The San Mateo Gospel

     I don't want to be irreverent.  At my age you start to think about what you will say to God when an account must be rendered for every careless word.  For a writer, every careless word rings with disturbing resonance.  Let's not be careless.  But some stories have to be told.  And some have to be retold, because people haven't been listening to the old version, or maybe they have heard it too many times and they're missing the point of the story.

     If I create a character who lives in these pages, will the man of history be offended, whose life and words I can only paraphrase?  An American vernacular rendering can't be worse than the version that is proffered in every marketplace.  Try to wash your hands of it, and on the edge of the sink is a purple plum of a tract that offers you a choice--an indigestible salvation or Hellfire.  I hope I will be forgiven for offering an alternative to something that can only make you sick.  My fast-food version of the story of Jesus can't be what the fresh original was, but I've lived long enough to know an imitation when I see one.  I call my version of this venerable story, The San Mateo Gospel.  I've written what I have written.

      The genealogy of the man who is called God with us goes back fourteen generations in the old country.  All these people were good Catholics, a fact verifiable by the books of the priests.  There's not a dissenter on the record. 

     Now the birth of Jesus happened this way:  When his mother Maria Gonzales was engaged to marry Joe Lopez, before her mother ever let the two of them out of her sight, Maria went to the doctor and found out she was pregnant.  This was a mystery of the Holy Spirit, but we didn't know that then!  Joseph was a nice boy and didn't want to disgrace her, so he decided to quietly cancel the wedding.  But while he was trying to find a way to tell Maria, he had a dream in which an angel appeared to him and said, "Don't be afraid to marry this girl; her child is a miracle of the Holy Spirit and blessed by the church.  She will have a son, and you will call him Jesus.  He will save his people from their sins."  We had heard this for generations: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and he shall be called Emmanuel which means 'God with us.'" 


Joe woke up and thought it over.  He decided to go ahead.  After all, he loved her.  She had the baby, and, of course, they called the child Emmanuel Lopez Gonzales.

      Jesus was born in Bethel, a small town in Texas, back in the 1950's.  Astrologers from California came and asked, "Who is this prophet who has been born?"  But governor Harrah heard about it and he thought an Hispanic child having visitors making charts could only mean trouble.  "Just what we need," he said, "Some weirdos coming 'round to get the farm workers stirred up."  The straw bosses were cynical.  These Mexicans, to them, were a bunch of superstitious Catholics who had too many children and lived out of the backs of their pickups. 

      The governor had a conference with the astrologers and found out a little more about them.  They had been troubled for years before they would admit to one another the content of their recurring dreams.  When they did start talking about it, the images and the stars seemed to indicate a child born in Texas was some great personage.  They packed up their apparatus in their VW bus and hit the road.

      Harrah heard all this and made a few phone calls of his own.  He rang up the prophecy experts at Dallas Theological Seminary to find out where the second coming of Christ was supposed to take place.  "The Valley of Jehoshaphat," they said.  "For to you will come the true governor of my people."  Fine.  The true governor of Texas, however, figured he would kabosh this nonsense before it got out of hand.  He told the astrologers to go find the child and then come back and tell him where he, too, could pay his respects.  They heard him out but went their own way.  Their star guided them to the place where the child was (I don't know how, either) .

      Suitably astonished, they went into the house Joe and Maria had rented 'on the cheap' in El Paso and offered gifts and honors in their old tradition.  Their dreams warned them not to go back to the governor.  They headed for Las Vegas. 

      Joseph was also warned in a dream to clear out of Texas.  That red-neck governor had a gang of vigilantes out to destroy the child.  Joe was no fool.  He took Jesus and his mother on a night train and went to California--pronto.  There he enrolled in a community college and studied hard.  It was horrible back in Texas.  The governor's gangsters committed atrocities that the Mexicans still remember.  You may have heard about the great Texas chain-saw massacre.

      The governor eventually died.  Joseph, still in California, dreamed again.  An angel told him they could safely visit their families in El Paso.  They packed up their station wagon and drove for two days in the heat.  But the present governor of Texas was the son of that old bigot, Harrah.  After a few weeks they hit the road again and knocked around for a while.  After some serious travel they settled in Nazareth, Pennsylvania.  Maria remembered the Bible passage: "He shall be called a Nazarene."

      When the time was ripe, and Jesus had grown and was a young man, John the Southern Baptist started preaching out in the plains states, "Repent!  For God's revolution is at hand."  Again, this was in the Bible, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness.  Smooth out the main road for the Boss."  Now John wore only wool and leather like a Hutterite.  He ate whatever he could shoot in the sagebrush country: prairie chickens, pheasants, even jack rabbits or rattlesnakes if he had to.  But urban folks went out to his camp meetings to hear him preach.  Confessing their sins, they were baptized by immersion in the Missouri or the Platte.  But when clergymen came out from the theological seminaries, John called them a bunch of snakes!  "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" he raged.  "Repent!  And stop saying to yourselves, 'We are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.' I tell you, God is able to raise up WASPs from the stones in this Okie riverbank.  Even now, an ax is hacking into George Washington's cherry tree.  Bear fruit or burn!"

      Lots of preachers get wild, but John seemed to be able to control his fast ball.  And he was a team player.  "I immerse you in water," he said, "But he who is coming is the real Rainmaker.  He will immerse you in the Holy Spirit and christen you with lightning.  I'm not worthy to lace up his boots.  He carries a pitchfork to thrash out the grain, and the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

      With this intro you can bet people were watching closely when John pointed out Jesus Lopez coming to be baptized.  John would have prevented him.  He said, "I need to be baptized by you."

      But Jesus answered, "It's only right for us to observe this ritual of willing obedience."  Then John consented.  When Jesus was baptized he came up from the water, and the sky over the wide plains opened to eternity.  As softly as a meadow lark gliding down from a telephone wire, the Spirit of God descended and alighted on Jesus.  A voice out of the blue said, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am mightily impressed."

      Jesus was led off into New Mexico to be tempted.  After more than a month in the desert without anything to eat, he was so starved he started to hallucinate.  The devil came to him and said, "So you're the Son of God!  Then why are you hungry?  Make bread from these stones.  You know what I mean."

      But Jesus answered, "You have gambling casinos and chorus lines within a two-hour drive, and you tempt me with bread?  The guys pumping the slot machines in 'Vegas' have stomachs full of beef and brew.  So what kind of jackpot are they trying to pull down?  What they're starved for is the word." 

      The devil took him to Salt Lake City and set him on the pinnacle of the Mormon Temple.  "Okay, hotshot.  Fling yourself down.  The Biiiible says, 'The angels won't even let you stub your toe.'"

      Jesus told the old fraud, "It also says... .   Well, something in the spirit of 'you shall not try flamboyant stunts to prove your faith.'  Maybe that's Saint Ignatius, but you get the idea." 

      The devil still had his best material, foolproof with these liberator types.  From the penthouse of a New York high-rise, he showed him the world of political power and big business and said, "You can have your ideal world, but don't think you're going to make it happen without doing a little business for me.  Some of my biggest producers started just like you."

      Jesus answered, "In spite of my fairly normal employment here, I have an insurmountable conflict of interest.  I'm already in business with your principal competitor."

       With a shrug, the devil left him. 

      Angels came and led him to a cool place by a spring.  The sun went down as he sat and watched long strands of grass play in a stream of water that flowed out deep and clear from among the rocks.

      When Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been arrested like an prairie squatter, he went back to Pennsylvania.  His time had not yet come.  Even so, he was a bit much for the folks around Nazareth.  What do you say to a fellow who quotes Ignatius, Clement, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, and Jerome, yet seems never to have heard of Bruce Springsteen.  To make it easier for his parents, he left town and traveled up through the Great Lakes Region.  He ended up in Chicago.  This was said to fulfill prophecy: "The land of Zebulon of Naphtali, toward the sea, across the Jordon, Galilee of the immigrants.  The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light."

      From then on Jesus took up the Baptist's cry, "Repent!  God's revolution is a hand."

      As he walked along the waterfront one evening, he saw two brothers loading their trucks.  They were teamsters.  He said to them, "Work with me and you'll move men, not cabbage and potatoes.  My union doesn't work for the mob."  They knew Jesus Lopez and already trusted him.  They must have, to walk away from their trucks.  Two other brothers, Jim and John Zebedee also parked their rigs on a lot owned by their retired father and went along with this migrant with the street-wise eyes.

      Jesus and his new cohorts went all over the state.  His proclamation of the revolution of God really had an impact.  He spoke in civic centers and in churches.  The thing is, he didn't just preach and move on to the next engagement; he healed peoples' diseases miraculously, or so it seemed.  The reporters were there.  He became a big media commodity.  More sick people were brought to him--cripples, people with pains of all sorts, psychotics, epileptics, and paralytics--and he healed them.  He drew enormous crowds everywhere he went, all without promoters or advertising agents.

      Having drawn a big crowd in a park in Cincinnati one day, he stood in an amphitheater, and taught:

      "Blessed are the alienated and depressed.  The revolution of God is theirs.

      "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

      "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.  And the aggressive and self-assured?  Trying to bull their way to the front of the herd, they trample one another.

      "Blessed are you who hunger and thirst to be good, for you shall be satisfied.  An appetite only for self-expression is enough to make you vomit.

      "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

      "Blessed are you who do what you do for the pure love of it.

      "Blessed are you who work to end conflict and controversy, for you shall be called the children of God.  Careerist hagglers can go to hell!

      "Blessed are you who are persecuted because you are good.  You are the revolution.

      "Blessed are you when people revile you, persecute you, and slander your name on my account.  Celebrate.  Your reward is of astronomical proportions.

      "You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how is it to be restored?  Good work done to satisfy a self-conscious sense of virtue touches no one.  It's only friction.

      "You are the light of the world.  A city of good can be built without a lot of witless proselytizing and gives hope without a harangue.  Let the ideologues battle.  You work patiently for results, for your light is the good you do.  From it comes the inspiration to revolutionize culture.

      "Now, somebody is going to say I come to abolish the Bible and our snake-infested church.  I have come, not to abolish but to revitalize them.  I tell you, 'til the sky is rolled up and we come out to take our bows, not a comma, not a dot will be nullified in the Bible or in the church's tradition.  Whoever then teaches bad faith and relaxes word or tradition resists God's new order.  Whoever teaches them shall be a hero of the revolution.  We need all the help we can get!

      "I tell you the truth, unless your goodness exceeds that of our liberal and conservative moralists, you will never see God's universal laws.  You have heard it said by the pro-lifers and by the antiwar activists that you must not kill, and whoever kills is liable to judgment.  I say anyone who is angry with another is liable; whoever insults another should be brought into court; and whoever says, 'You idiot!' could be hanged.  So if you are bowed at the altar, and remember you have offended somebody, forget about the sacrament, and go make amends to your neighbor.  Then approach God in your meditations, your prayers, and your sacraments.

      "Make friends with your accuser while on your way to court lest you incite him to greater severity and he prosecute you to the nth degree of the law.  You could end up in the 'slammer' with the televangelists and Lyndon LaRouche.

      "You hear a lot of preaching against adultery and other sex sins.  I say, if you have a promiscuous imagination, you are already guilty.  Throw out your television set if it offends you.  It won't be as dark without it as it is in Hell.  If your right hand rule produces marvels of electronics while you, the engineer, are led about by the fly of your pants... what a ridiculous case you are.  I wouldn't make divorce easier, but harder.  Serial marriages are a travesty of the institution.

      "Again you have heard, you shall be as good as your word.  A lie is a lie.  But I say, don't make hidebound promises and commitments.  Don't swear by heaven and earth or by the government.  Don't swear by your head; you might lose it.  Anything more than yes or no is an evil sham.

      "You have heard, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Sue the bastards!  But I say, do not resist one who is evil.  Turn the other cheek.  If anyone sues you, settle out of court as generously as you can.  If you are drafted into service by civil authorities, serve above and beyond the call of duty.  Give to the poor, and don't refuse borrowers who impose on you.  It's human nature to love your friends and hate your enemies, but I say, love your enemies, and pray for those who harass you.  In this way you become children of God, who is above all partisanship.  He makes the sun to rise on the good and on the evil alike and sends the rain on the just and the unjust.  If you love those who love you, what is your reward?  Even politicians do that.  And if you greet only your brethren, what more are you doing than is natural?  Any 'yuppy' pagan does as much.    You must be perfect, as God is perfect.

      Beware of public display of piety.  There's no great significance in making a production of your charity.  Politicians love to do this in public meetings and on television.  They have their reward.  Rather, give inconspicuously, and your charity will be noted by God.  When you pray, don't be like the fundamentalists who love to stand and pray in church and in restaurants to be observed by other people.  They have their reward.  But when you pray, go into your study and shut the door.  God will hear you.  And save your breath; long prayers are a pain in the neck.  God knows what you need."

      Here he was moved.  People were listening even though he was being a bit long-winded, himself, on this occasion.  He looked around at faces in the sunlight and eyes that reflected his serenity.  Children ran along the edges of the crowd, their voices clear as the sound of water in the old iron-stained fountain that gushed forth in the shade of the trees.  "Pray," he said, "In this way:

Eternal Transcendent God

Your Name is a Holy Fire

Reform the world

Make it conform to your desire.

Give us a living for our humble toil

Forgive us

As we forgive

Together we have failed

Push us
But not too far

Spare us the confrontation with evil

Greater than we can bear.

      "If you forgive others, God will forgive you.  Otherwise why expect gracious treatment from God?

      "Whatever you do in a sacramental way, let it be between you and God, not a demonstration.  Okay, so you don't smoke and you don't drink.  Can you resist desserts?  All kinds of things can be accomplished through self-control.  The higher power even comes to your aid, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous.  But let's not be heroic about self-denial.  Keep the reasons for your abstinence and the goal in mind, not the appearance of virtue.  Nobody else can help, so why put on a show for them?

      "Don't expend your best efforts making money and seeking recognition.  A certain kind of success is here today and gone tomorrow.  Enrich yourself spiritually.  What you prize will grow to strengthen or consume you.  Your spiritual eye is your guide.  If you discern correctly, you will move with the resolution that comes from knowing the truth.  Anxiety and pain await you at every turn, if your vision is clouded.

      "You can't work for two managers--conflict of interest again.  And you know the worst distraction: you are no good to God--or for anything else--if your real objective is money.  Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about earning your living, not even for the shirt on your back.  Isn't life more than the chore of sustaining it?  Look at the birds.  Do they have careers?  Yet they are fed.  Don't we belong in the world as much as they do?  And who can add years to his life by being driven?  As for clothing, think of the wild flowers on the plains.  They weren't manufactured in a sweat shop in the garment district.  Yet the Pope doesn't dress as well.  If God so clothes the prairie grasses which flourish for a single spring then burn, will you not fare as well, oh ye of little faith?  What shall we eat?  What shall we drink?  What shall we wear?  Grinding out your days to secure these things is known as the protestant work ethic.  They didn't get it from me!  "God knows what you need.  Seek his revolutionary goodness, and you will have security as well.  Do not be anxious about tomorrow.  Today's trouble is enough."

      There were a few people with Bibles out in the crowd.  Some of them were hotly pursuing him in the pages of their big books.  The long-haired enthusiasts weren't quite as rigorous, but they added their running commentary in King-James Bibleese.  Jesus seemed to bear down a little here on this group of Christians--as much as he was prone to, during these early laps of his marathon.  He was still able to smile.  "Don't condemn other peoples' lifestyles if you don't want to be condemned as well.  The severity of your judgment with regard to others is the degree of severity that will be applied to you.  And the generosity of your giving will be the measure of what you receive.  Why do you see the grain of sawdust in your neighbor's eye, but ignore the 2x4 in your own?  How is it you see so clearly to correct others?  You bunch of hacks, brace up your own disreputable houses.

      "Now you have learned a few things.  Don't run out to convert everybody you meet.  There are people who don't want to hear the truth.  Don't try to read Milton to a junk-yard dog.  And your pearls of wisdom and tolerance are not likely to be appreciated by chauvinistic pigs.  In either case you could get torn apart.

"Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you; for everyone gets pretty much what they're asking for.  Who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?  If you bastions of selfishness give good things to your children, how much more will God give to those who ask?

      "You have heard this one before, but it still is news: However you want to be treated by other people is how you should treat them.  This is the essence of the Bible, and it's a good rule upon which to create a nurturing fellowship in the church.  The interesting thing about it is that it doesn't ask you to love unconditionally.  Would you want people to let you carry on in a manner that would embarrass Falstaff until you die prematurely of cirrhosis of the liver?  But this requires a kind of thinking we Bible thumpers aren't used to.

      The way you think is nearly as important as what you think.  Authoritarian thinking erects a fence between people of ideologies.  You have to look for the narrow gate in this barbed wire of abstractions between the gun-control lobby and the National Rifle Association; between the environmentalists and the oil drillers; between the social planners and the supply siders; the Republicans and the Democrats; the saved and the damned.  There is a wide gate that leads to destruction.  This is the way of spineless liberalism.  Sartre is being mobbed like a rock star in that concourse by pop-existentialists.  A certain kind of tolerance is similar to intoxication.  But don't think the narrow gate is tended by nice conservative folks who will want to look at the date on your ticket and hear you recite Invictus.  Sorry to say, the difficult gate that few find is the one politely opened by an old mathematics professor when he has examined your work.  Have you gone off in one of the multitudes of erroneous digressions that lead away from the solution to our problem?

      "Beware of preachers who talk to you as sweetly as your grandmother but are mercenary vampires.  You will know them by what they neglect.  Is fruit gathered from a plastic shrub in the lobby of a hotel?  A good tree bears fruit.  A phony tree should be hauled out and thrown into the incinerator.  You don't have to listen to a sermon to see that some jerk is more interested in money and a big following than he is in helping the poor in spirit.

      "Not everyone who says, 'Jesus, you're my boss and best friend' will be accepted in our organization.  Only those who practice what I have been telling you.  Someday many people will say, 'We preached the name of Jesus; we counseled in his name; we healed in his name.'  So what is this name?  A magic word?  Why didn't you do what he told you?  Go to hell.

      "Everyone who understands what I say and does it will be like an engineer who builds from the principles of good design.  A well structured building isn't going to collapse.  If you don't practice what I've been telling you, you're headed for disaster."

      People were astonished at Jesus' teaching.  He spoke with an authority not available to preachers or politicians.  With a few words he was able to silence the great crowds that followed him.

      As he left the park, a man with AIDS came up to him and said, "If you will, you can cure me."

      Jesus seemed not to notice the sores that covered the man's face and hands.  He put an arm around him and said, "I will."

      Immediately, the man's strength returned.  The blotches on his skin faded without scarring.  Jesus said, "Don't talk about this to anyone, but go to the health department and get tested for the record."

      Out of another crowd came an Army colonel who, with a desperation you wouldn't expect from an officer in uniform, said, "My secretary is paralyzed and in terrible pain."

      Jesus said, "I will come and heal him."

      But the colonel answered, "I am unworthy to have you in my quarters.  Give the order, and he will be cured."

      Jesus was amazed.  "I havn't found much of this kind of resolution in the church," he said.  "I tell you, many people who don't know the salvation equation or the slogans will come to celebrate with the saints, while some enthusiastic 'Christians' grind their teeth outside in the dark."  Looking like a leathery-skinned cadet, Jesus stood eye to eye with the soldier.  "It's done just as you have resolved," he said.  The secretary was healed at that instant.

      Entering Peter's house, Jesus saw Peter's mother-in-law lying sick with a fever.  He touched her hand, and the fever left her.  She got up and made "rigatoni al burro" for dinner.

      That evening many people who were mentally ill were brought to him.  He cured them without counseling or drugs.  He also healed peoples' physical ailments in his miraculous fashion--just like in the Bible.

      When the crowds got to be too much, Jesus and his group went by boat to a retreat spa with a prominent minister.  The man said, "I will go with you wherever you wish."

      Jesus answered, "I live like a migrant laborer."

      Another said, "I'll follow you, but let me spend the next year or two with my stricken father."

      But Jesus said, "He doesn't even know you anymore and might as well be in an institution."

      In their small cruiser returning to the city, they ran into a storm so severe the boat was in danger of being swamped by the waves.  Thinking they were all going to have to get into life preservers, they woke Jesus from a sound sleep.  The boat rocked terribly in the wind, but Jesus stood and held up a hand that calmed the storm and the waves.  In the awesome stillness that followed he said, "Why were you afraid?  Have you no faith?"  They looked at him with eyes like tuna just netted and thrown out on the deck to gasp their last.

      Nonetheless, the storm had blown them off course. The shoreline where they landed the boat was a wooded landscape near a cemetery.  Two homeless psychotic men who had been living among the gravestones came out violently to meet them.  They swore and gestured in the way "crazies" do at no one in particular until they saw Jesus.  Then they cried out in unison, "What have you to do with us, GodMan?  Have you come to torment us before the time?"  Now there was a house nearby with wrecked cars in the yard and a few pigs rutting about in the dirt.  The madmen’s demons begged, "If you exorcise us, send us into the pigs."

      "Go," he said.

      The pigs stampeded into the lake and splashed around until they drowned.

      Bewildered, the demons' former hosts sat down on a log.  They talked calmly with one another.  They seemed to be concerned that they had been living on their capital instead of investing prudently.  The poor folk who had been alerted by the squalling pigs came out of their house.  They took off in one old clunker car of several on their property.  Reporters got ahold of their story, and it ended up in all the supermarket tabloids.  After that, Jesus was asked to leave the Chicago area by the Kiwanis Clubs and the JCs.

 ...  This paraphrase is now available as a Kindle book. One of the requirements for publishing in that format is to remove any other full digital editions.

For the rest of the story, see Kindle edition