An Approach to the Light Metaphor

As I wrote in the last post but one:

"Adam is, in the crucial sense of a moral scenario, hoisted into a suspension between Heaven and Earth.  He is not one with the rest of Creation, and he is not one with God."

As I wrote in the last post:

"Perhaps the best way to understand our proper orientation to light--to good--is derived from the metaphor's mundane derivation.  What we understand of 'the world' (or more inclusively, 'the universe') is--if taken as a binary, light-versus-dark metaphor--a question of how much of the surfaces of irregular objects is exposed to light."

The greatest marvel of we who consider ourselves thinking beings is the way that we can conceptualize that which does not exist, or that which exists only in potentiality.  Indeed, that is what it is to "think," if we are to address ourselves to the question of what we must do in our lives.  It would be foolish, of course, for us to imagine that our abilities to conceptualize were independent of our concrete experiences (that is, that we are other than in a suspension between Heaven and Earth), but it would be equally foolish for us to imagine that our relationships to the infinite were pursued properly by our imputing infinite qualities to a divine that we view as embodying every good quality we can imagine.

As I wrote in the last post but one:

"We want to think of God as a constellation of ineffable qualities--but that is really no different than thinking of God as a creature, insofar as all of our thoughts will ultimately assign words like 'ineffable' to the edges of our understanding."

We do not worship God when we call him the epitome of every good concept we can name.  We worship thereby an amalgamation of our imaginations.  Instead, we must recognize that God must be approached not as an "other" (really a creature) of inestimable named qualities, but rather as the great worthy "Other" about whom the concept of qualities must be subsumed into a greater, undefinable meta-quality.  In Jesus' parlance, this is the "light" that we approach when we should, and avoid when we should not.

This is where the "light" metaphor of the Gospels really comes in.  We are creatures capable of conceptualization, and therefore we are creatures capable of assuming orientations toward all we can conceive around us.  If assuming orientations in our thought-schemes is to be called "work" (and therefore shackled to some idea of moral achievement), it must be admitted that this "work" is potentially as undemanding as the "work" (which I will leave to strict Calvinists to sort out) of obtaining salvation through "faith" rather than "works."  Moreover, when Jesus tells us to become like the little children, we are presented with a similar open question of whether this is a "work," or rather a ceasing from the unwholesome "works" that might be thought to characterize what we call "adulthood."  And then there is the question of whether it is a "work" to--in accordance with John 3--yield to Jesus' contention that we know not, in any abiding sense, where we come from--and must surrender accordingly our attachments to our earthly concept-schemes.

But if we can choose our orientations as we are suspended--Adam-like--in a conceptual tension between Heaven and Earth, and if we can choose our orientations in a thought-existence independent of time and space, what then but real evil would prevent us from turning more and more facets of ourselves to light--to good?  This is the question of the Gospels, not the question of whether we can be good enough, or do good enough, or create enough good.

Metaphors will, of course, fail in the end.  My conceptualization of the present matter is that of us being required to present all we can of ourselves and our lives (really the same thing) as a collection of anvils against which we invite the hammers of the light.  This metaphor is as weak as my understanding, but then the paucity of my understanding was never in doubt.  One might wonder just what might be collected upon the surface of such "anvils," awaiting moment-by-moment the blinding hammer of God--but then we might as well wonder whether we can ever hope to understand just what it is that make us "us."

Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus speaks of the wisdom of embracing the beneficial experience-type of being broken on the "stone," rather than trying to escape and risking being ground to powder under it.  Would that be any different than the notion of seeking to be pounded by the light from above, rather than being found out by that light in the end?

A Preface to the Light Metaphor

The conceptuality of good and evil that controls in the Gospels is the idea of light and dark.  That a person is to be oriented to the light is expressed in the Gospels in precisely such terms--one is to go to the light and to avoid the dark.

Light and dark are not quantified in the Gospels, even so much as in general terms.  Light and dark are matters of orientation.  This matters in itself in the way we are to understand our proper aspirations.  If the "light" metaphor is allowed to control, then we will not be distracted or tempted by notions such as being good, doing good, or--God forbid--creating good.

Perhaps the best way to understand our proper orientation to light--to good--is derived from the metaphor's mundane derivation.  What we understand of "the world" (or more inclusively, "the universe") is--if taken as a binary, light-versus-dark metaphor--a question of how much of the surfaces of irregular objects is exposed to light.

On Constellations of Ineffable Qualities

Adam, as first described to us, is not in the blessed state that the denominations would have him to be.  That Adam could have been "alone" in the scene presented to us is a statement to the effect that his relationship to God was sub-optimal--long before the "Fall."  The notion that God intended Eve for Adam all along--that is to say, that God's intent so constituted a gracious bestowal rather than a gracious remediation--is belied by the very text.  Adam is at first offered the "helpmeetship" of the animal world, indicating that Adam's alone-ness is a twist to the flow of Creation.  Perhaps the animal world in some wholesome form or another will satisfy Adam's need for a balm for his loneliness.  If God's offer of "helpmeetship" in the animal world is merely a set-up for the appearance of Eve, then (as some cynics have presented in lurid terms), the animal world's companionship offer to Adam is just some sort of "Just So" story.

Of course, the commentators are free to suggest that the animal-companionship story is just meant to impart this or that lesson to Adam or to us, but the steady progression of logic will dictate to us that any part of the Bible can become thereby what the commentators will have it to be.  No--(as I have described before) the Adam story is beset with unresolved tension from the very first moment it is recounted to us.

Adam is, in the crucial sense of a moral scenario, hoisted into a suspension between Heaven and Earth.  He is not one with the rest of Creation, and he is not one with God.  Time--for a man at that point effectively immortal--is meaningless, and space--for a man with all his creaturely resources (and even the physical visitation of God) near at hand--is meaningless as well.  Adam's state is that of all who reside in the flesh, regardless of particular moral state.

Such is the state of humanity--that state is merely illuminated for us in greater or lesser degree, case by case.  Cursed Cain has been rejected by the earth, yet over that very earth he can claw himself into the quasi-divine status of patriarchy and--through his founding of a city--the divinely-mandated (or at least divinely-tolerated) status of a king.  Such at least is the murky and maddening realm of the "Sons of God."  Again, one might wonder what "space" meant to a Cain who inhabited an earth that he knew reviled him, and one might wonder that "time" meant to a Cain who feared for every moment he was alive and who yet looked out at the prospect of his earthly years as a punishment greater than he could bear.

It would be scarcely worth the effort to draw out a multitude of Bible characters who would fit this pattern.  At least they all might pale next to a twinned recounting of Judas--casting away the coins that might buy him comfort on the earth, and knotting a rope so as to spare himself yet one more moment of a lifetime of remorse--and Jesus--casting away the effectual lordship of Creation's time and space to assume humanity's place before the Throne of Judgment.  There, in the moments of the scriptures' recounting, do they hang between Heaven and Earth, and between the fetters of every binary dimension of Creation's bounds.

A different type of understanding of our theme is to be found in the mission-sendings of Jesus.  First the Twelve, and then the Seventy, are sent out by Jesus.  He tells them most particularly what to take and not to take, and what to do and not to do, but strikingly Jesus does not tell the pairs of disciples which towns of Lost Israel to visit, or which route to take, or how long to stay, or how to know they have stayed long enough.  The tasks are plain enough, but the elements of time and space are trodden under their heels like the dust.  No matter how many towns they visit, Jesus tells them (and no matter how many devils they best) they will never reach the end before the timely End.

Only in this vein can it make sense that Jesus, upon a triumphant mission's return, declares that he saw Satan fall from Heaven.  The business of Jesus' disciples is outside of time and space--though still they are creatures of the earth.  Enoch and Samuel and Elijah and the resurrected Lazarus minister not merely in their lives, but in how they experience--and endure--the phenomena of a divine meta-Creation that is the inescapable expectation of wonderings about a God who defies all description.

All of this becomes then particularly important when trying to understand the ministry and the sacrifice of Jesus.  If a proper understanding of humanity's plight--dating back to Adam at first--can be attained, then one can begin at least to understand the ministry of Jesus.  Jesus' agonized cry on the Cross is not a puzzle to be solved, or a theory of ensoulment or incarnation to be woven, or a prayer (among all those in the Psalms or in the inspirations of the faithful) that just happens to make it seem as though Jesus' sacrifice is for naught.  Jesus' incarnation is, at the Cross, his experience of humanity's flesh to the full.  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is entirely consonant with our expectations of Adam's first independent thought--such is the experience of the flesh.

Here we are confronted with the difficulty imposed over the centuries by a Christianity that seized quickly upon a perverse insistence that the Savior who triumphed over the sinfulness of human flesh did so by showing himself superior to--and thus ever distinct from--human flesh.  Rather, Jesus even in the thoughts coursing through his human brain saw a meta-Creation of malleable time and space, a meta-Creation in which his scrabbling and whimpering fellow humans were the very lights of Heaven.  The humanity to which Jesus presented himself--the humanity Jesus described in unvarnished terms to their very faces--is a humanity not of the earth, but of an Adamic suspension between Heaven and Earth, and of an Adamic tension against any set notions of time and space.  This description of Adam's seed seems an exalted one, but Jesus does not stint in proclaiming humanity responsible for living up to it.

What is lamentable is the tendency, out of a misplaced humility, for Christianity to describe humankind as squirming, earth-bound vermin, and then to draw the character of Jesus into the vacuum thereby  presented--assigning to Jesus the divine-ish quality of transcending Heaven and Earth, and being the lord of time and space.  Fleshly indeed was Jesus in the Incarnation, but he holds fleshly humanity accountable for not transcending Heaven and Earth, and for not being lords of time and space.  Did not Job at his worst hold forth nonetheless against his Creator in disputation, and did not Job hold in his hands and in his heart the means by which to decide a cosmic clash between God and Satan?  What piety is represented truly by crediting to Jesus as Savior the feat of behaving as he has every right to expect humanity to behave?

Indeed, Jesus is Savior in that he is ultimately as un-examinable as God himself.  Not even our attempts--shot through with self-effacing piety though they may be--to grasp the works or character of Jesus in all the wonder of the Gospels can approach even guessing at the nature of Jesus in his full divinity.  That is why (to use the most famous example) it is folly to conjecture about how the divinity of Jesus can be squared with his agonized cry on the Cross.  He came to be fully human.  That is how humans act.

Understanding what can be grasped about Jesus is perhaps seen more easily in a truly remarkable episode toward the end of the Gospel of John:

"Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say?  Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.  Father, glorify thy name.  Then came a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again" (12:27-28, KJV).

This statement from above can of course be taken as a ratification of Jesus' prayer, but indeed it is a curious ratification.  Jesus is talking about the very Passion that constitutes the heart of Christianity, the agonies of which the denominations extol and extrapolate (with inexhaustible creativity) to no end.  Even taken in its rawest sense, the fleshly torment of Jesus is scarcely imaginable.  And yet the voice from Heaven takes the resultant glorification of God as but one episode among others.

Here one might almost imagine a youth football coach carefully listing his own player-son's achievements in an balanced recitation of the team's season highlights.  Not everyone in the crowd around Jesus could hear it clearly, but the saying, "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again" was intoned apparently with every care to be taken soberly.  The glories of God--shared fully by Jesus as fully God--are beyond imagining.  Any imaginings we might have about Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God can be of value, but God is not to be understood as ratifying any of our imaginings as having weight against his inestimable glory.

Indeed, Jesus did not need to be told by God that the glories of the divine are beyond our human wonderings, and Jesus did not need to be told anything of what those glories are.  And then Jesus says to the crowd about the pronouncement from above, "This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes."

We must be reminded continually that merely being greater than Creation (or greater even than any postulated demons or such, inescapably having been created by God at some point) is not what makes God great.  We ourselves are failed godlings, if we are to credit Jesus' admonitions about what we could do if only we had faith, or if we are to credit Jesus as honorable in his demands of us.  We are the children of Adam, and God had hopes for Adam as great as his love for Adam.

Unfortunately we fall often into the mistaken belief that reckoning on the glory of God can be pursued through listing his good qualities--although of course God is the origin of qualities themselves.  We call God the lord of time--and then our minds slither into thinking of God striding over Time as though it were a self-existent phenomenon to be conquered.  Our thoughts of Creation can flicker at one moment toward God's ineffable authorship, and at the next moment our God is just an ancient deity wrestling with a pre-existing or self-existing Chaos.

We want to think of God as a constellation of ineffable qualities--but that it really no different than thinking of God as a creature, insofar as all of our thoughts will ultimately assign words like "ineffable" to the edges of our understanding.  Horrible indeed are the Christian ministries that will lead young people into vapid notions that one must "study Scripture" to "learn about God."  Of course, what is being "learned about" is some denomination's theology.  Sad to say, such denominations are often satisfied to assign--effectually--ideas such as "ineffable" to outright creaturely things.  Time and again preachers will (incorrectly) describe marriage as "God's plan," and will encourage spouses to explore and mediate upon and rejoice in continual discoveries about the partners who God has created for them--and indeed it is true that we can never learn all about persons or humanity in general.

Indeed, a fellow human being is a constellation of ineffable qualities.  Upon realizing this, however, it is to be hoped that we will be brought up short to realize that treating God as a constellation of ineffable qualities is really to just make God a super-human.  Pivotal to understanding this is the prior understanding that humans in the parlance and logic of the Gospels are creatures of God meant to act as representatives of God.  We are meant to bridge Heaven and Earth, and to stand astride time and space.  Jesus shows us how this is to be done--though of course we fail miserably.

In the gracious mercy of God, however, we are not hopeless.  We become hopeless when we decide that our miserable failure can be taken to mean that we can hold Jesus to have slipped us some sacerdotal token by which salvation is to be achieved.  Our only real hope, however, is in the God who cannot be imagined, shown to us in the Gospels by the Jesus who cannot be imagined.  On the other hand, the Jesus of the Gospels cannot but be taken by us as a limited figure--such is the unavoidable implication of the limitations of our intellect.

Jesus himself tells us that we will do greater things than he did.  Of course, he is talking about the Jesus we can consider.  The Jesus who is God is beyond all our considerations, however well intended (or profitable to our meditations) they may be.

Life is the Last Thing

The emphasis of this blog is meant to be experiential.  "Roused, readied, reaped" is different from "roused, ripened, reaped" in that the former addresses the quite intensely experiential possibility that the arcs of existence are cut short.  Our lives and our experiences are not characterized properly in terms of idealized completions--indeed, it is the phenomenon of things cut short, of things falling under the knife of judgment (for, indeed, divine judgment is latent in every conceptualization of our relationship to God) that characterizes properly the course of our experiences.

What was purposed about us--or about anything--before the first moment of existence is of course beyond us.  Every start is a fresh start, at least to us, and it is of little profit to wonder about the purposes of God pre-existent to us.  Jesus, after all, tells us we must become like the little children--he does not tell us that we must become like some miniscule portion of humanity's youth that happened to escaped being damned to hell from time immemorial.  All we can know, all we can experience, of the arcs of our lives is the times of readying and the times of reaping--leading possibly up to some number of intense expectations of our final reaping.

This necessary emphasis on our declines and on our falls is in accord with the underlying logic of Jesus' presentation of earthly reality.  "Take up your cross and follow me" as a command can only by fervent group-think be twisted by the denominations into "We must die to sin" and can thereby plan and anticipate full charted-out lives as lords of an earthly realm that God will instruct to blossom and bear fruit for us.  This doctrinal masterpiece of convenient delusion goes all the way back Christianity's mistaken view of the Noahide ark and its aftermath.

The famous post-Flood passage, Genesis 8:22, has, "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" (KJV).  Notable in its absence from this verse (which is only by implication included in the attendant direct statements from God) is any mention of rain or other supply of water.  Certainly there is no lack in Earth's history (or in the Bible) of episodes in which the applicability of "seedtime and harvest" was brought to nothing.

Christianity's misunderstanding (which is rooted in aversion to the unsparing statements of Jesus) of the Flood episode is truly fascinating.  The denominations look to a post-Deluge prospect--one might say a promise--of burgeoning wholesome life for humanity if only God's commands will be followed and (later) if only humanity will partake of the blessings obtained by blessing God's people.  Of course, to be fair, it must be conceded that Christianity squares itself eventually, in the course of working through the Bible, with the idea that the faith to which Jesus attests presumes the intractable failings of humanity only to be remedied by the Messiah's self-sacrifice.

The real problem with Christianity's misunderstanding of the Flood aftermath is of two parts.  The first has to do with the general procession of events and divine pronouncements to Noah.  First comes the slaughter and burning of the clean animals on the altar.  Then comes God's promise not to curse the earth again because of humanity--though innumerable creatures are later to suffer horribly in vast areas precisely because humanity has earned this or that local or regional curse (or reverberation of the original curse.)  Then it is said that humanity will become the fear and dread of all creatures, who will now become potential prey to humanity--such predation having to be multiplied to the extent to which blood-containing elements will be discarded.

As a culmination of this grim procession, the humanity that must ever seek God's forgiveness is told--not that murderers ought to be safeguarded like Cain so as to extend their opportunities for repentance--but rather that they are to be executed.  And as to the beasts--cursed with fear and dread; cursed originally because of humanity's sin, not theirs; doomed to be humanity's prey; doomed to the agonies of throat-slitting so as to secure humanity's separation from "blood"--the very beasts are liable to be executed as murderers for killing human beings.

And lastly in the procession of events, we are given the idyllic imagery--reproduced endlessly in children's books and posters and the like--of the rainbow, God's promise to never again destroy "you and every living creature of all flesh"--by a flood.  Inescapably, the rain-sparkled interlude of Noah and his sons and their wives in a world ready to be filled with life is not what we might have it to be.  It is a festival of death.

There is no overarching panorama of humanity's history understandable, as Christianity would have it, as a multitude of God's gracious promises being at first grasped and treasured by the faithful, and then rotting in their hands as they fall into the depravity--Herod and the Roman Empire and all that--which must preceded the advent of the Savior King.  The covenant with Noah, the promise to Abraham, the triumph of Jacob, the glory of Joseph, the testimony of Moses, the victories of David--all these (though with their flaws and tragedies) would seem to bespeak a life to the people of God (and, through them, to all humanity) that only gradually gave way to death and decay.  This is not so.

Humanity's experience since the origin-stories of Genesis is an experience associated with life only insofar as life has struggled up from a substrate of death.  This is the logic of Jesus--despite how frantically the world-wallowing mass of Christians look to the earth as a place in which it is well to be heaped upon by bounty after bounty--and to slough off into "charity" the excess.  The conservatives among Christianity who bemoan "the world's" "culture of death" are largely unmoved by Jesus' continual attentions to a world of death.

Jesus' judgment of the world is a as place of over-ripe and rank attachment to life when eternal life is found in reckoning that the time for harvest is always here, the fields "are white already to harvest."  In Jesus' world the fig is either fruitful or deserving to whither, in Jesus' world there is no burying one's father, no putting a hand to the plow and looking back.  In Jesus' world every night is the one in which a person's life is to be required.  Jesus surrounds us with death and tells us that our eternal life rests on whether or not we will give up our lives and everything that means life to us.  And then he tells us that he wishes us to have joy.

The proper notion of the true source of joy goes all the way back to the first chapters of Genesis, and here we will confront the matter as it applies to Noah.  This deals with the second part, as I alluded to above, of the problem of Christianity's misunderstanding of the Flood aftermath.  Along with "the general procession of events and divine pronouncements" in the story of Noah is the very idea of the character of Noah himself.  Noah is said to have found favor with God.  The KJV tries to employ the word "grace" (for indeed, who could find favor with God?), though to be forced to say "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God" is to give the game away.

So Noah found favor with God.  Noah obeyed God.  Noah built the ark and sailed in it with his family and the animals.  Then this man who had found favor with God proceeded essentially single-handedly, through his weakness and anger, to invent racism, slavery, genocide, and the persecution of the innocent.  Of course, the burgeoning and multiplying evils that post-dated Noah's curse on Ham's blameless son (and his blameless progeny) would have arisen by other means, but nonetheless we are confronted by such evils being attributed originally to a man who had found favor with God.  One must be necessarily reminded of David, such a favorite of God for his virtues who committed such infamies.

Where is joy to be found in all this?  Are we not really saying that the "readying" of innumerable moments and episodes of humanity's life are actually premonitions and progressions toward death?  To try to state the matter precisely, the life--individually and communally--of a humanity that is beset with sin must necessarily be a life characterized either by death or by willful delusion.  The culture of Jesus is a culture of death, because death awaits us at every moment and will remain poised against us even if the life that we visualize--either in length or in character--comes eventually to pass.

And yet, where is joy to be found in all this?  What joy is there in life, if life's chief attribute is the fact that it is to be taken away?  The implication of Jesus' ministry is that there really is no life--all of Creation has ever felt the knife above Noah's altar.  Humanity's experience is either of death, or of judgment unto death.  The experience of salvation is to be found in the realization of the ubiquity of death, and in the irrelevance of "death" as a fearful thing when it has already happened to us.  What, on the other hand, has not happened to us is each awaiting moment, a potential instant of virtual defiance of the phantom of death, a potential instant of giving oneself to any opportunity to strive for one good thing in one good moment.  It is not even necessary to succeed,

Jesus tells the parable of the talents, in which some of the servants turn a trust from their master into a tidy profit, and one of the servants--fearing the master's severity--hides away the talent entrusted to him.  When the master returns, this last servant gives the talent back and receives a great punishment for his failure to profit the master.  Of course, only certain potentialities for investment are dealt with in the parable.  One might wonder what would have happened to a servant who turned one talent into ten, if instead the investment had gone sour and lost all.  Would the master have said, "Hey, at least you took a shot"?

Many Christians have misused this parable, taking the profit-making as some sort of ratification of a speculative economy (though the modern version of potential failure will include bankruptcy protections or the public-backed maneuver of limited liability, not being cast into the outer darkness or some such.)  The part of servants making a profit is really tangential to the proverb (if not getting cast into the outer darkness is the main point.)  The timid servant is told--even after he bad-mouths the master--that he might at least have deposited the talent with the bankers and collected the interest.  That is--and this cannot be over-emphasized--the servant could have acted in submission to the master's will.

This is really the point about "being in God's favor" and "being a profitable servant": Such things bespeak life and what a person might hope for in life, and are not bad in themselves.  Such things become bad, however, when the person involved does not--or will not--understand that life is not something that comes to an end.  For sinful humanity, life does not ever begin (or one might say that it was over at the beginning--that is what to be "sinful" means in its most profound implication.)  In the ministry of Jesus, "life" as a concept is a negotiation with the prospect of death.  The language of this negotiation is submission to the will of God.  This submission is understood as an acceptance of death, as a giving up of life.  When this submission is perverted into a notion of making things happen in life, then in effect God's pronouncement that all deserve death is thrown back in his face.

A person does not gain salvation, or even necessarily move toward salvation, by performing or achieving things in that trap called "life."  Achieving things for God results in two things, as Jesus illustrates in the parables.  One, a person capable in small things is given charge of large things.  Two, a person entrusted with much is held liable for much--and has arguably gained nothing on the eternal scale.  An inspiring life-story can be built on such endeavors, but "life" means nothing to the equation of being saved.  The "lifeless" servant who goes only to the bankers can fare better in the long run than a pious achiever who absorbs an adherence to life.

Noah could have clutched the robe to himself and sobbed in his tent at the shame he helped bring upon himself.  Perhaps his life would have been over, as he understood being the patriarch--and what of it?  David could have thrown himself unbidden at the feet of Uriah and lost thereby both the respect of his soldiers and also his crown, even his life--and what of it?  In other moods and other moments, one might well grant them, both Noah and David would have withstood almost anything in direct submission to the will of God.  But for them--and for us--the greatest snare is thinking that one is alive, when the very premise of life, as Jesus will tell us, is that life is the last thing that one can claim, and the last thing that one should want.

The Essential Tension of the Gospels

The study of the Gospels must endure a perpetual crisis.  This crisis consists of a tension animating the development of any thesis in the Gospels, when by virtual definition no such thesis can admit of "development"--what are being described in the Gospels are not ideas being developed, but rather ideas being displayed as the world's accretions upon them are removed.

The business of displaying the theses of the Gospels is bedeviled by the fact that each stage of removal of such accretions is open to competing contentions about what is happening--and stage upon stage of such a process can lead to fatigue in any originally neat premise.  Things, unsurprisingly, can tend to get jumbled up.

Things in the Gospels can get so jumbled up that it is tempting to imagine the Gospels--or at least major strains in them--as satires, so flagrantly do they seem to entertain risks in apparently invited interpretations.  We will examine this in an episode from chapter four of John.

In John chapter four Jesus travels from Judea to Galilee and back again.  The trip is occasioned apparently by Jesus' assessment of the progress of the Baptist's parallel ministry--a progress that seems to be described in varying terms by the various gospels, though such disparities are peripheral to us here.  What matters here is that John's gospel describes Jesus leaving for Galilee.

John also describes Jesus as being constrained to make that trip through Samaria--a debatable contention.  Jesus the Jew does not merely travel through Samaria, but particularly through the area where he will encounter a well of Jacob--a well that is uncontested in this gospel as part of the patrimony of the Samaritans.

A Samaritan woman approaches, and Jesus says to her, "Give me to drink."  The woman replies, "How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria?"  (The notion of "to ask" seems a bit strained here, especially as the simplest reading of the text would have the unaccompanied, unprotected woman alone with Jesus.  How easily do interpretive scenarios arise when the encroaching presuppositions of the world make their appearance.)

The notion abroad here, of course, is that Jews would properly have no "dealings" with Samaritans--though that does not seem to have dissuaded the disciples from entering that "city of Samaria" to buy food.  Jesus and the woman enter then on the tantalizing, though unenlightening (to her, at least) discussion of the "living water," a discussion in which Jesus leaves uncontested the Samaritan woman's claim to "our father Jacob."

Jesus then brings up the embarrassing topic of the woman's marital status, to which the woman replies with, "I perceive that thou art a prophet," and brings up the question about whether worship of God ought to happen at the Samaritan Mount Gerizim or at the Jewish Temple Mount.  The commentators, of course, are quick to note that the woman seems to want to change the subject, though they are less rapid in noting (if at all) that Jesus' preceding command, "Go, call thy husband, and come hither," seems to have no necessary connection to her yet previous entreaty, "Sir, give me this water."

Jesus and the woman are talking largely at odds with each other, but the more fundamental realization is that the text is persistently talking at odds with itself.  This is, in a certain view, unsurprising.  As I described above, the theses developed in the Gospels are not so much developed as thrust out into the open.  Jesus' discussion with the Samaritan woman is leading up to his declaration:

"Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father."  And Jesus says, "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him."

All the talk about so-and-so's well and such-and-such mountain is ultimately to no point.  Moreover, Jesus' contention about how worship ought to be does not rely on the development of a new and more embracing theology.  Jesus says that, "the hour cometh, and now is"--and, as his references elsewhere to the Patriarchs reveal about their faith, it is plain that "the hour" has always been.

In the text between the verse of "the hour cometh" and the verse of "the Father seeketh such" is Jesus' statement, "Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews."  Again, while this verse seems of great portent, like the rest of this section it involves not the development of a thesis, but rather a peeling-away of accretions.  "Salvation is of the Jews" is essentially a tautology, but it gets at an essential underlying point.

It was not the original intention of God that there be a people called "the Jews."  "Israel" might be the best conceptuality of the people of God, though indeed this seems linked inextricably with the patriarchy of Abraham.  And while Abraham was yet Abram, the headship of the family to go to the Promised Land was apparently not Abram, but his father Terah, who unaccountably settled in Haran.  This same Terah apparently fathered Sarai, from which circumstance arises the unsettling marriage of Abram to his half-sister.

"The Jews," then, came tumbling out of centuries of turmoil that saw most of their brethren--whether the children of Jacob, or of Abraham, or even of Terah--separated and admixed with other peoples (though after a few centuries of turmoil it would have been largely unaccountable who was mixing with whom.)  Hence the part-Jewish, part-Assyrian, perhaps part-something-else Samaritans.  Of course, if the cousins produced by Shem, Ham, and Japheth had married each other instead of their siblings, then the whole idea of some favored "line" of descent even from Noah (and therefore from all of humanity) would be ludicrous.

Emerging from all of this were the competing conceptualities of patriarchy versus matrilineal descent (that is, the child is a Jew if the mother is a Jew.)  Of course, reliance on matrilineal descent is faulty if no Jewish women are available (and "descent" is understood biologically), and indeed we see the outline of this problem in Abraham's insistence that Isaac marry one of Abraham's "own" people--that is, that he marry one of the pagan offspring of the tarrying Terah.  Understood in the larger context, the Samaritan Woman at the Well is a virtual royal figure in the world-encompassing conceptuality of a "people" of God.  It is only in this self-same context that we can truly understand the implication of "salvation is of the Jews": Judaism, in the conceptuality presented by Jesus, has preserved the essential nucleus of the salvific message of revelation.

Jews, on the other hand, share with all people the chance (if that is the word) to merit individually Jesus' assessment as Children of the Devil.  "Salvation is of the Jews" seems to mean something besides itself, but that is not really so when it understood that to be a Jew can mean everything, and it can mean nothing.

The progress of the Baptist's ministry can mean everything, and it can mean nothing.  The choice of Samaria as a place for Jesus to talk with a non-Jewish woman can mean everything, and it can mean nothing.  Nearly every aspect of the story can be shown open to some quibble or to some contention that it cancels out some other aspect of the story.  This is the essential tension between the presentation of a story that can seem nothing more than a collection of insubstantial errors and half-truths, and a story meant to give a glimpse at a frustratingly vaporous sensation of truth against which all of the objective world is but a jumble of insubstantial errors and half-truths.

What We are to Give Up

There is a crucial aspect of "giving up one's life" in accordance with Jesus' admonitions that must be understood if we are to conceptualize rightly what that "giving up" portends for our lives "in the world."  This is touched upon by a teaching of Jesus that is often mischaracterized (if understood at all, in that its application seems foreign to much of our experiences.)  This teaching is in Chapter 14 of Luke, in a section titled bizarrely by the Ryrie Study Bible as "Concerning indulgent people":

"For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?  Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him.  Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.  Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?  Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and desireth conditions of peace.  So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:28-33, KJV)

A reasonable observer, granting the prudence of Jesus' warnings against the hypothetical characters' possible presumption, might nonetheless wonder what those examples have to do with "whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple"?  Are not the characters being found correct in that they would take prudent measures to conserve what they have, either their dignity or their kingly stature?  What does that have to do with forsaking all?

It might be tempting, in service to conventional Christianity, to contend that Jesus' examples of the tower-builder and the king are meant to describe a person's wise estimation that no resources they possess might secure their salvation--the whole "salvation by faith (or grace) alone," "cast everything upon Christ" routine.  The problem with this is found in the very text, which prefaces the passage above with the immediately preceding:

"And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple."  Clearly, Jesus is describing in these passages what is involved in "giving up one's life"--not describing some initial (or periodic) calculus on the part of the believer, but describing rather the very conditions of understanding properly the believer's relationship to "life" and to "the world."  Inasmuch as Jesus is depicting the tower-builder and the king as contemplating the unknowns of life's potentialities, the logical conclusion here is that Jesus is telling us that the "world" that we are giving up does not really exist--what we are giving up is our set of understandings and anticipations about our existences.

To a person who adheres to Jesus' demand to "give up one's life," that "life" is not merely to be set aside--as it were--into some compartment of conceptualizations.  It should need scarcely to be observed how two thousand years of Christianity have seen the goods and the snares of the world frantically embraced by supposed believers who have "given all" to Christ--and then have stuffed the vessels of their lives that they have labeled "His" with all manner of worldly goods and worldly bad.

To a person who adheres to Jesus' demand to "give up one's life," that "life" is something that has no existence other than in the mortal's lamentable attachments.  The same is to be said of the mortal's "world"--as additionally it might be said that the ultimate implication of the idea that God is the master of the world is the final, ungraspable conclusion that either God exists essentially, or the world does.  Either Jesus exists as everything he claims to be, or our lives exist.  Either Jesus exists, or the world against which he warns us exists--because we are attached to the notion that it exists.  If we were true believers as Jesus demands, we could walk over the water of oceans or walk through the stone of mountains--the "existence" of the world in anything but an infinitely malleable sense would be nonsense.

If we reckon that our lives and our worlds consist of unknowns--not an imprudent reckoning even by the standards of the world--then asking God for guidance and positive outcomes is not really praying, since we are asking God to oppose himself in our favor against a set of conditions.  The God of that manner of petition is not the God of Jesus--the God of Jesus is a being in contrast to whom everything else is nothing, not a pathetic collection of little things.  A god who is bigger or stronger than little things is an humongous idol, not the God of Jesus.

The God of Jesus has foreseen and provided for every possible permutation of Creation, and in this Creation Jesus teaches us that true belief--even including, as striking as it sounds, humble piety--is displayed in an attitude toward the world as an essential non-entity, serving merely as the conceptual space in which anything can happen, any "law" of "nature" can be broken, and any dimension can be defied.  Thus we are confronted by exasperating, shimmering conceptions of Elijah--chimeric, protean, what-have-you--yet entirely consonant with Jesus' unconcern with any mortal conception of the possible. 

Accordingly, Jesus teaches us that even our human petitions--presuming most awesomely on our incomprehensible status as the children of God, yet anticipated by a merciful Father--are sufficient as opposed to the conditions of the world.  That we do not get positive answers to our petitions shows merely that we have failed in our smallish duties in a smallish world--none of this has to do with a proper perception of the world existing at all in the framework of our aspirational consideration of God.

God has often enough repented of the very existence of human lives and of the creaturely world--the ancient (one might say primordial) belief system espoused by Jesus tells us as much.  What has survived, by God's indulgence, has been squeezed and wrung through unfathomable contortions.  What has survived might be called wreckage, though even that would be too much, since "wreckage" presumes some resemblance to that which stood originally.  We cannot, in our present state, get our minds around whatever existed originally.

The belief system of Jesus echoes a primordial state in which Adam needed no one but God--or at least was cast forth into existence with that rarefied potentiality.  Humanity foundered at a point before our species' first reckoning of it, and even an infinitude of preceding epochs or of preceding permutations of Creation would be incomprehensible to us, tethered as we are to what we call "the world."  We are "lives" in "the world" in which God concluded that "it is not good that the man should be alone"--and all of humanity has suffered for that, being cast into the nested chasm within chasm that characterize our inability to live properly in the present world, to live properly with each other, or to live properly with ourselves.

Adam the son of God was created into the only state of existence and the only relationship with God that we might imagine was perfect, and indeed it is beyond our imaginings.  Jesus teaches us that the only thing we can do is forsake the life (with attached world) that is all we know, and trust Jesus' assurance that beyond this forsaking is the existence that Adam and all of us should ever know.