The Present Realm of Death

We can now examine one of the most difficult sayings of the Gospels, presented in somewhat different forms:

"The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it" (Luke 16:16, KJV),

also,

"And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.  For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John" (Matthew 11:12-13).

And we must consider the ensuing verse from Matthew:

"And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come" (11:14).

This "difficult" teaching of Jesus is only difficult if one is intent on seeing the pattern of The Christian Life displayed and explained throughout his ministry.  How can every man press into the kingdom of God, and--though surely the kingdom can suffer violence--how can "the violent take it by force"?  Are not only those who are saved in this life the ones who are given "eternal life" in the kingdom?  How can this be squared with "every man presseth into it?"  And how can the salvation of the kingdom be squared with "the violent take it by force"?

Again, these sayings of Jesus are difficult only if we understand them as ostensibly describing life.  However, the entire thrust of Jesus' ministry presumes that it is too late for humanity to be striving for life.  Jesus' ministry is about us preparing for death.

We prepare for death by earnestly grasping the undeniable realities of our existence, understood chiefly in terms of our moral responsibilities.  We are supposed to do good, and to own up to our not doing good.  No religion and no ministry are necessary for us to realize such things.

However, what we fail to realize, because we are entranced by our experienceable surroundings, is the essential futility of trying to construct experiences--to make lives for ourselves--as though maintenance, growth, and flourishing of our individual or group lives can bespeak a wholesome development of our moral situations.  This is all wrong, and its futility is demonstrated by the repeated pattern of religious enlightenment throughout human experience.

Throughout many cultures, it is routinely part of life to believe that one's religion defines what is right and wrong.  However, what religious figures--at least those of the "great religions" of the world--do is to bring people into recognition of what they already know is right and wrong.  This is the inheritance of Adam and Eve.  The vital contribution of religion is to impress on the believer the scale and timing of the believer's relationship to the ultimate--the believer's relationship to existence writ large and to the timeless ramifications of behavior within that scheme of existence.  This is the legacy of the Garden.

And this is the legacy that Jesus bequeaths to us.  The kingdom of God is a scheme of understanding and belief--real, presumably, in the conceptions of God but scarcely ours to pronounce upon--that relates to us the necessity of subsuming ourselves to the ultimate.  We are citizens of the kingdom when we reckon that our lives mean nothing, even our lives that we might identify with families or nations mean nothing, and that the only "life" is identification with the totality of God's realm.  To truly live is to be spread so thin that our individual lives are unrecognizable.

To truly live is to embrace what the world will call death.  Of course, we will not obtain such self-abnegation on this plane, and the business of people being only more or less good will persist, no matter how emphatically the Gospel is preached.  Add to this the fact that our failed self-abnegation is reflected not merely in moral failings in themselves, but inevitably in moral failings that bring death--more or less, fast or slow--to our fellow creatures, and we have all the necessary elements of the besieged kingdom of heaven that Jesus describes.

So the kingdom is pressed into, and does suffer violence.  The God of the kingdom is perfect, and the template of the kingdom is perfect, but the true mark of the blameless inhabitant of the kingdom would be absolute renunciation of what we call "life," and we are not about to do that.  So we cling to the trappings of our mortal lives, and we entertain endlessly our delusion--disturbed, if we are so blessed, by tremors of conscience--that we can build good, religious lives in the service of the One who demands that we surrender our lives.

And we carry on as we do even as we are surrounded by perpetual evidences that human "life" is really just an arena of death.  Human beings--to say nothing of other sentient creatures--die unnecessarily faster than we can count them, let alone name them.  Our entire conception of ordered society--insofar as we have been able to construct it--culminates in the notion of the sovereign nation, an entity defined by nothing more profound than its contention that it exists as the peer of any other earthly realm, and that it serves its citizens and the world order never more so than when it claims absolute authority within it borders, and cedes to other sovereign nations the right to conduct atrocities within their own borders.  This is the kind of thing we acclaim in the name of "life."

We also accord a measure of authority to that miniature sovereign realm of society, the family.  Embrace "life" as the goal of Jesus' followers, and you embrace a horrid fantasy that has haunted the Western World for two thousand years.  We all know what cruelties have occurred in the name of the Christian Family, yet--like nations turning a blind eye to the misdeeds of their neighbors--we turn routinely away, unwilling to face the costs that responsible behavior will exact.  Only a very few of us will devote what it takes to combat social ills, and that devotion will often cost so much as to make us admit--if we can own up to it--that this brave few effectively give up their lives.

This is the realm of death that is the world, and this is the realm of death that drives Jesus' explanations.  As I quoted above, Jesus' described the besieged kingdom as springing from the time of John the Baptist, about which Jesus said, "And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come."  This "Elijah" was promised by the Book of Malachi "before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:  And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers...." (4:6).

This hopeful promise from Malachi, if one were to wax poetic about it, might be called a "word of life."  Jesus, however, delivers the overpowering "word of death":

"And his disciples asked him, saying, Why then say the scribes that Elias must first come?  And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things.  But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed" (Matthew 17: 10-12).

Only God can truly know why, but John was sent as if he could be a messenger of life to a world of death.  Jesus, however, addressed the matter more forcefully:

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.  For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.  And a man's foes shall be they of his own household" (Matthew 10:34-36).

The kingdom of God rules not over a world of life, nor even over a world of life populated by the spiritually dead (leavened by some estimate of the presence of the "saved".)  The kingdom of God rules over a world of death.  Citizenship in the kingdom of God--even with its promise of eternal life--can only be experienced in the present realm of death.

Murderers From the Beginning

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:17, KJV),

and then:

"...made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.  And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh  of my flesh..." (2:22-23).

It has, of course, been pointed out that--in the conventional sense--Adam and Eve did not die when they ate of the forbidden tree.  This might be laid to God's mercy, although such a contention does not do much for arguments in support of God's justice or truthfulness.  That will always be a puzzle for mortals.

It is always possible to approach this puzzle in an un-conventional sense, and in a moment I will try to do so, though admittedly getting the reader to embrace such an approach is something of a take-it-or-leave-it or take-it-if-you-can proposition.

Needless to say, the denominations--sometimes backed by temporal power--are somewhat less likely to assume a take-it-or-leave-it attitude.  We are told that Adam and Eve "died" spiritually (and, as my very blog description relates, I assent in some degree to that notion.)  Of course, the denominations have fixed themselves on the idea of "The Fall"--humanity's descent into a sinful state by the breaking of a commandment.

This idea of "The Fall" is somewhat problematic, and I don't mean simply in terms of the age-old observation that there is something backward about condemning the first couple for eating a fruit that would infuse them with the knowledge that they ought not to eat that fruit.  What is truly problematic about the conventional approach to "The Fall" is that this approach thrusts Adam and Eve into a state in which they possess a sinful nature--this sinful nature being such that every thought and action on their part is tinged with evil.  If such evil is now entirely pervasive in human nature, and humans are rightly to be punished with eternal damnation for that befouled nature itself (manifested by all sins from the greatest to the least--the magnitude does not matter), then why were Adam and Eve not wholly condemned by their behavior before?  After all--as the theologians have never rightly addressed--Adam was not content or even oriented to enjoy simple eternal communion with God from the first.  That is where Eve came in.  Adam's was, by any unsparing assessment, always a "sin nature."

The key to the un-conventional approach that I will present lies in the revealing statement from Adam presented above: "...made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.  And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh..." (2:22-23).  Along with Adam and Eve in the garden was the snake, a creature vastly different from the first couple.  You know the rest, leading up to God asking the terrified Adam, "Where art thou?"

God interrogates Adam first, and then Eve, and then turns to the snake.  It would be too much to imagine the snake--inextricably bound with the person of the Devil--retorting to God, "Why are you angry with me?  I didn't eat the fruit!  I spoke ill of you to the woman, but she responded in kind, and you would not be punishing anyone if she had merely entertained the notion of defying you and eating the fruit, and refrained from the act itself!"  It must be asked, however, what it is that the snake might be charged with.  The snake might be charged with deceit, or with impiety, but such would have been always its nature.

The most important answer about the snake's offense is indicated in God's first warning to Adam about the tree: "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:17).  The snake was contriving to bring about the death of humanity, and to do so through lies.  Or as Jesus describes when speaking about the explicitly named devil:

"He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him" (John 8:44).

The snake was committing murder; that is in the Genesis story.  Moreover, Eve, when she gave the fruit to Adam, was committing murder.  And Adam, when he chose to condemn himself--to murder himself--was engaging simultaneously in the murder of Eve, his "bone of bone and flesh of flesh."  By the end of the Garden of Eden story, all of humanity has murdered each other.

That is what it is to be human, and that is the death-like quality of what we insipidly call "life."  We are all under sentence of death, and rightly so, since we are all murderers.  I realize that there is a take-it-or-leave-it quality to the approach I have offered about the first couple's post-Eden survival, but nonetheless here it is: Adam and Eve did not die physically as a result of committing their murders in the Garden because there were no innocent victims.  Adam and Eve were just like us: all murderers and all murder victims.

Needless to say (I hope) bad deeds are not acceptable and not all bad deeds are as bad as murder.  I submit, however, that the cause of improving (or at least maintaining) human behavior is not furthered by the conventional Adam-and-Eve-died-spiritually notion.  At the "Fall," Adam and Eve did not at that moment become evil or die spiritually; Adam and Eve in that episode were thrust out of the Garden and into the state of humanity that has existed throughout all subsequent history.  This state of humanity is one in which we are all murdered, all murderers, and all sustain ourselves through murder.

Supply-side economics be damned; we all have what we have because it is being denied to another, 

and that at a cost--either total or incremental--to the lives of those who are thus deprived.  Such are the accounts Jesus gives, though they are enough to make professional theologians writhe in anguish:

"Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented" (Luke 16:25).

The fact that the denominations will not grapple directly with the ubiquity of human murder means that the denominations are self-defeated as voices for the teachings of Jesus.  In the teachings of Jesus the saved soak themselves in the knowledge of their own deadly sinfulness and exult in the comfort of a God who will value the repentant longings of the worst of sinners.  In the denominations the ostensibly saved soak themselves in sacraments or sacrament-like invocations, all the while praising God for crediting their protestations of their undeserving natures as substitutes for striving for righteousness.

God is not fooled.  Jesus is not fooled.  And only a fool would truly believe that humbly submitting to a sacrament or feverishly reciting a believer's prayer can substitute for the surging and resurging realization--latent in all human interactions, in all times and cultures--that we live at the expense of others, and that the ultimate image--the image that defies imagination--of those victimized others is the face of God.

Nothing Conceivable is Beyond the Scope of Belief

How often is it the case that one person will say to another, "I know what you believe in" or "I know why you believe as you do" or even "I know what you believe in and I know why you believe in it"?  A proper response--at least in the eyes of polite society--might be, "My beliefs are my own, and my reasons are my own, and I do not need anyone to pronounce upon my beliefs or my motivations."

There is a certain limitation, however, to the type of response presented above, and it is especially apparent in religious contexts.  The believer believes in the existence of some divinity, and usually claims--in general terms, at least--to understand the motivation of that divinity (even if that motivation on the part of the deity is one of wishing to remain obscure in intent.)  Is it anything other than a convention about politeness, that would refuse to admit the observation that the believer pronouncing upon the existence and motivation of the divine is not qualitatively different from the critic pronouncing upon the quality and underlying motivations of the believer's beliefs?

A similar consideration would apply to the beliefs of atheists.  If the divine is held to be non-existent because the evidence does not--ostensibly--support the notion, is it not being claimed that an entity meeting some necessary criteria of divinity is wanting, or perhaps claimed that such an entity would display this or that motivation or intent, yet fails to do so?  How are such assertions by atheists about the--ostensibly--divine fundamentally different from critics pronouncing upon what atheists believe, and why they believe it?

The key to understanding this situation lies in understanding the ubiquity of belief.  Without belief there is no experience.  Again, it is a dysfunctional sort of analysis in polite society that perpetuates our misunderstanding of belief.  In this analysis, many things are set apart from discussions about belief by thinking of such things as subject to other realms.  Some things are thought irrelevant or insubstantial where beliefs are concerned, and some things--unquestionable "scientific realities" or "logical necessities," for example--are thought beyond the scope of belief.

Nothing conceivable is beyond the scope of belief.  We know that the world is round because we believe in the substantive nature of our accumulated mental furnishings.  Let us believe that all of our memories are suspect, and we will have to admit that our certainty about the shape of the world is predicated on the belief--not knowledge--that our mental outlook is solid.  And yet, in that self-same cold logic that we apply to science, we must admit--if we are willing to consider it--that all of our memories ARE suspect.  Memory can fail us, and it is only our desire and our need for certainty that allow us, in our minds, to assign certainty to some imperfectly-defined critical mass of learnings and experiences, replayed for us by our imperfect memories.

Again, nothing conceivable is beyond the scope of belief.  Failure to understand this has led to failure to understand Jesus' teachings about the Kingdom of Heaven.  As I will attempt to relate, the Kingdom of Heaven is not some future state, nor is it some state of present spiritual enlightenment.  The Kingdom of Heaven is experience understood as a coherent whole subsumed--conceptually--to the phenomenon of belief.  The Kingdom of Heaven does not exist in some manner that would allow us to conceive of it, because then it would inhabit some context--at least in our thoughts--when by definition the Kingdom of Heaven must encapsulate all imaginable contexts.

This is why, for example and as we shall see, the Kingdom of Heaven is both a place for which to strive, and a place of condemnation and punishment for those who will not so strive.  The logical inconsistencies inherent in the "both" and "and" aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven are immaterial, because the Kingdom itself is immaterial to us (limited as we are in our understanding).  The Kingdom of Heaven is belief about the Kingdom of Heaven.  The Kingdom of Heaven is belief in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Abel in a World of Death

aaadwAbel in a World of Death

This is where this blog should have both its end and its beginning.  "Roused, Readied, Reaped" is not about life.  Our life is thrust upon us, and such "life" as can be measured in terms of our experiencing, and learning, and preparing ourselves for anything worthwhile is not truly life at all; it is us preparing ourselves for death--or being prepared for it by circumstances beyond our control.

We are thrust ("Roused") through the portal of life, but our "lives" make no sense other than in terms of death.  We can prepare ourselves for death, or we can try to avoid such preparation, but death will come, and with its advance we are confronted in plainest terms with what "life" is.  We can try to see life around us, but really death is all around us--"life" is our striving for a wholesome (or at least personally satisfying) imprint of our wills on our implacable surroundings.

"Roused" is a reality, but it would be futile not to see "Readied" and "Reaped" as the more compatible two-thirds of the title.  Indeed, "Readied" and "Reaped" describe the world of experiences that Jesus attempts to bring to us.  We can try to live modestly and moderately, but still our world is one of scarcity.  We live at the expense of other creatures, and we shower the world with death.

We live at the expense of ourselves, passing up innumerable chances to improve or tame ourselves, and routinely invoking the excuse that we need to "live a little."  And ultimately we must decide whether or not to prepare ourselves for death, a preparation that shades imperceptibly into acceptance of death.  We are not supposed to decide to die, yet it would be ridiculous to suggest that any of us is strong enough to avoid to the very last the capitulation--Jesus-like--of "giving up the ghost."

And so we can come to a conceptualization of Abel as a prophet.  Taken most plainly, he is a man who  brings an acceptable offering to God, and who is killed by his brother, a man enraged that his own offering is not accepted.  Taken even more plainly, Abel killed and offered creatures ("firstlings of his flock") that he was not even permitted to eat, while Cain seems to more humbly and humanely bring "of the fruit of the ground."  And then Abel is killed by Cain.  Upon what basis can Abel be called a prophet?

Abel can only be called a prophet if we remember that Genesis, like all human experience, is not a story of the lives of its characters.  It is a story of death.

Humanity has been dying since Adam was "born," and it is only in light of death that our lives make sense.  Abel killed the creatures that he offered.  He also caused them to breed, presumably, and to thrive, and to graze, and to ingest insects thereby, and to trample other creatures thereby.  Cain scratched and hacked and rent the uncooperative soil, and who knows how many creatures he killed thereby?

Death is all around us, and it is the price of life.  Purposeful sacrifice as described in the Bible is only a tiny splinter in the looming forest of death that has always surrounded us.  Sacrifice was always supposed to be a horrifying thing, and it is telling that many of the most odious characters in the Old Testament gloried in the numbers of their sacrificial victims, when the most solemn of the sacrifices of God's people would consist of single or only a few animals.  It was the death that mattered, not the death toll.

And so Abel--if we are to credit at least a continuity with the traditions that Jesus espouses--was a man who reckoned with death as a part of human existence.  Nothing about Abel's killing of animals makes him necessarily a more distasteful character than farmer Cain, and it can be seen as--at least possibly the case--that he was more mindful of death and suffering than Cain.

What then of Abel's own death?  Jesus describes often enough how his followers will be reviled, ill-treated, and possibly killed--and for what?  Usually, merely doing the right thing is enough to bring about enmity in some sizable contingent of one's fellow human beings.  Do the right things, and you will often frustrate--bring death to--others' plans and dreams.  Do the right things, and you will often threaten the very life of others' self-conceptions.  Do the right things earnestly enough and often enough, and someone may very well decide to kill you.

That is why Abel can be called a prophet, for he lived in a world of death.  We live in a world of death.

Life Being a Concept

It seems inescapable that trying to figure out something of substance about Christianity--perhaps about any religion--leads to a time of decision.  Can it really be that a person finds out something about a religion and then plugs that something into the religion in question?  Can a person really find something new about Christianity and then incorporate that new thing into "the Christian life"?  Would that "Christian life" be recognizable?

I suppose any substantive outlook on this question would hinge on whether the supposed discovery is substantive in itself.  (I will not presume that any "discovery" that I or any other individual might make is original as well as substantive.)  But what might be more substantive than the question of "life" itself?  Is not Christianity about the "life" of the soul?  Can we see the matter of salvation or damnation as anything other than the life of the soul?

And if (as I'm sure cynics have offered through the ages) "life"--for good or ill--continues for the soul after death, then what is "eternal life" in distinction to "life"?  And if it is "death" to the soul to be under the judgment that flows from "original sin," who among us has ever really been alive?  The idea of receiving Life in Christ exists still, but that does not change the fact that the communal experience--Christian or not--within the culture that is entwined with Christianity concludes as a matter of mundane experience that there is the simple matter of being alive or dead.  You're born, and you're alive, and then you die, and you're dead.

Or you're not.  The teachings of Jesus are held to be fundamental by his followers.  I am treating as "the teachings of Jesus" the four canonical Gospels--minus the obvious artifices of beginnings, endings, and interpolations--and the Old Testaments writings (particularly in Genesis) to which he refers for support.  If the teachings of Jesus are fundamental, then no concept (no matter how obviously correct it might seem to us) can override those teachings.

That is why (as this blog has tended from the start) I must conclude that we are not alive.  "Life" is a concept, not a reality experienced by us.  "Life" is a good concept.  "Life" is a concept essential to our communal understanding of our existence as human beings.  "Life" is how we understand things; to us, even the stars are born, live, and die.  Certain of us will maintain that it is wrong and bad to personalize (or "humanize") things like the stars, but none of us is possessed of absolute certainty about whether the stars have consciousness--it is just that some of us maintain that personalizing "lifeless" entities detracts from the quality of our lives, either individually or communally.  There it is, invariably: the concept of "life."

But Jesus and his belief system do not speak so of life.  Inescapably, Adam's estrangement from God at the very first is a living death, and just as inescapably our only life is the communal life of the Kingdom of Heaven.  The "abundant life" of Jesus' teaching is identification with life overall--particularly as manifested in self-abnegation--not the "abundant life" of the twisted Prosperity Gospel.

And so I must reckon that "life" does not really exist.  That doesn't sound like so much fun--certainly not as much fun as making some religious "discovery" that can enrich the discoverer's life.  But we must decide that life really does not exist, if we are to address responsibly the demands of existence.

Is it not a debilitating burden on the soul, to embrace a "reality" that does not exist?  Life is denied even to the animals.  A young, frolicking creature (inasmuch as any of them get to frolick) is reaching for life, grasping at life, and yet no sober observer can believe that such rare, brief spurts of heedless energy are practicable for the species other than as training exercises.  Meanwhile the adult members of the species are ever on the alert against dangers--dangers all too real, with bad results often too horrid to imagine.  How can we darken our souls as to believe that this is the "life" of God's intention?

The teachings of Jesus are more fundamental, more important, than life.  They exist more than life--life being a concept, not a reality, for us.

Lifelong Friends or Deadly Enemies

This might be one of my most difficult posts, because it has to do with the experience of life in the rawest.  It has to do with friendship and with enmity, and with whether or not there can ever be any other type of relationship between persons.

Jesus says near the end of John's gospel, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (15:13, KJV).  One does not want to quibble, but in the general flow of Jesus' teachings, it would seem that a still greater love would be to lay down one's life for one's enemies.  Surely the emphasis here must be on what Jesus considers to be true friendship--total and lasting and unstinting commitment.

This commitment to friendship must be seen in distinction from "friendliness," which is why it should not seem so strange to hear Jesus say in another context, "Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes; and salute no man by the way" (Luke 10:4).

But why does Jesus so emphasize friendship, when it would seem that a person's relationship to God would be what matters?  The answer would seem to lie in just what would make a person a friend to another, and an enemy to yet another.  The answer would be righteousness, especially as righteousness would be expressed in prophetic example or in martyrdom.

Consider Abel as a prophet, as Jesus would have us do (Luke 11:51).  Abel was surely a righteous man, but what exactly was so prophet-like about Abel getting sneakily clobbered by his brother?  Why does Abel, having done no more than his duty to God and then bleeding into the ground, rate mention in the same breath with "Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple"?  We are not told that Cain threatened Abel with death for offering his sacrifice, and that Abel, "Zacharias-like," persisted nonetheless.  Abel simply blundered into his own demise.

Yet we must remember that Jesus says that merely doing the right things will lead to incurring the world's deadly enmity--even when such enmity is muted or hidden, and even when the world thinks that it is not at all inclined to such sentiments.  This sets up what is--unsurprisingly--one of the least-emphasized episodes in the Gospels:

"Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law?  Why go ye about to kill me?  The people answered and said, Thou hast a devil: who goeth about to kill thee?  Jesus answered and said unto them, I have done one work, and ye all marvel. . . .are ye angry at me, because I have made a man every whit whole on the sabbath day?  Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment.  Then said some of them of Jerusalem, Is not this he, whom they seek to kill?" (John 7:19-25).

In the space of seconds, we go from "who goeth about to kill thee?" to "Is not this he, whom they seek to kill?"  The implication is clear, and has been borne out countless times in history: to practice righteousness is to dare the world's deadly hatred.

This cruel dichotomy--lifelong friendship versus deadly enmity--goes all the way back to Genesis.  Cain asks God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" and we imagine we are to respond with a resounding "Yes!", but that is to miss the point.  Cain is not Abel's keeper; Cain IS Abel.  As much as Adam and Eve are "bone of bone and flesh of flesh," so are Cain and Abel and all of us.

And when we forget that we are "bone of bone and flesh of flesh," then we humans in our selves and in our groups are as alien to each other as Noah was to the animals, when God said "the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth" (9:2).

We ARE each other, or we are each other's prey.  We are lifelong friends or we are deadly enemies.