The Life Death Dimension

In Matthew and Mark, Jesus in Gethsemane falls to the ground and presents himself to do his Father’s will.  The story has something to do with the possibility that Jesus might shrink from his task, or the story is hollow.

Adam is formed from the ground and given the breath of life.  He is presented with the prospect of a divinely-willed eternity of fellowship with his Father.  The text has God acting on the realization that Adam will shrink from the prospect.  The larger context of the Genesis approach to its narrative makes plain either that the story of Adam is the story of humankind, or that the story is hollow.

One thing is plain from Jesus’ teachings and from the stories (such as in Genesis) to which he subscribes.  To do the will of God is life, and to shrink from doing the will of God is death.  Those are the definitions of life and death.  To do the will of God is life, and to shrink from doing the will of God is death.  Surely life is biological, we will say.  Our forebears might have rather said that life is “natural,” or some such, and while the particular terminologies and connotations might differ with time and place, the import is the same.  In human understanding (or in what humans have decided to understand) “life” and “death” happen to the body, and all other applications of the terms are metaphorical.

It is sadly the case that human assertions of biological life and biological death as baseline applications of the terms “life” and “death” have been accepted by Christianity.  In any wholesome approach to the teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, it would be folly to speak of the “life of the soul” or of the “eternal death” of damnation (conceptually just a much a type of “eternal life”) or any other type of life/death metaphor employed by the churches.

Jesus said to some of the Jews, who protested that they would not persecute the prophets as their forebears did, that the mere recognition of a line of forebears made the speakers equally guilty.  There is no room in Jesus’ analysis for postulation—for putting forward some conceptualization of, say, one’s forebears as flawed and resolving to copy their virtues and shuck off their vices.  In Jesus’ analysis, there is only the moment and there is only the question of adhering to God’s will or not.  One’s forebears might as well be one’s contemporaries, and indeed to Jesus there has only ever been one “generation” (which will see all and experience all.)

Life as a function of time, or place, or parentage (he disparages parentage especially) means nothing to Jesus.  Life versus waking; death versus sleeping; the fullness of a life that one must give up; the death of the dead burying their own dead—all of these notions put forth by Jesus presume a life/death paradigm that controls all, and it is not the biological one.

Adam was given life.  Adam grasped for death.  We all would have done the same, for the “life” to which we aspire—though it might burst with all the natural virtues and joys—is the invitation to death, for it is the denial of life in its pure original—life in fellowship with God.  Moreover, the most biting aspect of original death is not that it is the opposite of life, but that life continuing after the original death is the very means of perpetuating the pain of original death.

Life and death are not opposites.  The dimension of life and the dimension of death serve to structure the experiences of the created being in a manner analogous to the scientist’s dimensions, but in the most perplexing manner.  Not like depth versus breadth do the dimensions of life and death bedevil us, but in the more tortuous manner of any of the physical dimensions versus the fourth dimension of time.

We are hoisted and spread-eagled by innumerable aspects of life and innumerable aspects of death assailing us at every moment.  Our only refuge is God, our only standard is truth, and the only true religion is to cast ourselves to the earth to which we are kin and pray for the chance—and the will—to do the bidding of our Father.  That is the lesson of Adam.  That is the lesson of Jesus.