1827

"I have seen you before.  I think," says Sarah. "Many many times, you have seen me, my child."  and now it doesn't seem quite so absurd that someone who looks like a sixteen year old boy should address a woman nearly forty as his child. "I have always had trouble imagining me being close to a mature man with a beard.  Because I am a woman and because I am attracted to women.  But as I see you now, my Lord, that makes much more sense of what I felt and could see with the eyes of my heart whenever I felt your presence near me.  But now the person I see you to be is much more compatible with my sense of the Jesus I was...feeling?" "When I rose from the dead, it was only the marks, the wounds of my crucifixion that I still carried in my body.  I did not rise again to continue looking the way I did before I died, but to show forth my true form.  but since my true form was too glorious for the human flesh and eye to behold, I show to you myself in the very human form most like my resurrected self..  So, whom you see here before you, is not a teenage boy, but the essence of the beauty and purity that I was resurrected into... "Who are you really?" says Erik. "You still don't believe", says Jesus, rather than asking it. "I am an atheist.  You still haven't shown any evidence that you really are Jesus Christ." "It isn't evidence you need, dear Erik, not so much as a change of heart.  Dear Erik, you were born and raised in a country of atheists.  Sweden.  But I must also remind you of that time when you were just twelve in Humlegarden Park.  You were seated, very self-absorbed, on a bench waiting for your mother to join you.  But it wasn't your mother that joined you.  Remember?  Erik.  Look at me please when I am talking to you." And now Erik is totally in the grip of Stubborn Swede, a syndrome that I coined thanks to having Greta for a wife and him for a brother-in-law. "Erik.  Who sat next to you on that bench?" He still refuses to look up at Jesus, but remains all coiled up in his snail shell  of stubborn denial.  Jesus rises from his chair and approaches Erik, he is first standing over him, and then our Lord kneels down and looks up in my brother-in-law's face. "Erik.  Who sat down next to you." "I don't remember." "Erik, please stop trying to lie to me.  I see everything.  And I will tell you who sat down on that bench next to you when you were twelve years old, and I will tell you all of our conversation."  Jesus is now holding my brother in-law's hands, both of them in his.  "I sat down next to you on the bench, and I said, Hello Erik.  And you looked at me and said, How do you know my name?  Remember?" Erik doesn't reply, but finally is looking into the green eyes of the youthful risen Christ. "I said that both your mothers would be arriving late, by about twenty minutes.  Your mother's name was Karin.  She died, October 2001 from metastasized breast cancer.  Amanda, her widow lives alone now in the same apartment in Stockholm.  She is retired now and has become an energetic community activist for the rights of nonwhite immigrants.  She is responding well to my tutoring.  I asked you if you knew who I Am, and you said no.  So, I replied that when you were thirty-two we would meet again face to face, in  another country, and then you would know me." Erik now stares fixedly at the green eyes of the Risen Christ, and stammers,  "Now I know you.  Jesus.  now I know you." Jesus fixes his eyes on him, and Erik simply cannot look away. Then Jesus bends over and kisses the top of his head. Erik is suddenly weeping. "Lord it is you. You are not a fantasy. In Sweden we are all taught to be atheists, that you are just a fairy story. But Lord", he sputters between his tears and sobs. "Lord, it is you. It is you! I never knew. I was never taught." And Eric suddenly drops to the floor on his knees before Jesus, who lifts him up under the arms and places him back in his chair. "It is one of Satan's most pernicious tricks to spread lies about me, whether through the Enlightenment blindness or ecclesiastical blindness. The first negates me altogether through scientific materialism. The second negated me all the more insidiously, destroying and murdering those who truly love me in the name of the many lies they have come to believe and promulgate about me."