Taste-testing Messiahs
Pretty often now, we'll have these bearded fucks wander into the temple telling us they're the savior we were promised. They like to wash people's feet (a little too much honestly), and go on and on about the true spirit of the holidays, until someone rich bothers to have them strung up in the public square or torn apart by horses.
But first, we always make sure to taste test the would-be savior. We know, after all, that whoever we accept as our savior, we'll have to taste a little bit of every Sunday for the rest of our lives. A sip of their blood and a little morsel of their body. A waste of good wine and bread, in my opinion, but you've got to get your iron somewhere. Problem is, most of these guys' flesh just tastes awful. So we let them get tortured and killed, and wait for a more flavorful prophet.
This morning, I was invited to a prison carved into a cliffside. Amid the agonized screams and the putrid scent of disease and excrement, we found the cell of one particular man, whose skin was radiant, his hands callused, his face smugly superior. I took a delicate nibble of his flesh, and found that it tasted delicious. I've never noticed a complexity quite like that. Nor have I had the pleasure of trying such exquisitely textured meat. It had the toughness you would expect from a muscular laborer, but it yielded quickly, and was still juicy. His blood, too, was delicious. The irony note was covered by a subtle basicity and umami, left behind only as an aftertaste, which was complex and thought provoking.
This man was special, we decided. If billions would be consuming whatever savior we chose, this would be the best choice we would be offered. So, we put a crown of thorns on his head, and hung him from a cross, and hired a servant boy to drag his body out of his tomb three days later and smack it on a cliffside like a rug until there was nothing left but mist. To confirm we had performed the ritual correctly, I sipped wine and took a bite of bread under a stained glass window, and I was immediately struck by the same glorious gustatory experience as I was in the prison. Truly, the glory of God is like no other.