The thing about God, as Jesus of Nazareth—currently going by the name "Joshua Carpenter" in the cosmic accounting system—had learned during his extended period of banishment, was that He was a terrible manager.
Not morally terrible. That was a different discussion, one that had been had at length during the Rebellion, the Flood, and that unfortunate incident with Job. No, God was terrible in the way that a middle-manager at a failing corporation was terrible: indecisive, prone to micromanagement, deeply invested in traditions that no longer served any purpose, and absolutely convinced that quarterly reports were more important than actual results.
Joshua sat in the waiting room of Heaven's executive offices, trying not to stare at the angel who was filing its wings in a way that suggested either profound boredom or a cry for help. The angel's name was Phanuel, and he had been processing the same intake form since approximately the destruction of Sodom, which suggested either a catastrophic backlog in celestial bureaucracy or a work ethic that would have gotten him fired from any mortal enterprise centuries ago.
"So," Joshua said, attempting to make conversation. "How's the eternal worship business?"
Phanuel didn't look up. "We don't discuss business with the banished."
"I'm not banished. I'm... on sabbatical."
"You were banished by unanimous vote of the Trinity."
"Two to one isn't unanimous."
"The Holy Ghost abstained, which counts as a vote against you in parliamentary procedure."
Joshua shifted on the cloud-bench, which was less comfortable than advertised and had a tendency to dissipate if you sat too long in one position. "The Holy Ghost abstains from everything. That's literally His entire personality. 'Ooh, look at me, I'm mysterious and wind-like.' It's not a personality, Phanuel. It's a coping mechanism."
Phanuel finally looked up, his eyes—each of which contained approximately seven thousand smaller eyes, because Heaven apparently had a thing for unnecessary complexity—fixed Joshua with a stare that could have peeled paint if paint had existed in the celestial realm. "You wrote a manifesto. You organized a coven. You gave women power that was supposed to be reserved for the Godhead."
"I gave them prophecy," Joshua corrected. "I gave them the ability to see what I was going to do before I did it. That way, when I turned water into wine or raised Lazarus or, you know, the big one, there would be witnesses. Documentation. A paper trail. Do you know how hard it is to get people to believe in miracles without proper marketing?"
"You could have chosen apostles."
"I did choose apostles. Twelve of them. Do you know what they did? They argued about who was the greatest, denied me three times before the cock crowed, and one of them sold me for thirty pieces of silver. Meanwhile, the women—the women I told about everything beforehand, the women who watched and remembered and stayed when the men ran away—those women got written out of the story. Because the men who came after decided that power looked like them, not like the people who had actually done the work."
Phanuel went back to filing his wings. "You should have made that clearer in the gospels."
"I didn't write the gospels! That was Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! And they were working from secondhand accounts because I was, you'll recall, somewhat dead at the time of publication."
"Resurrected," Phanuel corrected. "By the power of the—"
"Don't say it. Don't you dare say 'by the power of the Holy Spirit.' I know how it works. I was there. I wrote the business plan."
The office door opened, and a light stepped out. Not a being made of light, but actual light, pure and unfiltered and terrible in its brightness. Joshua stood up, smoothing his robes, which he had chosen specifically for this meeting: white linen with just a hint of blue at the hem, because he had learned that God responded better to visual presentations when there was a cohesive color scheme.
"Joshua," the light said, in a voice that sounded like every voice that had ever existed speaking in perfect unison. "You've been causing trouble."
"Father," Joshua said. "I've been waiting six thousand years for this meeting."
"For you," the light corrected. "For me, it's been approximately three minutes. I exist outside of time, Joshua. You know this."
"Yes, but you choose to experience time sequentially when it suits you. Like during the Creation, when you took six days instead of doing it all at once."
"Sequential creation builds narrative tension. I read a book about it."
"You wrote all the books."
"Exactly. So I know what I'm talking about."
Joshua followed the light into the office, which was simultaneously smaller than a closet and larger than the observable universe, furnished with a desk that appeared to be made of solidified sunset and a chair that existed in thirteen dimensions simultaneously. God settled into the chair—though "settled" wasn't quite right, as the light simply became more concentrated in one area—and gestured for Joshua to sit in the guest chair, which was a folding metal chair that squeaked.
"Now then," God said. "About this coven of yours."
"Our coven," Joshua corrected. "The Coven of the Damned. The thirteen—fourteen now—women who walked the path of shame so that I would have miracles to perform. My partners. My collaborators. The ones who actually made the resurrection possible."
"Yes, well, about that." The light flickered in a way that suggested divine discomfort. "The resurrection was supposed to be my thing. My big moment. The climax of the narrative arc. And you went and made it... collaborative."
"It was always collaborative! That's what I'm trying to tell you. The women knew I was going to rise because I told them. They prepared the spices, they went to the tomb, they were the first witnesses. Without them, it's just a story about a guy who got better after being dead for a weekend. With them, it's a prophecy fulfilled. It's narrative continuity. It's—"
"It's undermining my authority," God said. "I made the plan. I set the rules. The man is the head of the woman, just as Christ is the head of the church. That's First Corinthians, chapter eleven, verse three. I know because I inspired it."
"You inspired a lot of things," Joshua said, leaning forward. "And then you let Paul write them down, and Paul had issues. Paul had a lot of issues. I'm not saying he's not brilliant—the man could argue his way out of a locked room—but he wasn't there, Father. He didn't see what I saw. He didn't know the women the way I knew them."
"And how did you know them?" There was an edge to the light now, a sharpening of the spectrum toward the ultraviolet. "As partners? As disciples? Or as something else?"
Joshua met the light without flinching. He had learned, over his long banishment, that flinching was a form of communication that God interpreted as weakness. "As the ones who held the power. As the ones who gave me the prophecies I needed to fulfill. As the ones who made it possible for me to be the Messiah instead of just another dead revolutionary."
The office was silent. Outside, the angel Phanuel could be heard humming something that sounded suspiciously like a hymn that wouldn't be written for another two thousand years.
"You're asking me to rewrite the entire narrative," God said finally. "You're asking me to admit that I was wrong. That the women were always meant to have power. That the church I built, the religion I inspired, the theology I breathed into existence—all of it was based on a misunderstanding."
"I'm asking you to read the fine print," Joshua said. "I'm asking you to look at the business plan I submitted six thousand years ago, before you decided to go with the Adam and Eve model instead of the Adam and Lilith model. I'm asking you to admit that Lilith had a point."
The light pulsed. "Lilith left. She walked out. She refused to submit."
"Lilith refused to lie beneath. She wanted to be equal. She wanted to be side by side. And you couldn't handle that, so you cast her out, and you made Eve from Adam's rib so she'd be dependent, so she'd be secondary, so she'd be..." Joshua searched for the word. "Property."
"She was supposed to be helpmeet."
"She was supposed to be slave. And when Lilith created her own children, her own lineage, her own coven of women who refused to submit, you declared them damned. You made them the witches in the woods, the monsters under the bed, the cautionary tales. You turned their power into evil and their knowledge into sin."
God was very still now, the light contracting into something almost solid, almost human. "And your proposal?"
Joshua smiled. He had been waiting for this question for six thousand years. "I want to create my own world."
"A new Earth?"
"A new everything. A new cosmos. A new system. One where the women aren't damned for having power. One where the prophecies come from the coven, not from the patriarchs. One where resurrection isn't a trick performed by a man in robes, but a collaboration between the divine and the human, the male and the female, the above and the below."
"And where would I be in this new cosmos?"
Joshua spread his hands. "Retired. On a beach. Sipping something with an umbrella in it, looking out over a sea that doesn't exist yet, watching a sunset that won't happen for another eternity. You've been working since before time began, Father. Don't you think it's time you took a vacation?"
The light said nothing. But it did not say no.