and announced that he would soon be killed. One of the disciples, Judas, thought that if his religion was coming to an end anyway, he might as well cash in while he could. He went to the Sanhedrin and, in exchange for thirty pieces of silver, he agreed to lead them to Jesus so they could arrest him quietly.

Jesus thought it would be neat to have a big dinner party where he and the disciples could all be together one last time. He toasted his disciples, and lifting his glass of wine, he said,
“Well, this is it, boys. Tonight, one of you is going to betray me. I will be arrested and put to death. This is the last glass of wine I’ll ever drink until we all share one together in Heaven.”

“What? Betray you?” they said. “Who is going to betray you?”
 

Jesus nodded at Judas.

“Oh shit…I just remembered, there’s something I’ve got to do!” Judas said, getting up and bolting out of the room.
 

After dinner, Jesus asked the remaining disciples to go pray with him outside in the garden, but it was getting late and the disciples fell asleep.

“Wake up!”
Jesus growled.
“Did you not hear me? I am a dead man. These are the last moments we’ll ever spend together, and you’d rather have your beauty sleep?”

At this point, Judas reappeared. “Hey, I’m back! Anything happen while I was gone?” He walked up and kissed Jesus on the cheek, at which point dozens of armed men popped out from behind the trees and bushes, tackled Jesus, and tied him up.

“Whoa, who are those guys? They didn’t come with me,” Judas said unconvincingly.

The soldiers took Jesus to the temple for interrogation. At this point, Judas began to have second thoughts about his silver parachute. He was haunted by the thought that he had betrayed his master. He tried to take the money back, but the Sanhedrin just sent him away. Disgusted with himself, Judas threw the money onto the floor of the temple, found a nice empty field, and hanged himself.

Meanwhile, the Sanhedrin would ask Jesus a question, and no matter what he said, they’d spit on him or kick him in the face. It was like he was stuck in a Japanese game show.
 

“We hear you think you are the Messiah, is that true? Are you here to save Israel from the Romans? Are you our king?”
 

“Well, yeah, but I’m more of an
alternative
king,”
Jesus replied. But they had heard enough.

Since Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, they sent him to the Roman governor so he could be executed for treason. The Romans flogged Jesus, tortured him, and made him carry his cross to the hill where they would crucify him. The soldiers thought it would be funny to dress him up in a purple robe and shove a crown made of sharp thorns down onto his head. They mockingly put a sign on his cross which read “King of the Jews.” They nailed Jesus’ hands and feet to the cross and hoisted him up, high atop the hill so everyone could laugh at him as he died.
 

Even the two guys who were being crucified along with him joined in the fun. “Hey, isn’t that the guy who claimed to be the Son of God? Hey Junior,” he shouted, “how about getting us down? No? Okay, I just thought I’d check.”
 

“You’re such a dick!” the other one said, laughing. “If I could, I’d totally high-five you right now.”

As if being made fun of by the entire world weren’t bad enough, the soldiers who’d nailed him to the cross started gambling over his clothes and tried to make him drink vinegar out of a sponge.
 

As Jesus watched this circus unfold around him, on what had to have been the worst day of his life, he looked towards Heaven and cried,
“My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?!”
And having said those words, he died.
 

When Jesus died, the sky went dark, the earth shook, and dead people all over town came back to life and started wandering through the city as zombies.

“Hey, maybe he
was
the Son of God, after all!” one of the soldiers mused.

They took Jesus’ body and buried it in a tomb that had been donated by one of his fans. They sealed the tomb with a giant rock and posted a couple of guards outside to prevent his followers from stealing it. But that Sunday, there was a terrific earthquake. An angel came roaring down from Heaven and slid the rock out of the way, and the guards, who were never told their job would entail fighting angels, ran off in terror.
 

The next morning, some of Jesus’ lady friends happened by and saw the angel, who was sitting on top of the rock, waiting for them. The angel told the women to go round up all the disciples, that Jesus was alive, and that he would meet up with them in the town of Galilee.
 

And sure enough, Jesus had come back to life, and was relaxing in Galilee.

“Jesus! I’m so glad you aren’t, you know, dead. So, what’s up next? Are we going back to Jerusalem? Should we perform a few miracles to get the ball rolling?”

“My work here is done,”
Jesus informed them.
“I’m going back to Heaven to be with God. You’re on your own.”

“But…what are we supposed to do, then?” one of them asked.

“What do you mean?”
Jesus replied.
“You’ve just seen like three hundred miracles, including me coming back from the dead. Go tell people about it. Tell them I was the Son of God. Tell them the Messiah has come to get the world ready for the Kingdom of God. Oh, and tell them that I’ll be coming back soon.”

And with that, Jesus flew up to Heaven.

“Go, Jesus, go!” the disciples shouted after him.

Mark’s tale begins with Jesus meeting John the Baptist, a mystic who lived in the desert and was so poor that he wore camel fur and ate crickets, which he made taste better by putting honey on them. John the Baptist got his name from the fact that he liked to baptize people, or dip them under water. A baptism was a bathing ritual which symbolized someone’s rebirth as a spiritual being.
 

When Jesus was baptized, the skies parted and a dove fluttered down. In his booming voice, God announced to everybody that Jesus was his son, and boy was he proud of him.
 

Having gotten a big thumbs up from God, Jesus went from town to town, doing God’s work and dazzling people with miracles. He performed exorcisms, brought down fevers, and cured scores of lepers. Jesus had a thing for lepers.

Jesus was no snob. He would hang out with anybody. Soon, a cadre of fishermen, prostitutes, and other low-lifes began following him full time. He made twelve of these followers his official disciples. When asked how a supposed man of God could keep such sordid company, he merely shrugged and said,
“Who needs a doctor more: the man who is well, or the man who is sick?” 

While people loved his street magic, Jesus also started teaching his own religious philosophy, which rankled a lot of people.
 

“I like the free fish and bread,” they’d complain, “But can’t he just leave religion out of it?”

Jesus could not leave religion out of it. He went around telling people that all that really mattered was how much they loved God and how well they treated another, which especially bothered the Pharisees, who considered themselves to be holy men because they meticulously followed all the thousands of rules laid out by Moses.
 

“We’re not about to let our life’s work be undermined by some guy in homemade sandals,” they vowed.

One day, the Pharisees caught Jesus picking grain in a field on the Sabbath, a clear violation of the Law of Moses. When they confronted him, Jesus shrugged them off, saying,
“God made the Sabbath to serve man, not man to serve the Sabbath.”
 

Meanwhile, Jesus’ irreverent teachings and magic tricks were making him more and more controversial, and thus, more popular. As his following grew, Jesus decided to take his miracles up a notch. He was healing lepers and cripples by the busload. Eventually, he even began raising people from the dead. Jesus was making a lot of powerful people nervous, and they all began to think of ways they might quietly get rid of him.

But Jesus continued taking his show across the nation. One day, his tour took him by his old hometown. Everyone in this conservative sleepy town remembered him as little Jesus. Now he was coming back as this notorious shock preacher. His mother and his brothers worried that if Jesus started telling these people that he was the Son of God, or that they needed to follow him, he would get himself killed. They nervously tried to lead Jesus off the stage.

“Please, let us take him home,” Mary begged. “He doesn’t mean any harm, he’s not right in the head.”

“Yes, why don’t you go home,” the Pharisees argued. “Look, you’re making your poor mother sick!”

But Jesus ignored his family, and the Pharisees, and launched into his routine, healing the sick and casting out demons. Seeing Jesus perform exorcisms, the Pharisees flipped out, accusing him of witchcraft and devil-worship.

“How does that make any sense at all?”
Jesus asked them.
“If I were working for the devil, wouldn’t I be putting demons
in
people, rather than taking them
out?
”

Later, the Pharisees caught Jesus eating lunch without washing his hands first. They started in on him, blowing their whistles and shouting, “The Law of Moses requires you to wash your hands! You have defiled yourself, sir! You have eaten lunch without washing your hands, and now you are defiled!”

Jesus rolled his eyes, and said,
“People aren’t defiled half as much by what goes in their mouths as by the shit which comes out.”
Then he went back to eating his sandwich. The Pharisees decided they’d had just about enough of this smartass. 

At one point during the tour, Jesus came upon a big commotion. His followers were arguing with a local family about whether they should ask Jesus to heal their son.
 

“What’s going on here?”
Jesus asked.

The father came over to Jesus and said, “It’s my son. He’s possessed by some seizure demon who causes him to flop around on the ground and foam at the mouth. The seizures get so bad that he’ll flop right out of bed, or into the fireplace. Sometimes, when we’re outdoors, he’ll shake so hard that he rolls into the lake. We can’t have him flopping into the lake. It’s dangerous! I just don’t know what to do anymore.”

“How long has he been like that?”
Jesus asked.

“All his life, I’m afraid.”
 

Jesus walked over and put his hands on the boy. The boy shrieked and shook violently for a moment and then went limp and quiet.
 

“Oh my God, Jesus killed him!” someone cried out.

But after a few minutes, the boy came to, and everyone cheered.

“All the Pharisees do is scold and blow whistles at us,” people said. “I’ll take Jesus over those guys any day.”

Jesus and his disciples stopped in Jerusalem for Passover. When he got to the temple, he found the entrance lined with vendor booths selling animals for sacrifice and bankers exchanging money. Jesus was enraged to find that the temple had become more of a farmers market than a place of worship. He began knocking over the money-changing tables and horse-whipping the pigeon salesmen. This outburst put him in hot soup with the Sadducee priesthood who ran the temple. 
They arrested Jesus and read a list of charges against him.

“God isn’t interested in your laws,”
Jesus said.
“He doesn’t care about your sales figures. The only things God wants from you are the very things you lack: love and understanding.”

“Jerusalem isn’t some hayseed town,” they explained to him. “Running amok and knocking over cash registers might be how things are done in East Stop Sign, or wherever it is you come from, but here in Jerusalem, we have
laws
.
We have a system. Put simply, you don’t have any authority here. Now you’re welcome to enjoy Passover, buy some souvenirs, whatever.
Just don’t forget who’s in charge, okay, son?”

Jesus responded with a parable,
“There was a vineyard.”

“What, is he telling us a story, now?” one of the priests asked.

“Shhh! I want to hear this,” another one said.

Jesus cleared his throat and continued.
“The owner of the vineyard rented it to some nice, respectable-looking men, much like yourselves. Then, when the time came to harvest, the owner sent a servant to go collect the rent. Instead of paying up, though, the tenants beat the servant up and sent him away empty-handed. ‘Hmmm, there must have been some mistake,’ the owner thought, so he sent another servant, whom they killed. Finally, the owner said, ‘I’ll send my son, they wouldn’t dare refuse to pay their due to my son.’ But they killed him, too.”

“What are you trying to say?” they asked him, annoyed.