Following the Path of Expiation

It is unfortunately quite telling that much of Christianity cannot state with authority why Abel's sacrifice was looked upon with favor, and Cain's was not.  It is true, of course, that the language of Genesis is somewhat more effusive about Abel's sacrifice than about Cain's.  Abel "brought of the firstlings of the flock and the fat thereof," while it is stated simply that "Cain brought of the fruit of the ground."  On the other hand, Cain as the progeny of cursed Adam would not be thought necessarily more successful than his father at wrenching a crop from the cursed ground festooned with thorns and thistles--"fruit of the ground" might have been precious indeed.  And this is all before Noah's blessing (curse?) from God to the effect that the animals would know fear and dread of humanity.  Abel's unsuspecting flock cannot be thought to have been particularly hard to manage.

And so the commentators are led often to admit that Cain's bloodless sacrifice should have been perfectly acceptable (especially insofar as the commentators--with indifferent warrant--are reflecting the Pentateuch's rules back onto the start of Genesis.)  Some theory must be devised, then, why Cain's offering was not accepted, and this usually boils down to some notion that Cain's disposition about the whole thing was not correct (an especially important consideration when we strive to remember that the two brothers were not in a zero-sum contest.)

A key to a wholesome understanding of the matter can come indeed from looking at how sacrifice as an institution and a practice appears in the rest of the Old Testament.  One observation should rear up above all others, if the element of sacrifice is to be viewed properly as bearing on the ministry of Jesus.  This is the observation to the effect that the solemnity and (presumably) the efficacy of a sacrifice is largely independent of its size or its cost.  As the Scriptures progress, an element develops in which the magnitude of a sacrifice is taken as emblematic of its value, and yet the most solemn of the sacrificial proceedings (think of the scapegoat) involve the fewest victims.  There has been no shortage, of course, of Jewish and Christian thinkers who have lamented the tendency of sacrifices to become celebrations of the givers' piety or generosity--when of course such things are beside the point.

We must consider, then, that sacrifice is properly about one of only two things when sacrifice is in its true forms.  Sacrifice is about either thanksgiving or expiation.  If "thanksgiving" is the matter at hand in the "Cain and Abel" story, then there is no defensible reason to contend that Cain's offering was inferior to Abel's.  No serious commentator will contend that Cain should have bartered with Abel for some "firstlings" to slaughter--much thanks that would be, for Cain to give in appreciation for the hard-wrung produce of the soil.

But what about expiation?  Other than labored contrivances on the part of some Christians to contend that Cain was somehow expected to know that the fruitful-vine Christ of the Gospels was to be truly foreshadowed only by the shedding of blood, there is precious little abroad in Christianity as regards examination of the tenuous decades after the Fall.  Many children's-book representations of Adam and Eve and their First Family are essentially indistinguishable from the last century's museum dioramas of Primitive Man or Stone Age Man, with father and adolescent sons lugging around spears, and with mother and destined-for-motherhood daughters hunching over the fire.  In the (usually explicitly anti-evolutionist) Christian representations, the father can be called Adam, and the mother can be called Eve, and yet the same cast of timeless routine overshadows both the religious and the humanist representations.

Yet these are people (if Genesis is really taken seriously) who have undergone great traumas--traumas all the greater in that these people's sufferings have been attended by the imposition upon them of tendencies to the greatest of moral failings.  This may seem an impious explanation of the Genesis-generations' evil, but there is no escaping the fact (again, if Genesis is really taken seriously) that the sovereignty of God has overshadowed the moral decline of humanity: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman . . . . thy desire shall be to thy husband . . . he shall rule over thee . . . ," and all because the man "hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife."  It is no wonder that Paul has to wrestle in Romans with the idea of people being "given over" to evil tendencies they possessed already.

All of this was raw and fresh to the generations after the Fall, and they--unlike us at so great a distance--were in a position to remember (or have related to them first-hand) the very words and the very settings in which humanity first came to be.  As I have written before, the expectation must be that neither Abel's offering nor Cain's was bloodless.  Abel must have seen innocent creatures trodden under his own feet and those of his complacent flock, and Cain must have seen innocent creatures writhing in agony when falling under his earth-splitting implements.  This would never have happened in their father's Eden-tending years, and in those blessed years Adam was doing his duty to care for Creation.  Every agony of every beast was to be lain at the feet of Adam and his progeny.

This, then, is the magnitude and the scope of the question of expiation in the "Cain and Abel" sacrifice story.  Humanity had failed God and Creation and each other, and the picture is presented to us of the first generations of humanity presenting themselves with the picture of expiation.  Abel takes unsuspecting and presumably unalarmed creatures, and then he takes them out of the misery of their existence (including disease and old age) to which Abel's sin and those of all humanity had condemned those blameless creatures.  Much as Jesus tells us that divorce has its roots in Moses' troubling transmutation of God's desires, so also might we consider that the less-than-instantaneous blood-letting death of Temple sacrifice victims was a post-Genesis artifice.  Surely no one imagines that Abraham intended to slit Isaac's throat and let him bleed out--neither need we consider that Abel made his flock's deaths unnecessarily painful (as we remember that the Noahide abstention from blood is still in the future.)

The only reasonable explanation of the acceptability of Abel's offering is found when considering the sacrifices to be expiatory.  Abel's disposition was correct, and Cain's was not.  This is made explicit in Cain's infamous question of whether or not he was his brother's keeper--the "offering story" is just a backdrop.  Our earth is not an ordered system in which we can obtain without guilt material blessings that arise without suffering.  The "fruit of the ground" is not ours for the taking--and neither can we believe that our existences from moment to moment are leveraged upon other than the suffering of other creatures.  Ultimately, the only logical route of our following the path of expiation is through the teaching of Jesus to the effect that our very lives are the sacrifices.

A Basis to the Light Metaphor

A valid understanding of the ideas of repentance and forgiveness in Jesus' teachings can only be approached when one begins to get a grasp on the scriptural foundations of those teachings.  Those foundations are not what they seem to be when--as is conventional--the earlier parts of the Bible are viewed under the premises of Common-Era theories about the Gospels.

A good example of this is the set of quaint notions abroad in some evangelical circles about how the Protestant notions of salvation are foreshadowed (or even plainly represented) in the Jewish Scriptures.  Not merely the "saving faith" of Abraham is discovered by such evangelicals in Genesis, but also the framework of "faith alone" soteriology understood in terms of the Temple that is in turn understood as a pre-figuration (and effective substitute) for Jesus.  After all, Adam and Eve pass through (sort of) cherubim placed at the gate of Eden, and the flaming sword (perhaps "The Word"?) marks the distinction between their moral quandary and their lost blessed state.  This is all rather vague, but it can serve as some sort of answer to the "What about people before Jesus (or even before Abraham)?" question.

This set of conventional notions can obscure some rather salient observations about what exactly was the effect of the Curse that is supposed to follow the Fall, especially in terms of Adam (who seems to be the one who really matters.)  While it is true that he is sent out from Eden to scratch a sweaty living from the cursed soil, and while it is true that he returns to the dust, it is not at all the case that the larger pre-Flood narrative supports an Adam-story of suffering consistent with the doom pronounced at "The Fall."

Adam lives nearly until the Flood.  It would be a grotesque connivance to imagine that he is not fully immersed in the Decline of Civilization described between Eden and Noah.  And if that decline involved a decadent attachment to the fleshly, it is hard to imagine that Adam would not have soon thrown off his pitiable state of young father in wretched need.  Patriarchs in that milieu were little short of kings, if not gods.  He lived to see many generations, and would have been elevated presumably to the status of revered father (as was imperious Noah in his turn--being the father of all who would live thereafter.)

Moreover, since disease was presumably just arising and the pristine state of created humanity was presumably just beginning to wane, Adam could be destined to a life vigorous as well as long.  Given that the only malady described then in full force was the dread prospect of childbirth, women would have gotten the worst of it.  We are not told how long Eve lived, but if it was not divinely-prohibited incest for brothers to have necessarily mated with sisters, then the prospect must arise of a widowed--perhaps serially widowed--Adam imposing his perennial potency upon generations-worth of his perennially-youthful and gloriously sculpted daughters and grand-daughters.  The prospect is head-spinning, but scarcely less so than the inescapable conclusion that Adam's sons spent themselves thus upon generations of sisters and daughters and nieces.

Even the horrific loss of Abel (which is described in Genesis only as it grieves Eve) would have dimmed over time, not merely by the passing of years but by the passing of apparently multitudinous other offspring (victims of the pre-Flood violence.)  Adam would have seen many of his descendants die, and he would have been the father or grandfather or great-grandfather of many of them--and, if he is not to escape without warrant from the condemnation of the depraved hearts of pre-Flood humanity, he would scarcely have cared.  Cursed Adam was cursed to a lifetime of reverential luxury and fleshly indulgence--at least, that would be the understanding derived from the totality of the history of his time.

And then there is Cain.  Murderous Cain--or, that is to say, the Cain who we now call murderous--was cursed such that what he planted would fail him, and that he would be a wanderer, and that forever the earth would call out that Cain had sodden the soil with the blood of his brother.  So what does Cain do?  The murderous farmer who scattered Abel's blood proceeds to plant the blood of countless others--and get away with it.  Such was the effectual function of cities in the ancient world, and the first thing Cain is described as doing is building a city (that is, after he plants his seed in a sister of his.)

Cities of the ancient world (of which such cities before the Flood would have to be considered worst cases) were essentially death-farms.  The masses were bred only to serve the general cause, were worked to death, and were kept in conditions of deprivation and disease such as to make early death the expectation.  A person might hope to live to adulthood, to experience a few years of blighted marriage and child-bearing, and to see as few kin as possible die of disease or be driven to death by task-masters.  This might not be a fair appreciation of all cities of the ancient world (though the ostensible logic and comfort of religion would have been an indifferent benefit but surely a valuable type of crowd-control), but it must be remembered that the generations before the Flood are described as particularly heinous.  There may have been riotous revelry and buying and selling and marrying and giving in marriage, but the less-seen of society's members would have borne the continual cost.

And so this is the curse of Cain--expressed most fully in his being a curse to others.  The pat notions of the life-stories of people of "Bible times" usually fail scrutiny.  If we are to find lessons in the ancient scriptures to which Jesus referred, and if we are to find lessons in how Jesus uses such scriptures, then we must view them in Jesus' terms.  For example, there is evil aplenty in Genesis, but Jesus' use of such stories does not always fit the conventions of Christianity--and the very basic elements of Jesus' teachings do not always fit the conventions of Christianity.

When Jesus brings up the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, and compares them favorably to persons of his own day, he is trampling on the yes-no salvation-damnation conceptuality of Christianity.  Then again, when Jesus describes favorably the later inhabitants of Nineveh humbling themselves (as though the very "work" of humiliation would bring salvation and crying "mightily unto God" would bring mercy), he is trampling on the "faith alone" conceit of Protestantism.  In the teachings of Jesus, there are degrees of moral status ("You are not far from the kingdom of God"), and there is the prospect of moments of looking to the light of salvation that makes it plain that such looking--both in its cause and its character--can be as ineffable as the concepts of God that conventional Christianity tries vainly to codify.

If Cain is to be damned because he kills his brother, or because he expresses not remorse for the deed but rather dread of the consequences, then such a dire fate for him is indeed imaginable--but that is not the same as to say that he is cursed effectively by God in the Genesis narrative.  Cain seems to be cursed scarcely at all.  Adam, of course, can be seen to have lost a blessed state of which we can hardly imagine, but it is not the loss of that blessing that is made much of in the post-Fall curses--it is the harsh life that is to happen to him.  As I described above, that harsh life would not seem to be at all necessitated by the out-workings of the Adam-era story.

Of course, Adam and Cain might have suffered horribly within themselves in those crucial moments (and, of course, given the theme of this blog, I am going to emphasize the idea of moments.)  This is where Jesus comes in.  The commentators of today (and the theologians of every age) will emphasize salvation as a process (which becomes especially intriguing when the theologians are of the predestined-to-salvation, saved-by-faith-alone type, who are condemned to writhe about under the realization that SOMETHING must be done by the person saved.)

Jesus, however, has little to say about process.  People hear something (or hear something correctly), or they don't.  People see something, or they don't.  Moreover, if the emphasis in the Gospels about "light" is to be taken seriously, then it is not the question of "hearing" or "seeing" that controls, but rather the far more ephemeral notion of attention--perhaps better phrased as "looking."  Only the practically-instantaneous phenomenon of "looking" would make sense in terms of Jesus comparing himself to the snake raised on a pole in the desert.

I have written recently about the phenomenon of light as an important metaphor in Jesus' teachings.  Jesus tells us that we must embrace the light rather than the dark, but of course I am using the term "embrace" awkwardly here.  We must seek the light.  We must look to the light.  We must turn every aspect of ourselves and our lives to the light.  What can help in all this is realizing that the very concept of attention rolls right over any notions of "faith" versus "works."  Attention either happens to us, or it is a happening in which we are involved that occurs too quickly for volition to control it--which is the same thing.

Adam and Cain--and we--have moments that are critical to our eternal fates.  Both Jews and Christians know this, and both Jews and Christians are capable of creating narratives of such moments and their consequences.  I know I am limiting the contributions of Jews here to the "Old Testament," but as far as "The Bible" goes, neither testament spends any time on the narratives--such as proselytizers or missionaries might use--of those crucial moments as they might pertain to Adam or Cain.  We get stories of curses that are in some senses only formally curses.

What might have involved Adam or Cain looking to the light?  Episodes?  Moments?  Flashes of attention that one might describe as "moments" only by including the pre- and post-flash instants?  If the phenomena of attention are what really cause us to turn our lives to the light, can they be described as moments other than by convention?  When Jesus describes the word as being snatched up by Satan when it falls in the form of seed by the wayside, is what Jesus describes not really a narrative of cause that surrounds a supra-narrative, ultimately indescribable occurrence of inattention?

Here is where the debate about "faith" and "works" fails, and the theme of "the kingdom of God" rises to the fore.  Something as small as a grain of sand here or there, tumbling about as Adam or Cain tried more or less successfully to obtain a crop, might have been the catalyst of a saving reflection for either one of them.  Or might an impossibly brief moment of attention to the right thing have been linked for either of them with the tumbling of such a grain?  In the conceptualities of Jesus, the impossibly small can engulf the impossibly huge--the mustard seed can outweigh the universe.

When it comes to turning the elements of our lives to the light, which I have described as though such elements were irregular objects orbiting a light source (the "irregularity" allowing for more surface in the light than the dark), the instantaneous and arguably involuntary moments of looking to the light can serve to achieve such orientations with the expenditure neither of time nor of work--those moments defy "faith" versus "works."  Rather, all that we can hope to do is make ourselves open to such opportunities for attention-paying.

This is the sort of notion of admittance to the kingdom of heaven that makes sense in the teachings of Jesus.  It is not for nothing that he speaks of the growth of the mustard seed, or of the spreading of the yeast in the dough, or of the man who finds a pearl of great price.  Dimensions are of no matter in the kingdom of heaven, and it is to be expected that dimensions of time or effort make no sense in terms of any "process" of salvation.   Our created nature makes us ever liable to "processes" (the things we do without thinking or without bidding), processes that are neither good nor bad--though even that is open to question.  We automatically find affinity with people like us, though Jesus will deride that as being merely "like the heathen."  On the other hand, we automatically find ourselves concerned about our children's needs, and Jesus finds here an apt metaphor for God's care for us as his children.

Occasionally we will find ourselves repenting for something we have done.  Occasionally we will find ourselves asking for forgiveness for something we have done.  Jesus telling us to seek the light is Jesus telling us to gravitate toward such occasions.  Thereby we can make ourselves less far from the kingdom of God.

An Approach to the Light Metaphor

As I wrote in the last post but one:

"Adam is, in the crucial sense of a moral scenario, hoisted into a suspension between Heaven and Earth.  He is not one with the rest of Creation, and he is not one with God."

As I wrote in the last post:

"Perhaps the best way to understand our proper orientation to light--to good--is derived from the metaphor's mundane derivation.  What we understand of 'the world' (or more inclusively, 'the universe') is--if taken as a binary, light-versus-dark metaphor--a question of how much of the surfaces of irregular objects is exposed to light."

The greatest marvel of we who consider ourselves thinking beings is the way that we can conceptualize that which does not exist, or that which exists only in potentiality.  Indeed, that is what it is to "think," if we are to address ourselves to the question of what we must do in our lives.  It would be foolish, of course, for us to imagine that our abilities to conceptualize were independent of our concrete experiences (that is, that we are other than in a suspension between Heaven and Earth), but it would be equally foolish for us to imagine that our relationships to the infinite were pursued properly by our imputing infinite qualities to a divine that we view as embodying every good quality we can imagine.

As I wrote in the last post but one:

"We want to think of God as a constellation of ineffable qualities--but that is really no different than thinking of God as a creature, insofar as all of our thoughts will ultimately assign words like 'ineffable' to the edges of our understanding."

We do not worship God when we call him the epitome of every good concept we can name.  We worship thereby an amalgamation of our imaginations.  Instead, we must recognize that God must be approached not as an "other" (really a creature) of inestimable named qualities, but rather as the great worthy "Other" about whom the concept of qualities must be subsumed into a greater, undefinable meta-quality.  In Jesus' parlance, this is the "light" that we approach when we should, and avoid when we should not.

This is where the "light" metaphor of the Gospels really comes in.  We are creatures capable of conceptualization, and therefore we are creatures capable of assuming orientations toward all we can conceive around us.  If assuming orientations in our thought-schemes is to be called "work" (and therefore shackled to some idea of moral achievement), it must be admitted that this "work" is potentially as undemanding as the "work" (which I will leave to strict Calvinists to sort out) of obtaining salvation through "faith" rather than "works."  Moreover, when Jesus tells us to become like the little children, we are presented with a similar open question of whether this is a "work," or rather a ceasing from the unwholesome "works" that might be thought to characterize what we call "adulthood."  And then there is the question of whether it is a "work" to--in accordance with John 3--yield to Jesus' contention that we know not, in any abiding sense, where we come from--and must surrender accordingly our attachments to our earthly concept-schemes.

But if we can choose our orientations as we are suspended--Adam-like--in a conceptual tension between Heaven and Earth, and if we can choose our orientations in a thought-existence independent of time and space, what then but real evil would prevent us from turning more and more facets of ourselves to light--to good?  This is the question of the Gospels, not the question of whether we can be good enough, or do good enough, or create enough good.

Metaphors will, of course, fail in the end.  My conceptualization of the present matter is that of us being required to present all we can of ourselves and our lives (really the same thing) as a collection of anvils against which we invite the hammers of the light.  This metaphor is as weak as my understanding, but then the paucity of my understanding was never in doubt.  One might wonder just what might be collected upon the surface of such "anvils," awaiting moment-by-moment the blinding hammer of God--but then we might as well wonder whether we can ever hope to understand just what it is that make us "us."

Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus speaks of the wisdom of embracing the beneficial experience-type of being broken on the "stone," rather than trying to escape and risking being ground to powder under it.  Would that be any different than the notion of seeking to be pounded by the light from above, rather than being found out by that light in the end?

A Preface to the Light Metaphor

The conceptuality of good and evil that controls in the Gospels is the idea of light and dark.  That a person is to be oriented to the light is expressed in the Gospels in precisely such terms--one is to go to the light and to avoid the dark.

Light and dark are not quantified in the Gospels, even so much as in general terms.  Light and dark are matters of orientation.  This matters in itself in the way we are to understand our proper aspirations.  If the "light" metaphor is allowed to control, then we will not be distracted or tempted by notions such as being good, doing good, or--God forbid--creating good.

Perhaps the best way to understand our proper orientation to light--to good--is derived from the metaphor's mundane derivation.  What we understand of "the world" (or more inclusively, "the universe") is--if taken as a binary, light-versus-dark metaphor--a question of how much of the surfaces of irregular objects is exposed to light.

On Constellations of Ineffable Qualities

Adam, as first described to us, is not in the blessed state that the denominations would have him to be.  That Adam could have been "alone" in the scene presented to us is a statement to the effect that his relationship to God was sub-optimal--long before the "Fall."  The notion that God intended Eve for Adam all along--that is to say, that God's intent so constituted a gracious bestowal rather than a gracious remediation--is belied by the very text.  Adam is at first offered the "helpmeetship" of the animal world, indicating that Adam's alone-ness is a twist to the flow of Creation.  Perhaps the animal world in some wholesome form or another will satisfy Adam's need for a balm for his loneliness.  If God's offer of "helpmeetship" in the animal world is merely a set-up for the appearance of Eve, then (as some cynics have presented in lurid terms), the animal world's companionship offer to Adam is just some sort of "Just So" story.

Of course, the commentators are free to suggest that the animal-companionship story is just meant to impart this or that lesson to Adam or to us, but the steady progression of logic will dictate to us that any part of the Bible can become thereby what the commentators will have it to be.  No--(as I have described before) the Adam story is beset with unresolved tension from the very first moment it is recounted to us.

Adam is, in the crucial sense of a moral scenario, hoisted into a suspension between Heaven and Earth.  He is not one with the rest of Creation, and he is not one with God.  Time--for a man at that point effectively immortal--is meaningless, and space--for a man with all his creaturely resources (and even the physical visitation of God) near at hand--is meaningless as well.  Adam's state is that of all who reside in the flesh, regardless of particular moral state.

Such is the state of humanity--that state is merely illuminated for us in greater or lesser degree, case by case.  Cursed Cain has been rejected by the earth, yet over that very earth he can claw himself into the quasi-divine status of patriarchy and--through his founding of a city--the divinely-mandated (or at least divinely-tolerated) status of a king.  Such at least is the murky and maddening realm of the "Sons of God."  Again, one might wonder what "space" meant to a Cain who inhabited an earth that he knew reviled him, and one might wonder that "time" meant to a Cain who feared for every moment he was alive and who yet looked out at the prospect of his earthly years as a punishment greater than he could bear.

It would be scarcely worth the effort to draw out a multitude of Bible characters who would fit this pattern.  At least they all might pale next to a twinned recounting of Judas--casting away the coins that might buy him comfort on the earth, and knotting a rope so as to spare himself yet one more moment of a lifetime of remorse--and Jesus--casting away the effectual lordship of Creation's time and space to assume humanity's place before the Throne of Judgment.  There, in the moments of the scriptures' recounting, do they hang between Heaven and Earth, and between the fetters of every binary dimension of Creation's bounds.

A different type of understanding of our theme is to be found in the mission-sendings of Jesus.  First the Twelve, and then the Seventy, are sent out by Jesus.  He tells them most particularly what to take and not to take, and what to do and not to do, but strikingly Jesus does not tell the pairs of disciples which towns of Lost Israel to visit, or which route to take, or how long to stay, or how to know they have stayed long enough.  The tasks are plain enough, but the elements of time and space are trodden under their heels like the dust.  No matter how many towns they visit, Jesus tells them (and no matter how many devils they best) they will never reach the end before the timely End.

Only in this vein can it make sense that Jesus, upon a triumphant mission's return, declares that he saw Satan fall from Heaven.  The business of Jesus' disciples is outside of time and space--though still they are creatures of the earth.  Enoch and Samuel and Elijah and the resurrected Lazarus minister not merely in their lives, but in how they experience--and endure--the phenomena of a divine meta-Creation that is the inescapable expectation of wonderings about a God who defies all description.

All of this becomes then particularly important when trying to understand the ministry and the sacrifice of Jesus.  If a proper understanding of humanity's plight--dating back to Adam at first--can be attained, then one can begin at least to understand the ministry of Jesus.  Jesus' agonized cry on the Cross is not a puzzle to be solved, or a theory of ensoulment or incarnation to be woven, or a prayer (among all those in the Psalms or in the inspirations of the faithful) that just happens to make it seem as though Jesus' sacrifice is for naught.  Jesus' incarnation is, at the Cross, his experience of humanity's flesh to the full.  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is entirely consonant with our expectations of Adam's first independent thought--such is the experience of the flesh.

Here we are confronted with the difficulty imposed over the centuries by a Christianity that seized quickly upon a perverse insistence that the Savior who triumphed over the sinfulness of human flesh did so by showing himself superior to--and thus ever distinct from--human flesh.  Rather, Jesus even in the thoughts coursing through his human brain saw a meta-Creation of malleable time and space, a meta-Creation in which his scrabbling and whimpering fellow humans were the very lights of Heaven.  The humanity to which Jesus presented himself--the humanity Jesus described in unvarnished terms to their very faces--is a humanity not of the earth, but of an Adamic suspension between Heaven and Earth, and of an Adamic tension against any set notions of time and space.  This description of Adam's seed seems an exalted one, but Jesus does not stint in proclaiming humanity responsible for living up to it.

What is lamentable is the tendency, out of a misplaced humility, for Christianity to describe humankind as squirming, earth-bound vermin, and then to draw the character of Jesus into the vacuum thereby  presented--assigning to Jesus the divine-ish quality of transcending Heaven and Earth, and being the lord of time and space.  Fleshly indeed was Jesus in the Incarnation, but he holds fleshly humanity accountable for not transcending Heaven and Earth, and for not being lords of time and space.  Did not Job at his worst hold forth nonetheless against his Creator in disputation, and did not Job hold in his hands and in his heart the means by which to decide a cosmic clash between God and Satan?  What piety is represented truly by crediting to Jesus as Savior the feat of behaving as he has every right to expect humanity to behave?

Indeed, Jesus is Savior in that he is ultimately as un-examinable as God himself.  Not even our attempts--shot through with self-effacing piety though they may be--to grasp the works or character of Jesus in all the wonder of the Gospels can approach even guessing at the nature of Jesus in his full divinity.  That is why (to use the most famous example) it is folly to conjecture about how the divinity of Jesus can be squared with his agonized cry on the Cross.  He came to be fully human.  That is how humans act.

Understanding what can be grasped about Jesus is perhaps seen more easily in a truly remarkable episode toward the end of the Gospel of John:

"Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say?  Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.  Father, glorify thy name.  Then came a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again" (12:27-28, KJV).

This statement from above can of course be taken as a ratification of Jesus' prayer, but indeed it is a curious ratification.  Jesus is talking about the very Passion that constitutes the heart of Christianity, the agonies of which the denominations extol and extrapolate (with inexhaustible creativity) to no end.  Even taken in its rawest sense, the fleshly torment of Jesus is scarcely imaginable.  And yet the voice from Heaven takes the resultant glorification of God as but one episode among others.

Here one might almost imagine a youth football coach carefully listing his own player-son's achievements in an balanced recitation of the team's season highlights.  Not everyone in the crowd around Jesus could hear it clearly, but the saying, "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again" was intoned apparently with every care to be taken soberly.  The glories of God--shared fully by Jesus as fully God--are beyond imagining.  Any imaginings we might have about Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God can be of value, but God is not to be understood as ratifying any of our imaginings as having weight against his inestimable glory.

Indeed, Jesus did not need to be told by God that the glories of the divine are beyond our human wonderings, and Jesus did not need to be told anything of what those glories are.  And then Jesus says to the crowd about the pronouncement from above, "This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes."

We must be reminded continually that merely being greater than Creation (or greater even than any postulated demons or such, inescapably having been created by God at some point) is not what makes God great.  We ourselves are failed godlings, if we are to credit Jesus' admonitions about what we could do if only we had faith, or if we are to credit Jesus as honorable in his demands of us.  We are the children of Adam, and God had hopes for Adam as great as his love for Adam.

Unfortunately we fall often into the mistaken belief that reckoning on the glory of God can be pursued through listing his good qualities--although of course God is the origin of qualities themselves.  We call God the lord of time--and then our minds slither into thinking of God striding over Time as though it were a self-existent phenomenon to be conquered.  Our thoughts of Creation can flicker at one moment toward God's ineffable authorship, and at the next moment our God is just an ancient deity wrestling with a pre-existing or self-existing Chaos.

We want to think of God as a constellation of ineffable qualities--but that it really no different than thinking of God as a creature, insofar as all of our thoughts will ultimately assign words like "ineffable" to the edges of our understanding.  Horrible indeed are the Christian ministries that will lead young people into vapid notions that one must "study Scripture" to "learn about God."  Of course, what is being "learned about" is some denomination's theology.  Sad to say, such denominations are often satisfied to assign--effectually--ideas such as "ineffable" to outright creaturely things.  Time and again preachers will (incorrectly) describe marriage as "God's plan," and will encourage spouses to explore and mediate upon and rejoice in continual discoveries about the partners who God has created for them--and indeed it is true that we can never learn all about persons or humanity in general.

Indeed, a fellow human being is a constellation of ineffable qualities.  Upon realizing this, however, it is to be hoped that we will be brought up short to realize that treating God as a constellation of ineffable qualities is really to just make God a super-human.  Pivotal to understanding this is the prior understanding that humans in the parlance and logic of the Gospels are creatures of God meant to act as representatives of God.  We are meant to bridge Heaven and Earth, and to stand astride time and space.  Jesus shows us how this is to be done--though of course we fail miserably.

In the gracious mercy of God, however, we are not hopeless.  We become hopeless when we decide that our miserable failure can be taken to mean that we can hold Jesus to have slipped us some sacerdotal token by which salvation is to be achieved.  Our only real hope, however, is in the God who cannot be imagined, shown to us in the Gospels by the Jesus who cannot be imagined.  On the other hand, the Jesus of the Gospels cannot but be taken by us as a limited figure--such is the unavoidable implication of the limitations of our intellect.

Jesus himself tells us that we will do greater things than he did.  Of course, he is talking about the Jesus we can consider.  The Jesus who is God is beyond all our considerations, however well intended (or profitable to our meditations) they may be.

Life is the Last Thing

The emphasis of this blog is meant to be experiential.  "Roused, readied, reaped" is different from "roused, ripened, reaped" in that the former addresses the quite intensely experiential possibility that the arcs of existence are cut short.  Our lives and our experiences are not characterized properly in terms of idealized completions--indeed, it is the phenomenon of things cut short, of things falling under the knife of judgment (for, indeed, divine judgment is latent in every conceptualization of our relationship to God) that characterizes properly the course of our experiences.

What was purposed about us--or about anything--before the first moment of existence is of course beyond us.  Every start is a fresh start, at least to us, and it is of little profit to wonder about the purposes of God pre-existent to us.  Jesus, after all, tells us we must become like the little children--he does not tell us that we must become like some miniscule portion of humanity's youth that happened to escaped being damned to hell from time immemorial.  All we can know, all we can experience, of the arcs of our lives is the times of readying and the times of reaping--leading possibly up to some number of intense expectations of our final reaping.

This necessary emphasis on our declines and on our falls is in accord with the underlying logic of Jesus' presentation of earthly reality.  "Take up your cross and follow me" as a command can only by fervent group-think be twisted by the denominations into "We must die to sin" and can thereby plan and anticipate full charted-out lives as lords of an earthly realm that God will instruct to blossom and bear fruit for us.  This doctrinal masterpiece of convenient delusion goes all the way back Christianity's mistaken view of the Noahide ark and its aftermath.

The famous post-Flood passage, Genesis 8:22, has, "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" (KJV).  Notable in its absence from this verse (which is only by implication included in the attendant direct statements from God) is any mention of rain or other supply of water.  Certainly there is no lack in Earth's history (or in the Bible) of episodes in which the applicability of "seedtime and harvest" was brought to nothing.

Christianity's misunderstanding (which is rooted in aversion to the unsparing statements of Jesus) of the Flood episode is truly fascinating.  The denominations look to a post-Deluge prospect--one might say a promise--of burgeoning wholesome life for humanity if only God's commands will be followed and (later) if only humanity will partake of the blessings obtained by blessing God's people.  Of course, to be fair, it must be conceded that Christianity squares itself eventually, in the course of working through the Bible, with the idea that the faith to which Jesus attests presumes the intractable failings of humanity only to be remedied by the Messiah's self-sacrifice.

The real problem with Christianity's misunderstanding of the Flood aftermath is of two parts.  The first has to do with the general procession of events and divine pronouncements to Noah.  First comes the slaughter and burning of the clean animals on the altar.  Then comes God's promise not to curse the earth again because of humanity--though innumerable creatures are later to suffer horribly in vast areas precisely because humanity has earned this or that local or regional curse (or reverberation of the original curse.)  Then it is said that humanity will become the fear and dread of all creatures, who will now become potential prey to humanity--such predation having to be multiplied to the extent to which blood-containing elements will be discarded.

As a culmination of this grim procession, the humanity that must ever seek God's forgiveness is told--not that murderers ought to be safeguarded like Cain so as to extend their opportunities for repentance--but rather that they are to be executed.  And as to the beasts--cursed with fear and dread; cursed originally because of humanity's sin, not theirs; doomed to be humanity's prey; doomed to the agonies of throat-slitting so as to secure humanity's separation from "blood"--the very beasts are liable to be executed as murderers for killing human beings.

And lastly in the procession of events, we are given the idyllic imagery--reproduced endlessly in children's books and posters and the like--of the rainbow, God's promise to never again destroy "you and every living creature of all flesh"--by a flood.  Inescapably, the rain-sparkled interlude of Noah and his sons and their wives in a world ready to be filled with life is not what we might have it to be.  It is a festival of death.

There is no overarching panorama of humanity's history understandable, as Christianity would have it, as a multitude of God's gracious promises being at first grasped and treasured by the faithful, and then rotting in their hands as they fall into the depravity--Herod and the Roman Empire and all that--which must preceded the advent of the Savior King.  The covenant with Noah, the promise to Abraham, the triumph of Jacob, the glory of Joseph, the testimony of Moses, the victories of David--all these (though with their flaws and tragedies) would seem to bespeak a life to the people of God (and, through them, to all humanity) that only gradually gave way to death and decay.  This is not so.

Humanity's experience since the origin-stories of Genesis is an experience associated with life only insofar as life has struggled up from a substrate of death.  This is the logic of Jesus--despite how frantically the world-wallowing mass of Christians look to the earth as a place in which it is well to be heaped upon by bounty after bounty--and to slough off into "charity" the excess.  The conservatives among Christianity who bemoan "the world's" "culture of death" are largely unmoved by Jesus' continual attentions to a world of death.

Jesus' judgment of the world is a as place of over-ripe and rank attachment to life when eternal life is found in reckoning that the time for harvest is always here, the fields "are white already to harvest."  In Jesus' world the fig is either fruitful or deserving to whither, in Jesus' world there is no burying one's father, no putting a hand to the plow and looking back.  In Jesus' world every night is the one in which a person's life is to be required.  Jesus surrounds us with death and tells us that our eternal life rests on whether or not we will give up our lives and everything that means life to us.  And then he tells us that he wishes us to have joy.

The proper notion of the true source of joy goes all the way back to the first chapters of Genesis, and here we will confront the matter as it applies to Noah.  This deals with the second part, as I alluded to above, of the problem of Christianity's misunderstanding of the Flood aftermath.  Along with "the general procession of events and divine pronouncements" in the story of Noah is the very idea of the character of Noah himself.  Noah is said to have found favor with God.  The KJV tries to employ the word "grace" (for indeed, who could find favor with God?), though to be forced to say "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God" is to give the game away.

So Noah found favor with God.  Noah obeyed God.  Noah built the ark and sailed in it with his family and the animals.  Then this man who had found favor with God proceeded essentially single-handedly, through his weakness and anger, to invent racism, slavery, genocide, and the persecution of the innocent.  Of course, the burgeoning and multiplying evils that post-dated Noah's curse on Ham's blameless son (and his blameless progeny) would have arisen by other means, but nonetheless we are confronted by such evils being attributed originally to a man who had found favor with God.  One must be necessarily reminded of David, such a favorite of God for his virtues who committed such infamies.

Where is joy to be found in all this?  Are we not really saying that the "readying" of innumerable moments and episodes of humanity's life are actually premonitions and progressions toward death?  To try to state the matter precisely, the life--individually and communally--of a humanity that is beset with sin must necessarily be a life characterized either by death or by willful delusion.  The culture of Jesus is a culture of death, because death awaits us at every moment and will remain poised against us even if the life that we visualize--either in length or in character--comes eventually to pass.

And yet, where is joy to be found in all this?  What joy is there in life, if life's chief attribute is the fact that it is to be taken away?  The implication of Jesus' ministry is that there really is no life--all of Creation has ever felt the knife above Noah's altar.  Humanity's experience is either of death, or of judgment unto death.  The experience of salvation is to be found in the realization of the ubiquity of death, and in the irrelevance of "death" as a fearful thing when it has already happened to us.  What, on the other hand, has not happened to us is each awaiting moment, a potential instant of virtual defiance of the phantom of death, a potential instant of giving oneself to any opportunity to strive for one good thing in one good moment.  It is not even necessary to succeed,

Jesus tells the parable of the talents, in which some of the servants turn a trust from their master into a tidy profit, and one of the servants--fearing the master's severity--hides away the talent entrusted to him.  When the master returns, this last servant gives the talent back and receives a great punishment for his failure to profit the master.  Of course, only certain potentialities for investment are dealt with in the parable.  One might wonder what would have happened to a servant who turned one talent into ten, if instead the investment had gone sour and lost all.  Would the master have said, "Hey, at least you took a shot"?

Many Christians have misused this parable, taking the profit-making as some sort of ratification of a speculative economy (though the modern version of potential failure will include bankruptcy protections or the public-backed maneuver of limited liability, not being cast into the outer darkness or some such.)  The part of servants making a profit is really tangential to the proverb (if not getting cast into the outer darkness is the main point.)  The timid servant is told--even after he bad-mouths the master--that he might at least have deposited the talent with the bankers and collected the interest.  That is--and this cannot be over-emphasized--the servant could have acted in submission to the master's will.

This is really the point about "being in God's favor" and "being a profitable servant": Such things bespeak life and what a person might hope for in life, and are not bad in themselves.  Such things become bad, however, when the person involved does not--or will not--understand that life is not something that comes to an end.  For sinful humanity, life does not ever begin (or one might say that it was over at the beginning--that is what to be "sinful" means in its most profound implication.)  In the ministry of Jesus, "life" as a concept is a negotiation with the prospect of death.  The language of this negotiation is submission to the will of God.  This submission is understood as an acceptance of death, as a giving up of life.  When this submission is perverted into a notion of making things happen in life, then in effect God's pronouncement that all deserve death is thrown back in his face.

A person does not gain salvation, or even necessarily move toward salvation, by performing or achieving things in that trap called "life."  Achieving things for God results in two things, as Jesus illustrates in the parables.  One, a person capable in small things is given charge of large things.  Two, a person entrusted with much is held liable for much--and has arguably gained nothing on the eternal scale.  An inspiring life-story can be built on such endeavors, but "life" means nothing to the equation of being saved.  The "lifeless" servant who goes only to the bankers can fare better in the long run than a pious achiever who absorbs an adherence to life.

Noah could have clutched the robe to himself and sobbed in his tent at the shame he helped bring upon himself.  Perhaps his life would have been over, as he understood being the patriarch--and what of it?  David could have thrown himself unbidden at the feet of Uriah and lost thereby both the respect of his soldiers and also his crown, even his life--and what of it?  In other moods and other moments, one might well grant them, both Noah and David would have withstood almost anything in direct submission to the will of God.  But for them--and for us--the greatest snare is thinking that one is alive, when the very premise of life, as Jesus will tell us, is that life is the last thing that one can claim, and the last thing that one should want.

The Essential Tension of the Gospels

The study of the Gospels must endure a perpetual crisis.  This crisis consists of a tension animating the development of any thesis in the Gospels, when by virtual definition no such thesis can admit of "development"--what are being described in the Gospels are not ideas being developed, but rather ideas being displayed as the world's accretions upon them are removed.

The business of displaying the theses of the Gospels is bedeviled by the fact that each stage of removal of such accretions is open to competing contentions about what is happening--and stage upon stage of such a process can lead to fatigue in any originally neat premise.  Things, unsurprisingly, can tend to get jumbled up.

Things in the Gospels can get so jumbled up that it is tempting to imagine the Gospels--or at least major strains in them--as satires, so flagrantly do they seem to entertain risks in apparently invited interpretations.  We will examine this in an episode from chapter four of John.

In John chapter four Jesus travels from Judea to Galilee and back again.  The trip is occasioned apparently by Jesus' assessment of the progress of the Baptist's parallel ministry--a progress that seems to be described in varying terms by the various gospels, though such disparities are peripheral to us here.  What matters here is that John's gospel describes Jesus leaving for Galilee.

John also describes Jesus as being constrained to make that trip through Samaria--a debatable contention.  Jesus the Jew does not merely travel through Samaria, but particularly through the area where he will encounter a well of Jacob--a well that is uncontested in this gospel as part of the patrimony of the Samaritans.

A Samaritan woman approaches, and Jesus says to her, "Give me to drink."  The woman replies, "How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria?"  (The notion of "to ask" seems a bit strained here, especially as the simplest reading of the text would have the unaccompanied, unprotected woman alone with Jesus.  How easily do interpretive scenarios arise when the encroaching presuppositions of the world make their appearance.)

The notion abroad here, of course, is that Jews would properly have no "dealings" with Samaritans--though that does not seem to have dissuaded the disciples from entering that "city of Samaria" to buy food.  Jesus and the woman enter then on the tantalizing, though unenlightening (to her, at least) discussion of the "living water," a discussion in which Jesus leaves uncontested the Samaritan woman's claim to "our father Jacob."

Jesus then brings up the embarrassing topic of the woman's marital status, to which the woman replies with, "I perceive that thou art a prophet," and brings up the question about whether worship of God ought to happen at the Samaritan Mount Gerizim or at the Jewish Temple Mount.  The commentators, of course, are quick to note that the woman seems to want to change the subject, though they are less rapid in noting (if at all) that Jesus' preceding command, "Go, call thy husband, and come hither," seems to have no necessary connection to her yet previous entreaty, "Sir, give me this water."

Jesus and the woman are talking largely at odds with each other, but the more fundamental realization is that the text is persistently talking at odds with itself.  This is, in a certain view, unsurprising.  As I described above, the theses developed in the Gospels are not so much developed as thrust out into the open.  Jesus' discussion with the Samaritan woman is leading up to his declaration:

"Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father."  And Jesus says, "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him."

All the talk about so-and-so's well and such-and-such mountain is ultimately to no point.  Moreover, Jesus' contention about how worship ought to be does not rely on the development of a new and more embracing theology.  Jesus says that, "the hour cometh, and now is"--and, as his references elsewhere to the Patriarchs reveal about their faith, it is plain that "the hour" has always been.

In the text between the verse of "the hour cometh" and the verse of "the Father seeketh such" is Jesus' statement, "Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews."  Again, while this verse seems of great portent, like the rest of this section it involves not the development of a thesis, but rather a peeling-away of accretions.  "Salvation is of the Jews" is essentially a tautology, but it gets at an essential underlying point.

It was not the original intention of God that there be a people called "the Jews."  "Israel" might be the best conceptuality of the people of God, though indeed this seems linked inextricably with the patriarchy of Abraham.  And while Abraham was yet Abram, the headship of the family to go to the Promised Land was apparently not Abram, but his father Terah, who unaccountably settled in Haran.  This same Terah apparently fathered Sarai, from which circumstance arises the unsettling marriage of Abram to his half-sister.

"The Jews," then, came tumbling out of centuries of turmoil that saw most of their brethren--whether the children of Jacob, or of Abraham, or even of Terah--separated and admixed with other peoples (though after a few centuries of turmoil it would have been largely unaccountable who was mixing with whom.)  Hence the part-Jewish, part-Assyrian, perhaps part-something-else Samaritans.  Of course, if the cousins produced by Shem, Ham, and Japheth had married each other instead of their siblings, then the whole idea of some favored "line" of descent even from Noah (and therefore from all of humanity) would be ludicrous.

Emerging from all of this were the competing conceptualities of patriarchy versus matrilineal descent (that is, the child is a Jew if the mother is a Jew.)  Of course, reliance on matrilineal descent is faulty if no Jewish women are available (and "descent" is understood biologically), and indeed we see the outline of this problem in Abraham's insistence that Isaac marry one of Abraham's "own" people--that is, that he marry one of the pagan offspring of the tarrying Terah.  Understood in the larger context, the Samaritan Woman at the Well is a virtual royal figure in the world-encompassing conceptuality of a "people" of God.  It is only in this self-same context that we can truly understand the implication of "salvation is of the Jews": Judaism, in the conceptuality presented by Jesus, has preserved the essential nucleus of the salvific message of revelation.

Jews, on the other hand, share with all people the chance (if that is the word) to merit individually Jesus' assessment as Children of the Devil.  "Salvation is of the Jews" seems to mean something besides itself, but that is not really so when it understood that to be a Jew can mean everything, and it can mean nothing.

The progress of the Baptist's ministry can mean everything, and it can mean nothing.  The choice of Samaria as a place for Jesus to talk with a non-Jewish woman can mean everything, and it can mean nothing.  Nearly every aspect of the story can be shown open to some quibble or to some contention that it cancels out some other aspect of the story.  This is the essential tension between the presentation of a story that can seem nothing more than a collection of insubstantial errors and half-truths, and a story meant to give a glimpse at a frustratingly vaporous sensation of truth against which all of the objective world is but a jumble of insubstantial errors and half-truths.