The World as a Wound

Jesus tells us to give up our lives.  We have no right to our lives.  What we fail to recognize, however, is the fact that "giving up our lives" means little or nothing if we arrogate to ourselves (or delegate to others) the right to pronounce upon the question of what our lives are made of.  When we truly give up our lives we give up the boundaries we construct around--and within--them.

Jesus does not recognize the constructions we have of our lives.  This fact is sometimes obscured by the allowances Jesus makes for presenting his teachings in the context of his hearers' presumptions.  In Matthew 10, for example, Jesus sends out the Twelve and tells them to avoid the Gentiles and the Samaritans, but to "go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."  While this would seem to smack of parochialism (though yet Jesus says that the Twelve will not finish even this limited task), it must be remembered that Jesus is not sending the Twelve to minister to the faithful, but rather to "the lost"--a casualty-class, as it were.

As far as the status of non-Israelites, Jesus indicates that it is a matter of limited construction that they are considered different from the Jews--and moreover that construction can be seen to crumble.  The gentile woman with the demon-possessed daughter gets the better of Jesus by insisting that even the dismissive metaphor of "dogs" can be salvaged for her by the realization that even "dogs" are worthy of consideration.  And in John, Jesus indicates to the infamous "Woman at the Well" that eventually the worship of all peoples is properly to become one.

This crumbling of constructions can be viewed in still starker terms.  The preface to John refers indeed to how Jesus "came unto his own," but later that same section highlights what in truth constitutes the nature of Jesus' "own":

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."  This is essentially a recapitulation--presented in reverse chronology--of my oft-repeated contentions about the true plight of Adam and all of us.  To destroy the true curse (not the "Fall" so beloved of the theologians) we must travel back to before the great schism between humanity and God--the schism that occurred when it was declared that Adam in blessed proximity to God was nonetheless "alone."

"Which were born, not of blood": Descent from peoples, tribes, or families will avail us nothing.

"nor of the will of the flesh": Descent from the tumult of "begetting" will avail us nothing.

"nor of the will of man": Descent from the man who yearned for more than the companionship of God will avail us nothing.

To become children of God is to allow ourselves to be blasted empty of everything that to us characterizes our individual lives.  It is even a precarious presumption for us to imagine that we could ever have "individual" lives to give--God can know what we are as individuals, but an honest appreciation of our warring impulses, desires, and thoughts reveals to us that we do not know our lives as "individuals," and cannot expect God to deal with us in accord with our "individual" presumptions.  The "person" of the Jew who Jesus describes as lifting a sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath is not the same "person" as the identically-named Jew who claims to observe the Sabbath.  We all know what it is to be overtaken by impulses that arise we know not where--and Jesus is not averse to considering that actions we might commit as strangers to our "selves" might actually be understandable, if not laudable.

As Jesus illustrates with the devil that returns to its tidied former home with a host of devil companions, it is desirable to be blasted empty of presumptions about oneself--while it is perilous to rely on a notion of a reformed self when we cannot even pronounce with authority upon what our selves consist.  We have no solid idea about Adam (properly viewed, poor man, as nothing more nor less that we all might have been).  We cannot know how Adam could be alone with God--how can we know that the "self" that each of us thinks we possess is "alone" within us?

And how can we know that our "selves" are confined to that which we consider merely our own?  To Jesus, merely to recognize a person as an ancestor is to enter the moral life of that person--only by overt action can we make ourselves distinguishable from another.  We have "lives" that we consider to be our own (and the theologians will associate the self with the physical person as loudly as any others), but if we are to give up our lives, are we not obligated as much as anything to reckon that the "lives" to which Jesus can lay claim can by God be blasted across any boundaries we know?

We would like to think of Jesus, led to crucifixion in Luke, as speaking comfort to the "Daughters of Jerusalem," "weep not for me, but for yourselves, and for your children . . . . Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills, Cover us."  Though the prospect of eventual salvation exists for his hearers, Jesus presents a conceptualization of the dark comfort that exists for the faithful in consideration of the grim state of Creation: "For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?"

To the Daughters of Jerusalem is offered the same comfort as is afforded to the stillborn, who at least have been spared the tribulations of the daylight.  They have returned to dust, and they have yielded themselves to the blighted Creation that yearns for God's healing.  For this is really what the ministry of Jesus is about.  Jesus formed Creation through his pain, and the pain arising from humanity's maladjustment to God's blessings has been felt by Jesus also.

God said "Let there be light," and it would be ridiculous for us to believe that "Let there be light" is somehow nailed to a framework of time--as though time and light would have some existence of themselves.  "Let there be light" is ever-said, inasmuch as both light and time would dissolve if they--as anything else--fell from the mind of God.  John tells us Creation was made by Jesus, and inasmuch as it is pain to Jesus to be separated from God, then "existence" as understood by us can be understood by us only as a torment endured by Jesus for us--a torment of Creation-birth that has existed through all time.  Accordingly, to reckon our "selves" as mere fleeting phantoms of our attempts at self-understanding, and to offer our "selves" as balm and bandage spread beyond our feeble notions of boundaries--that is what it is to give up one's life.  Not that we could ever make such a claim, but Jesus has such a claim on us, and more.

The world is as a wound on our Savior.  Holding to our lives we are as thorns.  Forsaking our lives we are as dust, trampled on by our fellows.

Or perhaps we might be spat upon by Jesus.

Where the Good News Ends

It might be contended that existence is not religious.  It would be another thing to contend that understanding of existence is not religious.  "Existence" must be understood as everything that is known, as well as everything that is not known and perhaps cannot ever be known.  As I have tried to relate before, it is not my contention that non-religious people are deluded about their professed lack of belief.  Rather, I contend that the profession of belief among religious persons (as assessed by Jesus in the Gospels) is so insubstantial as to deserve all but the outright descriptor of "delusion."

The concern expressed by Jesus about human belief is not nearly so concentrated on the content of belief as upon the virtual non-existence of belief.  This concern might be seen as subsumed under Jesus' overarching contention that we do not understand existence itself (and refuse to recognize our ignorance), and therefore we have not even a "natural" base of understanding against which to contrast understanding of that which is "supernatural."  Nicodemus, in Jesus' assessment, is not an accomplished natural philosopher who is ignorant of the supernatural--rather, Nicodemus does not even understand earthly things.

And so all human beings are surrounded by an existence that they do not understand.  The atheist can look to science and its gains, and the religious person can look to that which he or she counts as wisdom.  In either case, the concept of knowledge-horizon presents itself--this is the analog of the belief-content issue that Jesus treats as secondary.  None of us understands existence in its entirety.  What matters more crucially in the teachings of Jesus is the overarching question of how each of us, religious or not, treats our "knowledge-horizon"--is it something that recedes to the vanishing-point of our imaginations, or is it something that permeates our approach to every moment?

And so, with apologies for my clumsiness and presumption, I will consider the notion of "belief" to be describable in terms of Jesus' teachings--with little but my passing nod above to anyone's contention that they might believe nothing.  Jesus seems to begin with the premise that we all believe nothing, and also with the premise that what we call "knowledge" is so insubstantial as to be conceptually twinned with belief--both being described in their lack, and neither being seen as so large as to impinge with consequence upon the other.

The "religion," then, that I will describe hinges on the very basic elements of "knowledge" that we consider so mundane as to be unworthy of mention.  We are individuals going through our lives and going through the world.  Or are we?  What but conceit of "religious" belief makes us decide that we are the same person from moment to moment?  Surely we are different each instant, and yet we will consider ourselves--if we are to be called sane--responsible for the actions of a half-second or a half-century before.  We have differing and often overlapping modes of thought and consciousness and yet--if we are to be called sane--we call ourselves "individuals."  We are surrounded by objects and beings and circumstances that we call understandable because they have been subject to the testing of our experiences, and yet we must admit that we personally subject to our testing a vanishingly small proportion of those elements that comprise the existence we claim to understand.

I have described before the notion that understanding life as a moment-by-moment experience can only be done truly if we will reckon that our personal competing thought-modes comprise, in every necessary substance, uncomfortably-housed, multiple "individuals" trying as it were to cling to the core of a "self" which is beyond our understanding.  Indeed, there is nothing strange in this, if we are to reckon responsibly with our limitations of thought.  We claim to experience the world, and thereby to understand it, yet our undeniable experiences of self-alienation and self-division we discount as phantasmagorical, even as we credit ourselves with understanding of locales and terrains and continents and worlds that we will never visit.

We claim to know things and to believe things, yet the very substance of most of our claims is belied by our insistence on claims that are neither necessary nor justified.  In the realm of religion (which is where, of course, my emphasis is going to lie) this phenomenon of pointless insistence is repeatedly dealt with by Jesus.  At the very periphery of the belief-system of Judea, it was to some people of crucial importance whether an ancient High Priest of a story was this man or that.  Jesus seems to treat the difference as though it means nothing.  Near the very center of the belief-system of Judea, it was to some people of crucial importance whether the Messiah was the descendant of this man or that.  Jesus seems to treat the difference as though it means nothing.

This, then, is the crucial issue of Jesus' treatment of both knowledge and belief: We can each choose whether our "world" (the composite of notions we have about existence from which we can extrapolate to the heavenly) is a "world" of settled assertions, or a "world" of surprising epiphanies.  Obviously, I will contend that the latter is to be preferred--we must always prepare ourselves for surprises.  Moreover, every time we discover something new about ourselves we must reckon that the newness of our self-awareness means that we now live in a new world.  We are the new wineskins.

This necessary awareness of the impinging and shifting nature of the true knowledge-horizon is what enlivens our perceptions.  It is sad indeed that so many Christians have built up great edifices of assertions--great empires of notions about the certainties and expanses of Christendom--and have counted themselves as soldiers against conjured "powers and principalities," when the real battle for our souls is a ceaseless struggle within ourselves.  For these are the selves in which we decide which of our clashing thoughts are not truly ours, and in which we decide what is true or not true within ourselves and around us.

These are the selves that house our demons.  Yes, this is the unavoidable application of such a disturbing term--lacing through the Gospels--to our understandings of ourselves.  The notion that we can be "clean" and placed above the struggles within ourselves is perhaps the foulest of all misunderstandings about our existence.  The churches have never been able to concoct a satisfying commentary on Jesus' description of the evicted entity that returns to a tidied house and--delighting in the refreshed environment--invites in a host of its fellows.  The notion of being "clean" and staying "clean" is a notion of a godling's wild conceit.  Jesus, on the other hand, has no hesitation in describing the vicissitudes of human attitude as reflecting identity with--or descent from--this or that devil.

Jesus was using terms and concepts that are strange to us--and that would have been of conflicting interpretations even to his contemporaries--but he is pressing toward a crucial and timeless point: our very selves are strange to us.  Our very selves are unsettling to us--or should be.  Of course, the notion that our very selves should be unsettling to us is a notion that haunts any responsible approach to understanding existence.  Alternatively, any conceit of aiming to travel through life having methodically stowed away self-questionings and self-doubts is a conceit that is headed for bad news indeed--at least, that is what the teachings of Jesus say.

Read beyond the Gospels and you will see Christianity establish for itself an empire long before it conquered--and bent to its brutal purposes--the worldly empire of Rome.  The empire of Christianity from Acts onward was a conceptual realm in which the conceit of a knowledge-horizon was pressed toward every vanishing-point.  The Gospels' world of Jesus, on the other hand, was a realm in which the mysteries of the Kingdom of God could be housed in a mustard seed--and a realm in which the murmurings of an infant could speak to every person's responsibilities and model every person's proper approach to God.

The Opposite of Life is Suffering

In my last post I wrote:

"The Jesus who felt the agonies of every creature (laid out most distinctly in the observations of evolution and its eons); the Jesus who knows of agonies or not in the pre-biotic gasses, dusts, and molten stones; the Jesus who knows of agonies or not in a yawning, aching truly infinite prospect of time not beginning and not ending--this Jesus is the Jesus through whom Creation was made."

This is really just the specific application of what would be--on any sober reflection--simply a prudent maxim about considerations of God.  If God feels something, can it be said that he feels it only finitely?  Indeed, any notion of proportion in any aspect of existence must be imposed by divine will--infinitude must be the default setting, as it were, of anything attributable to God.

The notion of Jesus suffering, then, must be understood in its limited particular applications to human experience as an imposition by God--by divine will the suffering Jesus is brought to us in Scripture and in our creaturely experiences more or less acutely.  In "more or less" is encapsulated the lamentable fact that our recollections of Jesus' suffering might easily be more than we can bear, and yet it must be thought simultaneously that we could never really recall Jesus' sufferings often enough, or acutely enough.

And we must recall also that Jesus admonishes us to surrender our lives to the service of his teachings and his mission--we are called to "take up the Cross."  Simultaneously, of course, Jesus wishes for us "the abundant life."  It cannot be recalled too often that this abundance is to be attended by persecutions.  Here, of course, we are confronted by a crossroads, by an opportunity (if we might call it that) to decide upon competing frameworks of "Christian life."  On the one hand, we can say that to "take up the Cross" is to suffer the loss of life throughout, and in such case "the abundant life" is found in rejoicing that earthly blessings are bestowed in general upon humanity--with all of humanity's shortcomings.  We can count ourselves lords of the earth if it matters not to us who in particular gets the blessings, if we count all blessings apportioned to us personally by happenstance to be more than our due (and with our fellow humans to be thanked along with God), and also if the deathly "Cross" admonition results in a life-long exercise in strengthened self-abnegation and forbearance of persecution.

On the other hand, we can decide that to "take up the Cross" in the "abundant life" means to gather the fruits and comforts of the world--couched as the bestowals of a generous God to his faithful.  In such a framework of "doing the will of God" the deathly part of "taking up the Cross" need mean little more than a professed anticipated willingness for eventual martyrdom at the hands of a secular police state, and "persecution" can take the form of being disallowed a majoritarian prayer at a public-school ceremony financed by the taxes of all.

As I have written before, the neat notion of polar opposites (such as "light" and "darkness") is often inadequate in describing the reality that God created.  (When God created light, he was in no way disempowered to create light to suffuse all.  From that moment, it would be as logical as anything to think of darkness as being drawn from light--the "separated" light and dark not being opposites, but rather dark as an extracted element of the default light granted to the universe by its infinite Lord.)  This refusal of conventional notions of opposites can apply to this discussion of life and death.

Of course, we say often enough that death is a part of life.  Moreover, the notions of "life" and "death" are of multiple applications in the religious realm--"mortal sin," "death of the soul," "the second death" and the like--as well as the notion of "eternal life."  Scarcely a person in the Western World has avoided the observation that Christians strive for "eternal life" as an alternative to living eternally in Hell.  What is most important here, however, is not the realization that life and death are not opposites, but rather a recognition of what, in the teachings of Jesus, might be best understood as the opposite of life.

The opposite of life is suffering.  The dead live eternally or suffer eternally.  If the opposite of life is suffering, and Jesus tells us to give up our lives, then what matters most in the midst of our suffering is the bolstering understanding that God made Creation as a blessing for us.  This is the infinitely good God that gives us as well the potential to count as more blessed than anything a cup of cold water (for who would dare to calculate the times in history when this has been undeniably so) and God somehow makes it possible for a blessed few of us to have handed a lone cup to a parched little one--and rejoiced in God's inestimable blessings.  This is life lived abundantly.

For Jesus made life for us out of suffering.  The divine made the not-divine for a reason, and if the reason was love then it was attended by a reason of felt lack, and both that love and that lack must be understood by us as infinite.  Here we must go to the preface of John.  We read:

"All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.  In him was life; and the life was the light of men."

Jesus poured out life for the universe, through his unimaginable sufferings.

If we look at the verses above, moreover, we are confronted by a truth even more shattering than the realization that life's opposite is suffering (as though that were not enough, and as though we might ever comprehend the implications of Jesus' sufferings.)  The verse "In him was life; and the life was the light of men," presents in twelve KJV words the reason why conventional Christianity is deficient.  The Christianity of all those celebrated centuries has acted as though what has always mattered most immediately is that Jesus brought light, and that the light of God's truth has been what has given life to the saved.

The Light that brings Life is inestimable to humanity, but who can ignore that the Preface to the Gospel of John (written to those after the "Fall" and declaring that the darkness has never been able to overpower the light) tells us that the life procured for us at such a price by Jesus is what is "the light of men"?  Creation is good, it has always been good, and the life that Jesus poured out for Creation has always been a blessing--and a light--to humanity,  Humanity has looked at the good Creation, and tried to understand good, and tried to be good.  Indeed, all of Creation, in attempting to act out its innate drives, has always tried (though imperfectly) to be good.  Even a fig tree can be bad or good, and Jesus can be understood to be both sane and just when he acts accordingly.

Jesus did not merely clothe the grass of the field with glories greater than Solomon, he endowed the lowly grass as well with the drive to thrust itself toward the sunlit heavens in a frenzy of vigor.  Again and again Jesus admonishes us to understand life, and the God who gives life, and the mercies to be sought for eternal life, in terms of the generosity of God toward his creatures.  This generosity was expressed for us in the sufferings of Jesus from time immemorial.  Jesus is so much more than his inestimable sufferings on Calvary, and Jesus' teachings are so much more than our speculations about how and why he did what he did.

The Wrong Side of Infinity

Adam committed sins in the Garden of Eden.  As I have written before, it is only reasonable (if we are to assume that the figures of Adam and Eve are relatable to us as humans) for us to understand the first humans' estrangement from God as existing from the very beginning, from when Adam has it said of himself, "It is not good for the man to be alone,"--though God was available to him.

It is also only reasonable for us to understand Adam (with an existence of finite length and of limited capacities) to have committed only a finite sum of sins.  Otherwise we might, if we chose, conjure up some notion that Adam committed an infinitely grave sin--deserving infinite punishment--in rejecting the infinite blessing of communion with God.  Such conjecture is not foreign to the realms of religious thought, though it would be fatuous to pretend that such an Adam of superhuman experience-capacity and superhuman actualization was really different in godling-quality from some "Child of the Son-God" pharaoh-ancestor.

No, the Adam of Genesis was a human being, committing sins of finite (albeit great) import.  Such might be said of us all, and no matter how great the number of our species might be eventually, still the weight of our sins is finite.  Such a realization must put the lie to the meaningless contention sometimes made, that Jesus on the Cross suffered the "equivalent" of an eternity of suffering for each of the saved.  How is there an isolatable "equivalent" to an infinity?

If we as unsaved humans are to experience eternal damnation, such must be understood as the out-workings of an internalized attitude of rebellion against God--not as a roiling stew-pot of infinite, unending punishments for finite sins, but rather as a clash of wills playing out as the result of earthly resolves.  For all of its otherwise unearthly aspects, the story of The Rich Man and Lazarus has its foundation in their earthly lives, and has its playing-out in the coherent--though mistaken--willful contentions of The Rich Man.

The sad part about our contentions about the degree of Jesus' salvific sufferings is not in how our imaginations run away from us--whipping up "The Passion of the Christ" imageries in what was a rather routine (thought holiday-shortened) crucifixion, possibly in raw terms harder on the Thieves--but rather in how we have sheltered our imaginations from the possibility of Jesus' sufferings through all of time.  The Jesus of the Cross, after all, is the Jesus of Creation, and in the recesses of the Creation in Genesis we can see--or, rather, not see--the very beginning of time.  The Jesus who felt the agonies of every creature (laid out most distinctly in the observations of evolution and its eons); the Jesus who knows of agonies or not in the pre-biotic gasses, dusts, and molten stones; the Jesus who knows of agonies or not in a yawning, aching truly infinite prospect of time not beginning and not ending--this Jesus is the Jesus through whom Creation was made.

This time-surpassing agony of Jesus is that which we can call "infinite," and if such speculation on our part might be mistaken, it would at least be prudent and sincere.  Contrast this speculation to that of The Rich Man (lecturing the heavens on the proper provisions for saving the lost) or to that of the theologians who will lecture the Crucified Jesus on the work he is performing for the saved.