God Is Disappointed In You (21 page)

“I’m saying that if you make the owner come back to the vineyard himself, there’s probably going to be a change of management.”

Whatever their faults, the priests had a firm grasp of subtext. Jesus was advocating revolution. This was the final straw, as far as they were concerned. And Jesus knew that it was only a matter of time before they came for him.

At first, they merely tried to ruin Jesus by tricking him into saying something stupid or that would get him arrested by the Romans. They asked Jesus whether he thought people ought to pay taxes, hoping that if he said “yes,” he would lose his radical chic, or that if he said “no,” he would be guilty of treason. Jesus slipped out of this rhetorical noose by brandishing a coin and asking whose face was on it. When the crowd answered that it was Caesar’s, he simply told them that they should give Caesar that which already belongs to him. Then he shamed the priests by adding that they should pay God in what they owed him. The priests eventually gave up on trying to disgrace Jesus. They would simply arrest him, but they would tastefully wait until after Passover.

The day before Passover, Jesus decided to drop in on his friend, Simon the Leper. While he was sitting at the table, a woman cracked open an alabaster jar of expensive perfume and began pouring it over Jesus’ hair.

“Ahhhhhh!”
Jesus groaned in pleasure.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” one of the other guests scolded her. “We can’t afford that. That perfume was made out of pure nard!”

“I don’t get it. What’s the big deal?”
Jesus asked indignantly.
 

“That perfume cost a lot of money,” he explained. “We could have sold it and given the money to the poor.”
 

“That was a really beautiful thing she did for me,”
Jesus replied,
“and you just had to shit all over it. Look, you’ll have plenty of time to take care of the poor, but I’m going to be dead soon, so just let me have this moment, all right? Geez.”
Jesus tied his sweet-smelling hair into a ponytail and carried on with his evening.

The next day, Jesus sent his disciples into town to make reservations for Passover dinner. After dinner, they were hanging out in a garden when one of their own sold Jesus out to the cops.

The cops took Jesus to the priests, who roughed him up, and asked if he thought he was the Messiah. When Jesus replied that he was the Messiah, they sent him to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to have him executed for treason.
 

The governor didn’t think Jesus was much of a threat to the Roman Empire, so he invoked an ancient and poorly conceived custom that allowed a randomly assembled crowd pick a convict to be released from prison. He brought out Jesus and an insurgent named Barabbas and offered to free whichever one got the most applause from the crowd. The priests had stacked the crowd with their own people, so Barabbas was clearly the favorite.
 

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have Jesus?” Pilate asked. “King of the Jews? Anybody?”

“No, the other one! Barabbas!” they shouted.

There was nothing left to do but have Jesus crucified. After Jesus died, they placed him in a tomb that had been donated by one of his friends and rolled a large stone against the door to seal off the entrance.

That Sunday, some ladies went to go visit Jesus’ tomb. Among them were Jesus’ mother, Mary, and his friend Mary Magdalene. They brought some perfume to rub on Jesus’ corpse. “I think he would have liked that,” Mary Magdalene said. “He liked to smell good.”

They were walking to Jesus’ tomb when his mother suddenly stopped.

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” she said, “but how are we supposed to get inside? They rolled that giant rock in front of the door, remember?”

Nevertheless, they sallied forth with their perfume. When they arrived, the stone that had been sealing off the tomb had been rolled away.
 

Instead of Jesus’ corpse, the women entered the tomb to find an angel in a white robe sitting on a bench.

“Where’s Jesus?” they asked.

“Oh, he’s running around here somewhere,” the angel replied.
 

“You mean he’s alive?”

“Well, sure,” the angel replied. “You didn’t honestly think they could kill a guy who brings the dead back to life, did you?”

God decided that he wanted kids. So he talked a young woman named Mary into having his son. Perhaps more impressively, he convinced her fiancé Joseph that this was totally cool and nothing to worry about.

The couple were traveling to a small town named Bethlehem when Mary suddenly had to drop. Since the hotels were all full, God’s son was born in a stable, among the cows, sheep and donkeys. Joseph and Mary named the baby Jesus.
 

Jesus was smart as a whip, and as you’d expect from a son of God’s, he showed an early aptitude for religion.
Joseph and Mary would take him to Jerusalem for Passover every year. One year, they were halfway home when they realized that Jesus wasn’t with them. Nervously, they raced back to Jerusalem and searched everywhere, finally finding him in the temple, debating the Torah with some priests.

“Jesus H. Christ!” his mother shouted, “Do you have any idea how worried we were about you?!”

“It’s okay,”
Jesus replied,
“I was just visiting my father’s house.”
 

As an adult, Jesus decided to take up religion full time and became a traveling rabbi. He assembled a group of twelve disciples to be his assistants. They were a motley crew of fishermen, tax collectors, and failed revolutionaries. Jesus liked to give his disciples nicknames. He changed Simon’s name to Peter, which means “rock.” There was another Simon in his group whom he called “Zealot.” He would refer to James and his brother John as “The Sons of Thunder.”
 

Among the disciples who didn’t get cool nicknames were Thomas, who was famous for being a skeptic (a rarity in someone who’s joined a cult), and Judas, the guy who would later betray him. Being rather progressive for the times, Jesus also had several women in his inner circle, including Mary of Magdala, Mary of Bethany, and her sister Martha. Jesus and his disciples traveled all over Israel, telling stories, performing miracles, and freeloading at friends’ houses. In that way, they were sort of like an improv group. 

Jesus had a lot of ideas about religion. His most important idea, though, was forgiveness.
The ancient world in which he lived was all about revenge, killing, and constantly appeasing gods who would strike you with lightning just to watch you glow in the dark. Jesus thought,
“Wouldn’t life be nice if we all simply forgave each other? If I forgave you, I wouldn’t feel the need for revenge. If you forgave me, I wouldn’t need to be looking over my shoulder all the time. If God forgave all of us, we would more love him as a father than fear him as a cosmic policeman.”

When the disciples asked Jesus how they should pray, he told them they should pray that God would forgive them as they forgave others.
 

“The old way is all about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,”
Jesus explained,
“but I say if someone slaps you, offer him a shot at the other cheek. If he sues you for a coat, give him two. Why not? Sure, you’ll be down two coats, but mentally speaking, you’ll be able to move on. Let the other dude be consumed by guilt and pettiness for the rest of his life. Who needs it?”

Jesus didn’t believe in revenge.
“If the scales of justice need balancing out,”
he told people,
“that’s a job for God, not a lynch mob.”
 

Jesus decided to go to Jerusalem. Some of the disciples went ahead to find a place to crash for the night at a nearby village of Samaritans.

“Well?”
Jesus asked upon his disciples’ return.

“They won’t let us stop in their village,” they replied. “Should we summon fire from Heaven to destroy their village, Lord?”

Jesus shook his head.
“No, we’re going to FORGIVE them. Have you heard nothing I’ve been talking about?”

Jesus’ teachings greatly annoyed the religious establishment, especially the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a group of somewhat snobby holy men who prided themselves on being worthy of God’s love by never breaking the rules. They made a point of following all God’s laws, all the time, no matter how trivial they may be.
 

Jesus was having dinner at the house of a Pharisee named Simon. A woman showed up to the dinner uninvited. The woman had been ostracized because of some great sin she’d supposedly committed. Having nothing left to lose, she walked into the house, right past security, and went up to Jesus. Standing there face to face with him, unable to think of anything to do or say, she simply broke into tears.
In her grief and shame, her tears began to splatter onto Jesus’ feet, so she bent down and began drying them with her hair.

“Will somebody get this skank out of here!” the Pharisee called out. But Jesus wouldn’t send the woman away.
“Can I ask you something, Simon?”
Jesus asked.

“Sure,” Simon replied, annoyed at the spectacle playing out on his dining room floor.
 

“There were these two people who owed a man some money. One of them owed him five hundred bucks, the other one only owed him fifty. Neither one had the money to pay him back, so he forgave both debts. Which of the two debtors do you think is going to be more grateful?”

“The one who owed him more, I suppose.” Simon answered.
 

“And that is precisely why we should forgive those who sin the most.”
Jesus raised the woman up from her knees and wiped the tears from her eyes.
“Go, and live in shame no more. Your sins are forgiven.”

Jesus was always telling little stories like that. Most of his teachings came in the form of these little parables. Jesus liked to keep things simple. He once told a crowd of people that in order to be worthy of the Kingdom of God, they needed to do only two things: to love God and love their neighbor. Apparently, even that wasn’t simple enough, as one guy immediately tried to lawyer-ball Jesus, asking him to define the term “neighbor.”
 

“Is my neighbor the guy next door? The people on my street? My fellow Jews?” Predictably, Jesus responded with a story. 

“A man was traveling when he was jumped by bandits who beat him up, robbed him, and left him for dead. He lay there bleeding on the street when a priest came riding by on a donkey. ‘I’m saved!’ the man thought, but the priest just trotted over him and kept on going.

“Later, someone else happened by— a man he recognized from his Synagogue. ‘Okay, this time, I’m
really
saved!’ the man reassured himself. But again, the traveler just puttered around him, taking care not to get any blood on his clothes.

“Finally, he saw a third man coming down the road, a Samaritan. We all know how much those Samaritans hate us Jews, right?
Well, the poor man’s laying there on the road thinking, ‘Could this day get any shittier?’ But the Samaritan stops, patches the man up, takes him to the nearest town, and sits by his bedside until he’s healed.
He even pays the man’s hospital bills. So, I’ll put it to you…which one of those three men would you say was his neighbor?”

“It’s the guy from the synagogue, right?” the man said confidently.

“Whatever,”
Jesus sighed.
 

Jesus saw adultery, murder, and materialism as the natural consequence of letting yourself be consumed with lust, hate, and greed. To Jesus, it didn’t do you much good to constantly resist temptation. You suffer more from unrequited desires than the ones you actually give in to. And sooner or later, you’d probably act on those desires anyway, making all that self-denial meaningless torture.
 

The only solution, in Jesus’ opinion, was to change your heart so you weren’t full of awful thoughts to begin with. To Jesus, it did as much damage to your soul to want to kill a man as it did to actually murder him.