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am. Is this, then resurrection and life? I suppose so. Although my action continues I don’t actually know who I am. By now I am only the energy of an idea; whoever is writing this down puts the name of Pilgermann to the idea, says, ‘What if?’ and hypothesizes virtualities into actualities.
    On some plane of virtuality the Temple stands, the Jews of A.D. 70 sing and dance while the scholars among them ponder God’s choices. God is a scientist. He knows everything and, having all the time there is, he demonstrates everything including his actual non-presence. Names colour actualities; forget the names Jew and Christian, call them
X
and
Y.
Let
X
be those who said, ‘The blood of him on us and on the children of us.’ Let
Y
be those who sometimes call that to mind when killing
X.
What is being demonstrated?
X
is being demonstrated as victim,
Y
as avenger. X’s action as victim shows us something of X’s character;xsxsxsx Y’s action as avenger shows us something of Y’s character. Will Y, red of hand with the blood of
X
through the centuries, ever say, ‘The blood of them on us and on the children of us’? It’s a matter provocative of thought.
    A matter provocative of thought, and new approaches continually offer themselves. For example: God being omnipresent is therefore everywhere at once in what is called time; all slaughter of
X
is therefore in his awareness simultaneously with the birth of him whose death the slaughter avenges. Might it even be possible that God, in his Hebrew aspect writing from right to left, writes first the slaughter of X and later the crucifixion for which they are slaughtered? If we look at it in that way we might see the slaughter as cause and the crucifixion as effect: the sin of the slaughter being heavy on the sinners, there comes the redeemer to offer hisinnocence for their guilt, the one for the many. As Pontius Pilate washes his hands X is heard to say (by an evangelist writing some four decades later), ‘The blood of him on us and on the children of us’, quite accurately predicting that they, X, will be held accountable for the death of that one who gave his life in expiation of the sins committed and yet to be committed against them, X. The purist may argue that God, being everywhere in time at once, would not have written one thing ‘before’ and another ‘after’ but that argument is well answered when we point out that the Creator characteristically employs a sequential mode of presentation, even going so far as to work six days one after the other and rest on the seventh.
    One seeks, as far as possible, reasonable explanations, but here, speaking as waves and particles freely ranging through what is called time, speaking as a witness to what has been done to six million or so
X
not so very far from here in what is called time, I must say, though lightning strike me as I speak, that there are moments when I begin to wonder whether God really is omniscient; I begin to think that it may be with him even as with some lowly mortal novelist who, having written a tremendous later scene, must perforce go back to insert an earlier one to account for it. Here of course I’m being arrogant, and maybe that’s why God keeps writing slaughter scenes: the character gets out of hand; X, having been called the chosen, presumes too much, grows excessively familiar, requires too much of God, becomes like the relative who turns up uninvited on the doorstep to stay for a month. Maybe it’s that simple—God is omnipresent but not omnipatient. He sometimes needs to make a little space around himself and Pfft! there go a few hundred or a few million
X.
Ah! to be an X, even to be the drifting waves and particles of an X long defunct, is to be not only arrogant but more than half mad. No matter.
    I am the resurrection and the life,
saith the Lord …
    So presumably there will always be action of one kind or another, some of us moving in flesh and blood, some of us in waves and