Sunday, July 27, 2008

What If Jesus Had Had Kids?

Gerard Vanderleun's imaginative and capricious (if irreverent) imagination at work...

I don't have a lot of arguments with the Lord. I expect Him to be capricious, irrational, and possessed of a mind and purpose beyond the comprehension of the smart monkeys. Why? Because, as God, He can.

I don't expect Him to answer my prayers because it is a very big universe and He's got a lot on his plate -- even for a Supreme Being. Imagine, if you will, being God in His office and deciding to step away from Your desk for a minute to get Yourself a beverage from the Holy Vending Machine (No charge). You're away for about 45 seconds but when You get back there are 25,345,654 "While You Were Out" slips on your desk along with about 100,000,000 items of Spam from Tibetan Prayer Wheels. What could You do, even if You were God. You'd just answer as many as You could at random, and then break early for a long lunch.

On top of this, our general behavior doesn't make it any easier for Him. In this, I'm a fan of the George Burns line in OH, GOD! where, as God, he remarks, "It's up to you. I gave you everything you need."

Which he did.

None of this really gets to me. I'm used to God's ways and don't expect any special favors from HIm and do count my many, many blessings.

It's the silence I can't take. I mean, 2,000 years is a long time between messages and messengers, and we've just about used up all the possible interpretations of the New Testament and are starting on lap number 2,365 for the Old Testament. You can say what you want about that latter day Supreme Being's Condensed Version of the Bible, the Koran, but at least there's only one book and when you've got it memorized you've got it. No radical departures. Lest your head leave your shoulders.
That's why I've started to think it would be nice if Jesus has had kids. I know about the "only Son" rule and I'm down with it. Somehow "The Holy Octogon" just wouldn't have the same ring. But where does it say that the Son couldn't have had a Son?

Jesus certainly had time to get this together, and it would seem to me it would be part and parcel of "living a full life in the flesh." Maybe he did and just kept it all on the down-low. If so, it would be human, all too human. Still, it would have been nice if it had happened and He had given it a little PR.

Sometimes I think all these vapid super-heroes our pop-culture keeps dreaming up are an unconscious yearning for the Divine, one step removed.

Besides, a son of the Son would have given us, especially during the Son's son teenage years, a third book to argue over, "The Way-New Testament." It would probably have been written in some sort of Aramic text-messaging but that would speed up the translation process (Hey, can we kick those bozos at the The Dead Sea Scrolls project up to tortoise speed please?), and it would engage our own feckless and foundationless youth.

But the real boon to all of this would be a break in God's silence over these past 2,000 years. As a father I can well understand why you don't want to talk about your child if things are not going well, if, say, He's still living and home after a couple of millennia, just hanging around your right hand, and all he does -- day in and day out -- is to judge the quick and the dead. (How hard can that be, really?). Yes, there's a lot of things your kids do that you are not to quick to talk about.

But nobody, not even the Supreme Being, can resist saying -- on a daily, if not hourly basis --- "Let Me tell you about My grandchildren...."

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