I have no doubt in my mind that if Jesus arrived back on a village street in Ireland today, not the second coming, but simply in the flesh like the first time, everybody would want to claim him as their own. Can’t you imagine Catholics pressing forward in the crowd saying: ‘Haven’t we got it right about transubstantiation? Isn’t it true that your mother was conceived and born immaculately?’ The Protestants would be shouting at him: ‘Aren’t we right about justification by faith alone? Isn’t it right that the bible is your infallible word, and the only rule of faith?’ ‘This way to the parochial house.’ ‘This way to the rectory.’ I can see the sadness in his eyes and the quiet dignity as he, ignoring the questions, makes his way slowly through the crowd not to the parish priest or the rector but to search out the lonely, the marginalised and the unloved.
If he arrived in Dublin I doubt if he would go near either of the Archbishops or other Church leaders. Indeed he might have harsh words to say to them as he did to the religious establishment first time round. Can you imagine the raised eyebrows in Drumcondra and Temple Road if he took the No 11 bus to Clonskeagh to see the Imam there. I believe he would be far more likely to go to the prisons and hospitals and to find out Father Peter McVerry and his work with boys in trouble, Sister Stan and her work for the homeless, the employment scheme of the Presbyterians in Parnell Square, the social outreach projects of all the other Churches and especially the work of St Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army. He would, I have no doubt, find out and approve projects for the development of people in deprived areas, like the Shanty Project in Tallaght, which have no explicit religious connection other than sheer love and care for people. The criterion of Christian authenticity is love and not doctrine. Love unites people across all kinds of human barriers while doctrine divides. No doubt there would be someone who would want to ask Jesus some theological conundrums. For example the one that occupied some people at the time of the world’s first heart transplant, as to whether it was all right to transplant a Catholic heart into a Protestant or a Protestant heart into a Catholic!