In my last post I wrote:
“Jesus’ divinity, in the agonies of his death, was not represented by his ‘understanding’ of what was happening to him, but rather by his unrequited yet unceasing reaching-out to God—'Why?’ he cried out. Jesus could not fail to embrace God, even from the experiential distance of the Cross. And this, in the finite scale of our own existences, is what is demanded from us as well . . . . We are not in this world engaged in a self/other conflict with elements of evil, whilst permitted to anticipate an eternity with a magnified, omnipotent figuration of ourselves called God . . . The great Other in this scenario is God . . . If we are to confront the mystery of our relationship with God, then let it be done in this basic sense, and let it be done—as I have described before—in terms of Adam’s initial forsaking of the Great Other who created him. It is this seemingly hopeless fracture that Jesus was sent to mend.”
This “hopeless fracture” is the mystery of existence itself. Things exist, and there is no discernable reason why this ought to be so. On the other hand, of course, there is no discernable reason why the existence of things ought not to be so. Things exist. Moreover, if they were the creation of a God who exists independently of any concept we can grasp, then neither the things themselves nor any of the properties by which existence is gauged can be thought to possess existence in themselves. Let God look away, and all else is nothing.
“Existence,” then, is a thing of times and places. Let time stop and motions cease, and “existence”—conceived of as that which can be experienced—ceases as well, and the “ceasing” as far as we are concerned is the same as non-existence. Or let everything happen at once, and it would be the same as if nothing ever happened. And yet to God everything happens all at once, and takes forever to happen—or is there some other, more defensible version of God available to us mortals?
For want of better examples, existence for us is an ever-shifting playing field on which there are no rules. Something, we are convinced, is supposed to happen, but the happenings of the game are indistinguishable from the administering of the game. We have sensations and impulses that play upon us, yet they are only momentary and localized, while the venue of the game extends beyond our view and the timekeeper hoards a clock away from us.
This is not meant to be silly, for the playing-field of our experiences is littered with tragedies enough. What I mean to describe is an experience-field that ranges from the most trivial to the most tragic in a proceeding that, to us, is alternately mundane and chaotic. Authors enough have spoken of the ridiculous to the sublime. It is unfortunate that theologians have not usually explored the matter in a similar vein. Jesus begins his ministry making fun of the first disciples’ tendencies to believe, and he ends his ministry with the agony of experienced futility. As critics have noted that the tragic—though deprived of the levity of the comic—is usually granted the final mercy of resolution, so the tragedy of Jesus’ despairing death ushers in the possibility of resolution to the—forgive me—“human comedy” that would be sad if it weren’t so funny, and funny if it weren’t so sad.
I know I have gone from the playing-field to the stage, and from the game to the play, but neither type of metaphor will suffice, yet each hints at the abiding informative quality of Jesus’ ministry, and of the scriptures that frame our understanding of that ministry.
The form of Jesus’ ministry is satire. There is no other way to put it. The very idea of translating the existence of God into a testament of the existence of God is an idea of irreverence—once that testament is understood as a presentation to us mere mortals. This hearkens back to the very beginning of the testimonies to Jesus, to the very beginning of Genesis, where the groundwork of the rationale for famine and fire and eternal damnation is littered with sophomoric word-play.
God made everything from nothing in an instant. Or perhaps he did not, yet there is no other intellectual template available to us. To us, something exists or it doesn’t, hence the “everything from nothing in an instant.” This is also, as I have indicated, ridiculous—there is no other intellectual template available to us. Everything comes from something else, and that original “something” must be bounded by the self-same framework of properties that bounds its product. This, then, is the intellectual distance between us and “God made everything from nothing in an instant.”
Yet Genesis does not inflict that distance upon us. “Creation” in its raw state is a pre-existing character in the narrative of Genesis, and the particulars of Creation are drawn out over a week. At the end of the week God, who does not need rest, rests from the week-long process that would not take him the smallest part of a week. This might seem an odd way for God to present Creation to mortals, but “God made everything from nothing in an instant” is a postulate, not a presentation.
So, we can take Jesus’ ministry (including those scriptures he treats as part of his ministry) as statement, or as satire. Character after character in the gospels offers this or that statement, and is responded to by Jesus with question, puzzle, paradox, retort—while it is the small, scattered cohort of sincere people who stand before Jesus while trembling in conflict over the glib statements of theology who gain his praise. In our exploration of this matter we must go back to the start of scripture—to its probing, piercing, sardonic, satirical bent—to understand the basics of what we call “faith.”
It takes a leap of faith for us to put ourselves in the place of Adam, simultaneously confronted and comforted by the God who made him, by the God who must be the ultimate Other to all else that exists (the confronter) and also the ultimate Understander of all else that exists (the comforter.) The great moment of humanity’s fate was not the apple-story Fall, but the primordial moment in which God decided of Adam, “It is not good for the man to be alone”—when the element of “alone” reflected the dispositions of Adam, not the dispositions of the Creator who for eons has lamented a broken communion with the man and his progeny.
“Statement” cannot encapsulate for us—the children of the man—the sorrow of our distance from God. “Satire” might seem, alternatively, to be irreverent, but it is entirely appropriate to the ridiculousness of Creation, and also to the ridiculousness of our attachment to the grime of Creation—in preference to the sublime aspirations with which we are haunted and which we cannot deny. The drama of satire—the structure of Jesus’ gesticulations, for which both kin and stranger branded him mad—is also the drama of searing experience. Satire is our method of holding onto otherwise unmanageable lessons and memories. Satire is the essence of our life-long, moment-by-moment undertaking of remembering the unthinkable and of clinging to the repellent—the essence of the faith that soothes even as it burns, and that continues to soothe only because it continues to burn.
Faith is not believing in something despite a lack of evidence, and faith is not believing in something because of the presence of evidence. Faith is believing in something as the chasm of the momentary experience yawns—as the initially-undeniable, say, tolling of a bell fades into waning echoes, and as the memory of the experience fades into the disappearing recesses of our recollections. Faith is an experience of motion—even so little as tensing ourselves to raise up half-forgotten sensations. Faith is an experience of motion—even as we quiver or dart or plod along—and we decide (or succumb to welling impulses) about motion, about what we will go toward or reach out for. This is what the great satire of Jesus’ ministry was always heading for. I do not mean the Jesus of calm Sermon-on-the-Mount imagery, or the Jesus of flaring and disappearing anger in the Temple, or the Jesus of the endlessly-reenacted Passion. These are merely set-pieces, placed before the believer by theologians like oil-paintings (even by the Masters) with explanatory placards below.
The Jesus of the Great Satire is the Jesus whose derisive laughter echoes still—all the more chilling in that his scream on the Cross echoes as well. This is the Jesus who could never stop moving toward God, who could never stop reaching out toward God, who could never stop yearning for God. Between us and Jesus, of course (as between us and God) is a chasm. Across the chasm come the dwindling strains of the screams and of the laughter, all of which—even together with every breath of Jesus—were bought for us at an inestimable price.
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