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.