"Zombie Jesus Day"?

A friend of mine, no doubt thinking he was being quite amusing, wished me a happy "Zombie Jesus Day" today. That threw me for a bit of a loop, truth be told. Last I checked, Jesus was not interested in our brains. He wants our hearts and our souls. And I am fairly certain that conquering death is not the same thing as being undead.

I understand that everything nowadays seems to have zombies added in order to make it more entertaining. Hate Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen? Try reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is a parody of Austen's work by someone with far too much time on his hands, erm, I mean Seth Grahame-Smith. (To be fair to that gentleman, I have yet to voluntarily read any book that has zombies, so I have no firsthand knowledge on how creative or entertaining his adaptation might be. I shall stick with the original novel, thank you very much.)

I have no interest in zombies. I do not watch zombie movies, read zombie books, or doodle pictures of people who have their skin sloughing off of them as they decay. Granted, I did inadvertently teach the kidlets to play a slow-moving game of tag, by the name of Zombies, where they chase each other while mumbling, "Grah. Braaaains." In my defense, I was tired of them running around the house and trying to tag one another, so this was my concession to them wanting to play tag in a manner that was safe for inside our house. But other than that, I just do not get the whole concept of why zombies are interesting, exciting, entertaining, or whatever they are supposed to be.

I am still perplexed as to how I should have responded to my friend this morning. I am sure he did not mean to offend, yet I found myself highly offended that the most important (in my mind) Christian holiday was being lumped together with gory B-movies and treated just as poorly as a mocked Jane Austen novel. Jesus was sent to this earth specifically to sacrifice himself for us. Even if you don't believe this to be true, millions of people on this planet do. A little respect goes a long way.

Of course, the snarky side of me wants to comment that it's too bad Jesus was not indeed a zombie. Some of the loudest objectors (that I have ever heard) to anything Christian are those who are quite intelligent. A zombified Jesus might indeed love to have their "braaaains" on His side. However, I'm still glad that's not the way it works.

Edit: After seeing the sheer volume of people actually locating this blog entry because of typing various forms of "Zombie Jesus Day" into search engines, I did a quick google search myself. Apparently the friend of mine was not being original. He was actually referencing something that plenty of people have "celebrated." Here's the link to one of the sites I found: http://www.zombiejesusday.org/ This does not make it any easier for me to digest, but at least it explains why my blog-read-only-by-two-people suddenly got a bunch of hits for this topic. Go figure.