He Defeated the Desert

There is an unfortunate tendency to think of Jesus as omniscient, and also an unfortunate tendency to think of Satan as omniscient.  That Satan might fail to realize something or another is scarcely surprising, for there is no warrant to attribute to him the all-knowing of God, and there are times in the Bible when Satan is mistaken.  Jesus, it must be admitted, is more difficult to conceive of as limited in knowledge, yet he describes himself so.  This lack of all-knowing must be kept in mind, especially when the contrasts and conflicts between Jesus and Satan are in mind.

There is something else to keep in mind.  Fancies aplenty are conjured up about the origin of Satan and about his supposed history before the creation of the earth.  All such conjecture is as nothing compared to the question of proper apprehension of the nature, from the first, of Jesus.  It would be as nothing, indeed, to opine about this or that manner in which Jesus gets the better of Satan--who would like nothing more than to show Jesus as somehow lacking--if one is mistaken about the character of the Jesus that Satan wants to impugn.

We must look to the origin of Jesus and his history before the creation of the earth.

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.  And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.  I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.  And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. John 17:1-5, KJV

Of all the things that might be said about Jesus, it would be scarcely controversial (in the mere saying of it) to say that Jesus (at the very least) is the perfect human being--and was so in his time on earth.  We can say--and truthfully--that Jesus is without sin, but we do him only dishonor when we imagine that "without sin" might apply only to the episode of the tree and the snake and its aftershocks.  Sin did not start with the tree and the snake, a point that I have made continually.  Sin dates back to God's appraisal of Adam:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. Genesis 2:18

Adam was unable to accept God's gift of the original relationship.  To echo the passage from John 17 above: "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ . . . . "  Adam, in the first burst of creation, was "given . . . power over all flesh," and (in the same vein as the proverbial "well done, thou good and faithful servant") Adam might have said to his Creator, "I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do."  No, Adam--as all of us--was sinful, and drew away from simple fellowship with his Creator.

It is the perfect, non-Adam human being--Jesus The Son of Man--who squares off against Satan, most notably in the desert of the Temptation.  Jesus responds to Satan as Man ought always to have done, and this is lost when we shrink Jesus down to the size of ourselves by making both Jesus and Satan into self-propelled chess pieces in an imagined game between two mythical super-minds.

When Jesus is responding, as in Matthew, to the challenge of stones turned into bread ("Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God") he is recapitulating the original design of Man in communion with God.  That is what the exchange is all about.  As far as Jesus' fast goes, there is no hint that he intends to starve himself to death, and the span of "forty days and forty nights" gives every indication of meaning to symbolize (as does "forty" elsewhere in the Bible) completeness.  Given what Jesus can anticipate in his earthly sojourn, collapsing and dying of hunger at this point would be a mercy, and the ministrations of the angels described in the text must surely have been a mixed blessing to their gaunt master.

When Jesus is responding to the challenge "on the pinnacle of the temple" ("Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God") he is giving good advice to Adam (and Eve.)  It really is a good idea not to entertain risks for their own sake, or to prove (or better, "test") a point.  If Satan were omniscient, he would know that Jesus would never fail God and God would never fail Jesus, yet here Satan acts in the same manner as in his failed wager with God in the Book of Job.  On the other hand, if Jesus were omniscient in his earthly state, his trepidations and agonies would have been but cynical shadow-plays.  Ultimately, Jesus responds to uncertainty by trusting, rather than tempting or testing, God.

When Jesus is responding to the challenge of "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me," Jesus could really just respond (as he does in part) with "Get thee hence, Satan."  Satan probably does not really need to hear the second part: ". . .  for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve."  What Satan does seem to need to learn, though, is the fact that his lordship of the earth and its kingdoms is illusory (or perhaps dependent on humanity ratifying the illusion.)  Commentators love to dwell on the idea of the earth as being under Satan, but Jesus does not stint to tell his disciples that the boundaries of possession (in the true and wholesome sense) will fall before them.  The people and things that Satan believes he possesses are ever and always the true possessions of people with proper dispositions:

There is no man that hath left house, or parent, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God's sake, Who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting. Luke 18:29-30

Matthew's account throws in "lands," for good measure.

Jesus is the perfect man, reflecting the nature of God.  He existed before flawed man, and the strength of his existence, as far as we are concerned, is manifested in an over-arching and ever-present reality: any worthy conception of religion, spirituality, or faith must reckon on the eternal truth of God's perfection as an inescapable premise.  We can try to develop notions about God, and some of them are good, but they always fold back into the ineffable nature of God.  Any time we try to celebrate God's activities in some realm of our conceptions, we are acting as though he could be confined--in any meaningful way--to the boundaries that define that realm.

Thus it is often, regrettably, with rehearsals of the story of the Temptations.  Really, Satan did not take Jesus on in some realm of consequence, since Jesus responded not by acting as though it mattered to respond to the questions at hand, but rather by acting as though it mattered to invoke the conceptual refreshing of the un-encompassed reality of God.  Jesus did not merely defeat Satan in the desert--he also defeated the desert.

The Existence of Death

I need to just work through this.  I wrote in my last post about the Original Creation spoken into existence by God.  I wrote about how Creation is surmounted in the Genesis description by (as I understand the Gospel of John reference) the Spirit of truth.  And I wrote about how God speaks light into being, revealing to created existence the chaos mediated through truth.

I will not say that Jesus is that light, in that John says it was through the life of Jesus that there came “the light of men.”  Then again, John’s prologue says that all creation is through Jesus.  And Jesus is the Word that is the true Light.

So, it is almost by way of a benighted word-association that I would stumble toward a rather obvious parallel.  Some Christian commentators are at pains to note how all the elements of the Trinity are described in connection to the four gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ baptism.  It would seem plausible that--if the “light” indicated by Jesus’ timeless “life” is in mind--all the divine elements are likewise pictured at the moment of Genesis’ creation: pictured as giving existence, giving truth, and giving light.

And yet there exist a few sobering considerations in connection to the divine provision of a creaturely existence attended by truth and light.  One of those considerations--which I believe is not usually accorded the suspicion it deserves--is that of a distinct First Sin and corresponding universe-wide Fall.  A creation account of creation-wide chaos being from the first subdued by truth and light is scarcely consistent with a creation-wide Fall (and attendant suffering of innocent creatures) because of a single offense.  And even if that were so, the (at least partial) squaring of humanity’s accounts at the Noahide covenant stands opposed to the notions of total depravity and universal degradation.

Another of those sobering considerations is what concerns me most now.  If Jesus brought light and life, then he also brought the experiences (unappreciable before) of darkness and death.  Darkness and death, it is probably safe to say, have seemed linked through the bulk of human experience.  Ultimately, nearly all the manifestations (and most probably all the evolutionary origins) of life are connected to light.  Darkness brings death, and the creatures of darkness--marvels though they be--have been associated almost universally with death.

There is, however, a consideration I must mention here.  Contrary to colloquial and poetic uses, darkness and light are not really opposites.  “Darkness” would mean nothing to a creature that could not detect light.  “Darkness” and “light” are cousins--two different ways that sensory perception is recorded by creatures that can detect light, and those two different ways are understood in terms of--and not just against--each other.

Similarly, life and death are kin.  “Life” can be the polar opposite of “death” only as a matter of clinical observation--and that is not how life works.  Life is what bespeaks life: energy versus lethargy, interest versus apathy, involvement versus detachment--though all such states could be called “life.”  Life is a thing of happening, and it exists against a background of un-happenings.  The simplest scenario to this effect is that of the frozen embryo.  It is not in the pure clinical sense “dead,” and there are millions of people who (as against any number of life-saving causes) see themselves as tasked with keeping that embryo “alive.”  Of course, if this or that embryo is safeguarded under refrigeration until the crack of doom, it would be silly to maintain that at the very least it had not been deprived of its life.

“Life,” then, is anything that bespeaks life, and the scope of life so defined can be found on close examination to be a far more ethereal thing than at first imagined.  To fall asleep is to fall away from life; to collapse into an exhausted bundle is to fall away from life; to exhale is to fall away from life; a heart between beats falls away from life; a cell in some as-yet-to-be-detected micro-micro-micro-second between chemical reactions could fall away from life.  One might well imagine that, even as the realm of the atoms is specks surrounded by mostly nothing, the realm of life in its barest elements could be mostly non-happenings on some impossibly small temporal scale, roused on well-separated and rare occasions by bursts of happening.

Life happens through time, and death happens through time.  Rather than as opposites, we might do well to think of life and death as states through time, as “cousins,” rather as one might call running and walking cousins—one is not the other, but they lead on the same course and are not always perceived as distinct.  I might seem that I am postulating for my own amusement, but there is a very serious matter behind all this: the way Jesus speaks of death and life.

Jesus speaks of death and life in ways that we can scarcely get our minds around, and so we have usually just ignored him.  For two thousand years, for example, we have parroted his direction about taking up the cross and following him--and we have decided that, well, if that means we’ll meet a martyr’s fate in the end, so be it.  In the most unsparing analysis, of course, Jesus is not asking us to dare losing our lives in the end--he is asking us to lose our lives all along.  “Taking up the cross” doesn’t mean leaving a cross in the garage in case someone wants to martyr us.  “Taking up the cross” is the execution itself.

Jesus treats death as something ever-present, indeed, as something so intrinsic to life that it is woven into life’s very fabric.  Jesus is exasperated indeed when he has to parse out the particular difference between “sleeping” and “dead,” such as in the cases of the young girl and of Lazarus.  Jesus treats death as no big deal, and as raising people from the dead as no big deal--he hands out at will the ability to raise the dead.  He permits a levy of the righteous dead to venture into Jerusalem just as he is attempting to convince the disciples of his own resurrection.

Christian commentators have seized with a frenzy upon their digesting of the Resurrection, and in the process of making so much of it in so many (presumptuous) ways, they have twisted the most undeniable of facts in the most inexcusable of ways.  The Resurrection as a one-time event is taken to crumple the very fabric of the Universe, while Jesus all along has maintained matter-of-factly that he can lay down his life and take it up at will.  The Resurrection is taken as the pivotal moment of Jesus bringing down the creaturely kingdom of Satan, and yet Jesus in John tells his disciples he has overcome the world before he is even arrested.  Life and death, burial and resurrection, mean different things to the Jesus of the Gospels than they do to the churches.

The topic, the unavoidable topic, of Jesus requiring us to experience a living death is a difficult one, and the story of this blog has largely been the story of my fumbling and jumbling in my attempts to deal with it.

The Existence of Truth

Nothing in the Bible makes sense, if by "making sense"--which we usually want to do for ourselves and for other people--we have in mind the justification of any system of thought in terms of its original premises.  There are no original premises that can "make sense" to us.  This is not a predicament confined to religious worldviews--no explanation of existence that we entertain is based on anything more substantial than "Well, this is how things are, and on that basis we surmise what came before and what is to follow."

To be sure, the "examined life" is exhausting (if I may offer as a philosophical good the idea that wholesome and responsible life requires continual--as though that were possible--reflection on the bases that we claim for our stances and actions.)  Of course we will fail--in greater or lesser part--to ground ourselves always in what we claim as our premises.  Add to this the not-unreasonable contention that we are responsible continually to scrutinize those premises themselves, and we have what I hope is a fair notion of the difficulties we face in addressing existence.

Yet--if we cannot experience correlation between our expectations and our experiences--if existence does not touch back when we reach out to touch it (spatially or temporally)--then we cannot exist.  We exist across time, and we would think ourselves mad (or be driven mad) if we did not reckon on the existence of time.  Yet--any of us who claimed to "understand" time would be equally mad.  The same considerations must apply to space, to physicality.

Something must be "true" to us, or nothing is true.  I neither claim to apprehend what that nucleus (or all-encompassing milieu, or whatever--metaphor must fail) of truth is, nor do I pretend that I am clawing out to extract some "sense" from existence for anything other than self-interest.  If nothing persists in some essence from moment to moment or micron to micron, then I do not exist--at least as I conceptualize existence.  (Which "conceptualizer" might be "me," or it might not.  How should I know?)

From all this I intend to postulate that our experience--our life as we understand it--is the experience of truth.  "Truth," as we like to imagine it, is mostly a creation of our limited and usually self-serving interests.  We like to find truth (or imagine we could find truth) in, for example, what we read.  Or we like to think we could detect untruths, and pronounce this or that to be an untruth, and perhaps on occasion pen a telling response to an untruth.

Yet we detect untruths not as they exist in an atmosphere (or an arena) of innumerable, continually-challenged contentions--be they true or false.  No, we experience the abiding truth of existence and are able (or think we are able, or hope we are able) to detect anomalies.  Our existence occurs in truth.  To say that the situation is essentially reversed--that truth exists as an element of our existence or (what amounts to the same thing) that "true" can be understood as an adjective deployable at our command--is to lie to ourselves.

Yes--we can call things "true."  However, we cannot change the experiential state that we are assigned.  We are--by whatever cause, we cannot as rational beings ascertain--relegated to existence in what surrounds us: an experience-realm permeated by truth.  In my own portion of that (presumably-shared) experience-realm, my understanding of existence returns repeatedly and persistently to the Bible--or perhaps I should say, to what I have gleaned from the Bible.  Other people might say I have in error rejected most of it, and other people might say I should reject it all, but here I am most interested in how I share the experience-realm with them all, and how--as I contend--we all live and move in a default state of truth and truthfulness.

Or, to put it another way, "nonsense" is not the opposite of "sense."  "Nonsense" is what we call anything that has seemed to slip off the default matrix of "sense."

I have been leading to what I desire most to discuss now: The Original Creation.  (That's just me trying to come up with a term to describe something I do not understand.)

God, as described in Genesis 1, did not create an experience-realm of solid premises.  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (1:1, KJV) is an encapsulation of the story, not the story itself.  The earth is described at the start, and "the heaven" is created later.  Even from its first words, Genesis describes a beginning-state, not a beginning.

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (1:2a).  Nothing here is described other than as such description is negative--that is, "negative" not pejoratively, but conceptually.  The original creation was such as would defy those modes by which we form conceptualizations.

"And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (1:2b).  It is hard to know what ought to be most striking about humanity's less-than-rapt reception of this saying.  The saying can be translated several ways, yet it would be intellectually indefensible to contend that the divine's presence was not indicated, and that the reference to "the Spirit of God" ought not to evoke the similarly-phrased "Holy Spirit" references in the Bible.

Yet what does Jesus cite as the most pertinent aspect of The Comforter?  "The Spirit of truth" (John 15:26).  Remembering that the upper vault of water was yet to be raised when Genesis says,

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters

we are left with a chaotic, though succinctly described, vista.  Everything is chaos--indeed, this chaos might be understood to defy any phantasm we might conjure.  And surmounting the chaos is the Spirit of truth.

Then God calls forth light--which will be the metaphor and the reality of the test of Creation's fidelity to the divine plan--and calls it (and subsequently Creation) "good."  My assertion, then, if I have described it adequately, is that our existence--indeed all existence as we understand it--is mediated through truth.

To utter untruth, to act in untruth, is to defy the divine.  There is no mandate that we understand our existence, or that we torture ourselves and each other over the idea that we have to understand God.  One cannot avoid being reminded of Jesus (full well aware of the wind/spirit identification of the ancients) choosing the unfathomable origin of the wind--the earthly, mundane wind--as a parallel of being born "again" or "from above" in his conversation with Nicodemus in John 3.

We do not understand the wind--not in finality, not even today, or forever (as we conceptualize intellectual progress.)  Neither do we understand being born "from above," yet it is only a simplistic and self-serving type of theology that would ever require such a distorted and unsupportable view of the divine as to imagine we can understand being born "from above."

We are born again when we are blown away by the truth that impinges upon us with every experience.  Reminded of such things, we are reminded that all things are miraculous, and that the existence of truth itself is miraculous.

Whether We Like It or Not

One of the most difficult aspects of "roused, readied, reaped" lies before me.  The multiple and varied arcs of our lives are dominated, in the substance of Jesus' teachings, by two great elements of our existence.  We are God's creations, and we are human.  We are also presented with Jesus as the divine Son of God, and with Jesus as the human Son of Man.  I think--as I must endeavor to show--that both titles for Jesus are reflected in our own natures.

The gospel basis for my description of these phenomena will be especially the extended discourse of Mark 11 and 12.  The conceptual basis is more wide-ranging, and therefore attended by more pitfalls.  The upshot, however, is this: We, along with Jesus, are children of God and children of Man.

To say that we have equal duties impinging on us from these two natures is nonsense--not because such an assertion is demonstrably untrue, but because it is immeasurable.  We fail in all our duties to God.  A failure that is not nearly so unavoidable, however, is the failure--which I believe the churches indulge themselves in--to credit Jesus' assertions about how we can approach our two main duties.

We think of ourselves as utter failures as children of God.  We choose, however, to be such failures, even to the extent of not even trying.  Children of God determine which mountains leap into the sea, and children of God determine who will enter heaven.  These truths can be demonstrated from the gospels.  Instead of confronting those realities, we flop helplessly before Jesus as the Son of God.  Jesus will have to work the miracles, and Jesus will have to forgive us the innumerable violences we commit against each other even as we congratulate ourselves on our reverence for our leper-healing, sea-calming Savior.

What we need to be doing most of all, however, is looking to Jesus as the Son of Man--an exemplar of how we should behave as parts of the family of Man.  Healing the sick, even raising the dead--these we ought to be able to do with a word or a thought, yet (in insolent disregard for the gospels) we cast these things back in the face of Jesus The Son of God.  We cap this insolence by imagining that the gospels are mostly about Jesus The Miracle Worker, rather than about Jesus The Perfect Man--who shows us how to behave toward our fellow children of Man.

The fact that Jesus is the true and perfect Son of God is most immediately a matter between Jesus and God, a matter that is presented to us at God's pleasure and for our edification.  The fact that Jesus is the true and perfect Son of Man, however, ought by the fact of its very existence be both a gall and a goad to us.  This gall and this goad, however, will be largely unavailing until we reckon that our sibling relationship to the Son of God is--by the gospels' direct demonstration--a simple thing to establish and a simple thing to try.

We are children of God whether we like it or not.

Too Much or Too Little

aaahyToo Much or Too Little

I am wrestling presently with an idea about proper gospel interpretation.  I suppose I should be honest with myself and admit that what I mean about "proper gospel interpretation" has to do with how I might think of the gospels as being true in the context of how I conceive of anything as being true.  I cannot claim, first, to have any expertise about the philosophy and literature of ancient religion and I cannot claim, second, to be approaching the whole matter independently of my long-held disposition to believe the gospels to be true.

Or to address the matter more directly: I am interested in how the gospels might make sense to me, and I have a vested emotional and intellectual interest in being able to claim that the interpretations I prefer are those prescribed by Jesus.  Actually, my desires run deeper still--I hope not merely to arrive at the interpretations Jesus would prefer, but concomitantly to have arrived at those interpretations by such methodologies as he would recommend.

(I know one thing about where this is going.  The notion that the Bible ought to be read as the Bible says it ought to be read is not, as some hard-liners would have it, the best argument for any interpretive methodology.  It is, as any conscientious individual should assert, potentially the worst.)

I will proceed anyway.  I have wondered of late if a certain construction of purportedly responsible interpretation is not, first, intrinsically flawed and, second, at variance with the very teachings of Jesus.  This is the construction of Bible interpretation that holds that definitive interpretations are both possible and necessary, and holds as well that it is incumbent on interpreters to reckon that they are only human and therefore possibly mistaken.  From this outlook, ostensibly, interpreters--particularly when possessing authority over others--are supposed to be careful, sensitive, and merciful when delivering pronouncements about scriptural interpretation.

I will leave it to readers--and particularly any with interest in the history of the churches and of Christendom--to judge whether precisely such humble- and humane-sounding admissions have not fallen from the lips of Bible interpreters who displayed themselves capable of the most ghastly intolerance, violence, and brutal presumption.

But is the interpretive philosophy I described--ostensible precision adorned ostensibly with humility--the philosophy of scriptural interpretation espoused by Jesus?  Jesus asked people to employ their life experiences to their religious and spiritual lives.  I am inclined to offer an experience I shared with my family--an experience many people have faced.  It is about deciding when to have the dog put down.  Many people agonize over when is precisely the right time to do it.

I have shared in the experience of the decision.  There is never a right time to do it.  Conceptually, there may be such time, but the "life experience" attendant upon the putting-the-dog-down scenario mocks our best attempts to light upon the perfect time.  We're either going to do it too soon, or too late.  That is the choice.  I will choose "too soon."  The reader can imagine (though I would not recommend it) experiences I have known when it is "too late" and the veterinarian's staff are not handy.

Jesus, I contend, tells us not to try to understand our spiritual lives with assiduous precision--comforting ourselves, and ostensibly comforting others, with assertions that we realize that we might on occasion be mistaken.  Rather, Jesus tells us that we will always be mistaken.  We can read too much into a scripture, or we can read too little.  There is no other possible eventuality.  We can care too much about a matter, or too little.  We can love too much, or too little.

I do not mean this simply in the abstract.  I would present the gospel story about the Sheep and the Goats, in which Jesus represents himself at the last congratulating the Sheep for having fed him and clothed him and comforted him.  The Sheep, as the story goes, ask when they did those things for their Lord, and they are told the incidents in question happened when they did such things for the least of Jesus' brethren.  (And of course the opposite judgment awaits the Goats.)

The irony to the story of the Sheep and the Goats (as I have indulged in describing elsewhere) is the fact that the story cannot really happen once it is told.  The audience knows the upshot beforehand, and therefore who at the end is to ask the Lord the questions ("When did we . . . ")?

The irony I have described, however, dissipates if but a single consideration is added to the mix.  Perhaps Jesus was not making a theological or moral point--at least in isolation.  Perhaps Jesus was talking about our attentions (or our inattentions), our efforts (or our failures to exert ourselves), our judgments (or our misjudgments).  Admittedly, any story about the last judgment will have to allow for the plot mechanism in which the participants are suddenly granted total recall (or instantaneous recourse to record books.)  Still--while bearing this all in mind--there can still be substance to the "bewilderment" aspect of the participants if the questions ("When did we . . . ?") have to do, not with doing wrong, but with being wrong.

We humans say we can be wrong sometimes.  That is incorrect.  We are wrong all of the time.  It is only our insistence moment-to-moment on interpreting our thoughts, words, or actions in one vein (or a few) that allows us to say we were right or wrong about this or that.  Life does not consist of this-or-that happening now, and this-or-that happening at some other time.  It happens (as I constantly refrain, in the "roused, readied, reaped" fashion) on innumerable, overlapping, and varied levels all the time.

Only such realizations can make intelligible the stories that Jesus tells.  He returns often to the stories "in the beginning."  There is Adam and Eve in the Garden.  In the conventional view, there is the Fall.  Also in the conventional view, there is Cain's murder of Abel.  Nothing rivals those two events.

Examined more closely, however, there are more particular considerations, such as, "Where was Adam when Eve was dallying with the snake?"  (In the conventional view, this question is usually not more than dallied with itself, lest it be pointed out that "sin" did not in fact crop up with the apple.)  Where, indeed, was Adam, when Eve was in the first, agonizing labor--an experience she describes as "With the help of the Lord . . . "?  Where was Adam--the forerunner of the priest-king-fathers ("patriarchs") of the Old Testament, when Cain and Abel were lighting on what they were going to offer?

Where was Adam--the forerunner of Old Testament fathers and therefore the effectual employer of his sons--when the two young men were experiencing their alienation?  Why, indeed, was Adam not asking Cain, "Why is your face downcast?"

The conventional Christian view--perhaps influenced by the patriarchal incentive to defer to father-led households--is that everything was going along OK with the first family other than the Fall and the Murder.  This, of course, is patently ridiculous, and--there being virtually no points of reference available--it is entirely possible that Adam was one of the most horrible people who ever lived.  Certainly the Bible does not assert that frequent, unmistakable communication with God tends inevitably to temper human misdeeds--one might even argue quite the opposite.

And so what would be the most logical, and humanly understandable, approach to the stories that Jesus tells or refers to?  In the case of the Garden of Eden, just to take one example, there is the threat of death that--arguably--does not materialize, and there is the sordid story of Adam and Eve and their children.  God, in terms of the expectations of the narrative, is better than he ought to be.  Adam is worse than he ought to be.  If Adam is all of us, then none of this is any surprise.

In our life--if we are honest about it, everything is approximate, everything is a guess, everything is wrong, everything is flawed.  More importantly, everything is in motion.  I know that I will have to work on the point expressed in this post, but I think it is worth following up.  We want to have stable and quiet vantage points from which to view life and existence, and yet not only is none of that guaranteed, there is also no reason to imagine that it should be.

Only in light of our ever-present limitations can we hope gain the impetus that true life requires of us.  Or to present a bit of scripture, and to wonder about its application:

"Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes , and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest" (John 4:35, KJV).

Entranced By the Good

I have repeated in the last few posts the following refrain:

"The miracle is existence.  The truth is the fact that we ourselves exist.  The faith is a sincere response to truth."

Truth is all that exists for us.  In fact, the only way we know that something exists is because we have found it to be true.  Even duplicity is only an arrangement of the recognizable--some things presented such as they are--so constructed as to be misleading.  The fact that we are drawn--or draw ourselves--into delusion does not detract from truth itself.

Jesus himself has a formula by which we might minimize the risk of delusion: don't believe things.  Don't go chasing messiahs or second comings.  If they come, they will be recognizable, and they will intrude themselves upon us.

Even teachers and prophets can be sized up with relative certainty.  In Jesus' view, promoters and doers of falsehood can be detected by their fruits.  And the "fruits" in question are straightforwardly observable in their characteristics.  They are true to their intended purposes, or they are not.

All of this can be seen in contrast to pronouncements about "the good, the true, and the beautiful" and the like.  "True" is what matters.  Something is good if it aligns with its purpose--as truly perceived.  And as for the beautiful--it withers and fades, like the flowers of the field destined for the furnace.

The primacy of truth can straighten and guide our understanding of things such as gospel stories--provided that we start with the simple proposition that a story is a story, not what we might choose to make of it.  Too often readers look at gospel stories hoping to find the "good," or the "beautiful," and are profoundly disappointed (or ratified in their disdain, as the case may be.)

Such is the case in instances such as The Gentile Woman and Her Daughter Both Called Dogs by Jesus:

For my part, I just can’t read the story in Matthew, with Jesus saying to her at last, “O woman, great is thy faith,” and extract from it the notion that the Gentile woman was subject to any humiliation other than that which--rightly or wrongly, for the sake of argument--Jesus imposes on all humanity.  The Jews, after all, were often enough called Children of Abraham in the gospels and excoriated for unbelief precisely because they could not claim the ignorance of the Gentiles.

As far as the story overall, it exists in the same milieu that haunted the story of Jesus and the (Samaritan) Woman at the Well.  It amazes me how often I hear the First Century Levant described (quite rightly, as I understand it) as a setting of almost unbelievable suspicion and violence--and then Jesus breaking the rule against speaking to Samaritans (a woman alone, in this instance) is spoken of by commentators as though it might at most have elicited tut-tutting from her neighbors.

The same considerations would apply to The Woman Called a Dog.  Her neighbors see her appeal--quite understandably--to someone who might help her daughter, Jesus insults her, and then he allows himself to be bested on the very point in question.  She has asked no demonstrable miracle from him (that is, nothing that she could employ as a defense of his legitimacy).  Admittedly, her interaction with Jesus is not without its low points, but are we supposed to prefer that the Gentile Woman, unaccompanied and unprotected, go out into the neighborhood having been thought to have had a warm exchange with an itinerant Jewish preacher?

The concerted application of truth--that the story of the Gentile Woman is to be taken as a story, first and foremost--cuts directly through any quibbles about its details.  It is not a beautiful story, and as for "good"?  Are there not logical limits to how a story such as this could demonstrate the "goodness" of Jesus, who might have cured every demon possession or mental disorder on planet Earth--or at least every one plaguing an innocent child--with a wave of his hand?

Jesus was not speaking idly when he asked the young man, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God."  Chasing after "good" or calling things "good" is not the proper occupation of humanity.

And then there is The Woman and the Costly Ointment:

I would have to agree that the gospel description of Judas’ unseemly motivations would seem to be injected into the story, but the question of embellishments or interpolations in the gospels is a matter that can be viewed independently of the story in question.  Particularly if the story itself is viewed as precisely that--a story--we are confronted with a couple of salient facts.  First, Jesus is not depicted as being okay with having himself anointed with a costly ointment (to the detriment of the poor, as Judas and others contend.)  Jesus is okay with having been anointed with a costly ointment.  The box, or jar, or whatever, is already broken.  Is Jesus supposed to humiliate the woman for her actions, actions taken in the fraught atmosphere of the final week?

Second, is there anything to be gained by placing the wastage of a jar of ointment to Jesus’ account?  Jesus (as the story goes) could have reconstructed and refilled the vessel with a word; he could have put 300 coins in the palm of every beggar in Eurasia; he could have cured every leper in the world--and the ointment incident took place in the house of Simon the Leper.  Are we not at the same liberty to view the story of the woman’s actions as Jesus would have had the disciples do?

The story of the ointment has every evidence of being true, and the upshot of the story is true to Jesus' presentation of his ministry--that is all that matters.

It is not difficult to see the harm that association of Jesus with the Good and the Beautiful has done to the legacy of his ministry.  Nowhere is this more in evidence than in those regions and cultural eddies referred to (with breathtaking hubris) as "God's Country."  Here are beautiful little churches and bountiful harvests, all taken to bespeak the Almighty's favor bestowed upon people of simple and humble (if one ignores the hubris) dispositions.

The truth is often less flattering.  "God's Country" is usually sodden with the blood of disinherited natives and echoing with the sounds of generations of lynching.  And as for the harvests--the wholesome goodness plucked from the soil or carved from the carcasses of the slaughtered is laced with the effects of chemical wizardry and procured with prodigious devouring and belching of fossil fuels.

That is the state of humanity--entranced with the "good" and the "beautiful," and ignoring that which is true--often glaringly true.  That is the state of Christianity, which has strained and exhausted itself for two thousand years trying to escape Jesus' command to embrace truth above all things when trying to grasp anything.

Just Existence Embraced

My last post consists of six words: "Yes and not.  Three letters each."  That is my awkward way to introduce what I imagine is the simplest and most inescapable implication of "roused, readied, reaped":

We do not live in an experience of symmetry.  We are born, we are molded, and we die.  We are dipped into--one might even say we glance off of--such reality as we believe exists outside of ourselves (and even that is to credit our sense of "ourselves" with a reality commensurate with our conceit about its permanence and importance.)

To say "yes and not" about our lives, rather than the symmetrical "yes or no" that we apply to any binary happenstance, is to attempt to verbalize our situation in the most salient manner.  We would, in general, prefer to obtain answers about our concerns (yes's or no's), rather than to seek answers to our concerns and receive what--arguably--we deserve: silence.  Sometimes the answer to our concerns is neither yes nor no (or any more complex response) but is simply nothing.

We are not symmetrical beings, and we do not live symmetrical lives.  I will grant that the word "symmetrical" might be clumsy in this instance, but I think it will suffice.  We careen through our lives, and we careen into the uncertainty of death.  On the face of it, of course, neither a humanistic nor a theistic worldview would militate necessarily against this contention of asymmetry.  We have expended lifetimes and generations and millennia bemoaning the pitiful, limited understanding of humans, but our realization of our state in this regard contains almost always the germ of our most crucial self-deception: we grasp typically at the notion that our existences should "make sense" or "have meaning."

To this notion of meaningfulness--this attempt to right the ship of our heaving and battered understandings--the answer from humans has sometimes been, "Why?  Why should existence make sense in reference to the individual, or in reference to any corporate entity in which the individual might possess membership?"  But what then?

To take the experience of perceived meaninglessness to the extreme, one might imagine the perceiving individual collapsing as an unmotivated and unstimulated pile of flesh.  Of course that doesn't happen.  And as we conceive of ourselves, the problem of meaning versus meaninglessness persists, even as we persist.  (The reader is free to postulate an entirely emotionless and relaxed composure in some suicide committing the act as a response to life's meaninglessness, but if we can pretend that such a person could be "an unmotivated and unstimulated pile of flesh," then we might as well concede that no discussion of shared emotional experiences in humanity has standing against any participant's fancy about what a person might think or feel in a situation.)

And yet we do have a shared experience of meaninglessness.  We were all born.  We grasped for what mattered to us before we knew what mattered to us.  As infants and children we sometimes got what we wanted, and we sometimes were confronted not with yes's or no's or explanations but rather with--nothing.  We got yes's and not's.  Of course questions and concerns come faster to children than their little lives can contain them--and so children hope to grow up "to understand someday"--or are at least told that they "will understand someday."

This is wrong--at least insofar as we as adults internalize such admonitions.  We should not spend our adult lives on binary "yes's and no's" (or even on explanations.)  We should not spend our adult lives seeking understanding, seeking answers.  The crux of my statement is the word "spend," which implies an undertaking or an investment.  It is foolish to attach an idea of expenditure to the search for meaning, since that grasping--no matter how elevated or base--is the default state of humanity.  Our proper undertaking--as especially I see in the teachings of Jesus--is one characterized by the scraping away of the notion of "meaning," an action essential to the working-out of the statement with which I concluded my last post but one:

'The miracle is existence.  The truth is the fact that we ourselves exist.  The faith is a sincere response to truth."

No "meaning," just existence embraced.

Yes and Not Three Letters Each

Yes and not.  Three letters each.

The Zombies That Did Not Appear to Us

I read a blog post recently about the "zombies" that arose from the dead at Jesus's death and entered Jerusalem after Jesus' resurrection.  The blog, which does not claim to be original in this thought, remarks on how curious it is that no gospel but Matthew includes such a statement, and how doubly curious it is that Thomas' doubt about Jesus' resurrection persisted even when--as the critics suggest--Jerusalem was overrun by resurrected persons.

Surely we cannot think that such a jibe would be unanswerable by the faithful.  After all, Jesus had stated that the Rich Man of "The Rich Man and Lazarus" was told that even if resurrected persons were sent to preach to the Rich Man's benighted still-living brothers, those lost souls would not believe.  Surely the post-Resurrection "zombies" (described as holy but not necessarily Christian) could be thought to have shown themselves only to the living righteous--persons like Anna and Simeon--who would have been neither tale-bearers nor people who would have needed communion or communication with Jesus' disciples.

There--we have an answer.  Perhaps not a very good answer, but an answer nonetheless.  What foolishness emits from both sides about miracles and the supernatural.

The miracle is existence.  The truth is the fact that we ourselves exist.  The faith is a sincere response to truth.

The Big Broken Lie

The great lie afflicting Christianity must be called out and defeated.  The great lie is the doctrine that the disease of sin is to be understood--in an always-awkward mixing of metaphors--as a state of brokenness.  In the most important application, "disease" ought really to be addressed with careful individual remedy, and whether or not it is fatal to the soul is a matter for God alone.  "Brokenness," on the other hand, invites the ministrations of the clergy--those purported doctors of the soul whose diagnoses are always correct (if invariably all patients fall short of perfection), and whose remedies can be packaged for sale.

God addresses with remedy--wholesome correctives meant to salvage, bolster, and heal us in our diseased state.  If  metaphor is anything, God's remedy is an organic, fluid process.  God's remedy is embodied and mediated by Jesus, a rather unsurprising fact, since all of Creation is embodied and mediated by Jesus.  At the start of the most elemental gospel, Mark, we are confronted with a quote from Malachi and a quote from Isaiah (introduced together as both being from Isaiah).  Both are imprecisely rendered from the Hebrew, and both speak of God applying correctives to his people.

The gospels pull toward a new way for people to live.  The clergy pull toward new people doing the living.  Something will have to give.