I picked up a pizza the other day. It was made by a national pizza chain. Myself and my Significant Other had ordered there a half-dozen times. When I held this boxed pie at eye level, however, I noticed a small, computer-generated label on the side of the box.
It said "Your Pizza Experience Managed by Christ."
I immediately thought, "So He did come back! And he's managing a pizza franchise!"
Of course, this is quite a bit of a vocational downgrade from coming in glory to judge the living and the dead, but I for one would not criticize His choice. I realize some of His followers are bound to be disappointed. His return was supposed to usher in the End of Days, Armageddon, the Rapture and the final Day of Judgment, the ultimate spectacular sky, light and sin show, after which Christians were going to get crunk in eternal glory while the rest of us were going to be sorry we kept rolling our eyes at them when they promised us the infinite wrath of God for laughing at Will and Grace and sleeping in on Sunday.
I'm sure that's what He intended to do at first, but during the two thousand year-and-counting gear-up to humanity's final moment, He's apparently lost some of His enthusiasm for it. The idea of sitting on a fiery sky-throne with lightening crackling all around You, waving Your divine staff over another quivering batch of souls in order to scorch them into everlasting perdition sounds appealing at first, but after a while the logistics of it might start to seem a little daunting. Seven billion souls is quite the judging marathon, and that's only the living ones, and with nearly every human activity from the original sin (eating mammoth on Friday) to wondering what's under Lady GaGa's meat dress being identified as sinful at one time or another, He might end up with only a few monks and Michele Bachmann sitting on His right hand. Nobody wants to spend eternity with those kinds of people.
He could get so sick of plumbing the depths of one dreary human soul after another that he could abruptly cancel in the middle, leaving it just at Judgement Morning instead of making a whole day of it and plead burnout. Couldn't blame Him for that.
So he took a low-key, secure job in the pizza industry. As someone who's used to obeying the will of His Father, He would naturally gravitate to a chain called Papa John's. He's a manager, of course. He's got the résumé for that, successfully running a team of apostles for over three years without so much as a Blackberry to keep track of them. And although He might feel a little pressure pushing out those pies from time to time, like on Saturday nights and Super Bowl Sundays, it's nothing compared to evaluating every act and thought of every human being that ever lived, so I'm sure He can easily relieve His workaday tensions by changing one of those leaky two-liter bottles of soda that pizza joints love to sell you into a nice wine and polishing it off with an order of breadsticks. For a hobby, He sends a few plays into Tim Tebow now and then.
Holding a boxed pizza had never before felt so numinous. An immense feeling of inner peace came over me. Blessed be the pizza-makers.
I opened the box. And I saw that it was good.
It said "Your Pizza Experience Managed by Christ."
I immediately thought, "So He did come back! And he's managing a pizza franchise!"
Of course, this is quite a bit of a vocational downgrade from coming in glory to judge the living and the dead, but I for one would not criticize His choice. I realize some of His followers are bound to be disappointed. His return was supposed to usher in the End of Days, Armageddon, the Rapture and the final Day of Judgment, the ultimate spectacular sky, light and sin show, after which Christians were going to get crunk in eternal glory while the rest of us were going to be sorry we kept rolling our eyes at them when they promised us the infinite wrath of God for laughing at Will and Grace and sleeping in on Sunday.
I'm sure that's what He intended to do at first, but during the two thousand year-and-counting gear-up to humanity's final moment, He's apparently lost some of His enthusiasm for it. The idea of sitting on a fiery sky-throne with lightening crackling all around You, waving Your divine staff over another quivering batch of souls in order to scorch them into everlasting perdition sounds appealing at first, but after a while the logistics of it might start to seem a little daunting. Seven billion souls is quite the judging marathon, and that's only the living ones, and with nearly every human activity from the original sin (eating mammoth on Friday) to wondering what's under Lady GaGa's meat dress being identified as sinful at one time or another, He might end up with only a few monks and Michele Bachmann sitting on His right hand. Nobody wants to spend eternity with those kinds of people.
He could get so sick of plumbing the depths of one dreary human soul after another that he could abruptly cancel in the middle, leaving it just at Judgement Morning instead of making a whole day of it and plead burnout. Couldn't blame Him for that.
So he took a low-key, secure job in the pizza industry. As someone who's used to obeying the will of His Father, He would naturally gravitate to a chain called Papa John's. He's a manager, of course. He's got the résumé for that, successfully running a team of apostles for over three years without so much as a Blackberry to keep track of them. And although He might feel a little pressure pushing out those pies from time to time, like on Saturday nights and Super Bowl Sundays, it's nothing compared to evaluating every act and thought of every human being that ever lived, so I'm sure He can easily relieve His workaday tensions by changing one of those leaky two-liter bottles of soda that pizza joints love to sell you into a nice wine and polishing it off with an order of breadsticks. For a hobby, He sends a few plays into Tim Tebow now and then.
Holding a boxed pizza had never before felt so numinous. An immense feeling of inner peace came over me. Blessed be the pizza-makers.
I opened the box. And I saw that it was good.
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