The Bewildered Anguish

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.