2012-05-23
Explanation
This comic takes a theological concept about God's relationship to time and applies it in an irreverent direction. In the first panel, a priest explains that God exists beyond human conceptions of time: a thousand epochs might feel like a fleeting moment to God, and two seconds of a human life might feel like uncountable ages. This is a standard theological description of divine timelessness.
The second panel cuts to "Nazareth, about 2,000 years ago," where Mary is in bed asking "Was that it?" and a glowing presence (God) responds, "Mary, baby, that was like 50 years to me." The joke applies the priest's theological explanation about God's warped sense of time to the conception of Jesus, implying that what was a very brief experience for Mary was subjectively an extremely long time for God. It is a classic SMBC move: taking a serious theological idea and finding its most embarrassing logical implication.