I'm in biiiiig trouble.

I'm jealous of Jesus.

Barb, you see, gets crushes. She has a crush on me that has lasted twenty-three years. She's had crushes on Chris Reeve. She has a crush on Cary Grant. There are various people, both celebrity and non, that I know she's had crushes on.

I'm not threatened.

Usually.

She's strongly heterosexual, and strongly drawn to certain members of the opposite sex. It's one of the things I like about her. She only acts on it with me...

But her latest crush...

Perhaps you've seen ads for that new GOSPEL OF JOHN movie?

That's right. I'm in romantic rivalry with the guy who's playing Jesus.

Even as a fantasy, how do I compete with that?

Isn't it kind of mildly blasphemous to even want to?

Do I brave possible lightning strikes or not?

You trust a woman, and a guy comes along and raises a few people from the dead, offers her some water turned into wine, and she loses her head...

Plus, dinner, with fishes and loaves that never seem to end...

"In my house there are many mansions"...hopefully not Playboy mansions...

If it's any consolation, she's not the only one. There's a friend of hers who got to see an advance screening.

She told her that when Jesus emerges from the baptism in the movie, it's in very, very slow motion, giving her friend very, uhhhmmmm, unusual thoughts for a Jesus-figure.

(Barb has another friend who, ever since she saw Billy Campbell (the Rocketeer) play Moses, gets very unBiblical feelings ever time someone talks about Moses...or maybe very Biblical feelings, considering how many people "knew" each other in the Biblical sense...)

I felt comfortable with Christopher Reeve crushes, even though that put me against Superman. (Ditto the guy who plays young Clark Kent in SMALLVILLE. Or Dean Cain.)

And Cary Grant's dead. Not a problem.

Kevin Kline...and he's happily married to Phoebe Cates....I can handle.

Pierce Brosnan. Also happily married; and the only reason she has any interest in James Bond. No, even James Bond doesn't threaten me.

But Jesus?

I know when I'm outmatched.

In a way it's a shame I'm not Catholic. I can see it now:

I enter the confessional.

"Forgive me, father, for I have sinned..."

"Yes my son?"

"My wife has the hots for the Son of God, and I don't know what to do."

Silence for a minute. Then, in an odd voice, the father says,

"That makes two of us. Uh, that doesn't know what to do...I don't have the hots for the Messiah."

Leave it to Barb to invent a whole new sin for me to worry about....Messiah-jealousy.

Maybe Judas had a girlfriend, who only had eyes for Jesus...it would explain a lot!

Some women can't resist a man who makes himself out to be a martyr...