The Communion That Awaits

One of the most nebulous aspects of the biblical notion of human virtue (or lack thereof) is bound up in the very text itself.  Commentators have tried for centuries to hash out the scriptural assessment of David as being a man after God’s heart—this same David being so ardently after Bathsheba’s charms and Uriah’s life.  And then there is the riotously incongruous contention of Second Peter, that Lot was an upright man, scandalized by his neighbors—whose proximity he chose in the beginning and chose until the final day to abide.  These two notorious examples differ merely in type and degree, of course, from the deceptions and maneuverings of the much-honored Abraham, but they differ crucially from Abraham to the extent that David and Lot were pronounced virtuous, and the commentators have tried to swallow those pronouncements ever since.

Of course, a perpetual Christian industry has been built around the business of proclaiming a person’s moral stature before God as being other than plain to the person’s fellow humans, and I intend here neither to dispute that notion nor to opine on the various theories of forgiveness, atonement, or substitutionary sacrifice presented by the commentators.  What interests me at the moment is the larger question—separated from entanglements with the examples of specific persons—of God’s pronouncements on relative instances of moral stature.  What does God say is “good”?

God calls certain of the elements of Creation good “in the beginning,” and the entirety of Creation he calls very good.  Inasmuch as God knows everything beforehand, it would be as plausible as anything to conjecture that Creation as a whole merited the assessment “very good,” while the implication that it was less than perfect (as anything that was not God) would play out in Creation’s parts themselves being only “good.”  In the beginning (it would seem only prudent to say) Creation was more “very good” than we might ever imagine.  Was Creation initially Heaven, and was Creation (at least potentially) as much Heaven for the First Couple as would be the “paradise” that Jesus promised the Good Thief?  It does not seem that the scriptures (either by themselves or in light of Jesus’ commentary) are concerned with answering that particular question.

Neither does Scripture answer the question of how the perfect God could create something that was less than perfect—or how such a created entity would bear the blame for its inadequacy.  As above, I do not intend to answer those questions.  What I do intend to discuss is the emerging theme in the texts of Creation being initially more “good” than we can imagine, and then displaying symptoms of moral decay.  As I have mentioned often, it seems inescapable that Adam’s discontent with the companionship of God was to some degree a moral failing—whatever its source—and it seems inescapable as well that we (in this mortal realm) are never to know the source of this disconnect.  Neither are we to know the initial blessed state that slipped from us humans.

But we can know that Creation was at first “very good,” and its parts often merited the assessment of “good,” and the part called “Adam” (followed by the part called “Eve”) was somewhat less good in requiring creaturely companionship when God was right there, and then moments (or years or eons) later the parts called “Adam and Eve” committed the acts that are traditionally (and presumptuously) labeled “The Fall.”  And things became still worse after that.

Creation became degraded because of sin, and the natural order was disturbed, and violence and competition set in.  “Man” got worse and worse, and “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  Of course, this last statement from Genesis is no more to be taken as definitive than God’s initial description of Creation as “very good.”  What exactly do such assessments mean?  If “every imagination of the thoughts” of humanity was “only evil continually,” how then were generations of helpless (and tiresomely demanding) children brought up?  And would not the “evil” of each succeeding generation be—in all fairness—assessed on a sliding scale comparable to the quality of their upbringing?

Jesus, of course, explodes such contemplations.  He tells us that we, though we are evil, know how to give good things to our children.  We are only so bad or so good—at least as we can subject ourselves to our own observation.  What matters, then, is the question of how we can align ourselves properly with moral demands, properly understood.  And, unfortunately, in the vein of the discussion so far, there is the question of what any further degradation of one’s moral state might look like.  We are a rather depressing lot, but in light of the scriptures and of Jesus’ teachings, how might we get even worse?

When it comes to the question of how we might get even worse, there are Jesus’ warnings about how we are going through life.  And then there are Jesus’ warnings about how we must give up our lives.  Our “lives,” it must be presumed, are moral traps: to just go about living is to get—in the final moral analysis—worse and worse.  We are presented, as was Jesus, with the Temptations.  We seek our own sustenance, we seek our own safety, we seek self-actualization.  Or to use the language of the Temptations, we concern ourselves with bread, we concern ourselves with the minor dangers of stones or the fatal dangers of precipices, and we concern ourselves with our places in the world—our possession of “kingdoms” great or small.

Interlaced among Jesus’ contentions that we must give up our lives are his promises that still greater lives are available to us, here and now as well as in eternity.  In this dichotomy can be seen the choice of proceeding downward or upward: we proceed downward as we pursue our own lives (leading us to multiply Adam’s dissatisfactions endlessly), and we proceed upward as we pursue “life,” which now as ever is about the communion with God to which we are ungrateful heirs.

The sorry business of going downward is seen precisely in the frustration of God’s (and Jesus’) intention of communion.  To become nothing is to become everything that might matter, for to become nothing (or the servant of all) is to partake of the life of all.  On the other hand, there is nothing worse than to stand in effectual defiance of God—apart from whom we have no being—by conceiving of oneself as a truly separate entity (even while perhaps denigrating oneself in the most demonstrative terms.)

The sorry business of going downward is seen precisely, for example, in the contrasting examples of Judas and Peter.  It is truly gut-wrenching to consider how centuries of popular imagination have seen Judas’ misdeeds as the most horrific imaginable, while Peter’s are quickly bathed in our soothing assertions that, after all, any of us might have behaved similarly.  Judas was beset with all-too-human greed (though one wonders what he ever found to do with his pilferings, and he might perhaps otherwise have sold his miraculous abilities to the highest bidder), Judas was at least cognizant of the question of how best to use the group’s resources, Judas was beset by the devil in the same milieu in which so many innocents were similarly beset, Judas did what he did while prompted to an extent by Jesus.  Judas felt remorse, Judas returned his evil blood-money, Judas hanged himself.  Judas was a sorry character.

Peter, on the other hand, was presented on a memorable occasion with Jesus predicting his own death as he intended to meld himself to sinful humanity and share the punishment for their sins.  Jesus was going to make himself the servant of all and was going to make his life a thing that mattered only insofar as it was sacrificed to the larger life of all who would choose the true life of the Kingdom.  Peter wanted Jesus to do something else.  In the simplest sense (the sense least risky in terms of our conjectures) Peter wanted to have a life in which Jesus retained his own life.  Jesus’ rebuke to Peter’s objection was to call Peter “Satan.”  Peter, in a manner that makes the sin of grubby Judas seem like child’s play, was staring into the very abyss.  Peter was seeking to frustrate the very logic that has permeated the scriptural account of Creation’s decline, and Peter was seeking to frustrate Jesus’ incomparable logic of salvation from that decline.  Jesus was going to sacrifice himself for the communion forsaken by creaturely beings from “the beginning,” and Peter—Adam-like—was looking for creaturely companionship.

It is then supremely fitting that Peter (with all the rest of The Eleven) betrays Jesus in the Garden as surely as Judas did, for as Jesus said, whoever was not with him was against him.  Of course, we all betray Jesus innumerable times every day.  David and Lot and Abraham betrayed Jesus innumerable times every day.  On the other hand, the greatest thing that Jesus gives us is the realization that infinite opportunities exist for us to reach for the communion that awaits us upon every instance of self-extinction—every instance of giving up our lives for the one life of the Kingdom.