Sweet Jesus

Hundreds of bloggers have already discussed the naked chocolate Jesus incident but I'll bring my own slant to it. I don't see what all the fuss was about. I googled "Chocolate Jesus" and found pictures of a fully dressed chocolate Jesus that apparently no one got bent out of shape over. So maybe the crucial issue isn't that Jesus was carved out of a humongous candy bar, but that he was depicted naked.

At least one blogger claimed that people were crucified naked in those days, so that appears to be simple truth telling without the fig leaf. In any case if Jesus was built like a man, why isn't it okay to portray that?

As for a chocolate statue of Jesus, it's been done and no one made a big deal. But this time it's offensive. Why? He did say to eat his body, what's wrong with it being chocolate? After all, everyone's eating chocolate bunnies and eggs in honor of the holiday, so what's wrong with going right to the source? And, why shouldn't God be sweet? I guess that could be a problem if you're trying to convert diabetics, but surely something could be worked out. The communion wafer originated as a piece of matzoh; well, today you can get your matzohs dipped in chocolate too!

When I was a teenager I once brought home a poster that I thought was very funny. It was called "The Birth of Christmas" and it was a manger scene but instead of a baby Jesus there was a baby in a Santa Claus suit. I thought it was funny and I saw it as a commentary on the commercialization of Christmas. I brought it home and put it up on my wall, and my parents complained so loudly about it that I was forced to take it down. I didn't want to waste it so I used it as a backdrop for a collage. The irony of it was, my parents didn't see that it was satirical, and their objection was that it didn't belong in a Jewish home.

But I think there's a bit of reverence and a bit of satire in both that old poster and in the Chocolate Jesus that was banned from a downtown hotel. I think it's good to be able to look at our beliefs with a little bit of humor. Hey, if God did not have a sense of humor, how is it humans have one? Yes, I know the artist seems to be hung up on working with food. Well, it's no crazier than ice sculpture which disappears once the winter is over. Chocolate melts, that's true. But maybe that's part of the plan.