Aletter to Jesus

Dear Jesus,

It may be unusual to accost you on paper; impertinent surely not.

People are incited to address you all the time, more often, I confess, in hope of favours and/or forgiveness than in conversational mode. In today’s jargon, you can be imagined as the spiritual form of Deliveroo; St Jude your 24/7 service. As the go-to member of the Trinity, you have practical experience, which the Father does not, of inhabiting a mortal frame; hence your role as mediator. By a self-denying ordinance, your actual interventions seem, like His, very rarely to amount to more than counsel and consolation. Was that decision His, without being negotiable between you?

If the question is vulgar, is it because it is impossible for you and Him to have different reactions? In that case, what can your mediation mean in any theological or practical sense? If you have more empathy than He with mankind, how can that not, in theory at least, lead to Trinitarian unevenness?

Am I not right in thinking that the machinery of sainthood, in Catholic colours, requires candidates to display three cases where the results are “against nature”? Benedict Spinoza declared such miracles logically impossible. His austerity, equating God and Nature, more enraged than impressed his co-religionaries. In Christian practice, qualifying marvels are liable to be in the tradition of your own terrestrial crowd-pleasing: the incurable patient rises from bed, food fills more mouths than expected, things of that eye-catching order. There is no reliable report of water being converted into wine since you attended that wedding in Cana of Galilee where, some joker has it, one of the guests would sooner have had water.

Has any grand catastrophe been averted by supernatural intervention? How could we know? What might have happened, but did not, offers a limitless field of speculation. In known records, divine brakes are never heard to squeal when it comes to human malice, however mass-murderous.