How odd it seems – or perhaps not – that the very same individuals who think that Mohammed should not have featured in those newspaper cartoons also voted to have the image of Jesus Christ on our coins. They think it is blasphemous and gratuitously offensive for a Christian to draw and have published a cartoon of Mohammed, but they do not see anything unacceptable about their determination to thumb Christ’s face each time they pay for a newspaper, a cappuccino, a packet of cigarettes, or a tot of whisky.

Nor have they worked out yet that the use of these coins is not going to be restricted to Maltese Christians, and that they might end up jingling away in the pocket of others who do not share the same religion – Christ’s image and all.

I find myself in the unusual situation of agreeing with the former bishop of Gozo, Nikol Cauchi, who has written to a newspaper to point out that plastering the image of Christ on a coin is sacrilegious, and that nobody has bothered to wonder what Christ himself would have felt about the matter. Like Bishop Cauchi, I do not think that his reaction would have been: “Oh golly, what an honour! Now this really proves how Christian you are, you lovely, lovely Maltese people. For this, you will go straight to heaven.”

I sometimes wonder whether all those classes in Catholic doctrine and catechism, all that compulsive (rather than compulsory) presence at Sunday Mass, and the constant adherence to the letter of Catholic law – while at the same time brushing off the spirit of Christianity – have achieved anything at all.

Many Maltese seem to never have learnt the most fundamental lessons of the New Testament, which cover many aspects of life and decent behaviour. Instead, they stick doggedly to the basic instructions of the Ten Commandments (do not kill; do not steal; do not have sex with another man’s wife), and see that as sufficient.

They have not ventured towards the more sophisticated lessons on behaviour that are spelled out so clearly in the New Testament. Christ might not have bothered coming along at all; the New Testament might as well not have been written, for we are that quintessential oxymoron: Old Testament Christians.

Priests should get their act together and start teaching these things to adults, instead of banging on about the dreary matters that send people to sleep and puts them off going to church. The basic message running through all of Christ’s teachings is that it is not the thought that counts, but the action. Calling ourselves “Christian” does not make us Christians – it is Christian behaviour which does that.

Those who behave in a Christian way – but do not think of themselves as Christians – are more Christian than those who call themselves Christians and then behave like selfish, narrow-minded bigots. It is not the name that counts – it is the behaviour.

Do you remember the narrative in the Bible about the important pillar of society who made his temple donations by means of a chute, so that the money would make the maximum noise as he gave it away? And the old woman who gave a farthing and said nothing about it?

This is not just about the act of giving, and how the left hand should not know what the right hand is doing. It is a lesson about how showing off renders the boasted-about action completely without value in the eyes of God. So, if you are doing something good, and then you boast about it, you get no brownie points at all. If you do something “good” for the sole purpose of showing off, then you are in deep trouble.

Putting Christ’s image on our coins falls into the category of boasting and showing off. It does nothing to endear us to the spirit in the sky, but rather the opposite, and if we are not doing it to gain better passage to heaven, then why are we doing it at all? The answer is that we see the image of Christ on our coins as a badge of identity, which is further proof that we really do not understand what Christianity is about, nor have we learned its essential lessons.

Putting Christ on our coins is not Christian advocacy. It is not an avowal of religious belief. “By your actions shall they know you” was not an instruction to wear fish-symbol necklaces, decorate the car with “I am a Christian” bumper stickers, and slap the image of Christ on money-coins. It was uncomplicated advice: that it is a person’s

behaviour which proclaims his or her Christianity to the world, rather than forms of boasting and showing off, including cheap advertising methods like stamping the image on Christ on coins.

You are not a Christian just because you put a sticker on your car or an image on your coins that says you are one. You are a Christian because you behave like one. Boast about it, especially when it is an empty boast, and the spirit in the sky frowns in grave

disapproval.

* * *

As a nation, we have invariably been plagued by serious bad taste. We tend towards baroque emotions and a hysterical take on life and living, and this is reflected in every area of our life, including our decision to put a holy image on a coin of common currency. Above all, it is in the most terrible taste – very base.

We are largely aesthetically illiterate, and have received very poor instruction, or even none at all, on appropriate forms of behaviour. The results are all around us, in every sphere of life in Malta. It’s “Bad Taste Island”, with Christ on its coins. So yes, in a perverse way, the Christ on our coins really is

symbolic of what we are, though not in the way that most would wish it to be.

* * *

Christians are taught to treat the image of Christ with respect, but when you put that image on a coin you are guaranteeing that Christ’s face is going to end up in all sorts of places and situations that are completely inappropriate and even insulting to those who believe. As a child, I once helped my grandmother clear up the flat of an old woman who had died. I shook a drawer full of holy pictures into the bin, and she retrieved them. “What do you want to keep them for?” I asked her. “I don’t want them, but you shouldn’t put holy images in the dustbin,” she said.

So, her fear of germs in conflict with her reluctance to throw them into the bin, she sealed them into a plastic bag and shoved them into a remote cupboard. I spent the next few hours trying to work out how unwanted holy pictures were disposed of: were they given to non-Christians to throw away on behalf of Christians, or was there a

repository for homeless holy pictures somewhere? It taxed my 10-year-old imagination no end: was a holy picture just a piece of paper, or was the image on the paper more important that the paper itself?

Those who would never dream of throwing away a holy picture now deem it perfectly acceptable – and even highly desirable – to stick Christ in their purse and have lots of little images of him jangling around in cash registers all over the country, including the cash registers in pole-dancing clubs and seedy bars.

They see nothing odd or inappropriate in the fact that men will pay for their sex shows, their streetwalkers, their girlie magazines and their condoms with coins that bear Christ’s image.

Women will go to the supermarket to buy the household rations (yes, it’s still the women who do it) and shove a handful of “Christs” over the counter, in exchange for the milk, bread and potatoes. Recalcitrant teenagers will exchange their “Christs” for a joint on the weekend or a bottle of vodka on which to get blasted.

It is so inappropriate – it really is. You would not expect it from chest-thumping Christians-in-name.

* * *

Christianity is not a badge of identity. It is a code of behaviour. Malta is not “the most Christian member of the European Union”, as I have heard it boasted somewhere, just because we say we are. On the basis of how we speak, think and behave, I sometimes wonder how we lay claim to being Christian at all, still less “the most Christian in Europe”.

You are not the most Christian because you have the highest density of churches per square mile. To have Christ on our coins is yet another indication of how vacuous we are, and how silly and shallow our thinking. We are more concerned with being perceived as Christians than as behaving as such. By your actions shall they know you, indeed: as a cargo of empty vessels making a great deal of sound.