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.