What Would Jesus Look Like?

My wife was brought up in the Baptist faith.  I think this means she believes in wasting her Saturday nights for fear of not being able to answer the Sunday a.m. bell, in an attempt to prove they are all double dippin’ into the same vat of Holy Water.  The first time I heard the phrase “Holy Water” I thought they were talking about this chick I once knew named Holly Walker – who thankfully ended up marrying a guy with a less biblically confusable name.

As a result of this former belief in early risin’ and usin’ water to facilitate dyin’, I am now being subjected to something called “The Face of Jesus” on the History Channel.  In HDTV nonetheless.  I don’t know if HD comes after AC or DC?  Maybe it stands for “He’s Dead” TeleVision.  I haven’t the slightest Jew.  Well, while I’m talkin’ about the lot of people who supposedly killed Ole J.C., let me just mention I don’t understand the fear or hatred of these folks.  No one of the Jewish Faith has ever tried to Gefilte my fish without consent, or wrap my foreskin in tin mohel.  I have no clue about why people don’t like them for their alleged stinginess cause – the way I figure it – why wouldn’t they hoard all their shit?  That crazy goddamn German came through like it was a “pay for none, get more free” yard sale and took all their shit.  Hating Jews for being smart and caring for their shit so it doesn’t get stolen again is like criticizing Jamaicans for selling ganja.  What in the fuck else are you supposed to do mon?

A bunch of “theologians” – which I think also dabble in the study of the societal significance of the lone Huxtable manchild – are splainin’ why something called the “Shroud of Turin” is some kind of blanket with an “image” or “outline” of his Almighty Baptitude.  This thing is like the most historical blanket the world has ever seen.  Even more important than that rag Linus carried around while felatin’ his thumb.  These fools have CT Scanned it, MRI’d it, looked at it through x-ray glasses, and even had a telepathic quilter try to recreate it using papyrus and Mastodon pubes of the highest quality.  Nothing comes close.  This is the blankie of all blankies.  It holds what believers to be an image of J.C.’s mug.  It’s even got the biblical version of a chalk outline on it showing how emaciated His Holy Holiday Hamness allegedly was the last time he curled up.  The point seems to be that a whole bunch of motherfuckers have spent their entire professional lives all trying to figure out if this sacred shawl really represents what it is supposed to.  I’ll represent that – no matter what spin cycle you look at it in – it’s going to be a window into the actual face of Christ, or, just a goddamn blanket with some coincidental markings, stains and burnholes.

I could care less what you make of it.  You either buy into it and what it represents, or you think it is the earliest example of a Snuggie that was not carefully taken care of.  Suddenly, an old hippie appears looking all knowledgeable.  This cat is trying to use his hipdom to lend credence to his Clearwater revival theory that it was once used to treat leprosy.  It’s like a Holy version of those weirdly soaked towelettes.  Apparently, instead of just removing grease and BBQ sauce, this one could remove and heal the most sloughing skin.

“There’s a lot of blood on this shroud.  A tremendous amount of blood that flowed from the head.”  This fucking thing is really a Holy gauze pad.  “It is not just blood.  It is human blood.”  Well, I don’t know if that was so persuasive; because my sources tell me red crayons were hard to come by back then, and finger-pricks often filled the void.  I’ll admit, there does seem to be an outline of a mug on it.  I have no clue what The Holy Homie looked like when and if he holied it around the hood back between the times the Aussies blokes first struck a chord.  But personally, I think the picture looks more like an outline of Duane Allman wearing a headband.  That can’t be the case though.  He’s no angel.  The outline of what they claim is the body looks like the first ever depiction of those goofy, non-scary, just dropped the top hat and cane skeletons you always see on lawns during Halloween.

There have been sightings of members of the Holy Hall of Fame throughout culinary history.  In 2006, a cat named Mike Thompson encountered Jesus’ mug in a pancake.  His reaction?  Immediately put it for sale on eBay.  I guess you could say he was merely asking other breakfast believers to throw a little tithe in his direction.  Lord knows, Bisquick-based products are endorsed by the Who’s Who of Saints.  Apostles believe in Saint Jemima and the Krusteaz Ortho-mixed Christians.

The ever believable Juan “Anejo” Patranoonce found the face of Christ etched in the back of his frying pan.  I mean, if Christ ever wanted to share a picture of himself, putting it on the back of a frying pan is the obvious choice.  I hear etching your face on the back of a frying pan was once the biblical equivalent of Facebook.  If you wanted to get yourself out there and make friends, you wanted your mug seen every time the Last Supper of the day was cooked up.  I’ve never even heard of people of the biblical ilk every frying anything.  This is like finding some kind of fucking higher message on the back of an infomercial product.  I can see a goddamn headline on Yahoo! tomorrow, “Showtime Rotisserie grill cures man’s alcoholism!  Says it told him to set it down and to forget it!”  Or “The Jesusdazzler bejewels everything in biblical patterns!  Faux jewels haven’t been this holy since a strand of Liberace’s anal beads were donated to the Catholic Church.”

To some, the holiest of all food-related biblical manifestations was the face of the Virgin Mary found in Diana Duyser’s grilled cheese sandwhich.  Once Ole DD discovered she’d already ate half of Mary’s mug, she stopped.  She immediately knew this was a sign from God.  According to media reports, she kept this fucking thing on her nightstand for 10 years and it never molded.  She said during that time it stood by her each night, and she claimed it also brought “good luck at casinos”.  She eventually decided that this cheese based piece of holiness would best serve the world if it were sold to a casino on eBay for $28K.  Nothing says first ballot Heavenly Enterer like selling a fucking grilled cheese to some schmucks running a casino for enough gouda to bind up the oldest pay toilet in all of Skirtsland.

They are still talking about this fucking blanket.  It’s “weave” this,  it’s “burn holes” that.  These are the type of statements you usually overhear when quilters bitch about their crocheting neighbor, while drinking coffee and chain smoking Virginia Slims.  At some point, someone used something anti-religious called “science” – as in, it blinded Thomas Dolby – to “carbon date” this thing, and it came back as only being around 700 hundred years old.  Oooops!  Damn the luck.  So either Jesus, Christ or the Almighty gave some caveman the making of history’s first science kit, or you think these fuckers put us here and gave us the ability to make up shit to confuse us.  Carbon dating isn’t talkin’ about two elements hitting on each other.  It’s talking about using elle-uh-mints – that everyone agrees exist – to figure out how old something is through a radiometric method using naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 in determining the age of carbonaceous materials.  This thing is turba-charged to figger out dates about 58,000 to 62,000 years ago.  Ooooops!  Science is ripe as the mail.  Come on darlin’, let’s ignore the truth.

“Say for instance, this shroud was on trial.  I believe the jury would say it is authentic.”  Some guy just said this then when talking about the evidence of Jesus’ existence, Easter and all that other jazz.   Whereas I can buy into the whole Mr. Wizard meets David Carusso and they blow shit up with a Mythbusters approach to deciding what is real and what isn’t, I don’t understand how a fucking sacred blanket or quilt could ever be put on trial for anything?  This just in, “Could the face on the shroud be a metaphor for the universe itself?”  If you want to know that, get one of those Peter Frampton microphones and ask Stephen Hawking, Vista 7 or any other compatible version what the fucking truth is.  That creepy voiced bastard is going to tell you ANYTHING could be a metaphor for anything else, metaphorically speaking.  If you compare the two by using one thing in place of the other during communication.  As in, if you’re speaking metaphorically, you’re using other means to communicate the same thing.

Well if I watch any more of this, I’m going to pour out my wine and turn water into a conduit for the ingestion of some form of benzodiazepine.  Water into wine?  Fuck that.  Sober into high would be more impressive.

P.S.  I do not have anything against you believing in whatever you believe in, and at the same time, I could not care less if you disagree or are offended by anything I have said above.  It’s Easter.  Go get a ham.