The Lesser Part of Any Possibility

Toward the end of my last post I wrote:

“The gospels describe the ministry of Jesus.  They do not describe its content, insofar as Jesus considered some such things to be pivotal and eternal.  The gospels are guides to our search—our search for the path, and for the gate.”

Our search is attended by the need for enlightenment, as I wrote:

“If we treasure the right things, we will be associated with light rather than with darkness.

“The matter, however—if we act as though we might analyze it—is not so simple.  When dealing with the question of how we humans see what we need to see (or do not) or hear what we need to hear (or do not), the gospels all make some sort of reference to Isaiah 6:9-10:

“‘And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.  Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.’”

Moreover, the gospel view of God includes the notion (presaged at points in the Old Testament) that God responds on occasion to willful, grave disobedience by giving transgressors visions both terrifying and misleading.  God punishes the complacent, the willfully ignorant, and the cowardly with imposed tendencies to indolence, dullness, and fear.  Admittedly, a certain detached analysis can posit that this means that God propagates lies, but this is no insight to any truly relevant matter—one might just as well contend that the very existence of deceit in any form in God’s Creation means effectively that God lies.

What is pertinent to our discussion here is something I described in the previous post: “The gospels all stress the importance of people being enlightened, but it would be disingenuous to maintain that the gospels speak of plain truths taught plainly.”  However, to say that the gospels do not “speak of plain truths taught plainly” is also, again, to raise objections as fundamental as asking why God created an imperfect Creation to begin with.  The conundrum shows itself all the way back in the beginning.  God threatened Adam with death if he ate of the forbidden tree.  Adam did not die.  Of course, if Adam had died, he would have found himself in the afterlife (according to the prevailing biblical view) and Adam would have been in a perfect position to ask, “So just what is this ‘death’ thing anyway?”

Manifestly, the great questions of existence can be spoken about more or less truthfully, but great (and therefore fundamental and—more importantly—“framing”) matters exist on a plane in which their very existence confounds notions of truth and falsehood, at least as far as we can understand them.  We experience existence through sensory processes that are imperfect—does that mean that the divine that created us meant for our every moment to be shot through with lies?  We might answer in the affirmative, but what (or where) does that get us?  Would we really be saying anything?

The question, which we might ask continually of ourselves (“Would we—or are we—really saying anything?”) is a very good question.  I would cite the admonition of Jesus that we are to pluck out our eyes or chop off our hands if they cause us to sin.  We can discuss the saying, but does the element of “discussion” really apply?  Clearly Jesus is confronting us with the gravity of sin, but are we supposed to glean a “lesson” from the admonition?  I contend that we are supposed to get a wrenching from the admonition, and that the harrowing imagery of Jesus’ saying is supposed to be of value in itself.

A similar sort of confrontation from Jesus greets us in Luke’s story of The Rich Man and Lazarus.  The architecture of the rich man’s torments in the story has—incredibly—been analyzed by theologians as descriptive of the realm of torment, even though the very notion of Lazarus—and Lazarus alone—in the “bosom of Abraham” would only bizarrely be understood to be taken literally—to say nothing of the contention that such is how Abraham, a human like Lazarus, would be spending his eternity.

The story of the tormented rich man is supposed to be harrowing, and it is a study in human pathology that the story would be taken as anything other than a consciousness-shattering alarm.  Of particular head-spinning impact is the story’s logic of simple surfeit and want presented as sufficient groundwork of the two men’s respective fates.  One would think that both the notions of wealth among the saved, and of salvation grounded in faith alone, would be reckoned exploded forever by the parable—but such is not consistent with how human beings function.

We lie to ourselves, and we do horrible things.  Such is the content of our foundational set of experiences, once we are old enough—sadly, amazingly young—to realize such things about ourselves, and about each other.  We talk about law, and government, and financial transactions—even about interpersonal relationships—and it would not occur to us for a moment to bar from any such discussion the prudence of expecting horrible things from people.  Much of child-rearing involves inculcating into the young a necessary caution about people.  And yet we can look at a passage of scripture that screams at us how we need to gut ourselves of our inherent evil, and the last thing we will demonstrate in the course of our analysis is any real attention to the business of gutting ourselves of inherent evil.  “Pity the damned rich man,” the twisted analysis will say, “who failed—perhaps was predestined to fail—to understand that he could simultaneously surrender his life to Christ and surrender himself to a life of luxury garnished by whims of optional alms-giving.”

We lie to ourselves, and we do horrible things.  Moreover, we deserve to have God treat us as creatures who lie to ourselves, and who do horrible things.  Yet again, we are fully aware that we deserve to have God treat us as creatures who lie to ourselves, and who do horrible things.

And yet what do we do with Jesus’ most emphatic warnings to us?  Consider the notion of the End Times.  Jesus makes the appearance of the Awful Horror the pivotal event.  At this appearance we are to drop everything.  And Jesus says, in a direct manner that the theologians have not been able to explain away, that the generation who heard him speak would witness all these things.  What are we to make of Jesus’ warnings?

Jesus speaks often enough of the complacency of the rich.  He describes a rich man who looks forward to years of idle contentment, and who is then told most abruptly that he is a fool, and that his soul (his distinctly ill-directed soul, at that) will be required of him that very night.  Would any disinterested observer conclude other than that the rich man was experiencing his share of something common to all mankind, always: the experience of the End?

Just as we are hit by Jesus’ command to chop off our hands (as if we would really do that) so we are hit by Jesus’ command to abandon all (as if we would really do that) at the appearance of the Awful Horror.  The End is always now, and we know it.  Our lives might be required of us now, and we know it.

Jesus is not lying to us when he describes an End Time scenario that would involve a wrapping-up of all earthly business.  We, however, are lying to ourselves when we pretend that anything we know about ourselves and our proclivities would militate truly in any other fashion that to place ourselves always in the dock of judgment.  We do not deserve to have God tell us the truth, and the only sincere way we can address this fact is for us to accord ourselves always the lesser part of any possibility the gospels describe.