*April 8, 2007*

*Easter Basket Surprise*

*By Harry T. Cook*

Surely it will not happen this year, but there is a good chance that next Easter some children may awake on that blessed morn to find not the clichéd chocolate bunnies in their plastic grass-lined baskets but replicas in the same flavor of, ahem, Jesus.

Although the Religion Police would no doubt shriek in high dudgeon and undertake boycotts of retail outlets that sold the chocolate Jesuses, the idea isn't as far out as one might think at first blush.

The same starchy pulpiteers who wag their fingers about "keeping Christ in Christmas" might wish to consider that the manufacture of Easter basket-fillers has finally come around to orthodoxy, /i.e.,/ that keeping the Jesus in Easter is more to the point than keeping the Easter bunny

This thing got its start on the eve of the Christian Holy Week when a Manhattan artist unveiled what news reports primly called "an anatomically correct" six-foot sculpture depicting Jesus of Nazareth in the confectionary medium of chocolate. It's title: "My Sweet Lord."

A day later after a fusillade of sound and fury from the Catholic Archbishop of New York and a scold from the Catholic League to the effect that the chocolate sculpture amounted to a grievous offense against believers, the Jesus disappeared from Manhattan. Perhaps he will reappear today as marzipan in Mamaroneck

Does this latest flap remind anybody of the Islamic how-de-do over the cartoons that allegedly dissed Mohammed?Honest to god! Some so-called religious people have thin skins to go along with their hard heads.

Listen. As far as anyone knows for sure, the Jesus figure made popular in Christian piety may never have existed. Not only do the gospel depictions of that personage vary in significant ways, but the gospels themselves bear all the earmarks of mythology in the making.

Hence: "My Sweet Lord" could be any chocolatier's depiction of any anatomically correct male, just as the bones some enterprising archaeologist (or grave robber) would find in an ossuary marked "Jesus" could be those of any First-Century Mediterranean Jew -- "Jesus" or "Yeshuah" being one of the more common given names for males in that culture at that time.

What if the Archbishop of New York and his pal over at the Catholic League had said nothing about the chocolate Jesus? What if they had gone about their proper business (and ours) of binding up the brokenhearted, freeing those enslaved by heartless economies and social structures? What if they had saved their scorn for something that is truly offensive, like the war in Iraq?

I do sometimes wonder whether some of my colleagues in the world of religion are of sufficient caliber of thought to perceive or of sufficient education to know what is important and what is not and when it is appropriate to laugh rather than carp.

As many of my readers know, I was once a working journalist in Detroit when there were actual newspapers to work at, instead of the pretty much beside-the-point, dead-tree byproducts that now flow off the presses each day. I made lifelong, trusted and very irreverent friends in those years. To them and to my daughter, the equally irreverent law student, I sent off the headline that topped the Associated Press story in Friday's papers about the offending /objet d' art/:

*Chocolate **Jesus upsets Catholics*

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I asked for follow-up headlines, known as "decks." Here are a few such submissions. I offer them not to ridicule Christian believers or their beliefs, but to lubricate with some gentle humor the hard, uncompromising side of religion:

*But don't we eat him every Sunday?*

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*At last! A chocolate that's really* */good/ for you!*

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*A new flavor for the savior*

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*Magically delicious!*

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*Anatomically correct Jesus gives up loin cloth for Lent*

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*Chocolate sculptor given one-way ticket to Hell*

And, by the way: I don't like chocolate.

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© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.