We were on a charter boat traveling all night to get to the place where we could all catch a mess load of fish. Problem was, the swells got so bad, we were going up and down, over and over, and we all started to feel really small, like this boat we were on was nothing compared with the big ocean we were in. The ocean was rolling, and it seemed that surely our boat would roll right over. The rain got really bad. You could see the sheets of it falling through the moonlight. People started to get sick, throwing up off the side of the boat, all of us. Some of us headed below deck to get out of the rain and there was this guy sleeping through the whole thing.
He woke up. He looked kind of annoyed (not sure with us or the weather) as he went up on deck. He looked away from the boat up at the storm and said, “Knock it off.”
Somehow, the water went all still and calm.
What? I mean, was that some kind of freak coincidence?
Imagine hearing about a group of people stuck in the middle of nowhere with no food. No phone service for UberEats or GrubHub. This guy with them says to sit down, so they do. After they sit, he says a prayer and opens one kid's lunchbox and starts passing food around like he has a truckload of catered sandwiches from Jason’s Deli. Everyone eats. Those sandwiches tasted like some incredible artisanal delight, more than good, the best deli ever.
OK, so, that’s just weird. Made up, right? Some kind of magic trick. The Amazing Kreskin or David Copperfield or David Blaine, just not on stage.
Did you hear the news about your neighbor or your co-worker and what happened? Her brother died. He was sick for just a few days. Or maybe it just hit him all at once. Maybe it was COVID. Maybe it was cancer. Maybe it was getting hit one too many times at a sports event. Or a heart attack just out of nowhere. Like the worst kind of defensive tackle. There was nothing the ambulance could do. He was gone. Off to the morgue they take him. People are just in shock.
Then this guy comes in from out of town. He looks at the corpse, the dead man, and this guy just says, “Get up.”
Imagine the unimaginable. Your co-worker’s brother sits up. He comes back from the dead. He is alive.
People are starting to get excited about this guy who seems so different from the rest of us. What he’s doing, well, it can’t all be some sleight of hand magic. I mean, there has to be something special about him, something amazing.
Yet, when you do at last see him, he looks, well, just like any other person, any other guy. There’s no halo, no heavenly voices, nothing crazy like that. This guy is not part of the marvel universe. He’s not bigger than us or stronger, he’s just one of us.
Some people want to make him president. Or more, whatever more might be. I mean, they’ve never been energized like this. They really think he needs to fix government, because if he can bring someone back from the dead and feed all those people and take care of the cataclysmic weather, he can surely take care of the border crisis and the financial debacle and the unbridled reach for power to people from the left and the right and the up and down, not to mention taxes, tsunamis, melting glaciers, corruption in government, fires, economic downturns and earthquakes and 1984-style Big Government and Pharma and, oh yeah, my sin.
He's wanted in another way, too; wanted like a criminal. Afghanistan’s most wanted. Post-modern Marxist classrooms. LGBTQ+ whatever. Mainland China, North Korea’s most wanted, or maybe hated would be a better word. Weird thing is, this guy doesn’t move away from it all. He runs toward the disaster, not away - he goes where he’s not wanted. He cannot leave the world and its people untouched.
He’s got a photographic memory. There are things and people he cannot forget. Those people, “remember me,” that’s where he is, right next to the man in jail, hanging there next to the thief, the woman beaten, the man who beat her, the shooting victim, the shooter, the homeless mental patient, the child orphaned. The wife cast out of her home, the broken mother, the desperate father, the pastor imprisoned, the prison warden, the blind man, the old man with no hope, the student denied entrance to university, the prosecutor and the defense, the crippled man on the stretcher who can’t fit through the door of the church, the lady who can’t remember her own name, the family swept away by a mudslide, the cancer patient, the hemophiliac reaching to touch his jacket or even just his shadow cast on the ground by the Mediterranean sun, a student swept out to sea in a riptide she can’t swim out of and all she can say is one word, one name, his. . .
We all long for a new heaven and a new earth. In the meantime, we get to make do with this guy.