Goodbye alpha, hello omega.

Time bent for the last time at Jesus’ death, which was the off-ramp back into Paradise. For the first time in his life, Jesus’ heart failed. I began to walk back toward the two Mary’s.

I thought I was getting the point finally. God made us all in His image and likeness. Love of family is a Godly thing. I loved Jesus again, and that’s what redeemed me back into God’s family.

A long time ago, when I asked Jesus why he was here, he said, “to save your ass.” He did it. He saved my ass. And at the same time, he saved everyone’s ass. I saw both roads going to the same thing—the Father.

And now all of those miracles where Jesus did a little bending of space-time piled up into payback time. When he died, there was nothing holding the fabric together, which had diked all of those ripples. The sky opened up. The earth shook. Everything hit us at once, such that for a moment I thought I could see thunder and hear lightning. The sky darkened and a wind roared through us. With this false night, I was able to glimpse a lone star shining above—the star of the Nativity.

A Roman repeated himself with, “Surely this was the Son of God.”

My God! Is this what it took?

I knew better. I was educated now. I didn’t need a tongue of fire. All you had to do was listen to what he had been saying all of this time to know. I’m not proud that I wasn’t always listening, but what happened to me on Golgotha was the Cliff Notes synopsis and commentary all rolled into one.

Lazarus had to just about pry me from Jesus’ feet. I staggered off listlessly, looking for myself. Back at supper the night before, when he wouldn’t tell me which way to go at the fork in my road, I mustn’t have been listening to him my whole damn life, because he was the way to go. He was the way. There were two of me and I knew now which one I was gonna dump.

I collapsed near a large boulder. The storm was still raging, like the morning breath of God Himself. I closed my eyes and once again met myself coming and going. I saw the lonely, despondent one with my left eye, and with my right eye I saw myself more clearly than ever before. My mind’s gaze slowly panned to the right with both halves of my brain. I was going to be a good angel in the antediluvian battle that was waging in heaven somewhere, sometime, and in my head now.

And just as suddenly as the cosmic upheaval rang aloud for Jesus’ death, the earth grew still again. And slowly there fell upon Golgotha something never seen before—snow. First as flurries, then a heavy flotilla of white, fluffy crystals. Jesus had had fun with the weather before, but this pureness seemed so appropriate.

The sky brightened, the winds calmed, and the ground sat inert under my feet. The snow hadn’t lasted for very long. By the time I drifted away from consciousness, the sun was already melting away the white on the ground. The fabric of space-time unraveled for a lot of others, too. To the horror of a lot of cured lepers they rapidly grew their lesions back. Newly seeing men went blind again; newly hearing men went deaf again; new speakers went mute. Now agile people fell out. An ear fell off of a soldier’s head. Many thousands who had eaten from manipulation of Fibonacci numbers as applied to chaotic systems and gravitational lensing suddenly found themselves achingly hungry. Foul-smelling Gaius fell back dead and became fetid again. And on and on.

Turned out that Lazarus, too, was dead within an hour of Jesus’ dying. Everyone thought he was just taking a snooze, of course, but they soon guessed the truth when they discovered me and the temporary results of Jesus’ other miracles. The physical world caught up with Jesus Christ, and a lot of people were very surprised.

And very pissed off. And then I died...again, unraised like everyone else Jesus had reanimated one time or another.

Back at Mary’s and Martha’s, everyone was in a state of shock—not only because of the whole crucifixion thing, but over Lazarus and me as well. For them, time itself seemed to be coming to an end. Mother Mary and Maddie, as unlikely a pair as could be conceived in fact or fiction, returned to Bethany to bring Lazarus’ body back.

The unexpected deaths were like a promise taken back, and it was tempting to think that Jesus wasn’t anything he had claimed to be, except just another dead Jew. It was tempting to be angry with him. Christianity was off to an awful start.

I don’t know what brought me back, but what woke me up was the sound of the massive crumbling and crackling of stone. I was groggy, and I began the usual preening of getting the sleep out of my eyes, scratching myself, and stretching on what seemed like a flat slab. My pupils had been fixed and dilated, and when the shaft of morning light streamed in I reflexly braced my eyes. I tried opening them, but the brightness was too intense. I sneezed.

“God bless you,” someone said.

“Who’s that?” I cried out, squinting to see.

“It’s me, Lazarus. Is that you?”

“Lazarus, I thought you were dead again.”

“Well, here I am alive again.”

“Wow, then I guess me, too.”

“I saw a light. Just like people say.”

“Really? That’s an improvement.”

“Yeah. And the closer I got, the more beautiful it got. And then something pulled me back. Man, I can’t wait to go back into the light. I know that’s where I belong. You saw it, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t see shit!” I grumbled.

“Uh-oh,” Lazarus said. “That’s your wake up call.”

“Oh, shut up, Lazarus.”

“Say, where are we anyway?” Lazarus asked. I could now open my eyes if I shaded my forehead with my hand. I looked around.

“I think…I think this is a sepulcher.” I sat up and looked around fully, and I saw the remains of several other corpses. “Ahhh!” I yelped.

“What!” Lazarus yelled.

“We were buried! I know we were dead, but buried! I am so grossed out.”

“We’re not dead now, my boy,” Lazarus said, yawning.

“Which is why I’m getting out of here.”

“You go ’head,” Lazarus said, resuming a reclining position, “I’m going to sleep in. I’ve had a really bad weekend.”

I sauntered out, a little dizzy. There was a large, round, carved rock, about the size of the opening into this concavity, and it had been neatly placed just to the side. Looking at the inscription on the rock, I found the family names Joseph of Arithmea’s relatives all over it.

I walked on, gaining strength in both my stride and my ability to constrict my pupils as I went. It was Sunday morning. By the time I was back in Bethany at Mary and Martha’s, it was common knowledge that Jesus had already been in the crypt a day and a half. I had to hear all about it from the beggar woman that hung around the place: how Mother had stayed over Friday, and dreamt that both Jesus was going to be all right.

Jews and dreams. She went home to Nazareth, saying she had nothing more to worry about.

She must have been right—about me, anyway—because I walked in like I had just pulled an all-nighter—a little hung over but glad to be alive.

“Jesus has been in that crypt over a day and a half,” she had told me. “At Joseph of Arithmea’s tomb.” When I recalled this, it creeped me out, because the only other talking person there was Lazarus. Could Jesus have been one of the other stiffs there in the darkness?

There are those who say Jesus never really existed. There are those who say he wasn’t everything he said he was. I guess naysayers can give their reasons why he wasn’t the Son o’God, and Bible-thumpers can give their reasons why he was. But when you go through all of the logic in the debate over Jesus Christ, you ultimately have to wonder, “What was in it for him?”

There was nothing in it for him. Just us.

There are those who say Jesus never rose from the dead. That his bones are still in the ground somewhere in Palestine. But if Christianity was off to a bad start when the lepers sloughed their skin again, then it would have been dead in the proverbial Jordan water had he just died and rotted. The Apostles scattered, like the followers of the false Messiahs before Jesus who had garnered enough of a following to warrant capital attention. Had they never met again, that would have been that.

But something happened for them. Christianity did take off. People like Saul got the thunderbolt out of the blue to become people like Paul. And the evangelists authored the New Testament. Not these guys the way they were—not these silly cowards and undependable doubters. There had to have been something big enough to put cowards and undependable doubters into turbo. A big surprise.

Now that I think about it, he never really actually told anyone he was going to rise from the dead. Not in those words. Sure, he had made some cryptic comments, but no one figured on something like this. And when he did rise, all the cures were reinstated. His disciples fell back toward him—like enough matter falling into a heavenly body to cause critical mass.

The star ignited and wise men paid attention.