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.