I went up to visit the earth the other day, but I didn't feel like working, so I climbed a mountain instead. The human world spread out before me, no doubt full of people having a great time being people and breaking at least five of God's stodgy rules at once. In other words, a beautiful landscape. I'd found a good rock to sit on and was just settling down for a good long contemplation of the sins of mankind when I happened to notice the gentleman nearest me. He was sitting right on the edge of an overhang with a considerable drop below him and looking thoughtfully at the distant treetops. Now God doesn't like suicides much; he tends to accuse them of being guilty of despair and pitches them out of heaven. Good-o, thought I, another soul for me. And then I looked again. Call me a cherub, if it wasn't Jesus himself! He was wearing the traditional light brown hair and beard and the bright blue eyes, but his halo was nowhere in sight.
Now once, a long time ago, God managed to get into my head and convinced me to go and tempt his baby boy to jump off a cliff very like this one. I wouldn't have minded having the lad on my side, but I'm blessed if I'm going to tempt somebody because God told me to.
So this time I got up and went and sat next to him on the overhang.
"Haven't seen you in these parts for a while," said I.
"Oh, get thee behind me, Satan," replied J.C. in the tones of one who has said it all too often.
"Not today, thanks," was my polite response.
Jesus made no comment, but looked gloomily into the distance at the rest of the world where all the humans were busying themselves with normal human things.
"Look, Jesus, I can see something's bothering you. Tell me what it is, eh?"
"I'm fine. Just enjoying the view," he growled.
I was tempted to poke around in his head to try and find the real reason for the nasty humour of the Lamb of God, but in his current mood, he was likely to push me off the cliff.
"Hey, I promise you, I'm not possessed by God at the moment. I'm not your dad testing you." As proof I tendered my wings. These look like the wings of any ordinary angel. When God weasels his way into my head they turn black or batlike depending on his mood, just so everyone knows I'm evil. He's into symbolism like that.
Jesus ran his hand along the edge of the nearest wing, checking it was real, I suppose. His hand left a tingle where it had touched. Comes with being half a god. Wish I was classed as a god...
He went back to looking at the landscape.
I waited.
"I hate humans," said Jesus Christ, superstar.
"Really?" I asked.
"Yep. You know why?"
"Why?" said I.
"Because I'm supposed to love them."
"Yes, that is true," I said, as neutrally as possible, wondering idly what all the true believers of the world would do if they knew Jesus resented his duty towards them.
He saw the expression on my face. "You know what they'd do," he said bitterly, "they wouldn't believe it."
He was right. The interesting thing about humans is that they develop their religious beliefs from interaction with other humans. It's possible to poke their minds in the right direction, but once they've firmly decided on the composition of life, the universe and everything nothing short of a visitation from Gabriel will change their minds. Even then they sometimes dismiss it as a dream or fantasy.
"I was born to love all the little children of the world," said Jesus. "God created me so he didn't have to waste time being the focus for all those prayers."
Satanists pray to me sometimes. It's nice to be wanted, I suppose, but they're embarrassingly obsequious about it. Too many prayers tend to make one big-headed.
Just look at God.
"The trouble is," continued Jesus, "most of the prayers are for God, not me. They think I'm a part of him, so the system gets all muddled up. I get to hear what they say, God gets the buzz. And I'm bound by his Free Will Policy, which means I can't actually talk back to them or do anything for them in case it over-rides their right to choose."
"God's a bastard like that," I said. "I gave up on him years ago."
"Don't I wish," sighed The Son.
"Most humans ask the stupidest things, anyway. 'Please, God, help me with my relationship', 'Help me win this race', 'Get me my job back'. It wasn't too bad at the beginning, but two thousand year of it's severely eroded my sympathy."
"I thought you and God were supposed to have eternal compassion and whatnot," I said, trying not to sound judgemental. I didn't want the poor chap to get annoyed and bless me. That hurts, even from a half-god.
"Hah, Dad's never had any to speak of. I was good at the sympathy and compassion thing when I was on earth playing human," said the Saviour. "The first thirty years of my life were human years. God seems a lot more special from down here, eternal love seems real. And because I was human, human concerns were important. So I spent my time trying to convince humans that if they were nice to each other and believed in God's eternal love, the world would be a better place. They fight over me these days. Useless dickheads."
He ran a hand over his face.
"Do you know what it's like to have the sound of two men who are trying to kill each other, both praying that their opponent will go to Hell, in one ear and the desperate pleas of a woman for the war to stop in the other?"
"Sounds like something the god of war would be interested in," I said. "Is there any way of transferring prayers?"
"To another religion's gods? I don't think my dad would take kindly to that. You know how he is about Thou Shalt Have No Other God But Me."
"Ares could do with some prayers. No-one believes in him any more."
"True," said J.C.
We sat there in silence and admired the view. Decent guy, really, Jesus, I thought. It's a pity about his dad. And all those humans.
"So are you going to be jumping off this nice mountain today or are you just contemplating injustice in general?"
"I'm thinking I'd like to kill all the humans," said the Saviour. "Don't you think the world would be so much better without them? No more prayers waking you up in the middle of the night, a nice clean planet with more than one species of large land mammal, no-one to inflate Dad's ego.."
"Didn't some human predict that you and your dad would get to drop a whole lot of people into pits of fire and sulfur at the end of the world?" I asked. I decided not to remind him that part of that deal involved me getting severely beaten up.
"Yeah, he did. But you know what? The ones who get saved are the believers. Can you imagine spending eternity with that lot? When they're not kissing God's feet, I'll have to babysit them. A world where the heathens get saved is my idea of a good Apocalypse. They don't believe in me or God, so they'll be pretty much maintenance-free."
Sounded good to me. Heathens are heaps of fun. They get up to all sorts of interesting things that God doesn't like very much. I tried to envision a new world full of heathens with God walking among them constantly having to cover his eyes.
There was a crack of thunder and a large voice spake:
"Satan! Are you blaspheming again?"
"Yup," said I. "Good, eh?"
Jesus quietly pretended he wasn't there.
"Some of those thoughts didn't sound like yours," spake God's voice in suspicious tones. "Have you been corrupting My Son?"
"I've been trying," I said. "The Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour of Mankind seems remarkably resistant to my charms."
"You're lying," said God.
"Pfff," I responded, lying back on the rock with my hands behind my head, "You haven't been able to tell when I'm telling the truth since you made me the Father of Lies."
God produced a thunderclap.
"Pardon you," I said politely.
"Insolent angel," snarled the One True God, "I could destroy you."
"So you say. The interesting thing is that you haven't done it. You could have destroyed me before the Apple Incident. Didn't, did you? I know why, too."
God was not a happy deity. He knew what I was talking about.
"Don't go climbing into my head again, either," I said. God doesn't like being in my head very much, luckily. It's like walking into a room with posters bearing nasty personal attacks all over the walls and full of people who shout "Boooo!" and throw rotten fruit at you.
So he blessed me instead and departed.
Luckily I was already lying down. When I came to with an aching head and pins and needles in my right wing where it had been squashed under my shoulder, God had departed. Jesus wasn't there either. I guess his daddy took him by the hand and whisked him away from the naughty Devil.
Poor bloke. I'm glad I don't have a father. I made a note to myself at this point that if I ever have a baby Antichrist, to let him do his own thing and certainly never make him listen to prayers from my Satanists.
There may be more of this at some point in the future. At the moment, this is where it stops.
