Preordained: Gabriel Jesus scores against Leeds. His early return after injury is somewhat miraculous. Photo: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
Easter is upon us.
Likewise — as predicted by the drafting committee that wrote the Bible all those years ago — the second coming of Jesus.
Not a bad call on the part of the authors.
A couple of days’ variation in two millennia and some change is accurate in anybody’s book: full marks to them, along with the player himself, and the Arsenal Football Club medical team, who have nursed Jesus back to full fitness.
One wonders what odds the bookmakers would have been offering on Jesus — not the Nazarene, but the Brazilian, Gabriel Fernando de Jesus — returning to the Arsenal side, and his goalscoring ways, in time for Easter?
By all accounts, the medial collateral ligament injury Jesus picked up last November while on World Cup duty should have kept the former Manchester City goal poacher off the field for longer.
Back then, Jesus was going through more than his fair share of trials.
Fortunately, it was not the flagellation, crucifixion and eventual spearing his Palestinian namesake suffered, but a goal drought for club and country that lasted 18 games ended in spectacular fashion with a brace against Leeds at the Emirates on 1 April.
Then came the injury while on country duty in November, an operation in December and what was expected to be a six-to-eight-month layoff while Jesus recovered and regained his match fitness.
Doctoring and determination aside, there appears to be an element of the miraculous — the hidden hand of the Almighty perhaps — about Jesus’s early return to doing God’s work and banging in the goals for the Gunners.
Divine intervention.
There’s been something spiritual — a sense of faith, of belief — about Arsenal’s almost evangelical football this season, a feeling that this team is headed for a destiny chosen for them by the gods of the game.
The sense that this season’s Premiership title may well have been preordained to be Arsenal’s has been there since Jesus first arrived, with a goal against Nuremberg 90 seconds after taking to the field.
That feeling has persisted despite his goal drought and his injury, with his fellow disciples Bukayo Saka, Eddie Nketiah and Reiss Nelson picking up his cross and carrying it with a skill and determination that seemed to have come from above.
Even the potential Judas Iscariot of the side, the former red-card specialist Granit Xhaka, has sought — and found — redemption this season, another chapter in a gospel that has been writing itself since Arteta arrived back at Arsenal in 2019.
Jesus wasn’t on the field in the 98th minute against Bournemouth, when Nelson volleyed that clearance that fell to him from a corner in the 98th minute to take three points against Bournemouth.
God was, though. From the moment Nelson’s left foot connected with the ball, it was going in.
That sense prevailed throughout the absence of Jesus, and gained strength, as the first signs that he was about to return began to manifest themselves.
The signs were all there, revealed as clearly as they were to John of Patmos, back in the day.
This time around, a tad fortuitously, the harbingers did not include the plague, or floods, or even the electoral decline of the ANC.
Rather, the second coming was heralded in by Jesus’s return to training, first alone, and then with the squad, followed by the cameos against Sporting in the Europa League; the minutes against Crystal Palace in the league, before the March international break.
The son of man was set to return.
The second coming of Jesus — two days before his 26th birthday — was, not unexpectedly, something of a revelation.
From the opening seconds it was clear that Jesus was back for real.
There was no sign of having spent a footballing three days and three nights in a cave after Mikel Arteta rolled away the boulder, managerially speaking, and gave him a full 60 minutes; no visible stigmata or whipping scars as Jesus slotted back into the ranks of the disciples, effortlessly.
Hungry, relentless roaming across the face of the opposition box; mad link-up play with Gabriel Martinelli and Leandro Trossard; menacing, slewing runs into the area that terrorised the defence and drew not the hand of God, but the foot of Leeds United right back Luke Ayling — and a penalty — in the 35th minute.
The red and white army in the stands became a somewhat unorthodox heavenly host and One Nil to the Arsenal took the place of the seven trumpets sounded by seven angels as keeper Illan Meslier went left and Jesus calmly stroked the ball into the right-hand side of the net.
The redeemer had returned.