The Christian world had been blanketed with the cryptic phrase ever since the initial news that God would be speaking to all of us had appeared simultaneously on screens all over the world, shortly after the “second” martyrdom of Christ. For what was left of my family and I, this was a relief – the possibility that all the controversy and uncertainty would be put to rest. How to live and die, straight from the source’s mouth. Of course, to get to this point, his son had to be brutalized, again, by us. We had been no better to him now (if in fact, it was him) than we were the first time around. Previous first contacts with God never had more than one witness – just the claims of solitary individuals, often with checkered personal histories, delivering inscrutable revelations. Too much like the UFO encounters you see on late-night cable TV that always seemed to happen to the lonely eccentrics. 

The person most of us in the West would come to believe was the reincarnation of the Son of God had gotten off to a rough start. Disheveled, greasy-long-haired, and speaking in obscurities, he did not stand out at first among the vagrants in the Herald Square subway station. He was terrified by the incessant noise of the many people and the screeching machines they boarded and left in packs every few minutes. It was all too much for a man who was really still a First Century Galilean. He was roughly hauled away by MTA cops when he crossed the line of social conduct by removing his clothes. It’s possible that he was suffering from the heat on the platforms, or that, at that point, he had not slept or eaten for some time and could not make sense of the frightening world he’d been cast into. 

He appeared with the conventional likeness of Jesus found in white countries, but with darker skin and much curlier hair. But so did many of the tunneled homeless. He repeatedly screamed at the arresting officers, “Take me to Caesar! The reckoning is nigh!”  The cop who tased and pinned him down, the one we all came to know as “Stop Resisting Cop” from the memes, would later kill himself when he came to believe that the man he brutalized was the Jesus his mother had taught him to venerate. His mother found him hanging in the garage of the house, seeing that he was no longer able to leave safely due to the publicity around his role in the first contact (Modern Era).

I chose to believe that this was the Messiah promised in the Bible, but many secular thinkers invested a good deal of time and words in trying to determine why he had become the focus of the Christian world in the days and weeks after the video of him being manhandled below 31st Street became the most watched video in history, until his last one. After all, many disheveled, tossed-aside people in the subways declare their holy bloodlines every day without so much as eye contact from a single passerby. There were assertions by intellectual humanists that he came by at the right time, during a crisis of spiritual emptiness, alienation and smartphone addiction, with the right message. The water to fill the empty chambers of our souls. These Harvard-Berkeley types never offered any evidence or explanation behind these conclusions, and I always found it ironic that my own faith was derided for exactly that reason by the very same men. 

The local police precinct he was brought to was overrun by a spontaneously gathered mob that night, and Jesus was once again an outlaw on the run from the authorities. I prefer to think of the brave people who freed Jesus as disciples, and maybe with enough time passing, they will be considered in that light. But the label “mob” stuck at first, which was not entirely an unreasonable way to describe a group that had overrun a police station. 

The group holed up in the Javits Convention Center and before too long it was surrounded by heavy military vehicles topped with mounted guns and cannons of every sort. A major assault and a lot of dead bodies seemed a certainty as we watched live. What happened next was said to be the result of machinery that was too heavy, set atop unrepaired roads not built for vehicles that size. The roads buckled and swallowed the military might into the bowels of the city. This was the first miracle that would swell the ranks of those in the Javits center, creating a modern-day Masada right there in midtown. I believe that God speaks to us with miracles, but I also believe that when desperate people gather, the necessary elements for a miracle tend to be manufactured to provide what a given situation requires to be interpreted as meaningful. Roads had buckled in Manhattan that summer in other parts of the city. The tanks sucked into the Earth? I just don’t know. Maybe what a true miracle requires is that hint of an alternative explanation to test the faith of believers. 

The authorities pulled back their perimeter and the siege was over. Powerful forces across the political spectrum demanded an investigation, that they had to be part of, to see with their own eyes. New security forces were brought in, now facing outwards to protect the Son. By then, Jesus was coming to terms with our miracles – the internet and the TV. He saw what was transpiring in front of the convention center as the first heavyweight D.C. entourage attempted to enter. Jesus, small, slight and ragged, stood blocking the door, telling the petitioners that this was now a house of God and politicians would not be welcome. Stupefied and unaccustomed to not getting their way, the politicians milled around, murmured profanity and blame at their hapless support staff, and walked back out to their motorcades. The whole thing was captured and broadcast around the world and it would be the first and last thing Jesus did that was universally popular during his visit to Earth. 

He spent the next several days watching his story unfold on cable news and the internet, staying away from windows. He refused to bathe, he said, until the unwashed people abandoned in the subways were bathed, fed and clothed properly. Collocated disciples immediately passed this on to city authorities as a priority directive. Reports from that time are that he mostly sat glued to the TV, moving beyond the news channels to the entertainment channels. He told followers impatient for the next steps of his plan that he had to learn to speak like the people before he could speak with the people.

 Finally, the day came when he addressed the Christian world on a live stream. 

“I want to proceed carefully. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the world you’ve made, it’s that anything said can be interpreted a thousand fucking ways five minutes after you say it.”

A gasp moved left to right across the large press room and Jesus followed the sound with his head, having not heard something like it before. 

“What I have to go on so far is what I’ve seen here in…this city, and, on TV. So, I say to myself, how the fuck can a civilization capable of so much leave people to rot on the street and on the subway, dying like animals no one cares about. I mean, some of you read this Bible, and I did too these last few days. An awful lot of bullshit in there, especially covering the time after I left Earth. But I was very clear when I said, ‘What you do to the least of my brothers you do to me.’”

A young reporter fixed on Jesus a gaze of shock; I remember well because it was me. He looked at me and said, “Sorry, what exactly is going on with you?”

“You said fuck!”

“You said fuck. I’m trying to be relatable.” 

“We were taught that Jesus was a holy, uplifted being, unworthy of profanity.”

“What does that have to do with fuck? Seems like it’s all you say on some channels. Am I missing something?” 

Another gasp ran through the room. 

“Ok. I know something about profanity and the vocabulary. Profane words are those used when swearing an oath or making a commitment to my Father. You don’t use them outside of those situations. Hence profanity. But all this fuck, shit, asshole came after I left Earth, and it has nothing to with oaths to God. 

How can you speak like this all the time if you think it’s profanity anyway?”

“We’re all sinners. But we believed you didn’t use such words.”  

It was the last thing I said to him, and even now I’m haunted by the expression in that final look he gave me. Was it disgust, or pity, or contempt? It wasn’t anything good whatever it was. I may have been the first to help him understand what he was now dealing with on Earth, and how far afield things had gone since he’d last attempted to instruct his children. 

Over the next few weeks, more communications flowed. Laying the groundwork for an eventual Newer Testament which was not appropriate for anyone under 18. We came to realize that when Jesus reappeared, his knowledge of science and the world in general picked up from where it was when he died. It was as if he had been asleep since he had ascended to heaven shortly after the Crucifixion. He was insightful, brilliant, and capable of absorbing information and distilling it to its essence at the speed of the technology he didn’t understand. But he was also a man, with the sensibilities and education of a poor carpenter living in a harsh desert climate around 30 AD.

With increasing exasperation, he explained that the Earth could not possibly be rotating, or we would all be flying of it violently into space. He ridiculed the idea that the Earth circled the sun: “Jerkoff, I’m standing here, next to you, neither of us moving, watching the sun move across the sky. Every. Single. Day. How much simpler can I make this?” 

He refused to believe the photos of Earth from space appearing to show an orb. “Look straight out, do you see a rounded edge? Looks flat to me. Trust the eyes that my Father gave you to observe his bounty. “Imbeciles,” he could be heard mumbling under his breath as he walked away.

Clock time didn’t work for Jesus, man of the first millennium that he was. Being inside the Javits center all day, he lost the natural orientation that the desert sun once gave him for direction and time. In order to start Jesus on time it quickly became the practice to have the press hoard and comms teams taken to him, wherever he was in the building, geotagged for tracking. 

The other problem Jesus developed with the schedules was the result of his most severe case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Just as the crowded, noisy, urban environment shocked his senses, processed foods shocked his innards. He ate McDonalds and Chipotle morning, noon and night, and his handlers tried their best not to schedule events the hour after every meal, which he would usually spend suffering in the Jesus-only Men’s Room. He quickly shot up to 220 lbs. and sweated profusely during meals. 

Jesus became a favorite of Progressives after his pronunciation on the homeless. Billions were quickly invested in reintegrating street people in an initiative the President of the United States was proud to call “The most incredible fucking initiative to eradicate the brutal inequalities in our land. No shit”. Opponents of such measures began to question whether this Jesus was the Jesus. Others began questioning whether the Son had been given authorization to speak for the Father. Their answer was implied in the unprecedented question, premised on the hope that, as is often the case on Earth, the Father was more conservative than the Son.

Jesus decided over time that his best way to convey the new gospel was to stop producing the messages that were inevitably interpreted in ways he didn’t anticipate. Instead, he conducted weekly Q&As, with the questions selected by a random algorithm to ensure there was no favouritism. As the sessions continued, a unanimous belief emerged that the selection process was anything but random, controlled instead by a sinister cabal of power brokers taking advantage of Jesus to serve their own ends. 

The beginning of the end in retrospect was probably the Easter broadcast. In response to direct questions, Jesus made clear that he was shocked, confused and totally opposed to legal abortion, after several minutes of disembodied voices outside of the camera’s view explaining it to him. He seemed to never fully grasp that the procedure occurred internally, but instead seemed to imagine a baby birthed and then immediately murdered. In the same session, he also opposed homosexuality when questioned. 

He came from a world of high mortality rates, where people in a sparsely populated land battled back the desert to create the arable fields necessary for survival. More people meant more cultivated land, leading to more people to cultivate more land. The idea that any person could be spared, that there were acts of sexual congress that did not have the potential for making more humans was too much for him to contemplate. #Allfetusesbroughttotermandnowastedsperm was the unwieldy hashtag that galvanized the new socially conservative group that sprung up almost overnight after the broadcast, and they would eventually form a larger coalition with the groups opposed to the taxes levied to get people off the street. The forerunner of the God’s Plan forces that would burn San Francisco, New York, Portland, Austin, and Chicago to the ground after building 50-foot metal walls around each city to make sure no one escaped. 

For the Easter broadcast, the religious leaders of the Christian world sat with Jesus in person as he spoke. Many nodded and smiled approvingly at his message. For just a moment. 

Then the Pope proudly asked Jesus how he felt about the celebration and festivities to honor his second appearance, from the vantage point of his third, pointing out that he had personally overseen the adornment of the room they were standing in. 

“What are you talking about? This is the second.”

A trickling stream of murmurs passed through the crowd. One of the things Jesus hated most about the new world and its many people was the unsettling sound of many people talking at once in closed spaces. The cacophony disoriented him, used as he was to outdoor conversations with much smaller groups in villages and pastures. 

“Savior, sure as shit you rose after your crucifixion, your disciples saw you emerge.”

“Ah. You fucking guys,” he chuckled. “I didn’t die from the crucifixion. They thought I did, they buried me. But I was unconscious from flaying and then being nailed up in the sun. I got up and walked out. I died not too far away in the desert a few hours later. People get…got…buried all the time who looked dead but weren’t. Unconscious people, sleeping people. It all looks the same after all. Does this not happen now?”

Those in the room gasped in unison, creating a noise that disturbed Jesus even more than the traveling murmur that danced across enclosed crowds in his strange new world.

“So, if you thought this was something that happened a long time ago, why are you celebrating it today?”

“We celebrate it every year, the day changes based on the ecclesiastical moon as you know, but it’s generally in the Spring.”

“As I know? Every year? Based on moons, during Spring? Tell me this is a fucking sick joke by you weirdos! You honor me repeatedly at the same time pagans celebrate fertility based on positioning of the moon?”

No one answered. No one spoke. 

“You want to say the day I was born was special? Fine. It’s fucking weird, but whatever. But when it repeats around astronomical cycles, annually, that is as pagan as you can get! It stops today!”

I will not forget the way he stared down the leaders standing around him. In just seconds they got on board with this Easterless version of Christianity. At the time, I remembered hearing somewhere that people at the tops of their fields got there by being flexible and adaptable, and these guys were handling the news that Jesus had never risen until recently as if they were being told about a flight delay. 

“Fucking A,” said the Pope, smiling at Jesus, as the other leaders thumbed up and nodded. 

After Easter Sunday, things went downhill rapidly for Jesus. He had alienated everyone with his statements and with the abolition of Easter, building a coalition across class and cultural lines that agreed only where he was concerned. He was bewildered at every turn by the reactions, often pointing out that he was just repeating verses from our Bible, compiled by us well after his death. When the U.S. government authorized an air strike against a small Latin American revolutionary group that had kidnapped and briefly held U.S. students, Jesus admonished the powers that be of God’s command to live a life of unnuanced pacifism: “Turn the other cheek, and don’t act like you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.” 

All over the country, trucks that summer sported a new bumper sticker: 

I don’t turn the other cheek.
I turn others’ cheeks.
Fuck around and find out.

The bumper stickers and similar patterns and designs around social media profiles came to be identified with the more vocal “Waiting for God”, and the later, “I Stand with God” movements, which would eventually merge into the aggressively anti-Jesus Christian movement, God’s Plan. Many members now openly claimed that Jesus was not Jesus at all, but an imposter created by high-level government agencies working in secret collaboration with overseas powers. 

His anti-military stance terrified business, military, and government leaders who benefitted from the continuous creation of weapons and their periodic use. When Jesus commanded soldiers who followed him to lay down their weapons and leave their posts, that was the final straw. An arrest warrant was issued, and Jesus and his followers were once again outlaws. There were only three disciples this time around when Jesus was tagged by one of his followers on Instagram while waiting in line at a Burger King off the New Jersey Turnpike, trying to be discreet under an oversized hooded sweatshirt. The last picture of this last last supper is of three bedraggled and eye-bagged young adults sitting at a table, and Jesus walking away from the table towards the back of the Burger King.

Eight minutes later, two separate mobs arrived, ahead of the FBI, determined to capture and try Jesus in their own recently created court systems which were associated with their movements. They pulled Jesus out of the men’s room and into the middle of the dining area. The last moments captured on video and posted to social media were of Jesus being pulled in five different directions as his right arm, left leg and, finally, head were torn from his torso by the mob. 

Anarchy reigned after that. A war of all against all. But one day, about two months after the murder of Christ, a message appeared across all the world’s interfaces: 

Tomorrow God Spoke.

Our spines froze with fear. We’d all done a lot by that point, and now this message across every screen reminded us that we may not have escaped notice. The initial opinion maker reaction was to mock the poor grammar of the sentence, referencing the future but using the past tense. It must be some illiterate hacker from some non-English speaking country vying for attention. As time passed, including many tomorrows, the planet’s cyber scientists worked around the clock to track the source of the message. Yet none could locate the source. This, they told us, was more sophisticated than anything they’d ever seen, more than a hacker in their parent’s basement could pull off, or even a nation-state using cutting-edge technology. The idea that this might be from a superior intelligence reentered the conversation. 

Linguists, physicists, and experts from many other fields brainstormed and dissected the phrase and the circumstances of its delivery under the auspices of an international committee representing all the countries of the world. They tore apart the message, broke into working groups to focus on each word, then each cluster, and finally each letter. They examined the image for hidden communications and embedded messages. They crowd-sourced. 

One day a message from a 14-year-old in Bolivia to the team proposed the most compelling explanation to date. She suggested that the message reflected a different, possibly superior understanding of time as circular, rather than the linear past-present-future that we had constructed to manage our existence. This message could be the attempt of a superior intelligence to send something that would make sense to us, trying to tell us something was coming, but from a circular understanding had also already passed. “Tomorrow” she proposed, could just mean “at a time you will experience as the future. I think it’s trying its best to communicate in a manner that it thinks will make sense to us.”  

Too smart for her own good, she was seen by some as part of the potential conspiracy to bring the world under the control of a secret group determined to rule the planet through technology. For her own safety, she disappeared, to her credit refusing the protection of many of the Western governments that would have no doubt seen her as a valuable celebrity pawn and scientific prodigy to further their own agendas. She was last rumoured to be hiding somewhere in the Andes, before the web went dark. I hope she is still alive and working to save what’s left of us. Only young people give me hope these days. If anything is going to be saved, it will be young people who save it. Full of energy and hopes, free from the ancient fears and hatreds that have been cast in the hearts of their elders. 

I think it was just over a day after her hypothesis was sent that the rest of us received the final communication.

God is fucking had it with you people. 

What you believed about what was meant by “you people” determined which side you were on in the wars that followed in what was once the West. Most often, this was usually based on who you hated and feared before the claimed Jesus ever arrived for the second attempt. The Christian world burned for years. The fires stopped when the fuel was exhausted. Disease and new types of fungus thrived, wiping out what hadn’t already been destroyed in the conflagration, including most vegetation. Our world became one big burned-over district, courtesy of the Final Great Awakening.

Most people I come across now believe the wars are over. Some think we learned our lesson; some say we are all just exhausted. I think we just ran out of bullets. The human heart is inexhaustible when fed with hate and fear. The industrial weapons plants of the advanced Western countries have been abandoned, and the old masters of war hide in caves not too different from mine. Nuclear weapons were never used, so they are still out there somewhere, but it’s unlikely they are operational, or that there is anyone left who remembers how to operate them.

What remains of human civilization exists one hemisphere over, centered around a new Silk Road, the axis around which what is left still spins. At one end, the Middle East is an Islamic Empire (having had no dog in the fight, they stayed on the sidelines). The other end of the axis contains the remains of East Asia, centered around China, the other big power unaffected by the spiritual convulsions of the West. They are what my deceased daughter would have called “frenemies” in the old world. They are each other’s only trading partners, but most think that between the devoutly religious and the militantly not, a new war is inevitable. 

There is a fungus I found growing along the walls and when I touch it, sores and swelling cover my body and face. Even though it makes me ill, unable to move most of the day because of the pain, I keep touching it to ward off any potential cannibals that I hope never find me, to make them fear that if they eat me, they will develop my condition.  

I’m down to my last pen and the ink is almost out, so I have to finish now. I don’t know if this will ever be read. I’ll wrap it as tightly as I can and bury it in one of the dry parts of the cave. I haven’t seen another person in about two months, I guess. Before that, groups of more than two or three were rare. Anyone alive is likely hiding as I am. I guess I’m about 62 now, but there’s no way to be sure. I count sunsets and decide to believe something about how long I’ve been.

I can’t be sure about the signals that reached our phones and computer monitors – whether it was God or not. Just plain white letters on a screen of black infinity. I do believe that it was Jesus who returned to Earth though. As a young reporter in his presence, I felt something I’d never felt before or since. A presence that was powerful, benign, and eternal, miraculously contained inside a normal man. 

My atheist college friends used to say that the Bible had it wrong, God didn’t create man in his own image, we created God in ours. We did do some creating for sure, and during his brief time on Earth, Jesus met none of our expectations. But I think he turned out to be the person who we hoped him to be but didn’t want when we actually saw him in front of us. It didn’t match what we saw when we looked in the mirror each day. He was earnest and guileless. Simple and pure of heart, the way a child is before the world gets to them. He wanted so badly to connect with us that the first thing he did was learn our rough vernaculars and how to imitate them in the hope that he might, this last time, penetrate our concrete skulls and stone hearts. He wanted to speak with us, not to us. He wanted to understand how we’d managed to come to our conclusions and relate to us in the ways he knew his Father could not, knowing that he was the only hope to bridge us with what was beyond ourselves. So we ripped his fucking head off and put it on the internet. 

So now we

About the Author:

Brannon O’Brennan is a writer from Washington, D.C. His pieces have been published or will be published in the literary journals Within and Without Magazine, Periwinkle Pelican Lit, The Rye Whiskey Review, White Cresset Arts Journal, Yale University’s The Perch, and Streetlight Magazine. His work has been shortlisted for the Empyrean Literary Award (withdrawn). He is currently seeking literary representation for his upmarket crime fiction novel THROUGHLINE, a novel about a dysfunctional family of outlaws and the effects of trauma across generations. 
Find him on Twitter/X @brianbooklover.