That Wretched Real Man

Each of the Synoptic Gospels describes early on the wilderness temptation of Jesus by the devil.  Mark’s perfunctory description is unproblematic, but Matthew and Luke describe three temptation events individually and disagree on the order.  A standard explanation of the disagreement seems to be presented in the book Hard Sayings of the Bible (Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., et al., 1996 edition used):

“Each orders the testings of Jesus and mentions details to bring out their picture.  Both pictures are true, but neither is complete in itself.  If we lacked either picture we would be poorer.  This is why it is important to read each Gospel for itself and to get the distinctive message each author is proclaiming, to see the picture each author is painting.  If we try to merge them together to get a homogenized harmony we lose these distinctive contributions, moving from books Christians believe God inspired to an interest in mere history.”

Of course, it can be amusing to note the authors’ contention that working out a “homogenized harmony” of accounts of the Savior’s universe-shaking lone battle with the Tempter would betray “an interest in mere history.”  What is more important to note in rationalizations such as that above (and others like it) is the way the authors grant themselves the edge in every nuance.  They write of the differing accounts of the temptations in Matthew and Luke, “Both pictures are true, but neither is complete in itself.”  Of course, they are complete in themselves—that is why commentators (like those above) must contend that the Gospel accounts differ because of the themes the Gospel writers want to bring out in their respective stories.  Writing a gospel that conflicts with another on a statement of fact does not “complete” the other, nor does it lend to the two conflicting gospels being more “complete” together—all that is “complete’’ in such an instance is the body of Scripture that the commentator has to work with (with all its attendant difficulties.)

Of course, the “conflict” (such as between Matthew and Luke on the temptations) must be shown to be direct—a gospel that leaves out (or appears to leave out) a detail presented in another gospel does not conflict necessarily with the latter.  A prime example of this is the gospels’ descriptions of the two condemned with Jesus—John and Mark describe their presence matter-of-factly (though some manuscripts of Mark include an Old Testament allusion), while Luke includes most notably the Good Thief upbraiding his fellow for the latter’s insults of Jesus, and in Luke the Good Thief receives the hopeful promise of salvation from Jesus.

Then there is Matthew, which has both insulting Jesus (at first?):

“Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders, said, He saved others; himself he cannot save.  If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him.  He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God.  The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth.”

Of course, if the Bible were held to be (as, unfortunately, it is held often to be) a seamless and unproblematic book of books, then the literary lurch between the Matthew thief (casting “the same” in Jesus’ “teeth”) and the Luke thief (“remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom”) would be neither more nor less than an embarrassment.  One can contend that one of the “thieves” changed his mind.

It is at this point that I must emphasize this blog’s focus on moments.  Moments are experienced, and each episode of attention-commanding experience is a moment.  And to each moment we are roused, readied, and reaped.

And if we are to understand Jesus’ teachings, we must understand Jesus’ emphasis on moments.  In the teachings of Jesus time and place are rendered infinitely malleable.  It is ridiculous to try to work out details of time and place in contemplating Jesus’ teachings, since his abiding and all-encompassing command is to submerge such particulars (which otherwise we collect and frame as our “lives”) into the experiential realm of the kingdom of God.

It is in terms of experiences that we must view the accounts of the gospels and of the scriptures to which Jesus draws our attention.  Most critical of all this is our understanding of (or attempts to understand) the experiences of Jesus.  “The experiences of Jesus” is one of the most problematic aspects of organized Christianity, since the topic of Jesus’ experiences is one of the religious topics subjected most fiercely to ideological abuse.  One wonders if Jesus’ physical and psychological abuse in the course of the Crucifixion is dwarfed by the horrific presumptions upon his experiences committed by theologians.  One would think that Jesus’ sacrificial torments would be reckoned the great theological holy ground untrammeled by divines, yet in their frantic need to extract supportable “salvation economies” upon which to base their denominations, theologians expound endlessly upon the height and depth and breadth and duration of Jesus’ agonies.

A person can spend a pious lifetime expounding on how the sins of all mankind were piling on top of the cross that Jesus bore.  Then again, there was the contribution of Simon of Cyrene.  A person can attempt to formulate an equation by which Jesus suffered the equivalent of eternities of suffering of all mankind (or, if you prefer, of all of the elect), although infinities and eternities do not fit well into our equations.  And then again, there is the surprise on the part of experienced agony-producers at how short a time Jesus lasted on the Cross (though the onset of the festival was going to cut short the agonies of Jesus and his condemned fellows at any rate.)  This type of conjecture is not merely ridiculous, but ultimately impious.

We cannot even begin to conjecture on the sufferings of Jesus.  When we try to do so, we do so in ways that betray our self-centered emphases.  When we want to construct a salvation economy, no pains will be spared in conjecturing about the aspects of Jesus’ suffering.  When we want to construct an argument for our version of Scripture, we will contort ourselves appallingly rather than abide the notion of a disjointed and cumbersome body of literature about Jesus.  The business of manipulating the extant scriptures is especially problematic in how this business discounts the experiential aspect of Jesus’ ministry.  We see this phenomenon in both of the examples (different in other respects) described above—the Order of the Temptations and the Behavior of the Crucified Criminals.

Arguments about the Temptations as presented in the gospels rely generally on considering certain related aspects of the narratives as being understandable in terms of writers’ viewpoints.  This or that order of the temptations related by this or that Greek phraseology representing this or that Hebrew (or Aramaic) utterance between Jesus and Satan are batted around endlessly.  Did Jesus and Satan even speak a post-Babel language to each other?  (Can we ever stop revisiting the notion that Hebrew was the “original language,” based on sophomoric word-play in Genesis?)  Did Jesus and Satan speak any language at all to each other?  Were the temptations limited to those described in the texts?  The (presumably and apparently) original description in Mark sure sounds like forty days of torment.  Who are we to imagine otherwise?  When the emphasis on the Temptations is “scriptural” rather than “experiential,” the Temptations come across as little more than high-school debating exercises.  Indeed, high school students would seem to suffer more exasperating temptations.

Jesus’ punishments were beyond imagining.  Jesus’ temptations were beyond imagining.  Either these things are true, or Jesus’ stature as the Son of God does not mean what we claim it means.  Only our experiential participation in the life that Jesus offers to us can direct us toward any understanding, and that very “directing” is intrinsically related to an understanding that we can never comprehend the divine.

We cannot forget the other example presented above, the Behavior of the Crucified Criminals.  The reason it does not matter whether they both derided Jesus until he died, or whether one of them repented and sought Jesus’ favor, is because Jesus knew the full experience of both scenarios—just as he knew the full life-story of everyone in the crowd ridiculing him.  Just as he knew the exhaustive details not merely of the lives of all the onlookers, but of how their lives—and presumably their attitudes toward him—would have or could have been affected by any experience they had faced, or would face.

There is an even more pointed example of how we will do well to focus on experiential aspects of Jesus’ ministry, rather than upon trying to construct a narrative.  This example is Jesus’ betrayal by Judas.  Judas has been raised in our communal lore as the most despicable of evil-doers, and little else might be expected of a “scriptural” heritage that considers him greedy, self-righteous, hypocritical, cowardly, and impious—to say nothing of devil-possessed.  It is this last point, however (devil-possession) that can help us throw Judas into proper light.

The Judas of John was a thief who became possessed by the devil.  The great crime of this Judas was thievery—unless we consider ourselves qualified to opine on devil-possession (and are prepared to deliver the pronouncement that Judas, and not Satan, bore the guilt of it.)

The Judas of Luke was simply devil-possessed and went to arrange (apparently) for money in return for the betrayal—the money presumably being more important to this Judas than to the devil who possessed him.

And, of course, since it seems that Jesus considered Peter little better than Satan if Peter were to hinder Jesus from his fate, it seems indeed strange than Satan would positively thrust Jesus toward that same fate.  Such, to say the least, is the sort of conundrum we enter when we start puzzling out demon-possession.  We have no more grounds to say that we can understand the devil-possessed Judas of John or of Luke than to say that we can understand the fallen angels.  It is beyond us.

Then there is the Judas of Mark, who does not even seem to have predicated his betrayal on monetary payment (or at least the translators seem unable to work the language that way.)  The Judas of Mark hands Jesus over to the authorities and bids them to keep Jesus well-guarded (or is it safely guarded?)  The Judas of Mark did what he did because the Judas of Mark did what he did.  The rest is beyond us.

And then finally there is the Judas of Matthew.  The book of Matthew is filled with alternating criticisms by Jesus of the people, and then of their leadership, and then of the people, and then of their leadership, and so on.  This is the gospel in which Jesus tells the people that they are to do what the scribes and Pharisees tell them to do.  This is the gospel in which Jesus says of the Pharisees “leave them,” or “let them alone.”  It would not be rash to assume that Jesus would get into trouble with the law, but for what, and with what gravity?

And so Judas goes to the authorities (whose internal deliberations would be hidden from him) and asks, “What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?”  They offer him thirty pieces of silver—enough to pay the temple tax for sixty men.  He is expected to betray Jesus, who likes to tells parables about millions of dollars in gold—for enough to pay the temple tax for sixty men.  Judas is expected—the Judas who the expositors like to imagine in league with immensely powerful men scheming to hold power under the mighty Roman Empire—this same Judas is expected to expose himself in something like a scene of darkness and torches and swords and potential panic, for enough to pay the temple tax for sixty men?

Judas, who has no reason to assume that Jesus will get more than the flogging that Pilate offers (and the type of punishment that the Apostles discover will be handed out by Levantine leaders almost as an afterthought) asks, “What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?”  The pittance he is promised might easily be translated by him into a statement—perhaps an assurance—that Jesus would be punished with a misdemeanor, and hopefully dissuaded in future.  We can think worse of Judas if we like, but he is at least a human being, and (unlike the demonic Judases of Luke and John and the sketch figure of Mark) the Judas of Matthew is a human being who we can try to understand.

And so Matthew continues:

“Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.”

What foul contagion of the most brutish ages of history would prompt two thousand years of Christianity to throw their eyes over this verse of Judas’ anguish and assign to him the role of devil incarnate?  The reduction of Judas to a soulless caricature would be bad enough, but there is a still greater evil here.  Judas’ prospective Savior has since the world’s beginning shouldered every burden and felt every pain of Creation—no follower of Jesus could possibly imagine otherwise.  And no follower of Jesus, in good conscience and confronted by the matter, would ever exempt from consideration any cause to contemplate a source of Jesus’ pain.

The only analyzable story of Judas in the gospels is found in Matthew.  It is a story of a man aghast at what he has gotten himself into, and what he has joined others in doing.  It must have been agony to him, and the suffering of Judas must have been agony to Jesus.  There is really no mystery here, no “How could anyone have shared earthly fellowship with Jesus and then have turned away?”  They all turned away—Judas, the fleeing disciples, the crowds, “all the people.”  And they all have been joined by the rest of us throughout history—our history—when too often we have recalled with remorse what we have gotten ourselves into, and what we have joined others in doing.

There is only one abiding lesson of the Temptations, the accounts of which are bound to be jumbled in the transmitting and the translation: Jesus was there, and he felt it.  There is only one abiding lesson of the thieves on Jesus’ left and right, whose agonies were mingled for Jesus with his own: Jesus was there, and he felt it.  There is only one abiding lesson of Judas’ act of betrayal, which involved real, not cartoonish, behaviors on the part of that wretched real man: Jesus was there, and he felt it.

Surrender in the Moment

It is time for me to focus more closely on the implications of “roused, readied, reaped.”  The concept of “roused, readied, reaped,” as I have tried to describe it, is meant to relate a phenomenon that—in its nearly infinite manifestations—characterizes human experience.  The cycles of rousing, readying, and reaping occur in every plane, through all times, and in varying duration throughout our mortal lives.  Even the very concept of “the moment” (or “the instant”, if you prefer) entails in our conceptualization the tiniest of experienceable time-frames.  A moment is a span in which something happens (or notably does not happen)—no matter how tiny or fleeting a moment is, it exists as a span of time.

So, there is no such thing as the “instantaneous,” if by that we mean something that occurs in “no time” and could be experienced by us as such.  Yet, of course, the briefest of moments are usually the most difficult for us to manage (or, most importantly, for us to manage ourselves within.)  In the moments of our lives, we are thrown up against our most undiluted dispositions and are deprived largely (if we address those moments in concerted fashion) of recourse to mental constructions of the surrounding time and place.

So, in the moments of our lives, we are (if we are willing to accept it) deprived of the constructions of time and place that constitute our inwardly-appreciated lives.  A moment truly lived is a moment outside of the lives we know, and it is in the Jesus-approved focus on moments that we find the greater life that he promises us.  Or, to put it another way (and this is the key, I believe, to understanding the ministry of Jesus), we find the greater life that Jesus promises us when we cease to see ourselves as possessing lives in which Jesus intercedes periodically, and when we begin to see that the life of Jesus is all that really exists, and our own “lives” are those self-bounded realms of referential assurances that are really self-reflections.  We are not wakened to supernatural events that we might associate either with miraculous revelation or with life-changing moral challenges—we are wakened to the Jesus-mediated life that really exists, and in those moments we are lifted out of the un-miraculous mire of that which we each in our own way label “real life.”

This is how the story of Jesus begins in the Gospel of John.  Here I must apologize for using the phrase “story of Jesus,” yet it is not without reason that I use it.  The gospels, or stories drawn from an amalgamation of the gospels, can be called “Lives of Christ,” and it is usually with the greatest of reverence that they are so called.  Unfortunately, the notion of a “life of Christ” is terribly misleading, and this fact can be demonstrated best by the beginning of John.  Here we can begin to see that, as I stated above, “the life of Jesus is all that really exists, and our own ‘lives’ are those self-bounded realms of referential assurances that are really self-reflections.”

In fact, the first part of John can be called most revealingly the “life of humanity,” with Jesus’ character the sole static element—only Jesus’ fleshly manifestation participates in the story with us, and the recurring effect of the story is to show how we are raised up (or hauled up) in moments long or short into the glare of God’s truth.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

We can call this part of a narrative, yet it is as much part of a narrative as “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”—it is a pre-story, started and finished as a premise, not as a Chapter One of the story.  So far there has been described no process conceivable to us.

“In him was life; and the life was the light of men.  And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

It is inconceivable that the light that “shineth in darkness” did not precede the creation of humanity, and if this “light” is the “life” in Jesus (“the Word”), then there is no way that we might conceive of it as other than pre-existing the creation even of physical darkness.  Again, we are being given premises, not elements of narrative.

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.  The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.  He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.”

John participates in the story, but he does so as a person thrust into the narrative (or, if you will permit, “roused” to his calling.)  In every moment in which he responded to his calling (and it does not seem later that his focus is all that God might have intended it to be), John was living the true life offered to him (and to all.)  John is describe as interacting, not with a narrative Jesus, but with a stable and endless stream of the changeless character of Jesus.

“That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.  He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.”

Again, the point is made—Jesus as an element of the salvation-story of his ministry is as an overarching, impending (some might say intrusive) source of light.  He exists in the story as an agent from time immemorial until time unimaginable.   The KJV has as above, “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (1:9).  The New Jerusalem Bible has the verse as, “The Word was the real light that gives light to everyone; he was coming into the world”—but for our purposes the import is the same.  Jesus in the gospels is described as something happening, but it is never forgotten that Jesus is always and everywhere something happening.

The “story” of the Gospels is the story of how persons are shaped by moments of dealing with Jesus, but the very fact of the ubiquitous and changeless nature of Jesus’ interactions with Creation makes plain a simple fact.  People are not changed because Jesus or an agent of Jesus breaks into their lives.  People are changed because their lives are broken (even if not totally or forever) as those people are lifted into the life of Jesus.  People are given chances (monumental or mundane, brief or long) that are the “rousings”, “readyings,” and “reapings” of mere existence.  The light of Jesus always shines (or scorches) and in moments of recognition of that light we are blinded to all surroundings and unconscious of time.  Our lives are shorn from us, and we are well rid of them, and we have to assent simultaneously to letting them go.

How this is to be done (or at least addressed) is exemplified by the quote from the Baptist later in the introduction to the Gospel:

“John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.”

John the Baptist interacted with the fleshly Jesus, but (as the verse just above makes plain) John was capable of understanding that the character of the divine Jesus exudes divine light always.  As I wrote above, when properly oriented to Jesus, “John is describe as interacting, not with a narrative Jesus, but with a stable and endless stream of the changeless character of Jesus.”  It is only when John looks at Jesus as a time- or place-dependent person that John ceases to have a proper understanding of Jesus, as in when he sends his disciples to ask if Jesus is the one for whom he had been waiting.

How different is this confused and worldly John from his very self a few years earlier, when he had said of Jesus, “he will thoroughly purge his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable”!  The Baptist’s experience, however, is not fundamentally different from anyone else’s—we have moments that overtake our lives, that become our lives, but of course we do not handle those moments perfectly, and they do not last.

Faced, however, with the impermanence of our moments of enlightenment, we tend unfortunately to decide that such fervor is rare (and probably just as well rare) and needs to be supplanted gradually by a more mature faith that by bits and pieces stores away a more sober and ostensibly more certain approach to Jesus’ teachings.  And then we sift through our stores of “faith” and content ourselves that we are learning to be ready to answer the calls of challenge that Jesus might thrust into our lives.  And then we think of time and place and of how blessed we are to have a sure theology and to partake of what we term the “abundant life” of believers enjoying the blessings of God’s creation.

And then we are wakened from our slumber by the voice that says, “You fool!  This very night your life will be required of you!”

What will time and place, what will our very lives themselves, mean to us then?  How might we ever answer, not merely for what we have done, but for what we have left undone?  I have no better answer than anyone for my own life, but here I want to highlight in any event the very pitfalls of an internalized “life” itself.  The only life to which we must aspire is that which finds its substance in the character of Jesus, and therefore by definition finds no substance in itself.  And the only source of instruction on this matter in the teachings of Jesus is to be found in the most unsparing assessment of his ministry itself.

Jesus went often by himself to pray.  Jesus went often to tend to the needy.  We also do such things (though neither kind of thing intently enough.)  Of course we tend to make assumptions about our moral character that will allow a far greater (in fact, infinitely greater) degree of failing on our part than on the part of Jesus.  When we pray, our minds wander.  When we attempt to address the needs of the needy, we stint.  Of course, we will say, our actions in such regards will always be lacking, and we might even indulge in examinations of ourselves in light of some theory of “total depravity.”  Fair enough.

But what shields the behavior of Jesus from such unsparing analysis, save our determination to account him unassailable by any observation?  Skeptics enough will tell us that Jesus lied about attending the festival, that he acted spitefully in cursing the fig tree, that he prescribed unstinting adherence to the Law while defying many of its provisions, that he treated his parents deplorably.

The answer to such contentions, I will argue (in accordance with the moment-by-moment implications of “roused, readied, reaped”) is found in the general scheme of analysis inherent in the introduction to John.  The vindication of Jesus (and the only hope for us to claim shelter in his eternal and ubiquitous mercy) is found in the moment-by-moment grasping at the eternal and ubiquitous nature of Jesus.  Sure, we can haul out schemes of moral analysis, but any merciless application of such a scheme (either by skeptic or by “total depravity” adherent) can claim victory on its own terms.  If merciless analysis is to be applied, why would we not look at Jesus in his very agony in the Garden?  If it were as simple a matter as Jesus being sinless (and as simple a matter as Jesus being analyzed like any human), might we not attribute sin to him even in his very agonies?  If he were sinless, would he not accept his fate serenely, and pursue the positive moral good of comforting his disciples?  It would be harsh enough for us ask such questions, but if we were honest with ourselves, we would admit that placed in such danger as Jesus contemplated, any higher thoughts we might have would be tinged (at least) by baser thoughts.

Or is Jesus’ sinless acceptance of his fate really what the Agony in the Garden all about?  Jesus, quite apparently, does not “accept” his fate except as a latent possibility through the long years of his life and the harrowing years of his ministry.  He asks to be spared his fate.  He accepts it in the moment.  IN THE MOMENT.  In the moment, his life is nothing but submission to God’s will.  He promises us nothing more, and it might be said that he “promises” us a good portion of suffering—all so that we might sacrifice all that we call our “lives,” and all for the sake of a “life” that finds its purpose in anything but ourselves.

We cannot do what Jesus asks except moment by moment.  The gospel accounts of his ministry have tortured us (and led to innumerable tortured commentaries) by how they return again and again to requirements of us that fall apart when “sinlessness” is held to be the issue, and that make no sense unless surrender in the moment is the issue.

Lain Aside Their Conceits

In my last post I wrote:

“Even a notion that we are pitiful parts of nature with pitifully inadequate naturally-derived intellectual capacities is a notion that places its holder metaphorically above, looking down.”

We must reckon always that our limitations are not confined to our inabilities to attain some goal that we visualize, nor even confined to our inabilities to frame our goals with certitude.  Our intellectual limitations extend to our inability to remain ever-mindful (for who could?) of the fact that our merest thoughts are constructions of our own making, constructions that are revealed—in moments of unsparing introspection—to arise in unplumbed recesses of that which we blithely call our “selves.”

I will not feign concern over how the preceding might play out in natural philosophy, but I am concerned about the prospect of how a concerted awareness of our limitations will play out in an attempt to grasp Jesus’ teachings.  In a world festooned with schemes of overarching philosophy, Jesus’ teaching seems to be focused unflinchingly on the momentary and on the experientially immediate.  As I have written before, a logical analysis of Jesus’ teachings and of his references to the Scriptures will lead us to examine carefully the state of humanity from the very beginning.

Is it not the case that humanity, viewed in light of the beginning of Genesis, has always struggled with an inability to grasp the momentary and the experientially immediate?  Adam was presented with such a state—a state that we as humans would prize presumably above all others—in his initial opportunity of fellowship with God.  The man for whom it turned out it was “not good” for him to be alone was of course merely “alone” in terms of his own “kind”—Adam was ever in proximity with the Perfect Other who had created him.

When Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree, their response was one of trying to manage time and place and circumstances—to writhe away from “the momentary and the experientially immediate”—and to maneuver thereby toward some perceived better state.  Responses of immediacy (either fleeing directly to God seek forgiveness or waiting submissively for God to deliver judgement) would have been infinitely preferable to hiding, and we are not surprised to find in the teachings of Jesus an emphasis on one or the other preferable approach, or on a combination of both.

The story of humanity from creation on down through Noah is often understood in terms of declining morality, and is often taken in gravest terms as a cautionary tale, but two major elements of conventional analysis are inherently problematic.  One element—which plays havoc with the operation of an “origin story”—is the tendency to imagine that logical analysis of the stories can be based on an understanding of “human nature.”  One example of this is found in attempts to criticize Adam on how or whether he—in the run-up to “The Fall”—exercised properly his role as family head.  A simple reading of Genesis without such predisposition will reveal that the male role of family head was in that very process being formulated (which throws a sour note over the conventional notion that the traditional family is “God’s design.”)  What we call “human nature” was forged in an interplay between God and his creation.

The second problematic element of the conventional analysis is to describe the decline of human morality as being reflected in a more and more bestial (with apologies to the animals) state of the human heart—as though “right thinking” could serve as something of a remedy.  Here the notion of humans understanding their predicament (we don’t) begins to assert its fatal influence.  Our hearts are to blame for making us have horrid thoughts in our heads, but if we will truly use our heads we will understand that—as was evident all the way back in darkened Eden—it is visceral yearning for reunion with God or addled submission to the approach of God’s righteous judgment (or a combination of the two) that can lead to salvation.  Theories of salvation (and the attendant and even more horrid prospect of human theories about God’s nature) cannot lead to salvation.

How then does evil proceed through the beginning of Genesis?  Already, before the Flood, it is said that every imagination of the thoughts of humanity was evil, but (as I have written before) that evocative statement would scarcely account for the manifest ability of humans to still raise children and to still maintain a civil society.  Jesus describes a quite normal, though admittedly coarse, society carrying on unawares before the Flood.

God’s choice of Noah as an exemplary person would seem to be in tune with an attempt to refine fallen humanity, though it might scarcely be thought that God had forgotten that he might save Noah alone and make for him a wife out of a rib.  Instead God dilutes Noah’s essential nature (if indeed humanity is becoming generationally debased) by making his genetic influence a minor fraction of that of post-Flood humanity.  And it is no secret what then happened to Noah’s family.

Clearly, the notion that people in themselves are simply “getting worse” does not stand as a description of the sorry state of civilization depicted in Adam (and Cain the murderer) and Noah and the Tower of Babel.  There are, however, whispers and utterances and shouts in the Genesis account of the true, developing, and insidious element that proceeds to dominate “human nature.”  Humans are beginning to conceptualize, and visualize, and theorize about their state.  The immediacy of moral empathy (the sense that we live in a universe of right and wrong) is being supplanted by the distanced conjecture that we apply to moral philosophy (a universe of thoughts about right and wrong hoisted up Babel-like on other, more-or-less substantial, ostensibly-foundational thoughts about right and wrong.)

In short, the stage is being set for such scenarios as flush-faced upright citizens squirming about in a crowd, hoisting stones around a quavering adulteress (curiously unaccompanied by an adulterer), and then a more sober citizen catches the attention of one of them and asks, “Seriously?”  (Or some such scenario.)  Or, “Are you really going to leave that poor sheep in the gutter?  Seriously?”

As I wrote in a previous post:

“Adam and Eve were not thrown into a world of despair because they were given the ability to know what was right and what was wrong.  They were thrown into a world of despair because they were thrust into the realm of the challenge that Jesus has for us—our eyes were opened, the eyes of our race were opened, to know good and evil, not to know WHAT is good or WHAT is evil.”

And as I wrote just above, there are whispers and utterances and shouts in the Genesis account of the true, developing, and insidious element that proceeds to dominate “human nature.”  Humans are beginning to conceptualize, and visualize, and theorize about their state.  That “state” includes necessarily anything people can think about, and that includes God.

Human beings went from a state of offered communion with God (Adam’s initial state), to a state of natural communion with God (Adam offered God’s garden and God’s creatures), to a state of human companionship in communion with God (Adam and Eve before the “Fall”.)  Clearly, “falling” was going on all along, and at every stage humanity demanded the actualization of their growing conceptualization-system.  The episode with the forbidden fruit was a dismal and unsurprising development, and it stands out most starkly in the explicit references to humanity aiming to understand their condition—an understanding to which, in the final analysis, only God can lay claim.

Men began to call upon the name of the Lord.  There was a time when the “name” of the Lord would have been inseparable from an unspoken renown of a practical inability to exist from moment to moment (as fair a guess as might be made of the newly-created Adam’s state) without God.  To “name” the humanly un-nameable, to speak of the Great “I Am,” is never doable for a mortal without a tinge of presumption.  To say that men began to call upon the name of the Lord is potentially to describe a moral slippage, not a healthy development, and it is of a piece with the general trend of people to concoct a conceptualization-system.

Humans began to create frameworks of thought that consisted of the things of the imagining, not of the things of God.  If there was but an iota of justice in the notion that Cain deserved to be avenged seven times (though we really ought to leave Cain’s “deserving” this or that between him and God), then Lamech in the reasoning of mortals might claim a more manly and courageous stance in declaring that he would exact revenge of seventy-seven.  There is something in what Lamech says, but to object that this “something” might not stand the scrutiny of God’s perfect judgment is no more than it would be to say that all human moral postulations are to some degree suspect.

And at last, the evil humanity before the Flood is supplanted by the evil humanity after the Flood.  Of course, it might always be said that the blanket condemnation of every inclination of the pre-Flood generations was unique (though uniquely unimaginable), although one wonders if such a condemnation of a people was merely supplanted in the popular imagination by more lurid references to this or that people being as bad (or worse) than post-Flood Sodom and Gomorrah.

It would seem, however, that the most revealing insight about Noah and his dysfunctional family is in just such a notion as “a condemnation of a people.”  The pre-Flood generations were bad enough, and violence seems to have filled the days in which—as Jesus reminds us—they carried on much as people in a “civil” state ever have.  There does not seem, however, to have been a system of conceptualized violence against people unborn or unconceived.  Noah’s generation took care of that.  Noah awoke from his stupor and condemned the progeny of Canaan to (presumably) unending and abject slavery.

Cain killed a relative he was unhappy with (though Abel could scarcely have been thought to have wronged his brother.)  Noah refrained from violence against Ham, though Ham had—in Noah’s conceptualization-system—wronged his father Noah.  In the immediacy, Cain (with malice aforethought) plotted his innocent brother’s death.  It would be difficult to contend that “evil” as overtaking people’s hearts was in greater measure reflected elsewhere than in Cain’s case—yet is it really the case that the sad Genesis narrative is describing the dismal progression of urges worsening, rather than something else worsening?

In fact, what is worsening in Genesis is not evil in itself, but rather the enshrinement of evil in human conceits.  Jesus can call people “evil” without batting an eye, and he can expect people—at least people of wholesome orientation—to accept the characterization as “evil” in stride, while working to understand some greater point.  (We, being evil, know how to give good things to our children.)  The enshrinement of evil in human conceits, however, is what is really reflected in the tragedy of Genesis.

Noah would have done a thing of (comparative) mercy to have struck Ham down on the spot.  Instead, Noah condemns Canaan (good luck with that, theologians) and his progeny to innumerable generations and innumerable tortures and innumerable murders (as befitting “the lowest of slaves.”)

This is what really separates us from the will of God, at least in the teachings of Jesus: the perpetual tendency toward rationalizations, a tendency that—in moral scenarios as elsewhere—leads us to ignore our own beams and emphasize others’ motes.  We are always looking to frame our existences, when in reality our existences are framed for us, in manners that we will never understand and that will always seem alien to us.  We can read Scriptures that tell us that we can never see God, and in a moment’s time we will opine on the nature of God.  What is that, but looking at a caricature of God?  In the realm of our experiences, what is that but presuming to see God?

And when we are not presuming to look at God, we are presuming upon the character of God’s universe.  Such conceptualizations are not evil in themselves, but they lay out before us and before each other table upon table of intellectual weapons and poisons.  What, in the midst of these horrid tensions, does Jesus require of us?  Are we not to be rewarded, are we not to find understanding of the means to salvation, in our attempts to understand our situation?

We are not.  In our attempts to understand our situation, we are no different from Adam clutching fig leaves to himself.  Fig leaves have their purposes, and clothing has its purposes, and seeking and asking and knocking have their purposes, but they do not have the purposes we imagine when we are trying to do the will of God.  The only ultimate purpose of all of our strivings is to remind us of the bittersweet futility of our striving—we ask, seek, and knock so that we will know that we already possess that for which we ask, seek, and knock.  We grasp for the kingdom so that we will know we already possess it.

And when we are seized by the futility of our strivings, we are cast—fortunate beings!—into that scene in the dim Garden, offered the chance to run in search of forgiveness or to quiver mutely in anticipation of judgment.  And when we are seized by immediacies of moral import—twice fortunate beings!—we can respond as God would have us, resolving ourselves to the endless, enveloping Otherness of God’s perfection as we see all experiential existence in a cup of water handed to the thirsty.

This, at least, has resolved for me part of the puzzle of Jesus describing at the Judgment how the saved helped him without knowing they were helping him—when Jesus in the gospel testimony had given away the ending of the story.  The saved who helped Jesus without knowing they were helping Jesus were the persons who had lain aside their conceits in the moment, in the immediacy.

Two Ways to Be Wrong

In my last post I wrote:

“The only commonality we might have with God is a sense of good rather than evil, and that sense is the only abiding torment that we face.  This is the architecture of the life that we must find in the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.”

And:

“In the world of Jesus, in the kingdom of God, right and wrong, good and evil, are all that exist.  Nothing changes but the notion of what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears.”

In the world that intrudes constantly upon us—the world to which we succumb too often, the world that distracts us—there are many challenges (and many of those challenges are constructed in the form of things that we need ostensibly to do in order to make our lives fulfilling.)  We will make many mistakes and missteps in addressing those challenges, and (it is to be hoped) we will maintain a healthy awareness that such things will happen.  As regards the kingdom of heaven, however, it is often the case that we will be thrown into panic or near-panic at the thought that we don’t know what we are doing.  Making mistakes about what God requires of us is what religion is supposed to allow us to avoid.

However, the notion that we must hear perfectly with our ears and see perfectly with our eyes is as ludicrous as the notion (as I have written before) that we can hear some truth once and enshrine it (or, rather, our conceit that we have understood it) once and for all.  We need to learn things over and over again, and we need to make mistakes over and over again.  Hearing and seeing are living things, and fallible things.

As I wrote in my last post:

“Adam and Eve were not thrown into a world of despair because they were given the ability to know what was right and what was wrong.  They were thrown into a world of despair because they were thrust into the realm of the challenge that Jesus has for us—our eyes were opened, the eyes of our race were opened, to know good and evil, not to know WHAT is good or WHAT is evil.”

We would do well to consider afresh constantly the predicament of Adam and Eve.  (This would stand opposed to the endless re-hashings of the “Fall” stories that are really told backwards—Adam and Eve did this or that because some fifth- or sixteenth- or twentieth-century notion of the “salvation economy” requires such a basis.)  At present, I would say that the growing sense of apprehension that would appear to afflict the first couple is really no different from that which afflicts us as we try to comprehend Jesus’ admonishments about the kingdom of heaven.  As I wrote last time:

“Our lives are good and evil, permeating everything about us and everything around us.  Our worlds are good and evil, permeating everything about us and everything around us.  We are angels and devils moment by moment.”

If we are really the duty-fettered progeny of Adam and Eve, we would not be surprised if the most basic admonishments related to us by Jesus would be well-understood to apply to the first man and woman.  Consider the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, and consider how it would apply most pointedly to humans—then as now and as ever—trying to wend their ways through the trials of life.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  Being “poor,” it must be admitted, is no virtue in itself, but here Jesus is apparently describing detachment, and in view of his other teachings, it would be expected that “poverty” really equates to unconcern about possessions (and a willingness to celebrate others’ enjoyment of what the world has to offer) such that the believer can be held to possess all—in the sense that possession really means anything.  Adam and Eve had nothing at first (and we might in charity attribute to them mixed feelings about the raiment procured for them by the death of animals), and the beginning of possessions for them and their immediate family was followed hard upon by strife over how to sacrifice some of such possessions to God.

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”—a particularly poignant imagery if (as a timeless maxim) it is seen to apply to Adam and Eve and to all of us as their children.  Being the opposite of meek, of course, has been seen as the usual way to gain and to pass on an inheritance in the earth.  Jesus’ lessons in the Sermon on the Mount are certainly not practical guidelines on how to prosper in this world.

What is generally not noted, however, is the fact that the Sermon on the Mount also does not consist of guidelines appreciable for their particular content.  To be merciful, to be pure of heart, to be peacemakers—these are all descriptions of dispositions, rather than specifics of thought or behavior.  And to “hunger and thirst after righteousness”—that is a wonderful thing, but it still leaves the believer to find out what in particular is righteous.

In addition, it is the case that Jesus’ longer discourse here does not limit itself to descriptions of dispositions that are devoid of particular content.  Jesus actually supplies his listener with a source of content about moral requirements, and it is scarcely what one would at first expect.  The listener’s moral duties, incredibly, extend not only to what he or she might internalize individually, but also to what other people might through their own dispositions impose on the listener:

“Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”

And if that is not enough:

“Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.”

The simplest way to characterize Jesus’ approach to the moral requirements of his listener is to say that Jesus demands that the listener give himself or herself all the worst of it—not a particularly specific guideline, but at least a guideline that tends toward a starting point in meekness.  Perhaps the most helpful thing that this guideline provides is a bit of insight into the intractable nature of moral decision-making.  Such decision-making is so difficult that is usually as prudent as anything to grant one’s opponent’s position.

So we are really all just floundering around.  And we are supposed to be such wonderful things, made in the image of God.  If we are mindful of the “floundering around” part, however, we can begin to understand the best ways to conceptualize our place in God’s universe.  We are of course, flawed—but then all of Creation must be considered as “flawed”—since the only thing that is not flawed is God (even if the only flaw is not being God.)

And yet we are creations of God, presumably created exactly (that is, without flaw) as God intended.  Here it is really the case that our ability to understand is being exceeded.  We cannot imagine that God can do anything imperfectly.  Can we at least imagine that God went perfectly about conceiving of an imperfect Creation, and then went perfectly about creating it?

The key here is “conception,” as we might understand it—a thought process.  Of course, we can say that anything that God thinks of as existing can therefore exist—although that really exceeds our own thought processes.  One problem, however, with our thought processes is that—however we might claim to appreciate their limitations—we are led continually to ignore those limitations.  One source of this difficulty is the fact that—virtually by definition—thought processes are imagined to be separate from the rest of Creation, and in a position to opine about it.  Even a notion that we are pitiful parts of nature with pitifully inadequate naturally-derived intellectual capacities is a notion that places its holder metaphorically above, looking down.

But if all is connected (whether by participation in a divine Creation or a natural universe) then all thought participates in that connection.  In the realm of Jesus’ lordship, of course, the divine aspect would be that which controls—Creation is God’s, and by God’s volition—and humanity’s place and character both had God as their Designer.  Even the “man in the image of God” idea is entwined in our understanding with our lack of understanding, being an idea that is both more esoteric than we can comprehend, and also an idea complicated with the linguists’ warning that “in the image of God” as we say it might mean either “resembling God” or “as conceptualized by God.”

What I propose here is that, within the scope of Jesus’ teaching, the concept of “thought” does not possess the neatly-sequestered character we moderns assign to it.  Jesus, for example, does not merely utter a curse against an unproductive fig tree—he tells the tree that it is cursed.  In Mark, Jesus follows that up by telling his disciples that they might speak to mountains, and be obeyed.  Thought—as an intrinsic element of Creation—exists always and everywhere: here or there, more or less emanating from God or his creatures, more or less understood by us, more or less capturing our attention.

When the notion of thought is not parceled out in our conceits, not assigned by us here or there or granted by us as an aspect only of certain creatures, then “thought” and its attendant phenomena can be viewed in a manner more consistent with Jesus’ teachings.  If “thought” exists in gradations, then it can be understood as existing in more or less distilled forms.  In our modern Western conception, for example, there are such things as topics, and questions, and answers.

In a conceptualized Creation mediated by God, however, any situation impinging on an element of Creation is effectively a topic, any experience is a question, and any decision is an answer.  A stone consisting of a locus of chemicals proportionally distinct from its surroundings is approached by a lava flow, the stone becomes heated, the stone fractures.  Ridiculous it would be to describe that as the stone’s topic, question, and answer—or even to describe that as the stone’s situation, experience, and decision.

But what of a plant placed in unusual circumstances, subjected to stresses, and then—predictably, as a botanist might assess—flowering or not flowering?  Are those stages at least a situation, an experience, and a decision?  What of a female animal in heat, approached by an interested male, and submitting (or not) to his advances?  What of a chimpanzee presented with a puzzle, permitted to explore it, and then taking some course to solve it?  Are we not seeing the melding of situation into topic, of experience into question, and of decision into answer?

If the processes of thought are understood as potentially permeating Creation—the Creation formed at God’s thought—then the elevated notions we have of “thought” as a rarefied quality of humanity must come into question.  And so also must we question the even more rarefied status we accord to logical thought.  We all as humans live through situations, experiences, and decisions—and those things run riot in our internal lives, much though we might like to pretend they do not.

These contentions, then, can place us in a better position to view the competing variants of Jesus’ ministry.  At times—to the crowd—Jesus spoke in parables.  At other times he spoke to his disciples plainly.  The standard notion in Christianity has been that the disciples got the better, the more authoritative, and the more substantial teaching—though, to be fair, one must reckon that they got to hear the parables as well.  And we must also reckon with the fact, as I have said, that the Gospel of John has Jesus start and end his ministry despairing of his disciples’ understanding of the proper source of their belief.

Parables or explicit theology—they are simply two ways to be wrong.  Or to be right, though it is usually more prudent to assume that we are wrong.  Only on this basis, meek though it might be muddled, can we begin to construct a foundation for understanding Jesus’ teaching.  As I quoted myself above:

“The only commonality we might have with God is a sense of good rather than evil, and that sense is the only abiding torment that we face.  This is the architecture of the life that we must find in the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.”