By Ogova Ondego
Published April 15, 2017
A man who specialises in money and financial issues has hanged himself over Easter, blaming Jesus and his disciples in a long suicide note.
The note, found at the scene of death and that is now being referred to as Judas Iscariot’s Suicide Memo, is addressed to his colleagues and reads:
By now you’d have discovered that the money bag is virtually empty and rightfully concluded that I have been helping myself to it. Now you do understand the difficult economic times in which we live. You were all indignant that night that woman, what was her name again, Mary, poured out that expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet. You all calculated the amount of money that the perfume would have generated had it been sold and concluded that it was worth a year’s wages. We all pretended to care so much about the poor for whom the money would have gone, but I knew better.
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I am just reminding you this in case you begin pointing fingers at me for betraying Jesus of Nazareth. You’re no better. Well, I may have been into money more than any of you. But didn’t you all hope for places of honour when Jesus established the Kingdom of Israel and that was why you were willing to leave your careers for the unknown? You were mesmerized by those miracles and the devotion of the people to Jesus. Some of you openly jostled for places of honour. When that didn’t seem to work, you, knowing the influence women had on Jesus, sent your mothers to petition him on your behalf. You, like me, saw yourselves seated on 12 thrones. I wanted to be in charge of the National Exchequer instead of minding that miserable money bag of ours.
But this your Jesus, what a wimp; he has dashed my dreams. How could he not have failed to capitalise on the frenzy and euphoria of the masses to get himself crowned king?
I was finally forced to take money from people whose position he threatened not only to replenish our fast-dwindling purse but also for my own use. At the time, I believed Jesus would finally come to his senses, release himself from captivity and restore the splendour of King Solomon’s Kingdom. Even if he didn’t do this on his own, I saw the people who adored him rising up against the occupying Romans, driving them out and forcefully crowning Jesus king; whether he liked it or not.
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When this didn’t happen, I realized my folly and tried to return the money I had taken from the Pharisees and priests but they wouldn’t take it back. Then it dawned on me, horribly, that our dreams had died with Jesus. Now don’t start getting any ideas that he will rise from the dead as he had claimed. That was, like many of his parables, a metaphor that shouldn’t be taken literally. Unlike you, I am anything but a realist.
With Jesus dead there is no future for any one; neither for you nor for me. We shall be hounded wherever we go. We will always be afraid to be recognized. Doesn’t Peter, who almost wet his pants the night the high priest’s house-girl recognized him, know this better than any of us?
This Jesus has messed me up; the messianic promises I thought he would fulfill have come to nothing while I will always be referred to as the student who betrayed his teacher. I can’t bear the disgrace I had little share in bringing upon myself. Having no past, no present and no future in this world, I quit.
Good bye, fellow losers.
This is historical Christian fiction based on the arrest, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
