This is the new blog description:
“Our lives last until the first moment we condemn a person.
For the rest of our mortal days, we choose between the salvation of wakeful
death and the damnation of slumbering death. [Here's how it works . . . ] We
are all one, sundered from each other, sharing only separation from the Perfect
Other.”
It wasn’t as difficult to fit as I thought it would be. I thought the limit was 250 characters, not 500.
Now:
Our lives last until the first moment we condemn a person.
For the rest of our mortal days, we choose between the salvation of wakeful
death and the damnation of slumbering death. [Here's how it works . . . ]
To add:
We are all one, sundered from each other, sharing only
separation from the Perfect Other.
(with subtractions as necessary from the beginning of the above
present description.)
Some aspects of Jesus’ teachings can be understood only in terms of two or more gospels, though of course innumerable complications might arise from deciding that one document must be interpreted in light of another. Probably the best example of this is the apparent salvation of the Good Thief of Luke. If Luke were the only source of any of that account, there would be opportunities aplenty for one to conjecture that the Good Thief was a confused believer, or one of inchoate belief, and that the Crucifixion was an episode of the consummation of his spiritual journey.
However, Matthew seems beyond doubt to describe the Good
Thief as at first joining in the imprecations leveled at Jesus by the other criminal. Luke, then, must be taken at face value as
describing a change of heart on the part of the Good Thief, and there is no
reason to ascribe that change to anything other than the text describes—the Good
Thief’s realization that Jesus was a suffering innocent (coupled perhaps with
his realization that there was something superhuman in Jesus’ comportment.)
Jesus responds by telling the Good Thief that he would be
joining Jesus that day in “paradise” (Luke 23:43), leaving it to the
theologians to conjecture about what precisely occurred to Jesus in the “three days,”
and to conjecture about when exactly the departed might enter “paradise,” and also
to conjecture about what precisely “paradise” is. We are given by the text little more than the
declaration that the Good Thief received an assurance of inestimable value.
This, however, is far from the only instance in the gospels
when the afterlife is described in vague or general terms. No John of Patmos is Jesus of Nazareth, and
no geography or architecture of the heavenly kingdom comes to us from Jesus. Indeed, when he assures his disciples that
there will be “many mansions,” he offers that assurance in the form of a concession. What exactly a “mansion” (or some such) is, remains
unspecified, though there is every reason to believe that it is as far afield
from what we might call a “mansion” as is the marriage-less angelic form of the
saved from any physical image we might have of ourselves in “paradise.”
I offer all this in the context of my contention that God is
viewed properly not as an extension or magnification of any concept (and
therefore any similitude) that we can entertain, but rather is viewed properly
as the ultimate manifestation of the “Other.”
This can be placed against my above-mentioned assertion that some aspects
of the gospels are best understood by how one or more of the gospels deal with
a similar subject. At present I have in
mind what is probably the greatest example of an “othering” experience—the Synoptic
Gospels’ description of Jesus’ final cry of despair.
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” I don’t suppose anyone can avoid having some
sort of take on that reverberating question.
At present I imagine the cry of despair to be a completely unsurprising
reaction to an experience of complete surprise—or at least surprise as we would
encounter it. The “experience,” as I believe
can be extracted from a larger view of Jesus’ teachings, is a recapitulation of
Adam’s first experience of God—or perhaps God’s first experience of Adam. “It is not good for the man to be alone” is
followed by the creation of a companion for Adam who is described most
crucially in terms of her similarity to Adam, a similarity that resounds chiefly
in how it makes her closer to Adam than God is.
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” could have been
voiced at first by Adam. And so Adam was
indulged in his desire for the similar.
To be returned to God, to enter into the presence of God, to see God
again—however those phrases might express a reality, they can be expected to
express a reality of a profoundly jarring quality, to say the least.
Indeed, if we are to view the text fairly, Jesus’ cry of
despair is manifestly an element of a necessary progression. Jesus is returning to the Father—as we all
must, in some way or another—and in crossing the frontier from the human to the
divine (in some of course ineffable sense) Jesus is confronted by the great Other,
as we will be. We have no reason to
imagine that Jesus’ humanity is any more comfortably disposed to confronting
the Other than would be our humanity.
Indeed, in that Jesus’ sensations might be all the more acute—and that
his death is a moment of deliberate, conscious, sacrificial agony—we would rightly
shrink from what Jesus faces.
What I must express most crucially about Jesus’ crossing to
the realm of the Other—and what I must believe would be its horrific quality—is
something that I must express in light of one of my above contentions: that
some elements of the gospels are necessarily viewed in a confluence of one or
more of the books. The Gospel of John differs
substantially from the Synoptics.
Indeed, I would say that John differs crucially, in that the very notion
of Jesus’ triumph (as regards timing, at least) in John is very different from
the other gospels. The “It is finished”
quality of the Synoptics is distinct from Jesus’ pre-Crucifixion assertion in John:
“I have overcome the world.”
I was at first going to call that a “pre-Passion” assertion,
but that would be to cancel my very thesis at this moment. Indeed, I think Jesus’ Passion (if we will
call it that) began in his final discourses to the disciples, not in
Gethsemane. Jesus is describing a
crossing-over, and we have no reason to imagine that it was any less tortured
than the tortured-seeming “logic” of his final statements before Gethsemane:
“And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the
world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep
through thine own name those who thou hast given me, that they may be one, as
we are” (John 17:11).
If the above passage does not mean, “My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?”, then the burden would be upon us to say why, just as
the burden would be upon us to say why we would believe that a perfect “paradise”
could exist that contained God and also contained Adam, when the latter—unaccountably,
if we regard the perfection of his Creator—was not satisfied with communion
with his Creator.
Indeed, we might also wonder about the glibness with which
commentators for two thousand years have thought so much might be made of Jesus’
sacrifice of his earthly life, while as well so much is made of how Jesus gave
up heaven to abide on the earth. Would
not each crossing-over have been an agony?
Would not Jesus’ relinquishing of his mortal life—assuming his mortal
life were genuine enough to encompass intellectual limitations—have been attended
by the same trepidations about the Other that plague all mortals?
We are told two things by logic and by the Scriptures. We are like God, and we are not like God. These can scarcely be imagined to be statements
of equal or counterbalancing imports. We
are not like God. When we see our impending
encounters with our mortal fates, we do well to consider that we are not like
God, and that God is not like us. We do
well to think of God as our father, but the “Father God” image is properly viewed
increasingly as the “Father” is considered increasingly by us to be the “God”—defying,
in the final analysis, any familiar considerations.
The disciples looked directly at God in the flesh and said, “Show
us the Father.” Ultimately, we will find
that the father-figure in which we would like to take comfort will look like
God Almighty. To bear up under that
prospect—enlisting the help of God—is true faith. True faith is not concocting an image of a
heavenly father and thinking ourselves dutiful in congratulating God for
measuring up.
For us to return to the Father is a terrifying prospect—one that is so deeply rooted in the primal human experience that it is to us indistinguishable from the bewildered anguish of Adam—and from the bewildered anguish to which our Savior was willing to subject himself.
In Matthew 13 Jesus tells a series of parables, and the series ends with the following statement:
“. . . Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the
kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth
forth out of his treasure things new and old.”
The parables, which include the famous ones of The Seed and
the Sower, and The Leaven, and The Pearl of Great Price, deal generally with
the phenomenon of people seizing or not upon the substance of the Kingdom. Unfortunately, much of Christian commentary
on those parables takes for granted the notion that a virtual schematic of “the
kingdom” is a necessary template for proper understanding. This sort of notion is similar to other, equally
arid, pronouncements of the denominations.
The kingdom is pronounced upon in its parts, the economy of salvation is
laid out from beginning to end, the history of the Church—ostensibly from the
beginning of time, through the Bible, through “Bible days” and the Councils, and
on through until now—is also laid out.
An overview of Jesus’ parables, on the contrary, will reveal
a collection of surprises and encounters and choices impinging upon persons in
scenarios that have little or nothing to do with all-encompassing
contexts. If the “soil” of the heart of
the believer in the “seed” parable is the deciding element, then its lack by
the roadside or its thinness in the stony soil (or conversely, its good quality
and quantity in the last instance) can scarcely be squared with the “thorns”
episode—is the quality of the soil determined by whether or not it is appealing
to thorns? Is not the husbandman to
blame, rather than the soil?
The notion that the Bible itself, or any other authority or
school of thought, is properly understood as laying out a tapestry of requirements
for the believer is fundamentally flawed.
The Kingdom is a surprise, and by its nature it defies what is “natural”
to any schematic of belief. The
denominations construct compendia of Christianity, and then set about defending
them. The results, when placed against
the words and actions of Jesus, are often revealed to be ridiculous. If the Parable of the Seed and the Sower is
picked apart, it falls apart, because its import is experiential, not didactic.
Consider the Parable of the Hidden Treasure (and consider as
well the realization that Jesus could construct a parable perfect in every
regard):
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a
field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth
and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” (Matthew 13:44, KJV).
If the parable is experiential, the man is confronted by and
responds to a sudden vista of paramount value, such as persons of every time
and place and faith have known when the question of ultimate value is before
them. If the parable is didactic, the
man is a scumbag.
This brings me to an important element of what I trying to describe
with “roused, readied, reaped.” For me
at least, “roused, readied, reaped” is always two things. It is the internalized phenomena of that
progression, but it is also—and this usually what I have in mind—a series of
events that could be laid out in the form of a timeline on a page. Even my contention that “roused, readied,
reaped” is a generalized phenomenon (consisting of innumerable overlapping,
perhaps repeating, arcs of varying duration) means merely that the occurrences
of that phenomenon might be difficult to chart out across a page—it is still a
phenomenon rendered lifeless by its being observed rather than experienced.
This is the case with much of religion, especially of conventional
Christianity with its emphasis on historicity.
The believer is told that there is an objective truth to the economy of
salvation. The believer is told that
there is an objective truth to history and to the historicity of the Bible. Unfortunately—and this is the barb inextricable
from the flesh of “the faith”—the existence of that which is ostensibly “objective”
is external to the believer’s progression (or lack thereof). God knows what is objectively true. What the human being "knows” resides in
a single basket, which contains what the human being recognizes as belief and also
what the human being believes to be simple, perfect translation of what is “out
there” in objective reality. The human who
believes that what he or she knows is unencumbered by the blurring effect of belief-thought
is a liar, a lunatic, or one who claims the omniscience of the Lord.
As ever, I must attempt to demonstrate my contentions in
light of Jesus’ teachings. “Roused,
readied, reaped” (or any other, likely superior, formulation of
religion-experience) must describe internal phenomena. History (for example) is on the other hand external—or
at least our conception of history postulates an external, objective phenomenon. The fact that we can neither know nor
remember history perfectly is the least of our concerns about finding recourse
to history to explain our existences.
What is of far more import is the relative value we place upon history
as against the immediacy of our experiences.
Jesus confronts us with something that was done when “Abiathar” was High
Priest (David and his men eating the consecrated bread.) If we are going to cast about for explanations
of why Jesus’ chronology differs from “history,” and if we will not proceed on
the matter without absolute assurance in some such explanation, how are we ever
going to proceed—bereft, essentially by definition, of “objective” assurance—with
dealing with the matter at hand, that being (in case the gospel reader might
forget by this point) the terrifying prospect of navigating the believer’s life
while unsure about what constitutes transgression, and what does not?
David and his men ate the consecrated bread. Any notion that David proceeded in this
without trepidation would make of David a god, or perhaps worse—a God-puppet. David was not a god, or an extension of
God. We are not gods, or extensions of
God. This major importance of this is
the fact that all of our experiences are internalized. This might seem a ridiculously obvious thing
to say, yet it underscores the fact that both our undeniably internal
experiences and our internalized notions of objective truth are subject to the malleability
of our minds. We decide—we must decide—the
immediacy or the import of the things that occupy our thought-life. We are no different from, and we are not by
time or place or the interposition of the written word separated from, the
actual hearers of Jesus’ words. When Jesus
asked who among his peers would not lift a lamb from a pit on the Sabbath, he
was speaking to all of us, and he was not—in the greatest import—establishing a
doctrine. He was asking us to be honest
about how we value things, and to confront value questions not against our notions
of external reality, but against our internalizations of reality, in which the
interplay of ideas of ourselves, of our surroundings, and of the Ultimate must
occur always.
Jesus dealt with this when (Matthew 23) he confronted certain
of the scribes and Pharisees with their doctrine that an oath sworn by the
Temple had no force, but an oath sworn by the gold of the Temple was binding—the
same being said of the altar and of the offering on the altar. Jesus does not respond by quoting some
scripture or by picking through some minutiae of interpretation. Jesus responds by blasting through the scribes’
and Pharisees’ rationalizations and declaring the whole matter to be an assault
on the sacred things of their religion and—most importantly—an assault upon the
majesty of the Almighty. The whole “binding
oath” thing was not a matter of interpretation, but of valuation—which is
precisely the type of matter with which we must deal.
This brings me again to the passage with which I started:
“. . . Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the
kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth
forth out of his treasure things new and old.”
This passage, which concludes a series of parables in
Matthew, is one of those extremely important parts of the gospels that are most
notable—sad to say—by how, in the conventional Christian take on scripture, they
just sort of lie there inert. In the Gospel
of Matthew, this passage is a very important conclusion to a very important set
of sayings, yet “bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old” has life
and substance only when it is recognized that the “scribe” in question is also
a person who weighs the import and determines the application of “things new
and old,” and “his treasure” is internalized and therefore amenable to valuation
idiosyncratic to the “householder.”
The fact that religious experience is internal, and not
graphable or even in the finest sense writable, is one of the easiest things to
understand, but one of the hardest things to remember. In terms of what I must remember about this
blog, the arc of “roused, readied, reaped” does not—cannot--really happen as immediately-conceivable
episodes. We are in startling moments
roused, and we are readied when—whether we know it or not—we are shaped by our
experiences even as we shape them, and we are reaped when, well, we might never
know when we are reaped.
What we can know is that every time we—as we must—write down what has happened to us (or at least “write such things down” in our mental assessments) we are lurching forward, never knowing whether each “lurch” is a step or a hesitation. The denominations seem to want to smooth such awkward things out in our lives. Jesus seems to want us to know that such awkward things ARE our lives.
We human beings are connected by our commonalities. This might seem a trite statement, but its crucial nature consists in its being an expression of a necessary condition in our relationships with one another. No matter how much we might claim to value differences and individuality, we are drawn to our commonalities. This matter resides—timewise—in our clouded past of Creation.
This past of Creation is an example of what I gather the
experts call a true “mystery”—not an unsolvable or yet-to-be-solved question,
but rather a representational display of a truth that can only be partially
displayed and partially grasped. The
mystery of our creation as a species goes back in Genesis to the original state
of Adam—described as an individual creature who required (the moral implication
being an even greater “mystery”) human fellowship. Adam needed other Adams or Adam-like
creatures. The direct implication of it
not being “good” for Adam to be “alone” was it being—at least provisionally—"good”
for Adam to have more of his kind.
The mystery here is us being in need of others of our kind, however
“kind” is to be reckoned. In the larger sense,
I suppose, this is a question of—as I gather the ancient Greeks postulated—existence
consisting not of individual entities so much as consisting of the “ideas” that
underlay them. A “kind” is represented necessarily
by a typology, even if that typology resides in such an earthy conceit as “flesh
of my flesh and bone of my bone.” Actually,
the flesh and bone in question belonged to Eve, but it is either the pre-moral
or supra-moral (the distinction is academic) fact that we—as so many other
creatures—are drawn to our own “kind”.
The notion of “kinds,” however, is something that we are as
likely to forget as to remember. What
underlies the concept of any “kind” is the idealized type that characterizes
it. Remembering the connection of the type
to the kind to the generally-characterized individual to the particularly-described
individual to the named individual can often elude us. For example, God has messengers who are often
earthly messengers who are often prophets who include desert-dwelling eccentrics
including John the Baptist. At any stage
of this declension of descriptions a commonality can be drawn, for the purposes
of any commentator, and when the commentator is Jesus in the gospels then the
very idea of individuality can be exploded.
John, for example, was the Elijah who was to come—and nothing but the typology
of the ”messenger” need be in play for Jesus to make his point.
This brings us to the recurring gospel topic of there being
only “one” of anything. There is only
one Father. There is only one
Teacher. In practical terms, of course,
such statements are not universally binding.
There will be fathers and teachers (for example), but when “practicality”
is applied as an approach to religion, the most “impractical” (in earthly
terms) of applications can be held to prevail.
There are examples almost whimsical, such as Anna and Simeon. In their temporary and localized functions in
Luke, they are the mother and father not just of Jesus but of the nation of Israel—one
might even say the mother and father of mankind. That their functions in this regard are
informal merely strengthens them, for the dancing, organic quality of such
typologies is their recommendation, in that they draw us to the mysteries they
represent.
In John, the disciple who Jesus loved ends up taking Jesus’
mother into his house. We can say that
this course of events occurred at Jesus’ direction, but we can never know
whether or not the narration of the episode in the gospel is determinative, or
(as Jesus would admit to elsewhere) it was performative. After all, was anyone described as the
disciple Jesus loved (indeed, the typological disciple) going to leave the
mother of Jesus—the mother of the king, the mother of Israel—unattended in her
grief?
All of this discussion of there being only “one” of anything
has implications of even greater practicality.
The nature of Jesus’ relationship with his disciples (along with their
individual fates, and perhaps any lessons to be drawn from them) is bound up
with the potential of typology as a crucial factor. There are the particulars of any narrative (to
return to the above episode, hinging on the practicality of “the disciple who
Jesus loved” being in the proximity of Mary, as an example), and such particulars
can often cloud the larger picture. Or
to put it another way, the story can get in the way of the “Story” to be told,
because we tend to look only at the explicit fates of named characters.
Jesus was betrayed by Judas.
That is the story. Jesus was betrayed
by a disciple. Let us consider that—Judas
notwithstanding—the ministry might have continued until the will of all Twelve
of the Apostles was worn down, or a circumstance might have occurred to each
that triggered a certain fatal flaw of character. Perhaps Jesus might have been betrayed by all
Twelve of the Apostles, or by any other disciples, and it might be of greatest
salience to apply “the rule of one” and say that Jesus was betrayed by “his
disciple” as a type.
But was not Jesus betrayed by “his disciple” as a type? Did not all of the disciples, protesting at
one point their determination to stick with Jesus, fail at the crucial juncture? Was not Jesus “Judased” by all of them? Would any of them, consigned on that fateful night
to trip and fall to their deaths (as in the contorted version of Judas’ demise
in Acts) have fared in the Judgment any better than Judas? Would any of them who died in their headlong
flight have less than the betrayal of their Savior for which to answer before
the eternal tribunal?
As I wrote above, there is a potential for great practicality
in considering the application of typology to the gospels. Jesus said to Thomas that blessed were those
who had not seen, and yet believed. The
story of doubting Thomas, however, if it is considered as a story involving
individual disciples, tends to show him in a less flattering light than the
others. But would the others have
behaved any differently than Thomas, if they had been absent on the first
display of Jesus’ resurrected body? Are
we not seeing—in the description of the collective disciples on the one hand,
and Thomas on the other—merely two permutations of experience occurring to “the
disciple?”
If there are distinctions—then as now—in how Jesus’
resurrection is considered by individuals, such that the faithful might be
distinguished from the rest, might not those distinctions differ from what
might be seized upon if only a narrative-based interpretation of the
resurrection appearances is viewed? Jesus
did not actually congratulate the initially-convinced as against Thomas. Jesus said, “Blessed are they that have not
seen, and yet have believed.” Presumably,
there were disciples who had not yet even heard of the Resurrection, and there
was a time when all of the disciples had heard only of the Resurrection as a
future event. They had Jesus in which to
believe or not to believe, and he said before his passion that he had overcome
the world. His Resurrection, in substance,
had already happened—or at least that is the implication of his pre-Crucifixion
demand for his disciples to believe in him.
And so, of course, the argument about the “historicity” of the Resurrection is a silly one, and it serves only to degrade faith in Jesus. Historical import might only be attached to any attempts to prove that the Resurrection did not happen, and Jesus saw to it that the actual, momentary event of the Resurrection (as distinct from reported post-Resurrection appearances) was seen by no human.
