Jesus comes back to the world after eighteen hundred years to see how things are going now. He
is ver y hopeful. He thinks, ’Now almost half the earth is Christian, now I am going to be welcomed
and received. The first time I was there on the earth people were against me because there were no
Christians, there was nobody to receive me. There were Jews, and they killed me.’ Now he comes
with great hope. He descends into Bethlehem on a Sunday morning. Naturally he chooses Sunday
– Christians will be free and they will be coming out of the church and he will meet them just in front
of the church
People are coming out and he is waiting with great hope. Then people come around him and they
start laughing, they start ridiculing him. They say, ’You are pretending perfectly well. You look just
like Jesus.’
And he says, ’I am Jesus!’
And they laugh and they say, ’Jesus is only one. This is sacrilege to call yourself Jesus. You look
like him, but how can you be him? It will be better if you escape from here before the priest comes
out. If he catches hold of you, you will be in trouble.’
But Jesus says, ’He is my priest. If you cannot recognise me, it’s okay – you are lay people. But
he is my priest, continuously reading my scriptures, thinking, meditating on whatsoever I have said
before, continuously talking about me. At least he will recognise me. You wait!’
And they laugh and they say, ’You are wrong. You just escape from here, otherwise you will get into
trouble.’
Then comes the priest, and the people who have not even bowed down to Jesus touch the feet of
the priest and give him a passage very reverently, very respectfully. And the priest comes in and
looks at this young man and says, ’You get down! You come follow me, you come into the church.
Have you gone mad? What are you up to?’
And Jesus says. ’Can’t you recognize me?’
Then the priest takes him into the church, puts him into a dark cell, locks the cell and disappears. In
the middle of the night he comes back. The whole day Jesus thinks, ’What is going to happen? Am
I going to be crucified again by my own people, by Christians? This is too much!’ He cannot believe
it.
In the middle of the night the priest comes with a small lamp in his hand. He falls at the feet of Jesus
and says, ’I recognised you. But please, you are not needed at all. You have done your work and we
are doing your work perfectly well. You are a great disturber. If you come again you will disturb the
whole thing. It has been hard wor k for us. For eighteen centuries we have struggled, and somehow
we have tried to manage things perfectly well. Half of humanity is converted and half is on the way.
You just wait. You need not come! Master, you are not needed, we servants are enough. You just
send messages from there.’
Jesus says, ’I’m happy that you at least recognised me.’
The pr iest says, ’Yes, I can recognise you when we are alone but in front of the masses I cannot
recognise you. And if you insist on creating trouble then I am sorry but I will have to crucify you the
same way that the Jews did with you – because a priest has to look to the establishment. I am part
of an establishment – Jewish or Christian does not matter. I have to save the Church. If there is any
conflict between you and the Church, then I am for the Church – I serve the Church. It is perfectly
good. You live in heaven, you enjoy there and we are enjoying here. Things are perfectly good.
There is no need of your second coming, the first was enough.’
The essential religion will always go against the established religion. Sufis are the very heart, but
the heart is bound to be against the mind, the intellect. The priest lives in the head; the man of
prayer lives in the heart. They are two polarities, their languages are different. Their languages
are so different that the priest cannot understand the language of the heart at all. He can spin
theories; he has great expertise as far as doctrines are concerned. He has a very legal mind and is
very knowledgeable. But as far as the heart is concerned there is a wasteland in his heart; nothing
grows, nothing flowers, nothing flows.
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