“Mercy!” cried the peoples of the world, as ironic bitterness pierced their lives in a million ways. “Why teach us in this way? Why did you not make us right to begin with, oh Lord?”
Jesus answered that to do so would have simply created the so-called angels all over again. Then, as with the angels, it would have been necessary to give them free will, so that they would escape the triviality of guaranteed goodness. And look what happened when the angels had been set free. One faction stayed loyal. The other set up shop elsewhere. Both continued to meddle. No, he was not yet ready to give up on goading humanity to see the right—which was permitted—and have them choose it for themselves. It was risky, but maybe it would come out right this time; after all, not all the angels had chosen wrongly.
Jesus adjusted the time, enabling him to sit next to Gore Vidal even as his plan of provocation played throughout the world.
After a few unmeasured moments that might have been years, or miniature infinities, Gore Vidal said, “Okay, I do sense that you’re doing something to the world, to my mind, and perhaps to time itself. I would consider it good manners if you would at least be up front about it. Of course, I can’t think of you as the traditional Christ. That would be beneath whomever or whatever you are.”
The man was brilliant, Jesus thought. For a man, that is. That was the trouble with these experiments. It was impossible to know where they might lead; yet they had to be left to run their course to have any value.
“I’ve always suspected,” the brilliant and intuitive man continued, “that humankind was some kind of put-up job. Will you confirm this?”
“Mercy!” the unprotectedly satirized cried in Christ’s mind.
“Watch it,” the Father said within him. “I wouldn’t want to have to try to drown them a second time.”
What the brilliant and remarkably intuitive man had said made Jesus think that it would be better to tell these creatures the complete truth about who they were and where they came from. That way they would at last be disabused of their misguided ideas about the powers of the Trinity. The brilliant and witty man sitting next to him was right. Show these creatures any great unexplained power and they tended to exaggerate.
“We have hundreds of callers,” Larry King said.
The speakerphone crackled. “How do we know you’re God, or Christ, or whatever?” asked a male voice, and a bald-headed little man in pajamas was suddenly sitting in Larry King’s lap.
The man got up and dropped to his knees with conviction.
“See that?” Jesus said to Gore Vidal. “It would have been better for him to doubt and find his faith, but you people always need a convincer.”
The man vanished.
“But very shortly many will doubt I did that,” Jesus said, “even if they replay the scene.”
“Well,” Gore Vidal said, “you do admit that it’s a shabby miracle, since there are countless ways to explain it. A miracle must be made of sterner stuff. It must be inexplicable.”
Larry King pulled himself together and said, “Is this why you’ve come, to nudge us into goodness... again?”
Jesus sighed. “I’m of three minds about it, and maybe I should lose all patience. We’ve tried to help you by visiting your scale of life, but it did no good then and might do no good this time either. Laughter doesn’t seem to open your eyes, except fleetingly, and then you forget to live the lesson. So I will let you all know how things are, just who and what you are.”
“Really?” Gore Vidal asked, eyes wide as his skepticism warred with his growing wonder.
Jesus said, “Starting over at the manger wouldn’t work today. You’re not children anymore.”
“I quite agree,” Gore Vidal said. “The lessons of that Bronze Age document, the Bible, have rarely instructed us to do more than kill each other.”
Disturbed by Gore Vidal’s critical attitude (he couldn’t tell which side the writer was on), King shifted in his chair and gazed at Jesus, determined to humor his mad guest. “So what did you... you or your Father, and that third thing, think you were doing when... you created the universe?”
“The universe?” Jesus said. “Hardly that. A world.”
“All right, a world,” King said.
“Being creative,” Jesus said. “You can understand that, I suppose,” he added, glancing at the brilliant and intuitive man next to him. “I’ve now reentered your scale of existence from what you would call a much larger one. You are an escaped creation, but we’ve left you to yourselves because we consider it wrong to destroy anything self-sustaining, however humble. It’s a matter of before and after. After is very different. It’s later.”
King’s jaw dropped. “You’ve got to be kidding, buddy.”
“Not at all,” Jesus said. “You’re only a quantum fluctuation in a superspace vacuum, scarcely more than a greasy spot on the wall in one of our oldest cities. But we have let you be. Our mistake was to make you free too early in the game. And of course you don’t like freedom. You want to be told what to do all the time, as if your own decisions, especially those about how you should treat each other, don’t count unless they have some kind of divine pedigree. And you yearn for enforcers.”
“But you say you’re Christ,” King said. “So you know what’s right and wrong.”
“See what I mean?” Jesus said to Gore Vidal. “Yes and so what?”
“And you punish us when we die, right?” King asked.
“Of course not,” Jesus said. “Most of you just dissipate into nothing.”
King stared at him.
“What?” Jesus asked. “Isn’t that bad enough? To go and not to know, I mean.”
Gore Vidal had a sick look on his face and held his stomach, as if he was about to hurl.
“Are you all right?” Jesus asked.
“No,” Gore Vidal grunted and bent forward. Jesus touched his forehead. “There, is that better?”
The brilliant and intuitive man sat back. “Yes, thank you.”
“How did you do that!” King asked.
“No more difficult than putting a Band-Aid on a cut,” Jesus said. “You’d call it a kind of channeling.”
Shaken, Gore Vidal asked, “How... do you power all these miracles?” and rubbed his chin.
Jesus said, “We lay off the energy expenditure to another scale.”
“Oh, I see,” Gore Vidal said. “So it’s paid for.”
“Yes. Supernatural in your eyes, but quite something for something rather than something for nothing. It’s pay as you go, even if you do rob Peter to pay Paul.” Jesus smiled.
“Can anyone learn?” Gore Vidal asked.
“In principle, yes.”
“This scale... of things,” King said, “does it go on forever?”
“Yes, it does. How else could we lay off the energy we need to do things? It’s a standing infinity.”
King looked confused, so Jesus said, “Things get bigger forever, and they get smaller forever. Got it?”
“And you made us, and kept this from us?” King asked.
“You’d only have destroyed yourselves sooner,” Jesus said. “You have to grow into that level of power usage. Some of you know about vacuum energy and the impossibility of zero-fields. But you’ve always ignored your best minds, except when they make weapons for you.”
Larry King took a deep breath.
Gore Vidal fidgeted. “I was not a good science student,” he confessed.
“Another caller!” King cried. “Go ahead, you’re on!”
“Do animals have souls?” a woman asked, then burst into tears.
“What is it, dear?” Jesus asked.
“My cat Dino died a few days ago, and my minister... well, I asked him where my cat was now, and my minister said nowhere! Because animals don’t have souls. He said that about Dino, for Christ’s sake!”
Jesus said, “Animals have as much soul as all living things, because they’re part of the same evolutionary programs we made. It doesn’t matter whet
her it’s pigeons or people. They achieve their share of soul, however small.”
Gore Vidal looked at him as if to say that this wasn’t much of an answer, because it still left the soul undefined, but it seemed to console the woman, who heard what she wanted to hear and cried out, “I knew it! Thank you so much,” and hung up. Jesus looked at Gore Vidal, as if he knew what the man of wit was thinking, and said, “You do have to earn a soul, my dear man. It must be built up in the complexities of learning and response to life, along with a good memory. A soul must be deserved.”
“Are you now prying?” Vidal asked.
“No, your objection was plain on your face.”
“Let me ask you something,” King said. “From what you’ve said about these levels, or scales—then there may be someone... above you?”
“Of course,” Jesus said. “But they haven’t visited us.”
“No, no,” King said, “that’s not what I meant. I mean is there someone above it all? I mean a God, a real one above all the levels of infinity?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Jesus said. “That’s not even a question.”
“It certainly is,” Larry King insisted, smoothing back his hair.
Gore Vidal leaned forward and said, “Larry, keep in mind that by the meaning of the word infinity it goes on forever, up and down from us. There can’t be an overall God, just the infinity. An overall God would limit it, and then would himself have to be an additional infinity.”
“Oh,” King said, then sat back looking confused. “No,” he said after a moment, “there can’t be an infinity. And how could you know if there was one?” He laughed. “Count it? Measure it?”
“That’s a puzzle,” Jesus said. “If we could travel indefinitely in scale, up and down through the multiverses, we might still never know whether they went on forever, since we might reach the last one in the next jump. After an eternity of travel, we would still not be certain.”
“There,” Larry King said to Gore Vidal, “I knew it!”
“However,” Jesus said, “the principle that you call induction would suggest, after a while, that one is facing an infinity. Besides, an infinite superspace is necessary to explain universes, to avoid the problem of origin, which then becomes inexplicable in finite systems. Local origins are acceptable, but there must be an inconceivable infinite vastness to support local origins. All reality is local.”
Gore Vidal smiled. “Either God always existed and is the ground of being, or the universe always existed and needs no explanation, in the same way that we would not ask where God came from. Choose one. Or are they both one and the same?”
Jesus looked at him. “I wish you people were as bright when it comes to your violent history and treatment of one another.”
“So is there life after death?” Larry King asked.
“Mostly no,” Jesus said. “You’ll have to gain the glory of greater life spans on your own.”
“Will you help us?” Gore Vidal asked, looking at Jesus with eyes that knew their mortality.
“I tried to give you life once,” Jesus said, “but you misunderstood and turned it into all kinds of mystical jargon.”
“Jargon?” Larry King asked.
“Words like divine love, grace, providence became meaningless as they were enlisted to serve your thieving power politics.”
King sat back, looking appalled.
Jesus continued, “According to your Bible, my Dad supposedly said to me, in so many words if not exactly, ‘I’ll forgive them their sins, now and forever, if you’re willing to die for this humanity on the cross. Just speaking up for them won’t be enough. I’ll know you mean it when you actually suffer and die for them. Of course, later on we’ll get you up again, but you will have experienced the human pain.’ And so on, as if my coming was a mission of some kind.” Jesus paused, then said, “But of course he said no such thing to me. I was not a sacrifice for your salvation, which still seems a long ways off to me. You got this Lamb of God sacrifice idea from your agricultural festivals, or some such.”
“If Christ has not been raised,” Gore Vidal intoned, “then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. Corinthians 15:14, I believe.”
“But you did rise?” King asked, ignoring him.
“Yes, yes,” Jesus said. “But what happened to me back then was a complete accident, later embellished.”
“But you did get up from the dead,” King insisted.
“What else could I do?” Christ said. “Later it seemed that maybe it would set a good example, encourage you to thinking about the shortness of your lives and spur you to getting yourselves a decent life spin, for a start, and more later.”
“Huh?” King asked.
“I wanted to set a good example,” Christ said.
“Let me get this straight,” King said, sounding dazed. “The way you talk suggests that you... made us somewhere, like on a table somewhere, in some large corner beyond our stars.”
Jesus nodded. “We made a program, with every initial condition specified, then let it run. It wasn’t the most impressive phenomenal realization of the noumena that I’ve seen. We might have started with a better Word. Still, you did get away from us, and there is much to be said for independence of action. While some of you do think, you’re mostly hopeless.”
“Oh, come now,” Gore Vidal said. “Here I must side with Larry and say that you don’t expect us to believe that our whole universe of stars and galaxies is some greasy spot on a wall?”
“One of you actually guessed something like the truth,” Jesus said, “a mystic named...”
But even as Gore Vidal named the noumenously inclined scribbler, Jesus was also at a nearby hospital-hospice telling jokes to the sick and dying. At first a few of the patients laughed, but as the jokes found their mark one man cried out:
“I’m pissed off! They say you’re Jesus Christ and you’ve been appearing all over the world. So you should be performing miracles instead of crackin’ funnies.” He looked around at the suddenly silent ward. “We’re dyin’ here! You should help us!”
Jesus raised a hand and said, “A laugh is nothing to sneeze at, my friends. Laughter has curative powers.”
Slowly, the chain reaction started, and the sick ward chuckled, laughed, then roared explosively.
Gore Vidal sat back smugly and said, “So you’ve come to pillory us for our sins?”
Jesus said, “I’ve come to make you laugh, to wake you up.”
“What’s pillory?” Larry King asked.
“You’re doing it to yourself,” said Gore Vidal.
Jesus shouted, “Laughter is divine, a kind of grace born of the unexpected, invasive understanding that steals into us and cannot be denied. A revelation, no matter how trivial the joke.”
“What does he mean?” King demanded.
“I tried other ways of helping you think for yourselves,” Jesus continued. “I revealed myself in various ways, to different people.
But it did no good. They made the same thing of my good advice.”
“And what was that?” Larry asked him.
“Religion,” Jesus said. “The bureaucratization of ethics.”
“What’s wrong with religion?” King demanded. “You, of all people...”
“It’s only a wish-fulfillment way out of your difficulties, death among them. You’ll have to work harder than just imagining a better place to go to. You’ll have to learn enough to make one for yourselves.”
“Tell me,” Gore Vidal began, “how is it that you do miracles, given that you’re not what we really mean by God?”
“I say again, they’re not miracles,” Jesus insisted. “Not in the sense that natural laws are inexplicably suspended. When you visit another scale, you can go around, behind, below, lower scales... and well, open doors in the physical laws.”
Gore Vidal looked skeptical, as if he had just awakened. “All this you’ve made us think you’ve done, it’s some kind of hypnosis, isn’t it? And it’
s not really happening.”
He waited, as if expecting the illusion to dissolve.
“It’s the best I can do to explain it to your level of understanding,” Jesus said.
Larry King guffawed. “Well, he certainly put you in your place!” He was still trying to do a tube show, even though human reality itself was in the balance and about to be found wanting.
“So what will come of your visit, this time?” Gore Vidal asked.
“We might just have to let you go,” Jesus said, “let you dissolve into nothing.”
“What!” King cried.
“So you’ve come to threaten us,” Gore Vidal asked, “rather than make us laugh? We’re supposed to die laughing, I suppose.”
“Don’t underrate nothingness,” Jesus said. “It’s a great peace. There are vast stretches of it in the up-and-down scales. Still, it’s hard to achieve. Something always persists, some suffering echo of a bad job, impossible to erase, since one would have to achieve what some of your finest today would call a zero-point field.”
“A what?” King asked.
“A hard wipe,” Jesus said, clicking his tongue.
“Erase us?” Larry King cried. “How cruel! Who do you think you are?”
“Might we not appeal our case to your father?” Gore Vidal asked, “or to some being above your... scale, who might be more... of a God than you are? Maybe there’s a God above all the scales, or outside them?”
Jesus sighed, then said, “I don’t think so. Why do you say it’s cruel? Your misery will be at an end. I will prevent a future of suffering damnation for humanity, going on as it has in pain.”
“But you can’t see all futures,” Gore Vidal said, “so maybe in some we’ll succeed.”
“You’re right about that,” Jesus said. “There is an infinity of possible futures. To see or try to change them, or prevent them, would put me in search mode forever. You’re quite a bright fellow, but no, I mean this world right here.”
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