Proper Arguments from Silence

In Matthew and Luke, Jesus fasts for forty days in the desert.  To say, as Luke’s gospel does, “he afterward hungered,” (4:2, KJV) is surely an understatement; Jesus would certainly have been at the limits of physical endurance.  In other contexts, Jesus does not present fasting as a grueling experience.  In Matthew 6:16-18, he cautions against making a show of fasting’s discomforts.

The forty days, then, is obviously no ordinary experience.  We cannot know all of the aspects of the fast in the desert, but it is undeniable that Jesus was in a depleted state, or at least was presented as such to the devil.  In the ensuing series of temptations, Jesus responds to the devil’s manipulations of Scripture by presenting Scriptures of his own.  In effect, Jesus does not answer the devil at all; he confronts the devil with the fact that his evils are diagnosed and catalogued in writings that the devil cannot refute.

A Jesus who does not provide his own answers to the devil is consistent with a Jesus who has been disarmed of all but his true nature as the son of God.  The physically and—as our understanding of physiology would indicate—mentally depleted Jesus would have been reduced to a conduit of truth straight from the divine.  Jesus here framed as an individual does not present an individual answer to the devil.

Of great importance, then, is the fact that the devil is presenting arguments that are doomed beforehand to fail against responses of which the devil is fully aware and which he cannot refute.  The depleted Jesus, being in truth fully divine, is uniquely empowered by the very fact of being disempowered—and is honest enough to invoke truths that stand in any circumstance.

What is simultaneously revealed is the fact that the devil, for the purpose of acting out the scenes in the desert, does not really need Jesus there at all.  The devil is merely arguing with himself.  And in this scene is the essence of our tendency to present arguments that, in truth, do not relate truth because we have not been truthful about what we are trying to accomplish.  We say we are arguing with someone else—someone with whom we are trying to communicate and with whom we are trying to forge an understanding—but that is rarely the case.

Most often we are trying to convince, not the person with whom we are arguing, but our image of that person.  Or we are trying to convince ourselves of something that we have to rehearse so often that it seems to assume an existence outside of ourselves.  (And it probably need not be said that we are particularly good at constructing communal truths that are not true.)

Jesus knew a better way to argue, but it is not always easy to spot in the gospels.  Though it is repeatedly said therein that Jesus was silent before his accusers, a critical observer might well remark that Jesus displays a distinctly verbose silence.  What is crucial is the extent to which Jesus offers non-responses, not quite silence.  To the elders, chief priests, and scribes Jesus says, “Ye say that I am” (Luke 22:70), and to Pilate he says, “Thou sayest it” (Luke 23:3, KJV).

Here Jesus is not arguing, as we understand it.  He is confronting his audience with reality and challenging them with what they know but would rather deny.  “Tell truth and shame the devil” is good advice from Shakespeare, but far too often arguing for the truth in order to shame the devil leads to behavior that delights the devil.

Only One Tree is Said to Be Guarded

Two trees are spoken of in the story of the Garden of Eden, the “tree of life” (KJV) and the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” (KJV). It is only the tree of life that is said, in the end, to be guarded by the flaming sword (Gen 3:24).

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil might not even have been confined, by its kind or by its offspring, to the garden. The contamination of that tree might be with us still, and might have spread to all Creation, or at least have spread to our communal estimation of all that has been created. There is no need to assume a Fall that changed the intrinsic nature of humanity.

Indeed, the nefarious quality of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil might have consisted merely of it being imperfect in its provision for the first couple’s needs. One might be reminded of Jesus’ cursing of the unproductive fig tree (Mat 21:19; Mar 11:14), or even of Jesus’ parable of the fig tree given a year’s probation to become productive (Luke 13:6-9), or yet again of the fact that the coverings of fig leaves were not sufficient to shield Adam and Eve (Gen 3:7).

And, indeed, it might be wondered if the prohibited tree’s fruit was the first nutritionally imperfect food consumed by the first couple, starting an inexorable progress to death from that very day (as alluded to in Genesis 2:17). Or it might in addition be thought that the experience of eating from the tree was the first unsatisfactory experience for Adam and Eve, leading them to level judgments against Creation, against themselves, against each other, and eventually against God.

The knowledge of good and evil was in any event a curse, and it scarcely seems reasonable not to follow that curse through to Jesus’ warnings against pronouncing judgment.

What it Means to be Born and Re-born

A traveler may be going down a path, either a physical path or a path defined by his intentions.  It is possible that he might be thrown off that path by some force or circumstance arising from an intersecting direction.  Both the traveler’s original path and the direction of the intervening factor can—indeed, inevitably will—be viewed as outworkings of chains of cause and effect.  If the identity of the traveler is linked to his physical form, then the origin of his new travel will be understood to be his first direction, now complicated by an alteration, and the causal chain that forms the history of the intervening factor will be reduced to a subset of the traveler’s history of cause and effect.  The traveler follows, in the usual analysis, a bent path, even if his new direction is indistinguishable from the path of an overwhelming intervening factor, and even though, as is indisputable, the intervening factor is the product of a causal chain just as inescapable and infinitely regressive as that which attends to the traveler.

This is because, in this scenario, the essence of the traveler is linked to his physical form.

Another example is not so simple.  Assuming no complicating physical differences between two peoples, an excruciating situation could still be forced on a child whose heritage was contested.  For the sake of consideration, a situation can be envisioned in which a child of some manner of colonists was raised by natives, and only later discovered the fact.  Which heritage would be his?  What if he was legitimately adopted by natives as an infant and then appropriated in early childhood by a third family, this one again of colonists?  To which culture might he attribute his earliest recollections of human interaction, to say nothing of imprints established even earlier?

This second scenario is more complicated and more difficult because it deals with psychological matters.  Or then again, it might be said that its complications and difficulties arise only from misplaced emphases on parentage or heritage—when more worthy considerations ought to be in view.  In any event, the fact remains that evaluation of concepts as they proceed from the mundane to the sublime by necessity requires abandonment of mundane mental constraints.

A chief example of shedding such constraints is that required in properly understanding Jesus’ insistence on being born again/born from above.  The simplistic notion of a one-time life-changing experience (for which Christianity conscripts Jesus as a ritualistic blood-washer) simply has no basis in the Gospels.  The Gospels speak repeatedly of parentage and heritage as mutable concepts, and as human beings—rather than as once-born or twice-born—as being sons or children of whatever personal metaphor will further the purposes of a lesson.

To return to the first scenario, that of the diverted traveler, and to attempt to transmute it into the purposes of the Gospels, is merely to see the futility of such an attempt.  Our souls are not tied to physical reality, and physical analogies to spiritual truths are limited at best—and they are at their worst as the truths become more crucial.  We are, in the spiritual realm, beset by every force and every possibility from every side at every moment—if it even makes sense to use physical analogies.

If we choose to appeal to the teachings of Jesus, then the scenario of the diverted traveler only applies in light of how Jesus applied terms of parentage and heritage.  If we embrace the faithfulness of Abraham, then the attributes and history of Abraham become the character and story of our souls, and so on for every instance we face among innumerable possible instances.  We are redirected by forces, for good or ill, and our heritages and our inheritances are those of the new paths, as though we had never traveled any other.