Imaginary Jesus

by Matt Mikalatos

  “Who are they, Daddy?”

  I put my hand on my daughter’s head. “I’m not sure. A singing telegram or something.”

  Elder Hardy scowled. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because your names are Laurel and Hardy. That’s a joke, right?”

  “I don’t get it.” Elder Laurel scratched the back of his neck. “Why is that funny?”

  “Great Caesar’s ghost! Could it be that you are so young that you have never heard of Laurel and Hardy?”

  The two missionaries put their heads together and talked in hushed tones for a moment. Elder Hardy turned to me and said, “We will ask one of the bishops to explain it to us later.”

  “We’d like to set up an appointment with you this week,” Elder Laurel said.

  “We could go for coffee right now.” I called to Krista to ask if she minded me stepping out for a bit.

  She came around the corner and saw who was at the door and rolled her eyes. “Go ahead. But I don’t think they’ll want coffee.”

  I slapped my forehead. “Mormons don’t drink coffee, I forgot.”

  Elder Hardy graced me with a genuine smile. “No problem.”

  I said good-bye to the girls, and the three of us piled into the cab of my truck. I drove out of the neighborhood and we headed south on Highway 99 toward Muchas Gracias, my favorite Mexican place in town.

  Muchas Gracias is open twenty-four hours a day and run by people who have, at one time, lived in Mexico. The Muchas Gracias chain helps establish new immigrants to the States and then teaches them to sponsor more. I am a huge fan of the concept and support the restaurants wholeheartedly with my fast-food budget. The first time I went to Muchas Gracias, the woman taking my order unfailingly referred to me as “ma’am.” Now the boys and I quibbled briefly about what to get. Laurel was from Arizona and skeptical of the food. He ordered the carne asada tacos at my recommendation, Hardy went with a chicken chimichanga, and I got a torta.

  “Sorry about inviting you to coffee,” I said.

  “That was funny.” Laurel took a bite of his carne asada. His eyes lit up. “Hey, this is great!”

  “Best Mexican food in the Northwest. Are you allowed to drink decaf?”

  Hardy explained, “It’s not the caffeine, it’s the tannic acid.”

  “I didn’t know that.” I was learning a lot here. Not about Jesus, but about Mormons. “Can you drink soda?”

  Elder Hardy placed his arms on the table and leaned forward. “There’s a story that someone went fishing with the prophet—the prophet is the head of the church—and asked him if he was allowed to drink a Pepsi, and the prophet said, ‘You may drink it, but God prefers that you not.’”

  “So it’s on your own conscience?”

  “Right.” Elder Hardy nodded. “But we know that there’s something in soda that causes damage to your bones.”

  I took a big bite of my torta. “So this is all a health thing?”

  “That’s right,” Elder Hardy said. “We’re supposed to take care of our bodies and be as healthy as possible.”

  I paused and considered this. A thought hit me as I watched the boys mop up the food. I said, “Elder Hardy, how’s that chimichanga?”

  “It’s good,” he replied, with no apparent awareness of what I was getting at.

  “The fried burrito you’re eating?”

  “Yeah, it’s good. Real good. I’m full but I’m going to finish it off, I think.”

  I had tried eating one of those chimichangas once and had spent much of the afternoon trying to counteract the burning in my bosom.

  “Anyway,” Elder Laurel said, “let’s talk about your Jesus and the real Jesus.”

  “I would like that,” I said. “This is going to be fun.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Mormon Jesus and My Jesus

  Do you know what the best-selling book of all time is? The Bible. The Bible is big business. It sells more than any other book ever, and every year it’s the number one book. Bibles are in every hotel room you ever stay in. Many people own multiple copies, and they buy new ones when those wear out. Churches are stacked with them. Bibles are everywhere. No doubt God is extremely pleased that he is a best-selling author and that various new editions and study Bibles are constantly being put out. He did a good job on it—took his time and wrote it over several thousand years. It’s an impressive book.

  The Mormons believe that at a certain point God decided to follow up his enormously successful book with a sequel. Like many sequels, the writing seems sloppier. In fact, large chunks of it seem to have been lifted whole cloth from an English translation of his more successful earlier work. But no one expects the sequel to be as good as the original. I knew that my new elder buddies would ask about it pretty soon.

  Elder Hardy started out by saying, “Have you ever read the Book of Mormon?”

  “Parts of it,” I said. “A long time ago.”

  “How did you feel as you read it?” Elder Hardy asked.

  I pushed aside the orange tray with my food on it. “I don’t want to offend you.”

  “Go ahead, be honest.”

  “I’m a writer,” I said. “And most of the time I was reading the Book of Mormon I suspected that someone was trying to copy the style of the King James Bible—”

  Elder Laurel eagerly burst in with a comment. “We read the King James Bible, you know.”

  I thought of King James Jesus’ faux pas with the donkey and smiled. “I know. What I’m saying is that I was distracted because it seemed that the style of the Book of Mormon was like someone trying to copy King James English but not quite succeeding.”

  Elder Hardy puffed up his cheeks and blew a half raspberry in annoyance. “You’re getting at how there are errors in grammar, things like that. You need to understand that Joseph Smith only had an eighth-grade education at the time he translated the Book of Mormon from the original Egyptian and Hebrew.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I know some Hebrew. That’s impressive. How did he translate it exactly?”

  “He had two artifacts—,” Elder Laurel started.

  “The Urim and Thummim,” Elder Hardy added. “They’re in the Bible, too. Then God supernaturally translated it, and Joseph Smith told people what to write down.”

  I leaned back in the booth. “So you’re saying that God dictated the translation to Joseph Smith.”

  “That’s right,” Elder Hardy said.

  “So the aforementioned grammar mistakes, those would be God’s grammar mistakes?”

  A long silence followed this question. Elder Hardy furrowed his brow and looked at the cracked surface of the table. I could tell he didn’t want to back down from anything he had said. At last he admitted, “That’s right.”

  I couldn’t imagine this was correct. Elder Laurel looked uncomfortable. “Elder Laurel,” I asked, “is that right?”

  “That’s a good question,” Elder Laurel said.

  “Let’s move on to another topic.” Elder Hardy took another bite of his chimichanga.

  “I’ve got to get home, anyway,” I said, so we piled back into the cab of the truck. We were just as tightly wedged in as before, but now a little thicker from our hearty lunch. “So what would be the main difference between what my church says about Jesus and what you say about Jesus?”

  “Where do you go to church?”

  “It’s called Village Baptist. It’s in Beaverton.” Beaverton, I explained, is just west of Portland. The elders weren’t from around here, and although they had biked and walked all over Vancouver, they knew nothing about the Portland area.

  “Baptist,” one of them repeated noncommittally.

  “It’s not like you think,” I said. “It’s a great church. I’ve had amazing experiences there. The pastoral staff is amazing, and they’ve created this bizarre community of Koreans, Chinese, East Indians, Hispanics, and Anglos, and they all meet together. The notes are in multiple languages. I’ve never been anywhere like it.”

>   “The only real difference,” Elder Hardy said, “is that your church says that we don’t worship Jesus. But we do.”

  “So you believe all the same things about Jesus as the people in my church do? The Nicene Creed type of thing? Fully God, fully man, virgin birth, lived, died, rose again, rules at God’s right hand?”

  “Whoa.” Elder Hardy held up his left hand. “The Nicene Creed—now, that’s different. That was just a bunch of people getting together and voting about what the Bible would say. And we believe in Jesus and Heavenly Father and the Holy Ghost, but not that they are all one.”

  “You don’t believe in the Trinity.”

  “We believe in the Godhead.”

  “Wow. I have a lot more questions for you now. True or false: Jesus is God.”

  “True.”

  “True or false: There are three gods.”

  “True.”

  “What about ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is one’—quoted in the Old and New Testaments? It says there’s only one God.”

  “Good question,” said Elder Laurel.

  I had learned that when Elder Laurel said “Good question,” it meant that neither of them had a convincing answer. So I started a new line of questions. “Did Jesus exist eternally, into the past as well as the future?”

  “We all existed eternally,” Elder Hardy explained. “Matter and energy can’t be destroyed. We were all intelligences, and Heavenly Father rearranged things to create us. Jesus is the first being he created.”

  I stopped the truck. Cars squealed around us. “God created Jesus?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the difference between the intelligence that became Jesus and the intelligence that became me is . . . what?”

  “He was chosen to die for us, and he became part of the Godhead.”

  The light turned red. This Jesus who was “just like mine” didn’t match a lot of things I understood from the Bible. “So it was like a promotion?” I asked.

  Elder Laurel laughed. “You could say that.”

  “That’s pretty different from my beliefs.”

  “You know, I guess what we teach about Jesus is pretty different.”

  We pulled into my driveway. “Let’s get together and talk again,” one of the elders said. He handed me the thin blue book that was God’s supposed sequel to his international best seller, and they gave me a section to read for our next meeting.

  The last thing Elder Laurel said to me was, “It seems to me that you’re sitting around waiting for God to show up. There’s no reason you can’t go looking for him. ‘Seek, and ye shall find.’”

  I slapped the Book of Mormon against my palm and watched them walk across the street to talk to my neighbor.

  Krista came up behind me and put her arms around me. “How was your meeting with the elders?”

  “Great,” I said. “They’re good kids. They have some strange ideas about Jesus, but don’t we all? I think that if they would simply open their eyes and try hard to find the real Jesus, they just might see him. I hope they do. They remind me of myself.”

  And it had been a valuable conversation for me. Elder Laurel had made a good point about waiting around for God instead of going looking for him. I decided that I would do some research and find Jesus here, in the Portland area. He was omnipresent, at least according to my understanding. I wondered if my new Mormon buddies would agree to that. But if he was everywhere, there was no reason that I couldn’t find him—the real Jesus—right here in Portland.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Atheist Bible Study

  One afternoon shortly after my meeting with the elders, our phone rang. Krista answered and talked for a while with the person on the other end. I could hear her laughter filling the house. I went downstairs to see what was so funny, thinking that Krista must be talking to one of her good friends. She handed me the phone and told me that it was “our friend” Sandy. I was pleased to hear her voice.

  “Matt,” she said, “I’ve started going to this Bible study I think you would enjoy visiting.”

  “I’m pretty busy.”

  “It’s an atheist Bible study,” she said. “At Portland State University.”

  I held the phone against my face, trying to process the information she had shared. “I’ll be there.”

  PSU is right in the heart of downtown. City streets cut through campus, and a stranger driving by might not guess it was a campus at all. The atheist club at the school had started a Bible study and invited Sandy to join them so that they could have “the Christian point of view.” Sandy had met one of them in a business class she had started taking a few months ago.

  The study met in a room on the second floor of one of the buildings on campus. I met a couple of the students beforehand, and they seemed genuinely pleased that another Christian had come to hang out. The atheist students (Mark, James, Nellie, Darren, and Shane) looked like students from any random Bible study on any random campus. There was the kid who looked like an athlete, the big hairy guy who didn’t wash enough, the little guy with the glasses, the average-looking guy, and the requisite young lady who was slightly Goth but only slightly.

  I was surprised when Shane—the average-looking guy: thin, tall, dirty blond hair—said that he hoped everyone had done their homework. Apparently they hadn’t, because they immediately took out their Bibles, cracked them open, and silently read from the book of John. Most Christian students I had been in Bible studies with would completely blow off a question like that with a quick apology. They wouldn’t stop talking and actually read their Bibles. Amazing.

  I asked Shane why he had started the study. He didn’t have to think long before he said, “I believe we should make informed intellectual choices. I realized that I was against Christianity on the basis of what I had heard about it. I was against Christ on the basis of his followers and their idiocies. I wanted to read the Christian Scriptures for myself and truly understand them. In fact, I’m working my way through all four of the Gospels right now.”

  Today’s study was on John 4. We didn’t pray before starting, which took me off guard, though it made perfect sense. We started by reading through the chapter. The unfamiliarity of the story to the people reading it was refreshing. Nellie had never seen the word sower and pronounced it like shower. Nellie colored slightly and said, “I have no idea what this is saying.” The others encouraged her, and someone suggested she try a different translation.

  I know you’re waiting for an uproarious story of hilarity ensuing at the atheist Bible study, but in fact they showed a real concern for understanding Jesus and a careful patience in studying the context of his words. They had some great insights. Mark pointed out that Jesus’ miracles seemed to revolve around health and sustenance and connected that with the continuous metaphors about food and drink.

  Darren (small guy with glasses) desperately wanted to make Jesus into a secularist, which is interesting and sad and textually impossible. He spent a long time explaining how the passages about worshiping God in spirit and truth might, in fact, be saying that if people followed reason and treated each other respectfully, a sort of secular utopia could be established.

  Shane had little patience for this. “Darren, that’s a good thought, but an impossible reading given the context of chapter 3. Remember when he told Nicodemus that he must be born again? He’s talking about spiritual truths, not mundane ones. Nicodemus even asked him, ‘How can a man get into his mother’s womb and be born again?’ and Jesus explained that he was talking about the spirit, not physical birth. He’s saying the same thing to this Samaritan woman. He’s telling her, ‘You’ve looked for satisfaction in physical relationships, but I can give you a spiritually satisfying life.’ He says eternal life, which can’t mean a secular kingdom. He means it literally.”

  Throughout the evening, Shane offered to let me or Sandy comment on various concepts or passages. We found that we mostly contributed historical background on the story, but Shane was the one who cons
istently shared spiritual truth by his careful study of what Jesus was saying. He was preaching. I looked around for the strange imaginary Jesuses I had hoped to see in the room, but I didn’t see them. Instead, Jesus was merely a dim figure, standing in shadow, a question mark on his face. For Darren, Jesus was a secular philosopher, but even that seemed to be more a projection of his worldview onto the blank slate of his imaginary Jesus. And Shane’s Jesus stood at his shoulder, whispering spiritual truths into his ear and then watching them roll about the table. I could see him, transparent as a hologram, flickering, but real.

  I realized with a start that Shane’s Jesus was not imaginary at all. The real Jesus was in the room in a powerful way. “He’s not a Christian,” I said to Sandy as we walked away from the study, not sure that was true. The trajectory of his life was shooting inevitably toward Jesus.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Can you imagine him getting to the end of John without becoming one?”

  I thought of Pete, setting out on a path to follow Jesus before he even knew who he was. Shane seemed to have his feet on the same path, carefully studying Jesus and building a knowledge of him that would prove unshakable in the years to come. He was new to the path and I suddenly realized that I envied him. Here I was, with so much more knowledge of Jesus, so many more experiences with him, yet I envied this young man, getting to know him for the first time.

  At the end of John 4 we’d read about an official who came to Jesus and asked him to heal his dying son. Jesus said, “Unless you people see miraculous signs and wonders, you will never believe.” Several of my new atheist friends had nodded at that. If they saw miracles, they would believe. But I had seen enough miracles to know that wasn’t enough. Sometimes seeing miracles makes the later lack of them that much harder. If he healed the official’s son, why did he let others go without healing? “I believe,” I said out loud. “But I wish you’d send some more miracles.”