THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GARY
Jesus was getting reckless. As if hanging out with whores, homosexuals,
drag queens, alcoholics, crack addicts, fist-fuckers, coprophiliacs, emetophiliacs,
and meth dealers wasn't already troublesome enough for us, His chosen image handlers.
It got Him bad press from the official organs, and plenty of
it, but at least He had plausible deniability. He was ministering.
At least, that's what we called it.
The problem was that His propensity for the low-life progressed.
It got worse, harder to whitewash in any honest, unexpurgated gospel, such
as the one I was determined to write.
First it was the Nazi tattoos and then it was the kiddie thing.
I tried to warn Him that He was pushing the envelope of
this "nothing human is alien to me" thing too far. That it was going
to come round and bite Him on His Holy Ass.
I argued that some sins were best left to the imagination, that
some transgressions were bad enough when entertained in theory, that there was no
good theological reason to act them out. Fair or not, some poor bastards were
born to go to hell.
But, no, Jesus argued, that was the whole point of the incarnation
experience. To experience this shit in the flesh. All of it. The good, the bad,
and especially the ugly.
He was quite the zealot on this particular point.
So He got Himself inked with two full sleeves of swastikas
and flaming skulls and "Kill the Jew" slogans. He suffered the little
children to come unto Him and then they suffered Him coming on to them.
Later on, sifting through the papers that survived, Mark, Matthew,
Luke, and John were grimly determined to put a positive spin on anything He did
and redact the rest. The effort drove at least one of them certifiably insane.
Me, I had to write my conscience, it's always been that way,
which is why you've never heard of me or my gospel, which contains the only good
news almost nobody wants to hear.
But I was there, remember. They weren't.
The unsolved spree killings across the Levant over those three
years—I don't even want to go there.
Towards the end, Jesus was hardly making even a minimal effort
to cover His bloody tracks in spite of all our desperate pleading. It seemed as
if He'd gone completely off His nut, like His old man before Him in certain
of the grimmer passages in the Old Testament.
We trembled in fear. Our bowels did loosen, as we put it back
then. Maybe it was hereditary. If the Father could work Himself into a cosmic psychopathic
homicidal rage over trifles, wipe out entire settlements for being "unclean,"
men, women, children, all the livestock, every chicken, etc. why not the Son? Maybe
the forbidden fruit didn't roll far from the tree, after all.
We hardly dared to voice the suggestion out loud. None of us
wanted to believe it.
But instead of toning it down as we gently suggested, as if out
of sheer spite and contrariness, with each murder Jesus just grew more and more outrageous.
Think Jack-the-Ripper, the Boston Strangler, Hannibal Lecter, and John Wayne Gacey
all rolled into one and then dialed up to eleven.
Think that and you still have no idea how bad it got.
He was the Son of God, don't forget. He could do anything
a man could do but He could do it better. He could do it infinitely, divinely
better and everyone likes to dwell on that. What they don't want to consider
is that He could also do evil and do it infinitely, infernally worse.
And He did.
"Lord," we begged, "show some care."
Jesus went right on, scattering clues behind Him like mustard
seeds, all but writing His ineffable signature on each murder scene, taunting the
authorities, rubbing their noses in their human fallibility.
I simply couldn't understand it at the time. I remember
thinking it was almost as if He were trying to get caught and, of course, it
becomes quite clear in hindsight that's just exactly what He was trying to
do.
But why?
"I have to know in My flesh, in My bones, what it is
to be a human being," He once said to me. "The entire rainbow, every shade,
the full monte, the whole enchilada. It's easy just to be the best. But if I’m not
also the worst of the worst how can I forgive the worst? You tell them the truth,
Gary, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I'm depending on you."
This was before the others threw me out of the inner circle,
afraid my conscience would get the better of me and I'd snitch. I was forced
to follow from a distance, the thirteenth apostle like the fifth forgotten Beatle,
reporting on the aftermath of Christ's grisly rampage of redemption, filing my reports
in wax-sealed amphoras and leaving them with the Gnostics who in turn buried them
deep below the desert sands.
I kept His secret. It weighed heavily on my soul. But I would
never betray Him, I swear to you. I had faith, for what that's worth.
It was, as is commonly known, Judas who ratted him out. The cops
had dirt on Judas, some unsavory misdeeds from his past, and they were tightening
the screws. What's more, they knew he was Christ's number one accomplice, his right
hand man.
And it's true. Judas was no saint.
He was right there with the Savior, luring victims,
disposing of bodies, aiding and abetting the raping and the butchering. He was Christ's
tattoo artist, his partner-in-crime.
But the authorities had a hard-on for Jesus and they were willing
to let Judas walk to get to Him—walk right into a noose as it happened. That
"suicide" always seemed suspicious to me, just a little too neat and
tidy, but that's another story.
This gospel is about Jesus and how He loves you even if
you're a serial-killing nazi child molester.
He loves you because he's been one, too.
He's been where you've been, walked a mile in your Doc
Martens. In your Prado heels, too. Jesus has been where you’ve been, been
who you are, whoever you are.
He loves you because He loves Himself and there is literally
nothing you could possibly have done that He hasn't done and done one helluva lot
more horrifically.
He forgives you because He knows, He really knows what it's like
to be human.
He gets it.
And He got over it.
He rose from the dead.
And He's here to tell you the very good news: You will,
too.
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