The following story is an example of a genre I occasionally venture into: rewrites of Biblical tales so as to restore their shock value. I started doing it in seminary. If such ideas upset you, watch out for this week’s posts.
JESUS, ONCE AGAIN (Hebrews 13.2)
God (the anthropomorphized version) was feeling adventurous and contemporary. He’d been watching the planet called Earth and saw that it needed another good jolt. They’d just about worn the Biblical Jesus the Christ into little tatters and most of the meaning had leaked out of Him. God thought about sending a woman this time, but it had been done. There was even a t-shirt. (“This time God is sending his Daughter and She is pissed.”) What hadn’t been done? What would make these goofy humans rethink again? Maybe even feel something? Jesus as a gay man had been tried. It was sort of lame since the version of Jesus many accepted already had long hair and wore a dress. Jesus the super-virile SuperChrist rock-star had also been done. Jesus as hippie, Jesus as black man. Jesus as lover. Wait now . . .
He noticed that everyone was very pre-occupied with the idea of same sex marriage -- why not move the idea of a gay Jesus to his parents: two gay men. It was a little problematic, but then, so was a virgin accepting the fertilization of a God (unless you’d been hanging around with those Greeks and Romans whose gods were always doing that). None of the gay guys had ovums waiting to bud into usefulness by pairing chromosomes with a sperm, but that wasn’t a problem for God. He just used a standard guy cell and added the super-genetic stuff on a third set of chromosomes. After all, the extra stuff wasn’t about glowing in the dark or levitating -- it was mostly spiritual, which is not the same as parlor tricks.
Even Jesus can’t really overcome a bad start at birth, so God sent this infant to Joseph and Markie. Joseph was a little old, but he was a protective man with a lot of resources. Markie was a man of joy. He got up every morning welcoming every sunrise, even in the winter rain. Even when he gave birth in a rathole motel on the California coast, a place no one would ever consider sacred. It wasn’t easy, since the baby had to come out his asshole.
Of course, the baby was gay but Joseph and Markie would have accepted a straight baby. They didn’t ask any questions -- just cuddled and fed and gazed into that baby’s blue eyes. Well, on the days the baby's eyes were blue -- they changed a lot. Sometimes they had a feeling they were looking into the eyes of the universe, but all loving parents feel that way.
So then one day the big census started and they lit out for Mexico in an old rackety van because Joseph couldn’t get his money out of the ATM without revealing where they were. They knew that being atypical was dangerous in the United States where the majority rules. Mexico is a religious country, a Catholic country, but their religion taught them that nothing was more sacred than family. It was not like the United States.
But Joseph and Markie were killed in the drug wars. By then Jesus was maybe eight years old. He didn’t know what to do. Then a man came and wanted the boy to go with him. Jesus was about to find out what it meant to have a body (corpus) that was vulnerable to earthly events. It was painful and there was blood. He didn’t need drugs afterwards because of his third chromosomes, which took him to a spiritual place during this act of invasion. It also infected the trick, but not with anything bad from God’s point of view. It was Heavenly Inspiration Dedication Syndrome, which made him want to help street boys everywhere. God got the idea from this little worm that gets into rat brains and makes them love cats. (You could look it up.)
After that, Jesus was also a street boy, starving and sometimes beaten up or cut. The only advantage he had was that he didn’t need drugs -- he just spaced out -- and when tricks infected him with AIDS, he just infected them right back with his own AIDS.
Finally one day in a major city in the US of A, the authorities captured Jesus along with other street boys. They knew he was a street boy because he was filthy, bruised, hungry, and shivering. This meant to them that he was bad and no one cared about him. If they had fucked him, they would have been infected with his AIDS, but they didn’t even check him for the earthly version because then they would have to pay money for the drugs to treat it. Well, they would if anyone figured out they weren’t doing it, because they were supposed to take care of the people in their custody. Money meant much more to them than sex. Sex was common, everyone had sex, you didn’t have to pay for it, you just took it. Sex is just a hole. Money is everything.
So Jesus was loaded into a bus and transported to the middle of Mexico and just dumped there. No one knows what happened to him after that. Some think that he has come back to America but there have been very few new cases of Heavenly Inspiration Dedication Syndrome. It’s just not very contagious because greed kills it and there’s a lot of greed around.
But some people say that he’s on the streets again and he might be the very next ragged, dirty, starving, shivering boy you run across. This is the reason that the believers will kiss such a boy on the mouth and buy him a meal. Because you never know which one of them is a carrier. People might not believe in miracles anymore, but they’d damn well better believe in epidemics. Sooner or later. It’s a kind of crucifixion, which means "open arms."
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