How Awkward Things Are

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.