Always Fleeting and Always New

Change in plans.  I just have some notes I want to make, although I should probably console myself with the notion that notes, not treatises, are really what a blog is about.

“Roused, Readied, Reaped” has as its architecture a familiar notion of a cycle or arc of life, but insofar as the “roused, readied, reaped” phenomenon happens in the lives of creatures, unfamiliarity (or confrontation with the “alien”) is an intrinsic element.  Experientially, change is alien, growth is alien, learning is alien.  And of course, as I have written before, the divine is in the first instance to be viewed as alien to us, with every substantive instance of affinity between us and the divine to be seen as miraculous.

This can provide insight into what Jesus must mean by “seeing.”  In a set of unsettling (and theologically unsettled) statements Jesus tells us to pluck out our eyes if they cause us to sin.  The jarring quality of the statement (independent of the fact that it is meant to be jarring) is presented to us chiefly by our limitations of analysis of the teachings of Jesus.  We are drawn almost irresistibly to fancied commonalities with Jesus, and we have the corresponding aversion to the alien.

It is, however, to the alien we must look if we are to find truth.  It is also to the alien we must look if we are to avoid sin.  God’s purity is alien to us.  The sin that separates us from God is, however, most mundane and familiar.  We would do well to note that Jesus is not warning us from sinful members of our bodies.  When Jesus tells us what to do when our eye causes us to sin, his statement is predicated on the notion that we have had experience of what happens to us when we cast our eyes in a certain direction.  Similarly, we have experience of what happens to us when we put our hands to this or that, or when we direct our feet here or there.

The remedy of having one’s eye cause one to sin is to look elsewhere—anywhere, if necessary.  The remedy is to look to the alien, and any search for God’s truth will lead of necessity to the alien.  It is the age-old phenomenon of “the dog returning to its vomit” that characterizes sinfulness.  Indeed, anything that has become familiar to us is apt to be a danger.  When Jesus speaks of new wine in new wineskins, he is speaking of our need to not only learn new things, but also to be willing to let learning change our very selves.  It is for this reason that the notion of time-honored “Christian growth,” lurching up already in the epistles, has little or no basis is the Gospels.  Jesus does not direct his teaching to the building up of knowledge, but rather to the breaking down of internal barriers, each breach of which makes a person to some extent a different person.

Of course, we are apt to resist such change—such yielding to the alien—and we are aided in this resistance by the fact that we must rely on the old that we know (or think we know) in addition to the new.  Jesus recognizes this when he speaks of the scribe and a store of knowledge new and old.  He also recognizes, however, (in an extension of the “wine” analogy) how people are apt to prefer the old.  We want to be able to rely on what we think we know.

Reckoning, however, that we must be willing to give up all to follow Jesus, we must admit that it is incumbent upon us to be open to new things, and to be open to new views of old things.  This is what Jesus means when he says things like, “whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”  We, indeed, hear such things spoken from pulpit and podium, but rarely do we register such things in the immediacy that characterizes Jesus’ teachings.  Let us hear—and believe we understand and accept—a teaching of Jesus, and for the rest of our lives we will hear such a teaching repeated and accompanied by “whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”  To us, however, that usually seems like an admonition for us to recall our experience of learning the thing in question.  This is a horror.  Nothing learned from God is ever really understood by us—that is the essential nature of an equation that includes the perfect and the imperfect.  If truth is directed to us by God, it must be renewed continually by us in our reception.  “In our reception” is the key—knowledge of the things of God is never to be recalled in terms of a previously-accepted teaching and reinforced by a conscious desire to strengthen a belief already held.  Truth from God is to heard anew in every instance—and hopefully in as many challenging, alien instances as possible—from the very first reverberation of sound and from the very first glimpse.

Connection with the Great Other is always fleeting and always new.