Our Present Situation Part Three

I must try to describe the present state of mankind (employing, as I indicated in the previous post, the four canonical Gospels.)  In so doing I will draw few particulars from the Gospel of John.  The reason for this is not because John avoids the subject of our situation; on the contrary, John is about little other than that subject, and John is best viewed in its entireties.

By “entireties,” I refer to the two-part nature of John, often presented in text as poetry and prose.  Each of those parts has its own progression.  For now, I can only say that John suspends before us the barest essential elements of our state.

On the predicament of humanity, as voiced by Jesus:

I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.

They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.  (John 17:14-16, KJV)

Given that the very next verse has Jesus ask, “Sanctify them through thy truth,” we can take it that being “not of the world”—believer or no—is at best aspirational.

“Aspirational” is probably the best term to describe the Gospel of John’s take on humanity’s attempts to understand this world or the next.  John’s pages can scarcely contain Jesus’ amusement when a new disciple, the open-hearted Nathanael, exclaims,

Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel.

Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou?  (1:49-50)

A more somber note attends the disciples’ declaration, mere hours before Jesus’ death:

Now we are sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.

Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe?

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone.  (16:30-32)

So this is the situation of humanity, suspended between heaven and earth, comprehending neither:

If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?  (3:12)

That is what this blog is all about:  Roused, Readied, Reaped—with the initial, jarring element both first and, usually, foremost—because each of our thoughts and experiences has a beginning—a rousing—and never a crisp one.  We are dragged or prodded through life, stumbling along—moment by moment, episode by episode—if we are lucky enough to get to our feet.  What is more, and of even greater import, is the inescapable fact that our deeper selves assert themselves with a speed and a scope we cannot hope with our conscious will to encompass.

I have attempted to describe this before:

We are sinful because our fleshly—and I mean fleshly—natures issue forth behaviors and utterances that our conscious selves can scarcely own.  Jesus is at great pains to declare that sinful behavior comes from the heart and not the mind….The very concept of religion is meaningless in the teachings of Jesus, because the foundation of the teachings of Jesus is the fleshly, the (for want of a better word at present) “infra-cognitive”—that is, that which precedes and undergirds all concepts.

And also:

The ephemeral yet ever-poised primal nature of the soul exerts itself more often than we can consciously acknowledge; indeed it is that very self of which our pitiful consciousness pretends to be master—a pretense that sends us on the quest for wisdom beyond understanding when yet we have decided that what we find will subject itself to our capacity, as we imagine, to understand.

The approach I am using to the situation of humanity differs, I contend, (and as I wrote last time) from that used by the author of Hebrews.  Hebrews goes about explaining the inexplicable—a favorite undertaking of theologians, knowing they always have a backstop in some other inexplicable notion.  God knows of Jesus’ perfection; the inspired writers and teachers (perhaps even of Jesus’ “other sheep”) know of Jesus’ perfection—who does that leave?  What do we know of perfection?  What do we make of Hebrews and the perfecting of the Savior?

What application is there to Hebrews’ contention—attested nowhere else, excisable from Scripture without scar or seam—about what supposedly happened “to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings”?  Arrogating to himself the capacity to opine on the nature of God and man, making a clean philosopher’s slate of our cragged and blasted existence, the author of Hebrews has set himself up to be the “captain” of his own salvation.

This sets up what I—in my fitful imaginings—would hold to be a prospect worth envisioning.  Even the least-acquainted student of Christian theology knows of the incredible and interminable debates that have occurred over the nature of the Savior.  How often might any of us have wished—interspersed with real or feigned hesitations from horror—to have witnessed the Crucifixion?  (Perhaps not best to assume we would have been boldly at the foot of the Cross.)

What an awful, wonderful thing that would be.  Imagine as well, being blessed—I said this was fitful—to stand next to one of the angels who are intermittently invoked in the Gospels.  What a purely wonderful thing that would be, to have a chance to settle the sort of thing that people have tortured and killed over.

Then one of us might ask of the angel, “Sir, can you tell me,—our Blessed Savior—is He fully human?”

“Of course, child of Adam,” comes the answer, “but what makes you think you are?”

We are not, of course, fully human.  The “of course” just comes out naturally; I cannot pretend to justify it, except that it comes out more and more as I study the Gospels.  And our lack-of-being-fully-human is not a dangerous notion, as long as it is frankly recognized.  What is dangerous is the fact that we can tend immediately to proceed to some arrogant pronouncement about any aspect of ourselves, even if the aspect in question is ostensibly humbling.

I am reminded of the oft-repeated tales of Victorian patriarchs being horrifically cruel in church or at the dinner table, moments after begging mercy from the Almighty for being miserable sinners.  We can all be tyrants over—and, ultimately, victims of—our own stunted souls.  If we recognize that we are lacking as creatures of God, still we want to describe that deficit as it pleases us.

I must turn next to the Synoptic Gospels, because in many particular ways they describe the true difficulties of our souls’ situation.  To foreshadow, I will describe such difficulties in general.  We imagine that we—the “me” who writes this, some (few) other people’s “me’s” who read this—are the truncated souls in question.  We’re not; we’re on the outside, looking in.