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.