I don’t go to church anymore, except on Christmas, and I only go then because I like to listen to the Christmas carols, and I also like making snide comments to my father and brother about the physical decline of various members of our congregation. (We can do this with impunity now because my mother recently joined the choir, so instead of preventing us from substituting the word “not” for key nouns in the hymns and singing “Hark The Hare-Lipped Angels Sing,” she has to watch us giggling hysterically. Anyhow.) As a kid, I went every week, even the first week of seventh-grade Sunday school, when I feigned a brain tumor because my father had volunteered as the teacher that year, but my parents stuffed me into a Sunday-school dress and into the car, and with the eyes of the entire congregation upon me, I had to walk out of the sanctuary and up to the junior-high Sunday school room in the company of a parent, but I don’t go anymore because I just can’t bring myself to get up and put on nice clothes at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. I believe in God, but I just don’t have much use for organized religion at this point in my life, and that includes Easter.

I just don’t relate all that well to the Easter story on a human level. Let me explain. The Christmas story “works,” in part, because the writers of the New Testament added a critical element of human drama. First, the angel Gabriel visits Mary at home, tells her of her blessing, impregnates her with the Son of God, and goes back to Heaven for a cold one, leaving young Mary to explain her sudden interest in pickles and ice cream to Joseph (and leaving Joseph with a grave case of performance anxiety). Fast forward nine months, when the pair must pack up and drag ass to Bethlehem on the eve of the birth in order to pay their taxes, and after handing over their hard-earned money, they can’t find a place to stay, and when an innkeeper finally agrees to let them stay in his barn, Mary goes into labor and has to give birth. IN A BARN. I used to work as a stable hand, and of all the clean and comfortable environments I could recommend in which to give birth, only a sausage factory and downtown Detroit rank lower on the list. At the same time, three kings travel all the way to Bethlehem bearing expensive gifts – not something kings usually do, and a very nice gesture in light of the fact that the average newborn is neither attractive nor a sparkling conversationalist. Plus, I think the kings walked, and when they got there, they had to take a load off – IN A BARN. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a bunch of shepherds, busily engaged in . . . whatever shepherds do, spot an incredibly bright star overhead, followed by the appearance of the heavenly host and a general feeling of peace on earth and goodwill towards all people. Cool. Suspenseful plotting, some nifty twists and turns, good characterization (well, Joseph could use a little fleshing out, but whatever), a feel-good ending, and a great soundtrack.

By contrast, I find the Easter story a bit flat. Readers of the Bible don’t see Jesus develop as a person; the New Testament writers skipped over his entire adolescence. I imagine that the scribes’ committee debated the inclusion of Jesus’ difficult teenage years in the text and decided that, although a chronicle of Our Savior’s journey to manhood might provide a portrait of more depth, the image of a pizza-faced Messiah wearing his headgear and wanking away while gazing at a nudie postcard of a naked Pharisee wouldn’t exactly send the conversion rate into the stratosphere. Besides, let’s face it – the Son of God probably didn’t face the same trials and tribulations of puberty as the rest of us. If you had God for a parent, would you let Joseph send you to your room? I don’t think so. Would you observe a curfew? I don’t think so. Would you even bother to ask him before taking the camel out for a spin with a couple of the guys? I don’t think so. And forget about getting your report card signed. But this decision to jump-cut to the crucial years of the Jesus story did have the benefit of sparing Bible readers the sorry spectacle of Jesus’ college years, which he probably spent eating pizza and walking on beer and wondering whether he should have majored in something besides religion. We didn’t have to witness the painful transitions of his twenties either: his failed attempts to grow that beard, his arguments with his old man about taking over the family business.

All joking aside, while I find the story of the resurrection an inspiring (and spooky) metaphor for human potential and the power of faith, Jesus as a person doesn’t interest me. This makes it difficult to grieve for him on Good Friday, or to go to church on Easter with the proper amount of reverence (never mind the fact that, after I have scarfed a rack of Marshmallow Peeps, the sheer volume of refined sugar coursing through my veins makes any reverence utterly impossible). I enjoyed Martin Scorsese’s interpretation of Jesus’ inner demons in The Last Temptation Of Christ; what some called blasphemous, I found refreshing. In this version, Jesus didn’t understand why God had chosen him. He didn’t particularly want to lead; he didn’t want to die. He fantasized about Mary Magdalene. I found Scorsese’s idea of Jesus much more compelling than the sanitized, too-good-to-be-true portrait the Bible gives us, or the stereotypical visual representations of Jesus, one hand aloft, looking vague and somewhat tired. I have heard people theorize that, if Jesus walked among us today as a prophet, we would probably dismiss him as mentally ill. Perhaps. I think we would find him a crashing bore, full of non sequiturs and overblown metaphors; I think he would stand too close to us when he talks. “Too nice,” we would shrug, or “nothing to say,” or “have you heard he still lives with his parents?” or “a couple of friends, sure, but twelve people? They didn’t even bring beer!” We would have to save each other from him at parties.

I like the idea of Jesus, and I believe that Christians need the idea of Jesus. No, not just because we named the religion after him, uh duh, but because it comforts us to feel that God can reside in one of us – sort of like having someone from your hometown play for the Yankees, but on a much larger scale. But I have trouble mourning the death and celebrating the resurrection of an abstraction, a supposedly flesh-and-blood human being who, upon emerging from his tomb, not only resisted the urge to run around yelling “WHO’S THE MAN? WHO’S THE MAN?” but acted perfectly calm up to and including the point where a cloud descended to fetch him up to his celestial home at the right hand of God. I want a higher percentage of mortal in the mortal-divine blend, I guess, because while I believe in God, I don’t understand him the way I understand other people.

Come to think of it, I don’t understand other people that well. If I did, a book editor would have read this page by now.

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