Listen / Read
The pain of childbirth. I see that stuff on telly and I can only conclude that it’s so not worth it. Should women in labour take pain killers or just dig their nails into someone’s hand? I don’t care.
So, moving on: Jesus. He suffered. Especially in The Passion of the Christ which I still haven’t actually watched all the way through because it looks a bit too gory. Did it say anything in the Bible about those little grappling/claw whip things that dig into the flesh and tear chunks of it out when they’re pulled back? Well of course I’ve looked it up between sentences and there is indeed some suggestion that the whip used may have been studded with metal. Lovely.
Anyway, he was tortured and suffered an unpleasant death and we should rejoice and clap our hands because he came all the way down from heaven to prove that he could be one of the humans and be brutally beaten and executed just like the rest of us. He suffered for all of our sins.
But that’s quite a lot of sins when you think about it. I’m not sure a bit of flagellation and a pretty routine execution for those days covers it. Even if it covered our sins at the time, we’ve done a lot more sinning since then. I’m beginning to think Jesus ripped us off. I don’t think he suffered enough for us. That’s probably the cause of all this suffering going around today. Here we are 2,000 years later fighting off pandemics and unemployment and Jesus is kicking back in heaven wondering whether to bother doing a comeback tour. It’s not good enough. We’re doing a lot of suffering down here and it clearly says in the small print that that’s his job.
So it’s about time he did do a comeback tour. Mel Gibson could direct.