Nobody Pushes Product Like Jesus

In ancient times, religion was the one thing that held the very fabric of society together. It brought you together as a community. It helped you marry your kids off. It oiled the wheels of day-to-day social and business interaction. It was also probably the earliest form of counselling and therapy. No wonder our grandparents and parents take religion so seriously. Well, mine do, to an extent. They don’t, like, wear crucifixes and carry pocket bibles or anything but they’d glare if I made any cracks about The Man. As a child I found this image really intriguing.



It’s like He got His picture painted in the middle of a really twisted open-heart surgery procedure. I was a bright kid, I was. I understood metaphors easily. So the significance of the dove and lamb and the Eucharist were quite easy to comprehend. But a saintly man blissfully smiling while his internal organs were exposed and pierced with painful thorns seemed a bit screwy to me. But every Catholic family those days had one of the Open-Heart-Surgery Images. It was a big thing for them. It was what bound them together.

My generation has religion too. It’s called consumerism. It doesn’t change too many things, though. Christmas is still a big thing for us. We’re going to get loads of stuff, aren’t we? We get holidays so we can travel and spend more money. And the real Christmas begins after the 25th of December when all the post-Christmas Sales begin.

When I catch the first strains of “..the weather outside is frightful..” I’m not thinking cheery carollers I’m thinking plush foyers of glitzy malls. Baby Jesus, angels, the three kings of Orient – instant association is shop window displays.

Marketing has both ruined Christmas with all the hype and at the same time you’ve got to admit it’s nice to feel a bit of that ‘festive spirit’ in the air even though you know it’s just evil corporations who’re trying to snatch your money and make you buy stuff you don’t need.

You think Beckham sells product? Baby, nobody pushes product like Jesus can.

With each generation, religion gets more and more diluted. There is truth in Gore Vidal’s cutting observation when he describes the Bible as “the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millenium”. You’d like to poke a hole in it. But you can’t, can you?

Some, like me, like to hang on to some bits of the ceremony of religion. Cribs, plum cake, adeste fieles, midnight mass, confession. I’m not religious. Just a sentimental fool sometimes. You know what I don't like though? Santa Claus. Always seemed a bit creepy to me. But if he gets me a PS3 this Christmas I promise I'll be nice.