A Reality in Jesus

In my last post I wrote of Jesus’ commands to his followers as being impractical (to put it mildly) means of establishing “affinity with all Creation that makes sense only in light of a call to reach out to an awesome dis-affinity—communion with God, the Perfect Other.”  The world—Creation--is the thing with which we may interact (or at least it is in the world where we might strive to interact with the divine), yet of course we are at all times expected to reach out for the otherworldly.

Unfortunately, we tend often to morph our responsibility to reach out for the otherworldly into a fancied responsibility to reach out for an “another-worldly.”  That is, we assign God to an abode that we visualize as some sort of parallel universe to our own.  Such illegitimate (or at least imprudent) assignment of God to “his heaven” merely degrades our appreciation of him, and I mean this to apply even to protestations that “of course God is everywhere” or “no dimensions can contain God.”  The mere statement of God as being unbounded can reflect either a valid attempt to yield to his ineffable nature, or it can reflect something unseemly like God visualized as a sort of all-seeing time-traveler.

Ultimately, despite our most earnest attempts at piety reflected in characterizing God in poetic or evocative terms, we are in fact deprived (and quite rightly) of any substance to our conceptualizations of God.  God is not the best of this or that, nor the highest of this or that.  Granted, there is nothing wrong in the immediate sense of our musings about God as the best and the highest, but almost immediately all such musings will shudder apart.  God is the author of qualities, not merely the paradigm of (positive) qualities.

What then is the conceptually-translatable version of God (or at least the best available of such versions of God) to which we can pin our attempts at communion with him?  As ever, I will defer to the utterances of Jesus.  When Jesus refers to the Comforter, he refers simultaneously to “the Spirit of truth.”  Of course, when we think of the divine, we are quite correct to think of such things as love, charity, mercy, forgiveness, and if we reckon—again, quite correctly—that we can never really comprehend God, we must admit that his love, his charity, his mercy, his forgiveness, and everything else we can attribute to God are worthy subjects for our contemplation, yet those are qualities that are understood by us in terms of God’s relationships with his creatures.  God’s truth, on the other hand, pre-exists any manifestation and stands—again, at least as far as we can imagine—as co-equivalent to God himself.

I do not claim to be able to assert simplistically that God is truth.  I cannot, however, ignore Jesus’ characterization of the Comforter in John as “the Spirit of truth,” and I cannot depart from the age-old association of the Comforter with the Spirit of God and therefore with God himself.  The persons of God will always be a mystery to mortals.  Additionally, the quality of “truth” is especially acute as an understood aspect of the divine alone.  We mortals can love too much, can be charitable in excess of prudence, can be merciful even sometimes to the detriment of the recipients of our mercy, can be forgiving too soon, too much, or on too little evidence.  All these things we can do, but we can scarcely be too truthful.

Truthfulness seems to be an especial characteristic of God.  Indeed, it is difficult if not impossible for us to see how we could progress from one moment to another without the fanciful versions of our reality that we understand as “reality.”  Everything from our momentary sensations to our most sober philosophies constitute approximations, at best, of truth.  Something entirely truthful (if we are to be “truthful” with ourselves) would be alien to us.  The quintessence of truth would be the full knowledge of God, and as above I will defer to age-old wisdom that says a full knowledge of God would destroy us.  The truth of God is alien to us, despite any conceits we might possess about our desire for truth.  What we must desire, in the end, is communion with the Perfect Other—communion with the One who is as alien to us as he was to Adam.

Jesus’ teachings about the Comforter are contained to a great extent in his discourses in John, and for our purposes here I will present a lengthy quote:

“Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.  And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; Of sin, because they believe not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.  I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.  Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.  He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.  All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you” (John 16:7-15).

What is most important about this passage from John for our purposes is its manifest emphasis on “the Spirit of truth” as more than an honorific.  The divine “Spirit of truth” here described is also presented as truth in its simplest form.  “Sin,” “righteousness,” and “judgment” will be addressed not by the visible imposition of an overt actor, but by truth itself.  “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.”  The truth presented here is both a crystal-clear transparency and a version of reality that must seem alien to us creatures, accustomed as we are to the conceits of our senses and of our limited understandings combining to form our “realities.”

I see this emphasis on “truth” (though our version of it ought really to carry the quotation marks) as being entirely indispensable to our understandings of certain Gospel accounts.  An example is that of the Good Thief.  The standard notions of the story are forced and shaky, because there is no reason to accept that the Good Thief possessed any knowledge base commonly identified with “Jesus’ message,” and—most importantly—there is little if anything in the story that reflects the things that we are commonly supposed to do to get salvation.  “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” is of no more substance than the ill-fated utterances of others who will say to Jesus, “Lord, Lord” and “Did we not drive out demons in your name?”

The Good Thief, however, does do one thing of note.  The Good Thief reckons that Jesus has been true to his obligations, and is being unjustly punished.  The Good Thief reckons that Jesus is true and that the accusations against him are false.  The Good Thief reckons that Jesus will be true to his word when he promises to remember the Good Thief.

The Good Thief throws himself across the void of his suffering and into the arms of One whose character is utterly alien to himself.  I think there is much to be found in examination of our duty to embrace likewise a reality in Jesus that is utterly alien to the reality we possess.