" 'That's true, Lord. And suffering is so terrible for humans, injustice is so terrible for the balance of their minds that it can destroy those lessons learnt in bed, magnificent as they are!'

" 'Oh, but when love is reached through suffering, Memnoch, it has a power it can never gain through innocence.'

" 'Why do you say that? I don't believe it! I don't think you grasp it. Lord, listen to me.

There's one chance for this to be proven my way. One chance.'

" 'If you think for one moment you will interfere with my ministry and my sacrifice, if you think you can turn the tide of the vast forces already moving towards this event, then you are no more an angel, but a demon!' He said.

" 'I don't ask that,' I said. 'Go through with it. Minister, outrage them; be arrested, tried, and executed on the cross, yes, do all of it. But do it as a man!'

" 'I intend to.'

" 'No, you'll know the whole time you're God. I'm saying Forget that you are God!

Bury your divinity in the flesh the way it's been buried intermittently. Bury it, Lord, leaving yourself only your faith and your belief in Heaven, as if it had come to you through Revelation immense and undeniable.

" 'But bury in this desert the true certainty that you are God. Then, you'll suffer it all as a man suffers it. Then you'll know what this suffering is at its heart. Then will all the glory be stripped from agony! And you will see what men see when flesh is ripped, and torn, and blood flows, and it is your own. It's filth!'

" 'Memnoch, men die on Golgotha every day. What is important is that the Son of God knowingly dies on Golgotha in the body of a man.'

" 'Oh, no, no!' I cried out. 'This is disaster.'

"He seemed so sad suddenly that I thought he might weep for me. His lips were parched and cracked from the desert. His hands were so thin I could see the veins. He was not even a great specimen of a man, only an ordinary one, worn down by years of toil.

" 'Look at you,' I said, 'starving, thirsting, suffering, tired, lost in all the darknesses of life, the true spontaneous evils of nature, and dreaming of glory when you exit this body! What kind of lesson can such suffering be? And who will you leave with the guilt for your murder? What will become of all those mere mortals who denied you?

No, please, Lord, listen to me. If you won't leave your Divinity, then don't do it.

Change this plan.

" 'Don't die. Above all, don't be murdered! Don't hang from a tree like the God of the Wood in the Greek stories. Come with me into Jerusalem; and know women and wine and singing and dancing and the birth of little ones, and all the joy the human heart can contain and express!