We Killed Him Once.
A psych-ward comedy bit and the question the Second Coming can’t answer.
THE SECOND COMING
A psych-ward comedy bit and the question the Second Coming can’t answer.
We Killed Him Once.
A friend of mine sends me stand-up clips the way other people send recipes.
The last one was Dan Docimo, taped at a club in Chicago, and it’s been rattling around my head for weeks. He says he was talking to a friend who works in a psych ward. She told him how often patients come in believing they are Jesus.
Not once in a while. Constantly. All over the world, ward after ward, there’s usually a guy or two who are certain they are Christ.
Docimo does the math out loud. If the number is that big, he figures, “one of them is probably just Jesus, because that was, like, a big thing for him, is that he was going to come back.”
Then he springs the trap.
Anyone who walks outside today and says he is the returned Christ gets walked straight into a locked ward. “There is actually not a step in the process where they make sure you aren’t Jesus,” he says. “They really just assume that you’re wrong.”
So he wonders how many times Jesus has already come back and died in an institution, anonymous, on a vinyl mattress. His guess is dozens. “I bet Jesus has been administered more Thorazine than anyone in human history.”
I laughed.
Then I stopped because the joke rests on a real problem, and that problem doesn’t have a comfortable answer.
Start with the part you can look up, the part Docimo got right. The delusion is real and not rare.
A psychologist named Milton Rokeach spent two years on exactly this. In 1959, he gathered three men at a Michigan state hospital, each convinced he was Jesus Christ, and put them in a room together to see what would happen when one unshakable identity met two more just like it (Rokeach, 1964).
They didn’t back down. Each man simply explained the other two away.
Rokeach later wrote that he had had no right, even in the name of science, to play God in those men’s lives. The apology reads like its own small sermon.
The numbers back the frequency. Among people living with schizophrenia, religious grandiose delusions are common, and the content runs to the obvious headliners: a saint, a prophet, the devil, Jesus himself (Murray, Cunningham, & Price, 2012).
There is even a version that visits the supposedly healthy. Doctors at a Jerusalem psychiatric center described tourists with no history at all who arrive in the city and come apart, a few of them wrapping themselves in hotel bedsheets and heading out to preach (Bar-El et al., 2000).
Honesty requires a footnote.
Other psychiatrists pushed back hard, arguing that nearly everyone affected was already ill before they landed (Kalian & Witztum, 2000), and the condition appears in no diagnostic manual.
The fight doesn’t soften the picture. It sharpens it. Even the experts can’t draw a clean line between the man touched by God and the man whose brain has turned on him.
And the drug is real. Docimo names Thorazine, and Thorazine is not a punchline he invented.
Chlorpromazine, sold in America under that brand from 1954, was the first antipsychotic (Ban, 2007). It did to the asylums what nothing before it had managed. The population of American state mental hospitals stood north of half a million in the mid-1950s, then fell, year after year, as the drug spread and the wards emptied (American Chemical Society, 2005).
So, the instrument in the joke is the actual instrument. If Christ showed up tomorrow and said so on a street corner, the medication to quiet him has been sitting on a shelf for seventy years.
Here is where the comedian’s bit turns into a question for the people in the pews. I count myself one of them, on my better Sundays.
I run the sound booth at a country church outside Sioux Falls. I’m a skeptical agnostic Lutheran, which means I take the prophets seriously and the prophecy-chart salesmen not at all.
So let me ask the thing the joke keeps circling back to. What did we actually say the return would look like?
The tradition I was raised in answers loudly. The Augsburg Confession, the document that spells out what Lutherans confess, says that Christ will return visibly at the end of everything to judge the living and the dead (Melanchthon, 1530/2024).
The scriptures behind it promise the same scale. Matthew compares the coming of lightning that flashes across the sky with the Son of Man arriving on the clouds in glory (Matthew 24:27, 30). After the ascension, two figures tell the disciples he will come back the same way they just watched him go (Acts 1:11).
Visible. Glorious. Unmistakable.
Nobody could confuse that with a man in a paper gown.
That’s the expectation. Now set it next to the record of the first time.
Because the same texts that promise the blazing return also tell us, plainly, how the man went over when he was actually here.
Isaiah, in the passage the church reads as his portrait, says he was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, from whom people hid their faces (Isaiah 53:3).
Mark says his own family went out to grab him, convinced he was out of his mind (Mark 3:21).
John records the crowd’s verdict in words a triage nurse would recognize: “He has a demon, and is insane; why listen to him?” (John 10:20).
In the first century, they called it demonic possession. We have a different word now, a different building, too, and a drug to go with it.
So how would you tell the difference?
Read the two pictures side by side. The return we advertise is lightning across the sky. The reception we actually gave him was an insanity charge, and a family was trying to walk him home before he embarrassed them.
That’s why the joke lands. It forces together the two things the doctrine keeps in separate rooms.
If the real Christ came back unannounced and unarmed, no army, no clouds, just a man insisting on who he was, every system we’ve built would read him as a patient. The diagnosis would be sincere. The paperwork would be in order. And there’s no step in the process, as the comedian says, where anybody checks.
Dostoevsky saw this coming a century and a half ago.
In the parable his characters tell, Christ comes back to Seville during the Inquisition. The people know him instantly. The Grand Inquisitor has him arrested by nightfall (Dostoevsky, 1880/1990).
The old churchman visits the cell and explains, almost kindly, that the church has finished its work and no longer needs him. That he’s coming back now would only get in the way.
The institution built in his name turns out to have no use for the man himself.
He listens. He says nothing. He kisses the old man and is let out into the dark.
I’m not telling you any of this to mock anyone’s faith.
The dig is at the institution, not the believer, and the difference matters to me because I’m still in the building on Sunday mornings. My skepticism has never pointed at God. It points at what we keep doing with God: the boxes we build and label and then defend with whatever the century puts in our hands. A sword in one era. A syringe in the next.
The hope that the world gets set right someday is not the part I’m questioning.
The machinery we’ve assembled to recognize the one who would set things right is the part that should worry anyone who reads the Gospels closely.
Docimo has one more move, and it’s the one I keep coming back to.
He asks the crowd if they’re excited about Jesus coming back. A few of them cheer. “We’re gonna whoop his ass,” he says. “It’s gonna be a good rematch. I think we’ll get him again. We didn’t even have guns last time.”
It’s a filthy joke. It is also the most honest reading of the Gospels I’ve ever heard from a comedy stage.
We did get him the first time. The crowd waving palms on Sunday was calling for a cross by Friday. The texts don’t hide that. They put it at the center.
So I’ll leave the question where the comedian left it. On the vinyl mattress. In the locked ward. With the man saying the one thing nobody in the building is built to hear.
We already killed him once.
We aren’t the people who would know him if he came back.
We’re the people who assume you’re wrong.
Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.