You will be reading this on Good Friday which Christians all over the world observe as the day on which Jesus Christ was crucified. Those who wanted him dead constituted the dominant religious oligarchy—chief priests and elders who felt threatened by the simple teachings of Jesus as he spoke to the poor, dispossessed and downtrodden.

When Jesus appeared before the governor, the priests and elders all waiting in the wings for blood, the governor, Pontius Pilate, asked him if he was king of the Jews. If one translates Jesus’ reply into Trinidad parlance we would end up with something like this as a reply: “You saying so, not me” (thou sayest).

Then the priests and elders had their say and accused Jesus of everything under the sun. Jesus’ response was to say absolutely nothing.

And when Pilate asked him (again I am taking the liberty of translating into Trinidadian), “You hear all these things they saying about you, what do you have to say for yourself?”

Jesus, whether out of contempt for his accusers, or out of anger and possibly dismay at their fabrications, or through self-discipline, or perhaps understanding that nothing he could say would make any difference, kept his silence, much to the amazement of the governor, who in his heart knew that Jesus was not guilty of anything. Indeed, he suspected that the high priests were simply envious of Jesus’ growing popularity with the masses.

In fact, Pilate wanted to exonerate Jesus of the charges and set him free, but the priests and elders used their position and influence to manipulate the crowd. And although Pilate was openly indicating to the crowd that if they asked for Jesus’ freedom he would grant it, the crowd called for the murderer Barabas to be set free instead, goaded on by the priests and elders.

And when Pilate, in dismay, asked, “What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?” the crowd called for him to be crucified and at that point Pilate washed his hands of mob democracy and mob justice.

But the Roman soldiers took him away to be crucified even though no one had really identified any evil that he had done or crime that he had committed.

I think that T&T is a place where someone like Jesus Christ could be easily condemned for speaking his mind and trying to do good deeds and very few in this country would bat an eye.

The thoughts and ideas of Jesus would be sacrilegious in this unholy city today and Jesus would be unwelcome to the majority.

And if Jesus Christ lived among us and turned out to be another murder statistic, would anybody care enough to do something about it?

Imagine telling Trinidadians and Tobagonians (and I am translating again into our everyday language): “God is real and there is only one God. And one of the beautiful things that you can do as a human being is to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might and with all your strength: this is a very important thing and equally important, you must also love your neighbour as yourself. There are no greater commandments than these. This is how we should live as human beings, in love of God and with love for each other, as children of the one God.”

Imagine the commotion that these two pieces of advice would cause in T&T if someone were truly championing it as a philosophy. Why spend your time and energy loving God and loving your neighbour when you could kidnap your neighbour for a ransom and rape your own relative for the sense of pleasure and power and bugger your neighbour’s boy child for the sheer perversity and evil of it? Why love God and your neighbour when there is money, rum, cocaine and prostitutes? After all, what’s love got to do with it?

But Jesus went further in spreading the philosophy of love. Not just God and your neighbour but your enemies. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.” I am quoting directly from the New Testament now.

If Jesus were to say that today in this country many of us might ask: what is wrong with Jesus? Love your enemies? Pray for them that persecute you? If Jesus came with that kind of philosophy in T&T today, won’t he be considered a kind of fool? A madman out of touch with reality?

But how does he justify his philosophy? I go back to a Trinidadian interpretation again of what is attributed to him in the Bible: “If you love someone who loves you, what does it really take from you? And if you love your own family and friends and tribe, what are you doing that is different from what everyone else finds is easy to do? It is when you show love to those who show no love towards you that you are making a difference.”

And Jesus closes by saying and I quote from Matthew directly: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect.”

Permit me the freedom to interpret that line in this way: God represents perfection, as children of God we should strive for perfection (to be more like Jesus, if you like) and the reason we must love our enemy is that we must conquer the tendency to evil within ourselves, in order to conquer evil outside and spread goodness in the world.

You may call this a Hindu interpretation of Christian teaching because Hinduism also teaches that personal sacrifice and self-restraint are ways of achieving virtue and that striving for perfection, evolving to a higher and higher level of consciousness until one is able to connect with God is the ultimate in human spiritual achievement.

However you take my perspective, though, how could you possibly disagree with me that Jesus would have a damn hard time in this country?

T&T, which seems committed to the murder of goodness and dedicated to the destruction of love, is headed not in the direction of an evolution of consciousness but in the direction of devolution and degeneration.

Spiritually, this country has been on a long, steep slide for some time.

Those among us who are prepared to think might want to pause to ask what is happening in secular education, in the religious institutions, in national politics and regional society that is facilitating such degeneration.

And what do we need to do to make this land a place where Jesus, who was cursed, spat upon and brutalised, the last time he tried to raise the consciousness of people, might consider walking, talking, teaching again.