A thought experiment for Christmas Day.
Imagine a rule quietly slipped into canon law. No bishop, no cardinal, no Pope may be older than Jesus was when he was crucified. Thirty three, give or take the usual theological hedging. At thirty four you retire. Hand back the mitre, clear your pigeonhole, stop explaining God to other adults.
The Church would implode overnight. Two millennia of accumulated gravitas replaced by what is essentially an ornate student union. Bishops with flawless skin and absolute certainty. Cardinals who have never buried a parent, watched ideals erode, or learned that reality does not care about theory. Synods that conclude by lunchtime because nobody has yet discovered nuance.
Peter would not qualify. Augustine would be told to stop reminiscing. Aquinas would be dismissed for excessive footnotes. Experience would be heresy. Wisdom would be disqualifying.
And yet, inconveniently, it was enough for Jesus.
Jesus was an idealistic revolutionary precisely because he was young. Not naive, but unencumbered. He had not spent decades trimming beliefs to fit institutions, or mistaking longevity for wisdom. Youth gave him the one thing every revolutionary needs and every institution fears - the willingness to take ideas seriously. Literally. To follow them to their logical end without checking whether they were administratively convenient.
Older men ask whether something is practical. Younger ones ask whether it is right. Jesus did not run cost benefit analyses on compassion, or worry about stakeholder buy in for mercy. He spoke as if truth mattered more than survival. Which, inconveniently, it did.
Now imagine Jesus growing old.
Not crucified. Not martyred. Just ageing. The sermons become longer and more conditional. Parables acquire footnotes. He starts prefacing moral absolutes with “of course, we must be realistic”. The poor still matter, obviously, but they must help themselves. Charity is fine, but only if it does not encourage dependency.
By his fifties he has concerns. Not hateful ones. Sensible ones. About order. About cohesion. About borders. About how loving thy neighbour has been taken rather literally. Compassion remains important, but it must be balanced with personal responsibility and the rule of law.
By sixty he has a grudging admiration for the Romans. They keep the roads in good order. They understand authority. They get things done. Crucifixion is regrettable, of course, but deterrence matters. One cannot simply overturn tables without an impact assessment.
The Sermon on the Mount becomes a keynote speech. Blessed are the meek, yes, but let us not romanticise meekness. The meek can be terribly disruptive if left unchecked. "Common sense" theology.
This is why Jesus did not get old.
He was dead by his early thirties. No office, no book deal, no committee work. He preached, disrupted the establishment, frightened the authorities, unsettled his followers, and was executed by the state. In Christian terms, that was apparently sufficient to alter the moral direction of Western civilisation. But not, it seems, enough to run a diocesan finance committee.
If Jesus applied today, HR would show him the door. No qualifications. No management experience. No pension plan. Too young. Lacks gravitas. Come back after forty years in the Curia and we might talk.
The Church venerates a man who never grew old, never governed, never accumulated power, and was gone by his early thirties. It then insists on being run by men whose entire formation consists of ageing gracefully inside an institution designed to preserve itself. Poverty becomes symbolic. Sacrifice becomes optional. Youth becomes a probationary inconvenience.
Idealism tends to curdle with age, not because people become wiser, but because they become invested. Careers form. Status accumulates. Risks acquire consequences. Radical edges are sanded down until what remains is respectable, manageable, and safe. Institutions then call this maturity.
“If it was good enough for Jesus” is precisely the argument institutions cannot tolerate. Because if you take it seriously, authority stops being something you accumulate and starts being something you burn through. Briefly. Publicly. At some personal cost.
Much safer to canonise the sacrifice, then construct a system that ensures nobody ever has to repeat it. Revolutions are inspiring, but continuity pays the bills.
Still, one cannot deny the appeal. Short papacies. Fast conclaves. No gerontocratic politics. A conveyor belt of intense, messianic careers followed by enforced silence.
Speak truth. Disrupt power. Exit young. Leave a mess behind for others to argue about for centuries.
Which, come to think of it, is about as Christ like as it gets.
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