Good and Evil Things to Know

Change in plans.  I think I have to just blurt this out.

The world is created in Genesis.  The turmoil is made light, the heavens are raised, dry land appears--nothing about this is really more edifying than would be the experience of a person (if someone had existed) who had viewed the bewildering spectacle.

Then the earth is ordered to produce vegetation--though it is really the seed-containing growth potential of the plants that is emphasized, and (as the reader might surmise) I will note that it is only "later"--if the "second Story of Creation" can be kept at hand--that above-ground vegetation is focused upon.

Then the lights in the "vault of heaven" appear, followed by creatures of the sea and by birds--birds that, as the KJV has it--"fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven."  This is the end of the fifth day, and only one day of making remains.

What is important to note here is that nothing so far created would be anything but a distant puzzle to the hypothetical person I mentioned before.  The sky, the heavenly bodies, the creatures of the sea, and the birds (which might have inhabited distant surrounding shores and appeared only as high-flung apparitions against the "vault of heaven"), as well as seeds of vegetation hiding their potential under the soil, need not have been accessible to examination.

In this one last day--the sixth day--God creates the animals and humanity (and it is only the marking of days that denotes the progression, not "this happened, and then this happened.")  On this last day, if the two "Stories of Creation" are melded, animals and people are created.  God puts the man against the setting of distant and inaccessible phenomena I described (though apparently with plenty of featureless mud) and plants a garden for him, it being particularly noted that God brought forth for the man plants "out of the ground," in which their seeds might have lain in waiting.

The man needs the plants to survive, and he is being given knowledge about them to further that cause.  Unfortunately (in a manner that we might never hope to really understand) the closeness of God in that verdant setting is not enough for the man.  The man's dissatisfaction certainly seems like sin, and we must note that it is a dissatisfaction that occurs in the only world he knows, with the only knowledge-horizon he knows.  God grants the man further companionship, but of course that companionship will come along with further knowledge--knowledge to be perhaps improperly assimilated.

And so on this sixth day (as I fancy it), with the progression of creation formally denoted only by the passing of days, the animals (and perhaps only the more terrestrial) birds are formed out of the ground, to be named by Adam (quite possibly prejudicing the light in which each creature will be "known" by humanity) and to be examined to see if any of the creatures are "an help meet" for Adam.  None of them are.

And so the woman is created out of man, in a manner not to be repeated.  She is brought to the man, and he delights in how she is "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" (though, as I have noted before, it might have been more seemly for Adam to have delighted in the woman's individual nature.)  What is most important here is the additional fact that Adam seems to take no delight in how the woman's "flesh" might accompany him in intimacy.  Only after "the Fall" does the text relate how he named her "Eve" because she was the mother of all the living, and only after "the Fall" is childbirth described or sexual intercourse related (wherein a man "knows" his mate, in some translations.)  (The "shall cleave unto his wife" narration immediately after Adam describes the woman as "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" is best understood as attributed to God, not to a sexually-awakened Adam, and Jesus indeed treats the "cleaving" as being a divine imposition.)

What is going on throughout the Creation narrative is a step-wise broadening of humanity's knowledge-horizon--and it does not seem to be a good thing (even if we just consider what centuries of "cleaving" have done to the moral history of our species.)  In the beginning, Adam and his Maker did not discuss political philosophy or the various theories of a "salvation economy"--or so it would seem.  The very fact of being surrounded by the vista of Creation while in the company of God would be enough for anyone--or would it?  Is this not perhaps the rub of our imperfection--the "genesis" of our sin-separation from God?

And then there is the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Here I will have to toss out some scriptural references--in full awareness of the latent folly of proceeding so as a layman.  The standard notion of the fateful "knowledge of good and evil" is the notion that Adam and Eve were morally innocent beforehand (and we are all aware of the rejoinder to the effect that they--and we--were punished for a transgression that by definition cannot have been a transgression because they had to sinfully decide to eat from the tree that brought them sinfulness.)  In the standard notion, Adam and Eve came to know what good and evil were, and became thereby morally responsible creatures.

However, the matter is not so simple.  In the "Fall" verse (2:9) of Genesis, the tree of the knowledge of "good" and "evil" uses words in Hebrew that are typically used as adjectives ("good," "better," "best," "well," and "evil," "wicked," "bad," "wrong.")  In contrast, Genesis 44:4, detailing Joseph's manipulation of his brothers, has him telling his steward to say to them, "Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good?"  Here the words for "good" and "evil" are those typically rendered as nouns ("good," "prosperity," "good things," "favor," and "disaster," "evil," "wickedness," "harm.")  (The predominant variant meanings are taken from the NIV concordance.)

In 1 Samuel 25 David complains of Nabal that "he hath requited me evil for good," and the words for "good" and "evil" are the noun forms I described above, while yet in the rest of 1 Samuel it is usually the case that the typically adjective forms are used in phrases translated such as "good report" or "evil spirit."

The argument for the respective uses of these terms is far from clear-cut, and there is much overlap in the usages (though I would note that both the Psalms and Jeremiah render the quite distinctive notion of "good" for "evil"--probably the most solid "noun" uses of the words--with the Hebrew "noun" rather than "adjective" forms as I have described.)

What I am getting at in my clunky progression (if the reader has not already guessed it) is the notion that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was not a source primarily of "wisdom" about what is good and what is evil.  In other words, it is not of paramount importance to view the story as showing Adam and Eve coming to know "good" and "evil" as nouns.  What the story is really telling us is that the plethora of knowledge (or what passes for knowledge) possessed by human beings in our present state is a mixed blessing.  Adam and Eve set themselves to pursuing knowledge that can be good or evil in its effects on us (or in how we let it affect us.)

Humanity was in a step-wise decline throughout the Genesis narrative, and our fascination with the supposedly pristine moral state of Adam and Eve has blinded us to implications of the story that we cannot afford to miss.  Adam was surrounded by more wonders than an eternity could hold--or that he could hope to comprehend in an eternity.  He was not satisfied with the wonders of God's Creation and of fellowship with God.  Even the trees of Eden were an infinite knowledge-horizon, and indeed no notions of any level of intricacy or elevation can compare with God.  To have sought diversion in what God had not provided, rather than in what God had provided, was asking for trouble--an "asking" from the morally-competent Adam and Eve that stands in incomparable distinction from the cartoonish notion of the first couple suddenly coming to an understanding of "good" and "evil."  Rather, the first couple attained knowledge that was good and evil from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

It is the importance of questions about knowledge that is probably the most-overlooked aspect of the teachings of Jesus.  We tend to do this over-looking because we focus disproportionately on the question of belief.  That is to say, we look to belief without considering adequately what tends to underlie belief, and what tends to dictate most potently the manifestations of our beliefs.  This missing factor is the simple notion of a knowledge-base, of a carefully-tended set of observations and ruminations on the state of our existence.  Our lack of care in this regard can certainly place us in the jeopardy that Jesus describes in speaking about "careless" words.  We tend to think of this as having to do with cursing, blasphemy, scatology, or simply idle talk.  We do not consider often enough that simply making unwarranted assumptions about our existence can be such "careless" talk--with all the dire implications.

We do not believe enough, it is true, but it is also true that we cannot really cease to believe.  Those two poles, however, do not reliably describe our predicament.  Jesus already tells us that our belief is always too small to measure, while simultaneously he tells us that even in our evil state we can scarcely forsake the entirety of the positive aspects of our nature.  The true realm of our battle for "belief" is not in those moments when we aspire to belief or, alternately, when we are caught short in the realization that we are not acting as though we believe.  The true realm of our battle for belief is in the larger middle ground, wherein we must face the relentless reality that we swim in--we drown in--what we know and what we think we know and what we know deep-down that we have accepted as "knowledge" merely out of habit or convenience.  This is the good-old Adam-and-Eve realm of good and evil.

An apt parallel of this argument is to be found in our horrible struggle with racism.  In its worst aspects in the history of the West, white people tried to believe that black people were not human.  For a while it was fashionable for educated white people to believe that they were nearer cousins to chimpanzees than to the gorilla-imaged Blacks.  No notion was too ridiculous to hold, as long as the prospect of rendering Blacks non-human was in play (such as the import of the Dred Scott decision.)  In short, the paramount "belief" of racism in the West was the black person as an animal (if even reckoned that nobly), though the undeniable reality of black-white progeny put the lie to the whole business (and often made plain the business of racism being used for privileged or positioned whites to make sexual objects of Blacks.)

In short, the paramount "belief" of racism in the West was not "believed," anymore than any of us can "believe" in God or Jesus as we ought.  I do not mean the parallel to be ridiculous (though of course it is) but rather to place both issues under the withering light that Jesus employs in challenging us to accept that fact that "belief" in the simple terms we would like to use is essentially ridiculous.  Belief is what we think we can base on what we claim to know, but (Eden-like) to "know" something is to embrace the good and evil of our claims to knowledge.

And, of course, what we really know is not all bad.  Jesus did not tell us to think of ourselves as all bad, and indeed there have been few times and places in which people have been all bad.  There is goodness admixed with evil, and in many times and places the residue of good has shown itself to be crucial.  It is of course somewhat sickening to think that there were and are mitigating factors in the racial horrors that were and are abroad in our culture, that is, mitigating factors that can be extracted with some pains from less-than-noble constructions we can have of our situations.  However, one might think of patronizing and simplistic sentiments about "good Blacks" that would (sometimes) temper the cruelty of actions and institutions.

And so I have described an analogy to attempted overarching religious beliefs in overarching racial beliefs, and I have described an analogy to moral residues about religion in moral residues in communal behavior.  What remains, though, in constructing the analogy-scheme resides in that cavernous middle-ground that constitutes the bulk of our lives.  The most potent element (or at least the most potently-addressable element) lies in the questioning of what we believe, and in hard reality that involves questioning what we think we know.  Any moment of any day can be a trap we allow to spring upon us.  In racial attitudes, any moment of any day can be a moment of confirmation bias, or of slights delivered (and often at no personal experiential cost) so that bad habits are reinforced, or of unthinking ratification of one's "heritage" that is no more determinative of personal reality than inheriting someone's hair color.

Again, this is something that I thought I had to blurt out, and some of it is almost too bewildering or to disconcerting to comprehend.

The Arena of Our Conceptualizations Part One

Genesis 3:6 says, "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof . . ." (KJV).

It would not, I think, be too great a feat of modesty for me to assume that I am not the first to point out that--given Adam's presumed lack of experience in the matter--there would be no reason for Eve to "see" that the tree was "good for food."  As a purely logical proposition, the text is insupportable.  How could Eve "see" that the tree was "good for food?"

One might as well ask whether succeeding generations had the opportunity to find out if the tree in question was "good for food"--its moral poison having already done its work.  It does not seem to be contended in Scripture that the "Cherubims" and "flaming sword" persisted through the ages of humanity.  Did the edges of Eden simply give way to overgrowth and intermingling of "in-garden" and "out-garden?"  Did the other tree, the Tree of Life, though it would allow people to live forever, not have the intrinsic property of endless life without Adam's "dressing" and "keeping?"  Were the barriers to Eden rendered simply superfluous?

And then again, the creationist can simply invoke the charm of the Flood, and contend that Eden was destroyed.  None of such carryings-on, however, can change the fact that we are told, in cart-before-the-horse fashion, that Eve "saw" that the tree was "good for food."  It is inescapable that Eden serves not as a physical setting (despite any and all exertions of the literalist--though of course there is no impediment to asserting that God can "literally" do anything he wants, rendering all analysis futile.)  Rather, Eden (just as many other scriptural plots in space and time) is an "arena of conceptualization"--an externalized setting that displays the problems inherent in human experience.

An "arena of conceptualization" is physical only insofar as physically-conceivable metaphors are intrinsic to the arena's applicable moral lessons.  Eve "saw" that the tree was "good for food"--it matters not if its fruit was nutritionally worthless and/or its taste was repellent (though the latter negative quality might have spared Adam his part.)  The "seeing" is what mattered, just as the "seeing" (or, more creepily, actual leering) of a man at a maid that he would want to possess is the very act of adultery itself.  Physicality, in the language of the Scriptures, is the fleshing-out of a harder reality, the reality of moral condition.  The positive inverse of internalized "seeing" as a lecherous pursuit can be found in Jesus' contention that we can possess material goods beyond compare--if only we will count ourselves as undeserving possessors of the world at large, rejoicing in the benefits of its fruits to all and sundry--just as though they were enjoyed by ourselves personally.

Our existence, whether seen in terms of particularized scenarios or seen (as best we might) in totality, is characterized by such "arenas of conceptualization."  As I described in the previous post, the concept of "sin" in our existence is supportable only as long as we remember that sin is pervasive, and is therefore described fatuously if we attempt to treat it as an isolatable thing.  The only thing "non-sin" about our existence is the intellectual conjecture (and scriptural promise) of a "non-sin" alter-existence.  Nowhere, then, in considerations of Jesus' teachings, is to be found a more crucial topic for arena-of-conceptualization analysis than "sin."  "Sin" is understood truly only when it is understood to be pervasive, to be fundamental to every postulation about our existence, and to be determinative of the relationships among the elements of our existence.

Such is the way the gospels treat sin.  "Sin" is not a thing in the world.  "Sin" is the foundation of this world--the only world we know, the only world that we can analyze and with which we can interact.  Just to take the word "sin" itself as it shows up in English translations (in this case, as in the NIV) is to take the first step toward viewing "sin" in its arenas of conceptualization--if we will consider the gospels' treatments of the matter as fundamental.  When the gospels speak of sin, they speak of existence--and then they layer on such superficialities as physical reality, common human experience, established religious ideations, and the like.  This should be apparent regardless of translation used.

As I said, then, when the gospels speak of sin:

Matthew 5 (immediately after the "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her . . . " part that I referred to above, has, "And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell" (KJV).  Of course, this passage has engendered no end of theological conjectures--because we tend to see it as describing an aspect of sin (or of our response to sin) when sin itself is the landscape upon which the conceptualization is placed.

This passage is, after all, part of a recorded discourse of Jesus that begins with the Sermon on the Mount.  As the discourse proceeds, we are told to rejoice in persecution; to reckon that our strength ("salt") in testimony to God can be lost to us; that we must adhere perfectly to the Law of Moses; that anger in speech is the same as murder; that divorce is adultery; that the swearing of oaths is evil; that we must allow ourselves to be ill-used; that we must attain the perfection of the Father; that we are to forsake earthly cares; that a life of wonderful works can still end in damnation.

What is most important to remember here is the fact than an entirely different (though complementary) thread of teaching is drawn through this same discourse.  Yes, we are told to rejoice in persecution, but of course that entails the presence of those who would persecute us--and this is just the beginning of the conundrums that are to face us.  We cannot offer a sacrifice to God while yet another person has anything against us--and our reconciliation with those we have alienated is not guaranteed.  Moreover, the press of time and circumstance is such that we must offer virtually anything to mend those rifts.  As exemplified in cases of divorce ("whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery") we can be held accountable for others' misdeeds if those deeds have their seed-bed in our actions.  (Matthew 9 prefaces the "hand offend thee, cut it off" part with a warning, not about sinning, but about causing sinning in others.)

The important point here is that attaining the degree of righteousness required of us by Jesus is not merely impossible.  It is impossible as well for us to address the full scope of our moral responsibilities without the active cooperation of our fellows.  We are not faced with sin in the world--we are faced with a sin-world.  Of course, we are faced with a Savior who tells us to seek the mercy of God, but we stumble in this at the outset if we do not understand the scope of what we are asking--and, of course, if we do not understand that mercy asked for ourselves alone is incomprehensible in an existence of sin permeating all and therefore connecting all.

Such is the greatest arena of our conceptualizations.  I will continue with the relevant gospel passages in the nest post.

Our Broadest Insult to God

There is a certain piece of housekeeping I need to perform, though it might seem odd to describe it so mundanely.  Actually, this piece of "housekeeping" will highlight how "mundane" must be all the aspects of what we can claim to understand as "life."  All of life is interconnected, and that is part of what "Roused, Readied, Reaped" entails--we are thrown into a set of circumstances, we are shaped by that set of circumstances, and we must expect fundamental and permanent consequences at the end (insofar as we can understand "the end.")  The importance of "fundamental and permanent consequences" becomes all the more acute for us when we understand that we are not passive experiencers of the arcs of our lives--we respond to them, and we are responsible for how we respond.

All of this leads to the concept of sin, that indescribably great and horrid thing that separates us from the relationship we would want with God.  Unfortunately, the conventional faiths tend to act like sin is some conceivable "thing" that affects our existence.  Sin "infects the world," sin "separates us from fellowship with God," sin "came into the world (or into humanity's world) with the Fall."  What all of this (treating sin as a conceivable "thing") tends to do is to minimize sin, as though sin was to be understood as a more-or-less manageable negative aspect of our existence.

Sin is not an aspect of our existence.  Sin is what makes our existence different from the utterly different other existence without sin that was intended for us.  The very idea that sin can be localized, quantified, or conceptualized as a pollutant in our existence is wrong.  We ought to take as our initial clue in this matter God's warning that "sin" was lurking at the door of Cain.  From the start, and throughout, the Scriptures treat mentions of "sin" as proffered metaphors--"sin" itself cannot be described, because sin affects fundamentally every aspect of existence that we experience.  We live in the sin existence, and we strive for the non-sin existence.

The internalized striving for the "non-sin" existence is of course ultimately undefinable, but then so is the undefinable experience of "being" as against the quintessentially unprovable contention that we ever did not exist.  Conventional Christianity has operated throughout with disdain against the fundamental epistemological questions of philosophy.  The solipsist, and (in our day) the postulator of life as a computer simulation, are held up to ridicule.  Existence just exists, and the philosopher is an impious and internally false justifier of his or her unbelief--or so says conventional Christianity.

This is all well and good, with one great exception.  We can say that existence "just is," and we can reckon quite reasonably and humbly that we will be haunted by the undeniable fact that we are effectively defining existence by the fact that it exists.  The chief problem with Christianity's sense of self-justification, however, lies in the notion that the "salvation economy" (or whatever) is meant to allow us an escape from the effects of "sin" as a conceptualizable element of existence.  This is unsurprising--if existence "just is," then describing sin as a "thing" places sin (no matter how amorphously or multi-faceted in description) into "existence," into "the world."

When Jesus tells The Woman Caught in Adultery to "sin no more," he is quite well aware of two things.  Firstly, the woman will sin more in her life (presumably including sin in lust or devaluation of herself in improper relationships), something that she would do well to strive against.  And secondly, the woman, were she ever accused again, cannot rely on Jesus to be there to save her.  The woman is caught between the existential (we are all sinners) and the practical (we can all expect earthly consequences of sin.)  Jesus is warning the woman against the sin-existence which is the only existence we know.

The Woman Caught in Adultery is a problem for the churches because, one, she neither expresses remorse nor pleads for mercy, and two, because Jesus provides no rationale by which her release from condemnation can be taken as other than happenstance.  Why does Jesus not condemn her, and why does Jesus makes his lack of condemnation presumably total as regards her sin?  (Jesus, after all, cannot be understood as merely reassuring the woman that he will not throw rocks at her, sinful creature though she be.)  Of course the notion of a quantifiable instance of sin, isolated from a larger world in which "sin" exists, is not the notion of the story (though the churches will disgrace themselves in contortions such as "The accusation against the woman alone was obviously a set-up.")

No, the story of The Woman Caught in Adultery is a story not of "sin" (which is only ever describable in lesser conceptualizations or manifestations) but a story that takes place in our sin-existence, an existence that hems us in as surely as its "blank grey wall" of "the future" I described in the previous post.  The idea of sin is always inadequate, which is why the topic of sin must always be understood in that it cannot be understandable, any more than we can understand our existence by placing ourselves in a vantage-point above it.  No one will ever "understand" the chopping off of hands or feet to escape sin, any more than anyone will ever "understand" how humanity can forgive sins or how humanity can share each other's sins by failing to forgive them.

We can say that "sin" as a thing in the world (or in a larger "world" of the supernatural) is a thing that separates us from God, but one would not (in view of the gospel testimony) do well to argue with Jesus to the effect that God has ratified that pronouncement.  We are separated, rather, from God's stated intent to house us in an existence free from sin, which is to say, a completely different existence from the one we know.  The "connection" (which is an inadequate metaphor) we have with the non-sin existence is as tenuous and indefinable as any connection we might have with any existence larger than our personal experience-fields.  In the great puzzle of existence, we in our birthing into the world reach out (literally and figuratively) as infants to that which we love and long to be loved by.  Arguing about whether we are initially innocent or merely bathed in the receding glow of pre-creation innocence would be ridiculous--neither notion need distract us from Jesus' admonition that we need to become like little children.

When Jesus says that we, being evil, know how to give good things to our children, he is saying nothing any more remarkable than, "You, being of limited intellectual capacity, know how to give good things to your children."  God knows how to reach into the existence of sin and minister to us (which is not to say that we will like it.)  Sin is existence-wide--for us.  "Sin" does not have to be shrunk into a universe-wide, conceptualizable opponent of God and God's people, and to attempt this effectual shrinkage by describing sin as an isolatable concept renders insult to God.

We Eat Our Existences

The Garden of Eden has Adam provided with food, and supplied as well with an "occupation," if one might call it that--to tend the Garden.  (Presumably Adam's work was not particularly taxing.)

The vision that Jesus supplies of paradise includes a great feast (and not much else described in specific.)

Bodily sustenance, rather than being risen above in any vision of humanity in a blessed state, is presented not merely as an aspect of the longed-for existence, but as its most powerful and plentifully-described aspect.  Why?

Or perhaps the better question might be, Why do we not seize upon the biblical descriptions of bodily sustenance as a collective key to understanding the Scriptures?  After all, the notion of obtaining food--and more importantly, the notion of sharing food and/or procuring it for others--are only reduced to minor parts of human existence if we choose to view them so.

It is true that Jesus tells us that life is more than food, but here again the matter of proportion is what governs--life may be more than food, but life itself is (in Jesus' construction) a minor part itself of overall existence.  What matters to Jesus is how one lives, and in this regard life is to be lived simply and humbly.  We have little to possess and little to give, and in this context the basics of sustenance become a large part indeed of the business of life.

People who have the leisure to conjecture about the meaning of the Scriptures are usually people who are at least somewhat shielded from the dire concerns of mundane existence that plague the truly poor.  And yet many people, even if thought a small portion of humanity, are nearly as bound up by moment-to-moment questions of survival as were the animals presented to Adam in the Garden.  If questions of proportionality are exercised vigorously, one might well wonder if "humanity" proper does not consist of the desperately poor, scarcely distinguishable now from the soil-scratching grandchildren of Adam, while that admittedly large proportion of modern humanity who know relative comfort are the analogues of the "mighty men" of old, or even of the "sons of God" or the Melchizedek-like divines of anomalous stature that lorded it over the most ancient peoples.

If we remember what a large part is played in earthly existence by bodily sustenance--that is, if we refrain from thinking ourselves as elevated in considering food and drink minor concerns--then we can come to an entirely new conception of the proper relationship of humanity to God.  Adam's "food" was the totality of provision he obtained from God.  The "food" of the blessed feast foretold by Jesus is the totality of provision to the elect.  And the "food" of the mortal human is the totality of earthly provision we enjoy because of the sufferings of Jesus in Creation.  In this light the idea of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus is not merely apt, it is inescapable.  Our "food" is the sustenance provided to us in all regards by Jesus, much as Jesus has "food you know not of" from his Father.

As regards the theme of this blog, "roused, readied, reaped" is not merely a persistent stream of continual, overlapping, and differently-sized arcs of experience, it is also (if properly viewed) a cascade of cycles of "provision and procurement" of the means of life--the faded offspring of the great initial process of Eden, in which Adam was given all he could want, and that included an untiring and unfailing occupation of training up and plucking that bounty.  For us, the bounty is less, and the effort is greater, but the hoped-for blessed state in the end is the same.

The upshot of all of this for salvation is to be found in the implications of "provision and procurement."  When we remember what food and drink mean to this or that person--the "poor" who we will always have with us and who we seem intent on making sure we have with us--who are trying for one more moment of life and who in such moment might find salvation, then we can no longer look with disdain on what we so often deride as "consumption."  "Consume" as the generalized notion of "eat" is what we do in life.  We are blessed by God with natural resources and with means to obtain those resources--that is, "provision and procurement"--that is, more pointedly, "consumption"--that is, more pointedly yet, "eating."  We eat our existences.

It is often said that we should eat to live, not live to eat.  Nonsense.  As an example, "living," for us mortals, cannot be understood but as traveling through time, yet our conceptions of time are phantasms.  No one knows if time--that is, time containing any points of reference describable as elements of our lives--will continue beyond any moment.  For all we might refuse to admit it, the "future" might as well be seen as a blank grey wall that could manifest itself against us at any moment--the past is no guarantee of the future.  In effect, though, we treat the future (if we are honest enough to admit that it possesses for us no guarantee) not as a blank grey wall, but as a mirror.  Possessed of no necessary qualities, the future must then have ascribed to it the qualities we have known.  The future must be mirrored--if only approximately--by the past, if we are to conceive of the future at all.

We provide to the future a set of anticipated qualities that we extract from the experiences that have been provided for us.  We draw from the future a set of expectations that we procure from the stores of experiences we have had.  We, in our conceits, place the future before us as something by which we will be sustained--even if we are only to be sustained in a framework of familiar experiences in which we might meet the new, the challenging, the risky, even the fatal.  The future might kill us, but we approach the future as a resource that will sustain us.  We consume the future.

We consume time.  We consume space.  We consume each other.  We live to eat, because that is what living is.  When we live we consume the Savior whose sacrifice for us was always implicit in human existence--it is the understanding of this that is the substance (consumed, intellectually, as well) of the ritual.  We all must eat, but only rarely do we eat with the proper notion of what we are doing, just as anyone feeling penitent could bow underneath John's baptism, but only a few would grasp that they were under the ministrations of Elijah.

The World Has Ended

We have no cause to know whether or not the world had been "filled" with humans by the time of Jesus' earthly ministry.  Certainly to "fill" the earth does not mean to cover all of it with human flesh.  It would be as reasonable to maintain that the earth had been "filled" when first it became the case (certainly by Jesus' time) that the hinterlands and hunting grounds and arable fields around the great cities had been populated and used to the point at which a failure of any of those elements would show the great cities as vulnerable to starvation and disease.

Even in the time of the Conquest of Canaan, it had become the case that yearning for a "spacious land" was a well-known aspiration of a people.  By the beginning of the Common Era, further "filling" of the earth was in most cases to be dependent on the development of technologies and their unforeseen drawbacks and costs.  In many instances, the "development" (so-called) of virgin territories was made possible by the implementation of brutal social structures.  In the modern era, of course, the supposed blessing of God for humanity to "fill the earth" has been expressed in the pillaging and befoulment of certain regions in resource-mining to gain the means to venture into other inhospitable lands--lands in their turn subject to pillaging and befoulment.

Why not imagine that the earth had been "filled" by Jesus' time?  More to the point, is it not the case that the Gospels depict an earth ripe unto harvest, and not merely likely to end at any time, but manifestly rendered into a state likely to end?  It is, after all, the case that Jesus indicated two things at once: that the End could happen at any time, and that the earth would show itself as being ready for such an end when it came.  It is inescapable that Jesus' depiction was of a world that had already expended itself and was merely in its death throes--whether for seconds or centuries.

It was a matter of real wonderment and respect for me to speak to a man of great--and largely conventional--Biblical faith about a prophecy of Daniel.  The prophecy in question was the one about "to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."  My contention, which the gentleman was forthright enough to ratify, was to the effect that every generation has cause in good faith to regard their time as one in which "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."

The same manner of analysis can be directed toward Jesus' statements about "wars and rumors of wars" and "the beginnings of birth pangs"--the world is always ending, and always ready to end.  Indeed, it is reasonable to think that the world has already "ended," insofar as the Genesis account of the world's beginning is considered.  The world of the start of Genesis--viewed in its physical state--was (prior to what might be really called a narrative) a dark chaos surmounted by a mighty wind.  Suffice to say that the chaos of the formless deep and the presumably roiling atmosphere above it would surpass our greatest apprehensions.

This chaos is hearkened to by Jesus when he describes our plight on earth--buffeted by the wind that blows where it pleases--and when Jesus is in his agony on the cross, the skies are darkened and the earth is convulsed.  Moreover, we are to live always as though the sky might open or the ground might open--the earth of God's good Creation Week is no more, and it has not really existed since the advent of Jesus' ministry.  The earthly expression of the Kingdom of God in Jesus' utterances is simultaneous with the delivering of a (suspended) death sentence on the kingdoms of the earth.

Similarly, we are each issued a personal death sentence--a sentence that we can hope to escape only by a dwindling number of moment-by-moment opportunities to trade effectual death here on earth for life in heaven.  This hope of attaining citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven is illustrated for us, in the most pertinent way, in the giving-up-of-life demonstrated by John the Baptist.  It is often foolishly thought that John is to be understood most importantly as a near-attainer of that citizenship, both because of his query of Jesus about whether John is to wait for another, and also because Jesus says in Matthew,

"Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."  This statement can mislead us, if we do not remember that in the teachings of Jesus, NO ONE has attained the Kingdom this side of the grave--and no one ought to think of themselves in such a way.  (At least, no one ought to count on such assurance as obtained by the Good Thief in his unusual circumstance.)  This is probably why Jesus tells one man that he is not far from the Kingdom, and then does not tell him what he lacks.  Similarly, Jesus tells the "rich young ruler" that he lacks one thing (the selling-away of his wealth) and then proceeds to tell him that he needs still to do another thing (". . . and come, take up the cross, and follow me.")

We are in a world that has already come to an end, and we are living in such precarious tumult as would characterize such a state.  The tumult of our expired world is shown in the very sentence that Jesus appends to his fulsome description of John being as great as any "born of women": "And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force."  Of course the Kingdom of Heaven was available to the Patriarchs and others of old--Jesus' description of the Kingdom of Heaven does not involve a change in the Kingdom, but rather a change in the earth from which we might strive to attain the Kingdom.

Moreover, Jesus describes an earth in practical effect returned to its original state of chaos, even as the other elements of Creation are returned in a progression back from their humanly-caused travails (such travails felt most deeply by Jesus through whom Creation was made.)  The predicament of Creation was not the conventionally-described Fall (a point I have described incessantly.)  Rather, Adam rejected God's company as sufficient, attached himself (with all the connotations) to another human, and fathered a race that splintered into a warring mass of sub-attachments.  Jesus declared the divisions of humanity as meaningless in the face of everyone's duty to worship God; Jesus worked the whole male-female thing back (first through faithful monogamy as a human duty, and then through sober questioning of what fleshly fixations can do to detract from our total lives); and Jesus demanded of us a striving for communion with God that challenges all other attachments.

In short, Jesus directs us to travel back against the course of humanity's stepwise decline, and Jesus deprives us of the claim that we have duties to "the world" and in "the world."  "The world" is dead, and not merely dead in sin (so that we might feel that the trappings of religion, such as the conventions and concoctions of the non-Gospel New Testament, are part of our duties to God.)  The world, in everything that matters to the teachings of Jesus, is all dead, and our duties are such as would be fitting in the echoes of its death-throes: Are duties are to reach out in response to the echoes of Jesus' sufferings we hear in the sufferings of our fellow creatures--to reach out reflexively and without regard to doctrines.

And when the End in all its implications does finally come, it with be a recapitulation of God's "Let there be light"--it will be such as a flash of lightning from horizon to horizon.