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.
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