Saint Christopher may not be a saint after all. He’s not mentioned in the Bible, while there may have been a Greek martyr name Christopher. But this didn’t change anything for Jesus. In other words it didn’t matter to him whether the church recognized Christopher as a saint or not. The idea of having a big burly guy always around to protect him, someone to carry him to safety when necessary, appealed to Jesus…as well as it did to many other Filipinos.
This reliance on a Santos didn’t mean Jesus wasn’t a brave man. If we’re looking for examples of his bravery (or try to judge whether he was brave or not) we don’t have to look very hard. Sometime during the last year that we were neighbors he told me that he was “seeing things.” I believe every mental problem has an explanation; the fact that he said he was “seeing things” meant to me that he had a problem. Because of which he probably prayed to Saint Christopher and prayed to him even if he didn’t think it would do any good. The truth is that there are 30 different kinds of poisonous snakes in the Philippines, and Jesus wouldn’t have been able to recognize all of them, so when he said he saw a snake right in front of him, he wouldn’t have necessarily known if it was poisonous or not. But one with two heads! It seemed incredible to me. The fact was though there used to be a two-headed snake, a snake freak that people flocked to see at the Tashkent Zoo. Thus Jesus could’ve seen a two-head snake and then had a nightmare about it. (Or he was hallucinating, only I didn’t know him to be a drinker,) Dreams frequently seem realistic, disjointed, and weird, but he claimed he hadn’t been sleeping, so rule out nightmare. Now factor in fear. Factor in the superstition and the belief that anyone who sees a two-headed snake is doomed to die. Panic. Even if Jesus wasn’t superstitious, he still could’ve been frightened because fear is often irrational. And then perhaps he did think he was doomed. Now go no further. Here, if we believe him, we have the example of bravery were looking for. So then what did he do? Instead of running, he killed the two-headed snake so that other people wouldn’t come across it and die. But then too he could’ve made it all up.
Now let’s suppose he was telling the truth, and he did run into a two-headed snake. First it would’ve been an extremely rare specimen, so killing it might not have been the best alternative to choose. Scientists deserved a chance to study it and would want to determine which head it uses to eat food because it seems likely that the two heads would want to fight one another over the food. Or they would want see what would happen when one head saw the food and the other head tried to snatch it away.
Do I believe Jesus? Truly the whole time that I knew him I don’t think he ever told me anything that was untrue except maybe this story about a two-headed snake. I might’ve dismissed it entirely had he told me about it with less fervor and if I hadn’t seen the look on his face. What I didn’t know at the time was that the tale of the two-headed snake didn’t come out of thin air and that most likely it originated in ancient China:
A little boy, named Sun Shu-ao, comes across a two-headed snake; the boy then runs from the field yelling, “I’m doomed! I’m doomed!” But, suddenly the boy stops running and decides to go back and kill the snake, thinking “if I don’t kill it, somebody might come across and he will die.” Bravely he goes back to the field and kills it with a big stone. Then he runs home, and in tears tells his mother, “I’m going to die, because I saw a two-headed snake, but I killed it so that others may not come across it and die too.” The good mother then reassures her son that he wouldn’t die because he saw the snake but when he did die and went to heaven, he’d receive a reward for thinking of others.
Most people can easily understand the moral of this story. The defenders of common sense have no trouble with it. That was why it was repeated and passed on from generation to generation and then implanted in Jesus’ brain. His reaction actually meant more to me than the moral of the story. I could see that whatever he saw, or thought he saw, scared the bejesus out of him.
Randy Ford
