To the Limits of the Machine

Next, in my description of the operation of the Machine:

The intelligent creature projects immediacy of time and surroundings into a horizon of aspirations.  There is perhaps no more concise description of humanity’s approach to traveling through time and space than the casually-offered query about any belief system: “Where is all this leading?”  It would be unsettling enough for any answer to “Where is all this leading?” to amount to “Nowhere—there is no place for us to go, and no hurry to get there.”  Even Taoism—sometimes described clumsily by outsiders are merely a philosophy of “going with the flow”—can scarcely be described so in its totality.  After all, the ancient description of Lao-tzu as “sick at heart at the ways of men” (or some such) is inconsistent with a satisfaction with any concrete state of affairs.  For humanity, there is always somewhere to go and some need to get there before too long.

It would be unsettling, as I have said, for any religious teacher to contradict our presumption that there are things in space and time to be done.  And of course, in the case of Jesus, it is incontrovertible that he intended both to accomplish an end, and also to relate to his disciples beforehand what that end was.  In this latter task (getting through to his disciples) Jesus was—by the estimation of virtually every critic—spectacularly unsuccessful.  Jesus’ description to his disciples of what lay before him was uncomfortable, but it would be simply untrue to contend that it was too fantastic to be grasped in its particulars.  The Twelve—grown men by any reasonable assessment—had lived their entire lives in the company of stories about heroic witnesses, martyred prophets, tortured innocents and—in the “ferment” so often used to describe their era—resurrected gods.

When we observe the disciples from our vantage-point, however, we are confronted by a selective distillation of the story—a distillation afforded both by the editors’ choices, and by our own predispositions.  Ensconced in a set of presumptions, we can divide ourselves into two camps about the progression of Jesus’ ministry: either that it does not make sense, or that it would be nonsensical for the Savior of Mankind to have proceeded in any substantially different way.  To frame my response to this situation, I will quote from my preceding post:

“The existence of reality does not make sense.  There is available to us—virtually by definition—no reason why anything should exist.  Fortunately, there is however available to us the capacity to employ thought in manners that we have come to treat as counter-intuitive.  My contentions about the teachings of Jesus rely on such approaches, and for what it is worth my contentions seem hardly more likely to satisfy the religious than the non-religious.”

Whether religious or non-religious, critics of the stories of Jesus in the Gospels have set themselves to seeing if the stories (or “collections of stories,” given the existence of four gospels) make sense.  In these endeavors, nothing is more crucial than the participants’ predispositions about what is necessary in order for something to “make sense.”  To state the participants’ position generally, Christians contend that it makes no sense to disregard the “evidences” of Jesus’ ministry, and their critics contend that the stories of Jesus’ ministry “make no sense.”

What these two camps share, however, is the presumption of the “time and space” aspect of describing the appearance of Jesus on the scene.  The story of Jesus is true or it is untrue—either the story really proceeded as it is described, or the story—possessing no substance—went nowhere, and never happened.  At this point I will inject what I referred to earlier: “thought in manners that we have come to treat as counter-intuitive.”  I will present the notion that nothing of substance about the ministry of Jesus would be altered if—in a manner reminiscent of the apparently truncated ending of Mark—all of the surviving manuscripts of all four gospels ended with the disciples scattering at Gethsemane, described in like terms as the disciples at that truncated ending: “they trembled and were amazed.”

What would have been lost if the “story” of Jesus’ resurrection had been lost, or never told?  And I will not fail to note that—in an extreme irony—in one sense, the story of the Resurrection was never told.  All we have is stories of the evidences of the Resurrection—of the event itself we have not even stories of Jesus resurrected within the tomb and first spied upon his exit.  Yet the entire force of the gospels consists of the contention that the disciples, listeners, and even opponents of Jesus ought to have seen him in life as the Messiah, ought to have understood him in his qualities, and ought to have understand that in his fulness as the Son of God he had—as he told his disciples in John before his betrayal—"overcome the world.”

Jesus, revealing himself in his earthly ministry, had related to people who and what he was.  The “time and place” aspect of his story was ancillary at best.  It is no slight to Jesus’ listeners (or to us) that they tended to seat the substance of Jesus’ ministry in their expectations about the playing-out of a narrative.  As I have indicated, it would be “counter-intuitive” for them to have done otherwise.  And as I began with “the intelligent creature projects immediacy of time and surroundings into a horizon of aspirations”—we want to see what is going to happen, and we want to be there when it happens.

In John, Thomas was not present at the first appearance of Jesus to the disciples, and when he was confronted by Jesus at the second instance, he was told, “because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”  In typical modern fashion, the application of “blessed are they that have not seen” is applied to the idea that the gospels (and other parts of the New Testament) ought even now to be taken as sufficient evidence of the truth of Christianity.

What is not typically remembered (because “time and space” considerations, rooted in our wishful thinking, are easily bent to our wishes) is the fact that Jesus’ assertion about “blessed are they that have not seen” applied at that moment not merely to persons who had never seen the resurrected Jesus personally, but to persons who had not yet been exposed to the “evidences” of the Resurrection.  They had not been given—perhaps would never be given—the tedious recitations from the faithful about this or that appearance, or “Why would so-and-so lie about an appearance?” or “Isn’t it revealing that five hundred saw Jesus at once?”  (Would “five thousand” not be more convincing?  Or “fifty thousand”?  At what point would the size of the crowd be less rather than more impressive as “evidence”?)

The story of Jesus is a story of his qualities.  It is a story of people having to decide what to do with those qualities.  It is a story of people being confronted by a person of Jesus’ qualities, and necessarily being confronted simultaneously by the latent question of whether those qualities constitute ultimate reality.  The preceding sentence could have been written differently in so many ways, but I will confess to being unable to imagine a worthy aspiration of humans that is divorced from the idea of reality.  If reality is the matter at hand, then so is truthfulness—the proper relating of reality.

Much might be said about the pursuit of truth—it is perhaps the noblest of aspirations.  It must always be remembered, however, that truth can never be more than its progressively more perfect iterations.  Truthfulness, on the other hand, might at any moment or any place—in any person, God willing—be the greatest it has ever been, or greater than it ever will be.  Truthfulness might—in any time or place—be so great that only the reality of the Ultimate abuts it.