Answers Don't Solve Anything

Answers don't solve anything.  An "answer" satisfies the conditions of some problem.  The "problem" of humanity is in the fact that we exist in a set of conditions for which we were not created--"answers," by virtual definition, are therefore insufficient for what we seek.

Providing answers that don't solve anything is intrinsic to the teachings of Jesus.  The Lord's Prayer is a distillation of non-answers.  The prayer begins with asking that our realm of existence be brought into conformance with God's idealized realm--something that is not going to happen.  Then we ask that our daily needs be met--something that is as like to happen to the most miserable of sinners (if such as the rain of heaven is key to our daily bread.)

Then we describe the answer we might provide--that we might forgive our fellows so as to merit our own forgiveness from God.  As a straightforward proposition, that is a laugh.  And finally we get to the one aspect of the prayer that bears upon our true predicament: the concluding fact that, by our imperfect nature, we have been cast into an alien realm--into a set of conditions for which (short of death) there is no answer.

Here at last we say, "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."  To ask to be spared temptation is not to ask for an answer to our predicament--it is to ask to be removed from that predicament.  It is to ask God to warp time and space, for the very time and space we occupy exists purely because we cannot resist temptation.  The concluding passage from the prayer is sometimes rendered such as, "do not put us to the test," and "deliver us from the evil one" (as though humanity might be translated back through time and space, and The Fall avoided) but still the upshot is the same: we are not asking for a rectified situation, but rather a new situation, and that request is made against fundamental aspects of what we believe we know about God.

Jesus knows what a preposterous thing we are asking, and in Matthew the very next words address exactly that matter:

And he said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves; For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to set before him?  And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are now with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee.  I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth. (11:5-8, KJV)

 And then Jesus says:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. (11:9)

There are no answers, because there are no grounds of commonality between our situation and God's, save those that God condescends to bestow from his sovereignty--a situation that itself illustrates the preposterous nature of any contention that answers have been provided for us.  The only answer we get is that the answer is to seek for answers.

Answers don't solve anything.

Parables Don't Teach Anything

Parables don't teach anything.  A "parable" is based on a comparison--and the only test of the validity of the comparison is the listener's receptivity to the message.  Listening to a parable might be of some value--a value that we might put under the heading of "education," but only insofar as we call it "education" to be reminded of something one knows already.

Parables are at most ancillary to education, as prophecies are ancillary to anticipating the future.  Parables remind one of truths, as prophecies remind one of the tendencies of God's judgment--tendencies that play out in more complex and organic fashion than can be accounted for in any catalog of prophecies.  An example of each of these realities is the Parable of the Rebellious Husbandmen (Matthew 21:33-46), who brazenly and violently defied their master:

When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen?  They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons.

When the "chief priests and the Pharisees"--the target of the parable--heard it from the lips of Jesus, all that they learned anew was that Jesus was capable of such effrontery.  Everyone in the audience would have known "what will he do unto those husbandmen," and any of them at all familiar with the scriptures would have known with what mundane regularity goods were--upon God's judgment--taken from the wicked and given to those more deserving.

An even more striking example of the "non-teaching" quality of parables is the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matthew 13:24-43 which, incidentally, touches on end-time prophecy in Jesus' characteristically non-specific way--"until the harvest".)  All that one might "learn" (in a straightforward educational sense) from The Wheat and The Tares is the rather unsettling fact that "servants of the householder"--even at God's direction and with such aid as he might provide--could not be relied upon to tell wheat from tares.  (Proponents of an inerrant Bible--in the "autographs" or not--might want to take note.)

Of course, at the end of the parable, the angels ("reapers") will perform precisely that sifting operation.  If the "servants of the householder" from before are not angels as well, then it is truly a puzzle who they are, since "the children of the kingdom" are busy being "the good seed."  Clearly this parable is meant to be evocative--as parables will be--rather than didactic.

Parables don't teach anything.

Prophecies Don't Predict Anything

Prophecies don't predict anything.  A "prophet" carries a message from God about happenings to be expected, but the expectations are not focused on expectations alone--rather, they are focused on the interplay between human behavior and the responses of God.  A false notion of prophecy might be the scene where Jesus tells Peter to catch a fish that will have a coin in its mouth with which to pay a tax.  A "prediction" that might be called--or a divine display--but it can only be slotted awkwardly in with the components of "prophetic ministry."

Prophecy of any lasting import is that which connects the actions of God with the behaviors of humans.  Moreover, the very notion of pending or suspended judgment entails the contention that the behaviors required of humans by God are known to humans--known, that is, and imperfectly (to say the least) performed.  Imperfection, however, is not the same as absence, and so it is to be expected that prophecies--sweeping or thunderous though some might be--will be fulfilled in proportion across time and space.

Early in Luke, Jesus returns to Nazareth:

And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias.  And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4:17-19)

 Jesus sits down and then says,

This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

Jesus' audience would not accept that--if by "that" we intend to mean a conventional prophecy, specific to time and place--and they would be right.  A specific such "year of the Lord" would have to wait until at least 1948, and the place (at least approximately) would have to be Jewish possessions in the Levant.  Of course no such limitations will comport with Jesus' meaning, and the difficulty is only somewhat resolved by Jesus' dissertation to them about the real ways prophetic ministries work out:

But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land; But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow.  And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elise'us the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.

Prophecies are fulfilled in a manner roughly (as it seems to us) proportionate to the terms in which they are described: divine actions in response to human behaviors.  Fulfillments are even more roughly (if at all) apparent to us in the context of time and place--to say nothing of the possibility of piecemeal or gradual or nuanced fulfillment.

Prophecies don't predict anything.

The Loss of Understanding

The full measure of the loss that we--as created beings--might experience would be our universe itself.  Our surroundings are that against which we measure ourselves.  Every conceptualization we might have is rooted in our experiences, and every experience we have occurs in the universe we imagine exists.

The so-called Great Religions of the World have decreed that there is a larger reality than that which we can describe, or can even experience this side of the grave.  We call it humility to accept this view, and we call "paganism" any belief system that treats a created thing as a god.  A mountain is not a god, it is a place where a god dwells; no, wait--it is a place where we go to speak to a god; no, wait--it is a place we approach while an anointed few go to speak to a god; no, wait--it is a holy place itself (its "mountain-ness" being but a representation of its function as a portal); no, wait--it is all mountains or none (being itself just a representation of the potential of communion with God.)

The mountain, then (the "thing" that we must be careful not to worship) becomes all things or nothing--depending on what kind of grasping for the transcendent has seized us at the moment.  This sort of wild tension is apparent in the gospels where, for example, one moment the Children of Abraham (in the form of the depicted audience) are described as the unique and irreplaceable brood of the Patriarch, and the next moment it is said that such a brood might be conjured from the stones.

The upshot of all this is the reality that not only can we not possess the mountain (or possess our imagings of a god perched on that mountain), we cannot even possess our conceptions of "mountain-ness"--because all aspects of creation (and therefore all of our imaginings) are but phantasms.  To deny this is paganism (describing a debased religious tendency of whatever faith), and this contention can be demonstrated easily enough in the Christian world.  It is a small matter each spring to find church message boards that say something like, "The birds are singing . . . the flowers are blooming . . . God did it again!"  Of course it would be just as accurate six months later to write, "The birds are freezing in the gutters . . . God did it again!"

The point is that the rhythms of life--those cycles and pulsings that we associate with vitality--are really manifestations of death.  God did not intend reapings and sowings, but rather continually smooth and unfevered blessings.  It is in the context of our post-Eden faithlessness and vile cravings that Jesus assails us at one moment with anxious want, and the next moment with creaking harvests.  And all along we are hounded with recollections of the inevitability of death--such recollection being death itself, as Adam was promised.

Adam was given the breath of life, and then he--and we--were given to know the lack of it.  This really holds for all of life.  At some moments we know the nearness of death, and then we are distracted by events or drawn as usual into seemingly-normal routines, and we draw these breaths--both literal and figurative--as though they are our due.  They are not--they are overdrafts against accounts that can be called in at any moment.

This is the most pernicious danger of Christianity--or of any of the great religions of the world: the effectual paganism of worshiping a God congratulated simplistically for the design of this world--a world that is not as God intended.  We are still the creatures that God made, rather than some essential post-Edenic re-design.  That is the nature of the curses.  We are as we always were, thrust awkwardly into surroundings that are not only inhospitable, but phantasmagorical.

We were never meant to understand this universe.  God help us whenever we believe we do.

How It Works In Loss

And the Lord God said unto the serpent . . . . I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.  Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children . . . --Genesis 3:14-16, KJV.

Eve, Adam's partner in sin, is told that her offspring will suffer in the face of a hostile world, and Eve is told that child-bearing--the experiential source of humanity's continuance--will be an agony for her.

Adam is told that the woman will desire him--a fleshly inducement for him to provide for his family--and he is told that the effect of the curse on him will be hard work and his own death.  Poor Adam.  Even the snake--told that its offspring will experience deadly struggle against humanity--is confronted with a curse in the form of suffering of creatures with which it might identify.  But Adam?  His life is just going to mostly stink, that's all.  Not a word is expended on the notion that he is going to care about anyone else but himself.  (Though it must be admitted--if the general description of the first patriarchs holds for him--that he will have ample opportunity to expend himself in at least the outward expressions of affection; he can be expected to have experienced sexual potency for most of a thousand years.)

And Adam does get to learn that his transgression will lead to suffering--through a cursed Creation and its damned creatures--a thousand-fold greater than the suffering of the snakes, but the only focus here is on how Adam's gastronomic experiences are going to suck.

Lost, apparently, in three or four thousand years of humanity ruminating about the curses of Eden, is one salient fact.  The overall process of child-bearing--the life-long, consciousness-defining aspect of the life of being female--ought first and foremost to be understood not in terms of the agony of giving life, but in the agony of bearing death.  A solid half of pregnancies (in Bible days as now) are never completed.  Women bear within themselves a process of death.

Women give birth to persons, knowing all along that those persons will eventually die, and as a culture in the Western world we reckon that an unfortunate portion of women will know what it is to have a child die.  I say "reckon" guardedly, because that is one of the most obtuse reckonings made in all of human civilization.  If we reckon forthrightly with the process, most women who become pregnant a few times (and most women who might chance to become pregnant a few times) have lost offspring--whether they have known it or not.

Women are not chiefly bound together by the largely-experienced phenomenon of being bearers of life, but more typically by being bearers of death.  Women, in the implacable working-out of the curse, are born with death inside them.  For this fact, individual women are not to blame.  Yet it is just as much a fact--if we are to forthrightly apply our enlightened notions of civil support--that women (in what they know they experience, or what they must experience in the suspicions about what might reside in each issue of blood, or in the youthful experience of dreading the impending dark possibilities of child-bearing), women, I say, are survivors of dreadful trauma, and are deserving of social support.

This leads unavoidably to the great dark horror of the abortion debate.  If women are to be given to understand that the conceptus they might abort is fully human, where then is the societal reckoning on the inescapable fact that any conceptus--indeed, even the maternal expectation of a developing conceptus--must be reckoned as fully human, even in loss?  A woman who has a positive pregnancy test followed by a negative can be counseled all we might about false-positives, but who are we to decide that she ought not from that time forward--perhaps even for her entire life--be provided with civil supports as a trauma survivor?

Indeed, as I will attempt to show, the very idea of a civil society--of a government ostensibly directed toward safeguarding and/or providing social goods--is, in the common human endeavor, fundamentally flawed, and this flaw reaches as deeply toward our core values as the very ideas we have of families and individuals.  Left or right, our politics and economics revolve on questions of gain--on productivity of what might be produced, or distribution of what might be distributed--when the true common endeavor of humanity ought to be addressing the phenomenon of loss.

Muddy Water Men

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, end every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God has not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.  But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.  And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.  And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.  And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  And  a river went out of Eden to water the garden . . . .  And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.  And the Lord God commanded the man, saying. Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 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.  And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone . . . .  --Genesis 2:4-18a, KJV

In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.  For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.  Then went out to him Jerusalem, and Judaea, and all the region round about Jordan, and were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.  But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance: And think not to say within yourselves, "We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.   And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.  I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire . . . .  --Matthew 3:1-11

The parallels of imagery between the creation of Adam and the appearance of John, once seen, can scarcely be denied.

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. (Before every plant of the field . . . was in the earth, end every herb of the field before it grew.)

This is (in the gospel application) the river Jordan, in the midst of the desert, and as far as the imagery of watered the whole face of the ground, the gospels stretch the imagery into a horizon of irrigatable plains, with Luke even adding, "Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low."

The Jordan valley--eastward of Jerusalem--though dry and forbidding in Jesus' day, is the parallel of the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden.

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

And in Matthew,

And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

And of course in both accounts we have fruit and snakes and subterfuge and law-breaking and well-deserved wrath--and a muddy-water man who is his generation's mortal "Crown of Creation" (to lift a phrase) shown at once to be an awful majesty of God's handiwork and an awful expression of depravity.  There is Adam, the man of thorns and thistles and the first great sinner, and John the Baptist, the man of locusts and wild honey and of which it is said, "he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."

Recognizing the parallel imagery of the Creation of Adam and the Baptism of John is only of value, however, if the "genesis" of Adam's sinfulness is recognized.  This is the Adam of "It is not good that the man should be alone"--the Adam unable to embrace communion with God, much as John--awestruck though he is by Jesus' majesty--hesitates to embrace Jesus.  This is not so much a recapitulation of "The Fall," as much as it is a recollection of Adam's first estrangement from God--the "It is not good that the man should be alone" moment.  And now we have John the Baptist's turn in the gospels, his--as it were--"Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?" moment.

And of course we cannot forget John's "I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham" moment.  From the first family on down, Adam's inability to commune with God his Father has been compounded by our species' foul fascination with earthly lineage.  We are supposed to be God's children, and to be siblings with our first sibling Jesus, and to be bound together by the Spirit of truth.  In this reality reside all the elements of the Trinity, as expressed in the teachings of Jesus.

And so the reality playing itself out in the gospels does not begin with Jesus exulting--as we might imagine--in his baptism by John, but rather with Jesus rising up "straightway out of the water" and into a true Baptism--symbolized by the form of a dove and solemnized by the heavenly voice, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."  This is the baptism truly associated with Jesus, who, as the Baptist says, "shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire."

As Jesus, in this episode of John's ministry, blasts past the ancestral-religion fixation of the populace, one is reminded of the Transfiguration, in which the appearances of ancestral figures are blasted away, leaving the onlookers with God's unadorned pronouncement, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him."

This is why water-baptism is such a misdirected ritual.  Considered carefully, water-baptism makes as much sense as a practice of Jesus' followers as babbling about "we brought no bread" makes sense when Jesus warns his followers about the yeast of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.  The true baptism of Jesus makes sense only in terms of the necessity of his followers refraining, first, from turning their reverence for God into reverence for their own supposed abilities to understand God.  We can understand God no more fully as adults than we can as children--we just learn as we get older to dress our misunderstandings in greater and greater sophistication.

In truth, God is our Father, and this simple realization (independent as it is of the age or sophistication of the believer) must be held to even as we are tempted to find parenthood in our fellow mortals.  This is the second thing from which we must refrain--finding our "family" among our own species, no matter how closely (or whether) they are our blood-relations.  We are of God's family, and imagining otherwise is the greatest of falsehoods.

We are the sons and daughters of God, and we are the siblings of the Son of God, and we are bound by truth above all else.  This reality--this undeniable element of truth--is not made manifest to us by some esoteric teaching, nor has it been hidden from the religions of the world.  At any moment, we can be the effectual children of the merest of babes and the effectual parents of the most aged souls; at any moment, we can be the closest of relations and neighbors to those farthest from us and those most distant--by any criterion--from us.  All of this is held together by the divine.

This teaching is true baptism.  This is what Jesus means when he exhorts his followers,

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.