The Story of Easter, Part 2

Getting Himself Killed

When last we left our intrepid deity, his plan for committing the single most loving and holy act in the history of the universe was well on its way to fruition:

1. Create enormous universe for humans… check.
2. Man, woman, talking snake, tree with evil fruit… check.
3. Chosen people… check.
4. Slaughtered goats, burnt wheat, no touchy the vagina blood… check.
5. Centuries of slavery and captivity under evil “not the real god” worshipers… check.
6. Crazed prophets giving everybody the wrong idea about the savior… check.

Yes.  Things were falling into place just as he knew they would.  It was time for the cleverest thing anyone had ever done.  When the time was right,  God split himself into three pieces, but by using god-magic, he made it so that he really wasn’t three pieces.  He was one.  But three.  All at the same time.  And through the magic of being himself, he also made it so that he had always been that way, even though he hadn’t always been that way.  (It’s nice to be God.)

Next, he decided to call himself his own son, even though there was only one God, and no Goddess for him to have sex with.  Maybe it was because he liked sex so much he thought it would be nice to imagine having it, since he could never have it himself… unless it was with himself, which wouldn’t be sex, but masturbation.  Anyway, it’s impossible to know the mind of God, so we can only imagine why he used a term that didn’t apply to himself.  He’s God, so he can do what he wants, and it is good and holy.

When the time was right, God magically teleported to earth and went into the uterus of a young woman named Mary, who might have never had sex before, but also might have, and might have just been known as a “young woman.”  We can’t really tell these days because God knew (in his ultimate loving wisdom) that for his plan to work perfectly, no original copies of his holiest of holy books could survive long enough for anyone to know what they really said.  But I digress.

God spent the normal nine months as a fetus in Mary’s uterus, and then came into the world very unceremoniously, being deposited in a hay trough, since neither Mary nor her long-suffering husband, Joseph, could afford proper lodging.  You see, God knew that it was very important for him to go through all the motions of being poor and outcast, even though he could have saved a lot of trouble for a lot of people by coming out of Mary’s vagina holding a magical pot of endless gold and a vial of endless cancer preventer medicine.

Instead, God — the part of him that was still in heaven, not the part laying about in afterbirth — told one of his magical servants to go fly down to some rich men and send them traipsing across the desert with gold, frankincense, and myrrh to give the little baby.  He also had another magical servant tell some herdsmen to go look at the baby.  It was all very pretty, and God knew that it was important to do these things so that in another two thousand years, Hallmark wouldn’t have to recall several million nativity sets for lack of historical accuracy.

After the birthing was over, God, who was now known as Jesus, did regular human things until he got to be thirty years old, at which time he got twelve men together and went about performing god-magic and generally upsetting the status quo.

Remember that part of God’s magnificent plan involved giving lots of people the wrong idea about what the savior would be like.  Since God was still only talking to his chosen people, it goes without saying that they were the ones he was confusing on purpose.  He needed to do this because it was very important that the Hebrews (or Jews, if you prefer), do the most loving thing possible and kill the God that had bestowed so much loving and mercy on them for the past several hundred years of slavery and desert wandering.  (I know… it sounds odd, but it will all make sense in the end.  I promise.)

So Jesus, (or God, if you prefer) spent three years upsetting the Jewish holy men, who were still under the impression that God was  in his Goat Blood Fetish Stage.  You see, God was not really into memos.  He  always preferred telling the most important things in the universe to prophets and preachers, who then told everybody else.  Perhaps he thought it garish to just tell everybody plainly what he wanted.  Perhaps it amused him to watch such a small percentage of the human population cause so much confusion for so many people.  Who can know the mind of God?  In any case, the holy men had had it up to here and took advantage of a legal loophole in the Roman justice system.  They talked Pontius Pilate, who honestly didn’t give a rat’s ass, into crucifying Jesus.

This was just what Jesus wanted to happen, but it was still pretty upsetting because being crucified hurts very badly.  So Jesus made a big show of  being distraught, and performed one last magic trick which consisted of reading the mind of Judas, who was fed up with the whole affair and was planning on turning state’s evidence.   Then he went up to a hill where he knew the feds were waiting for him.

The whole crucifixion thing took quite a while, and was very gruesome.  The Romans who were in charge of killing God were well versed in the art of making the experience as painful as possible.  They spit on him, gave him vinegar to drink, skewered him like a piglet, and made light of his political misdeeds. When the whole thing was over, several concerned fans took his body and put it in a small cave, then sealed the door with a big rock.

Everybody thought that was the end of it, but there was much more ahead. Much, much more.

To Be Continued

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