Whether We Like It or Not

One of the most difficult aspects of "roused, readied, reaped" lies before me.  The multiple and varied arcs of our lives are dominated, in the substance of Jesus' teachings, by two great elements of our existence.  We are God's creations, and we are human.  We are also presented with Jesus as the divine Son of God, and with Jesus as the human Son of Man.  I think--as I must endeavor to show--that both titles for Jesus are reflected in our own natures.

The gospel basis for my description of these phenomena will be especially the extended discourse of Mark 11 and 12.  The conceptual basis is more wide-ranging, and therefore attended by more pitfalls.  The upshot, however, is this: We, along with Jesus, are children of God and children of Man.

To say that we have equal duties impinging on us from these two natures is nonsense--not because such an assertion is demonstrably untrue, but because it is immeasurable.  We fail in all our duties to God.  A failure that is not nearly so unavoidable, however, is the failure--which I believe the churches indulge themselves in--to credit Jesus' assertions about how we can approach our two main duties.

We think of ourselves as utter failures as children of God.  We choose, however, to be such failures, even to the extent of not even trying.  Children of God determine which mountains leap into the sea, and children of God determine who will enter heaven.  These truths can be demonstrated from the gospels.  Instead of confronting those realities, we flop helplessly before Jesus as the Son of God.  Jesus will have to work the miracles, and Jesus will have to forgive us the innumerable violences we commit against each other even as we congratulate ourselves on our reverence for our leper-healing, sea-calming Savior.

What we need to be doing most of all, however, is looking to Jesus as the Son of Man--an exemplar of how we should behave as parts of the family of Man.  Healing the sick, even raising the dead--these we ought to be able to do with a word or a thought, yet (in insolent disregard for the gospels) we cast these things back in the face of Jesus The Son of God.  We cap this insolence by imagining that the gospels are mostly about Jesus The Miracle Worker, rather than about Jesus The Perfect Man--who shows us how to behave toward our fellow children of Man.

The fact that Jesus is the true and perfect Son of God is most immediately a matter between Jesus and God, a matter that is presented to us at God's pleasure and for our edification.  The fact that Jesus is the true and perfect Son of Man, however, ought by the fact of its very existence be both a gall and a goad to us.  This gall and this goad, however, will be largely unavailing until we reckon that our sibling relationship to the Son of God is--by the gospels' direct demonstration--a simple thing to establish and a simple thing to try.

We are children of God whether we like it or not.

Too Much or Too Little

aaahyToo Much or Too Little

I am wrestling presently with an idea about proper gospel interpretation.  I suppose I should be honest with myself and admit that what I mean about "proper gospel interpretation" has to do with how I might think of the gospels as being true in the context of how I conceive of anything as being true.  I cannot claim, first, to have any expertise about the philosophy and literature of ancient religion and I cannot claim, second, to be approaching the whole matter independently of my long-held disposition to believe the gospels to be true.

Or to address the matter more directly: I am interested in how the gospels might make sense to me, and I have a vested emotional and intellectual interest in being able to claim that the interpretations I prefer are those prescribed by Jesus.  Actually, my desires run deeper still--I hope not merely to arrive at the interpretations Jesus would prefer, but concomitantly to have arrived at those interpretations by such methodologies as he would recommend.

(I know one thing about where this is going.  The notion that the Bible ought to be read as the Bible says it ought to be read is not, as some hard-liners would have it, the best argument for any interpretive methodology.  It is, as any conscientious individual should assert, potentially the worst.)

I will proceed anyway.  I have wondered of late if a certain construction of purportedly responsible interpretation is not, first, intrinsically flawed and, second, at variance with the very teachings of Jesus.  This is the construction of Bible interpretation that holds that definitive interpretations are both possible and necessary, and holds as well that it is incumbent on interpreters to reckon that they are only human and therefore possibly mistaken.  From this outlook, ostensibly, interpreters--particularly when possessing authority over others--are supposed to be careful, sensitive, and merciful when delivering pronouncements about scriptural interpretation.

I will leave it to readers--and particularly any with interest in the history of the churches and of Christendom--to judge whether precisely such humble- and humane-sounding admissions have not fallen from the lips of Bible interpreters who displayed themselves capable of the most ghastly intolerance, violence, and brutal presumption.

But is the interpretive philosophy I described--ostensible precision adorned ostensibly with humility--the philosophy of scriptural interpretation espoused by Jesus?  Jesus asked people to employ their life experiences to their religious and spiritual lives.  I am inclined to offer an experience I shared with my family--an experience many people have faced.  It is about deciding when to have the dog put down.  Many people agonize over when is precisely the right time to do it.

I have shared in the experience of the decision.  There is never a right time to do it.  Conceptually, there may be such time, but the "life experience" attendant upon the putting-the-dog-down scenario mocks our best attempts to light upon the perfect time.  We're either going to do it too soon, or too late.  That is the choice.  I will choose "too soon."  The reader can imagine (though I would not recommend it) experiences I have known when it is "too late" and the veterinarian's staff are not handy.

Jesus, I contend, tells us not to try to understand our spiritual lives with assiduous precision--comforting ourselves, and ostensibly comforting others, with assertions that we realize that we might on occasion be mistaken.  Rather, Jesus tells us that we will always be mistaken.  We can read too much into a scripture, or we can read too little.  There is no other possible eventuality.  We can care too much about a matter, or too little.  We can love too much, or too little.

I do not mean this simply in the abstract.  I would present the gospel story about the Sheep and the Goats, in which Jesus represents himself at the last congratulating the Sheep for having fed him and clothed him and comforted him.  The Sheep, as the story goes, ask when they did those things for their Lord, and they are told the incidents in question happened when they did such things for the least of Jesus' brethren.  (And of course the opposite judgment awaits the Goats.)

The irony to the story of the Sheep and the Goats (as I have indulged in describing elsewhere) is the fact that the story cannot really happen once it is told.  The audience knows the upshot beforehand, and therefore who at the end is to ask the Lord the questions ("When did we . . . ")?

The irony I have described, however, dissipates if but a single consideration is added to the mix.  Perhaps Jesus was not making a theological or moral point--at least in isolation.  Perhaps Jesus was talking about our attentions (or our inattentions), our efforts (or our failures to exert ourselves), our judgments (or our misjudgments).  Admittedly, any story about the last judgment will have to allow for the plot mechanism in which the participants are suddenly granted total recall (or instantaneous recourse to record books.)  Still--while bearing this all in mind--there can still be substance to the "bewilderment" aspect of the participants if the questions ("When did we . . . ?") have to do, not with doing wrong, but with being wrong.

We humans say we can be wrong sometimes.  That is incorrect.  We are wrong all of the time.  It is only our insistence moment-to-moment on interpreting our thoughts, words, or actions in one vein (or a few) that allows us to say we were right or wrong about this or that.  Life does not consist of this-or-that happening now, and this-or-that happening at some other time.  It happens (as I constantly refrain, in the "roused, readied, reaped" fashion) on innumerable, overlapping, and varied levels all the time.

Only such realizations can make intelligible the stories that Jesus tells.  He returns often to the stories "in the beginning."  There is Adam and Eve in the Garden.  In the conventional view, there is the Fall.  Also in the conventional view, there is Cain's murder of Abel.  Nothing rivals those two events.

Examined more closely, however, there are more particular considerations, such as, "Where was Adam when Eve was dallying with the snake?"  (In the conventional view, this question is usually not more than dallied with itself, lest it be pointed out that "sin" did not in fact crop up with the apple.)  Where, indeed, was Adam, when Eve was in the first, agonizing labor--an experience she describes as "With the help of the Lord . . . "?  Where was Adam--the forerunner of the priest-king-fathers ("patriarchs") of the Old Testament, when Cain and Abel were lighting on what they were going to offer?

Where was Adam--the forerunner of Old Testament fathers and therefore the effectual employer of his sons--when the two young men were experiencing their alienation?  Why, indeed, was Adam not asking Cain, "Why is your face downcast?"

The conventional Christian view--perhaps influenced by the patriarchal incentive to defer to father-led households--is that everything was going along OK with the first family other than the Fall and the Murder.  This, of course, is patently ridiculous, and--there being virtually no points of reference available--it is entirely possible that Adam was one of the most horrible people who ever lived.  Certainly the Bible does not assert that frequent, unmistakable communication with God tends inevitably to temper human misdeeds--one might even argue quite the opposite.

And so what would be the most logical, and humanly understandable, approach to the stories that Jesus tells or refers to?  In the case of the Garden of Eden, just to take one example, there is the threat of death that--arguably--does not materialize, and there is the sordid story of Adam and Eve and their children.  God, in terms of the expectations of the narrative, is better than he ought to be.  Adam is worse than he ought to be.  If Adam is all of us, then none of this is any surprise.

In our life--if we are honest about it, everything is approximate, everything is a guess, everything is wrong, everything is flawed.  More importantly, everything is in motion.  I know that I will have to work on the point expressed in this post, but I think it is worth following up.  We want to have stable and quiet vantage points from which to view life and existence, and yet not only is none of that guaranteed, there is also no reason to imagine that it should be.

Only in light of our ever-present limitations can we hope gain the impetus that true life requires of us.  Or to present a bit of scripture, and to wonder about its application:

"Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes , and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest" (John 4:35, KJV).

Entranced By the Good

I have repeated in the last few posts the following refrain:

"The miracle is existence.  The truth is the fact that we ourselves exist.  The faith is a sincere response to truth."

Truth is all that exists for us.  In fact, the only way we know that something exists is because we have found it to be true.  Even duplicity is only an arrangement of the recognizable--some things presented such as they are--so constructed as to be misleading.  The fact that we are drawn--or draw ourselves--into delusion does not detract from truth itself.

Jesus himself has a formula by which we might minimize the risk of delusion: don't believe things.  Don't go chasing messiahs or second comings.  If they come, they will be recognizable, and they will intrude themselves upon us.

Even teachers and prophets can be sized up with relative certainty.  In Jesus' view, promoters and doers of falsehood can be detected by their fruits.  And the "fruits" in question are straightforwardly observable in their characteristics.  They are true to their intended purposes, or they are not.

All of this can be seen in contrast to pronouncements about "the good, the true, and the beautiful" and the like.  "True" is what matters.  Something is good if it aligns with its purpose--as truly perceived.  And as for the beautiful--it withers and fades, like the flowers of the field destined for the furnace.

The primacy of truth can straighten and guide our understanding of things such as gospel stories--provided that we start with the simple proposition that a story is a story, not what we might choose to make of it.  Too often readers look at gospel stories hoping to find the "good," or the "beautiful," and are profoundly disappointed (or ratified in their disdain, as the case may be.)

Such is the case in instances such as The Gentile Woman and Her Daughter Both Called Dogs by Jesus:

For my part, I just can’t read the story in Matthew, with Jesus saying to her at last, “O woman, great is thy faith,” and extract from it the notion that the Gentile woman was subject to any humiliation other than that which--rightly or wrongly, for the sake of argument--Jesus imposes on all humanity.  The Jews, after all, were often enough called Children of Abraham in the gospels and excoriated for unbelief precisely because they could not claim the ignorance of the Gentiles.

As far as the story overall, it exists in the same milieu that haunted the story of Jesus and the (Samaritan) Woman at the Well.  It amazes me how often I hear the First Century Levant described (quite rightly, as I understand it) as a setting of almost unbelievable suspicion and violence--and then Jesus breaking the rule against speaking to Samaritans (a woman alone, in this instance) is spoken of by commentators as though it might at most have elicited tut-tutting from her neighbors.

The same considerations would apply to The Woman Called a Dog.  Her neighbors see her appeal--quite understandably--to someone who might help her daughter, Jesus insults her, and then he allows himself to be bested on the very point in question.  She has asked no demonstrable miracle from him (that is, nothing that she could employ as a defense of his legitimacy).  Admittedly, her interaction with Jesus is not without its low points, but are we supposed to prefer that the Gentile Woman, unaccompanied and unprotected, go out into the neighborhood having been thought to have had a warm exchange with an itinerant Jewish preacher?

The concerted application of truth--that the story of the Gentile Woman is to be taken as a story, first and foremost--cuts directly through any quibbles about its details.  It is not a beautiful story, and as for "good"?  Are there not logical limits to how a story such as this could demonstrate the "goodness" of Jesus, who might have cured every demon possession or mental disorder on planet Earth--or at least every one plaguing an innocent child--with a wave of his hand?

Jesus was not speaking idly when he asked the young man, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God."  Chasing after "good" or calling things "good" is not the proper occupation of humanity.

And then there is The Woman and the Costly Ointment:

I would have to agree that the gospel description of Judas’ unseemly motivations would seem to be injected into the story, but the question of embellishments or interpolations in the gospels is a matter that can be viewed independently of the story in question.  Particularly if the story itself is viewed as precisely that--a story--we are confronted with a couple of salient facts.  First, Jesus is not depicted as being okay with having himself anointed with a costly ointment (to the detriment of the poor, as Judas and others contend.)  Jesus is okay with having been anointed with a costly ointment.  The box, or jar, or whatever, is already broken.  Is Jesus supposed to humiliate the woman for her actions, actions taken in the fraught atmosphere of the final week?

Second, is there anything to be gained by placing the wastage of a jar of ointment to Jesus’ account?  Jesus (as the story goes) could have reconstructed and refilled the vessel with a word; he could have put 300 coins in the palm of every beggar in Eurasia; he could have cured every leper in the world--and the ointment incident took place in the house of Simon the Leper.  Are we not at the same liberty to view the story of the woman’s actions as Jesus would have had the disciples do?

The story of the ointment has every evidence of being true, and the upshot of the story is true to Jesus' presentation of his ministry--that is all that matters.

It is not difficult to see the harm that association of Jesus with the Good and the Beautiful has done to the legacy of his ministry.  Nowhere is this more in evidence than in those regions and cultural eddies referred to (with breathtaking hubris) as "God's Country."  Here are beautiful little churches and bountiful harvests, all taken to bespeak the Almighty's favor bestowed upon people of simple and humble (if one ignores the hubris) dispositions.

The truth is often less flattering.  "God's Country" is usually sodden with the blood of disinherited natives and echoing with the sounds of generations of lynching.  And as for the harvests--the wholesome goodness plucked from the soil or carved from the carcasses of the slaughtered is laced with the effects of chemical wizardry and procured with prodigious devouring and belching of fossil fuels.

That is the state of humanity--entranced with the "good" and the "beautiful," and ignoring that which is true--often glaringly true.  That is the state of Christianity, which has strained and exhausted itself for two thousand years trying to escape Jesus' command to embrace truth above all things when trying to grasp anything.

Just Existence Embraced

My last post consists of six words: "Yes and not.  Three letters each."  That is my awkward way to introduce what I imagine is the simplest and most inescapable implication of "roused, readied, reaped":

We do not live in an experience of symmetry.  We are born, we are molded, and we die.  We are dipped into--one might even say we glance off of--such reality as we believe exists outside of ourselves (and even that is to credit our sense of "ourselves" with a reality commensurate with our conceit about its permanence and importance.)

To say "yes and not" about our lives, rather than the symmetrical "yes or no" that we apply to any binary happenstance, is to attempt to verbalize our situation in the most salient manner.  We would, in general, prefer to obtain answers about our concerns (yes's or no's), rather than to seek answers to our concerns and receive what--arguably--we deserve: silence.  Sometimes the answer to our concerns is neither yes nor no (or any more complex response) but is simply nothing.

We are not symmetrical beings, and we do not live symmetrical lives.  I will grant that the word "symmetrical" might be clumsy in this instance, but I think it will suffice.  We careen through our lives, and we careen into the uncertainty of death.  On the face of it, of course, neither a humanistic nor a theistic worldview would militate necessarily against this contention of asymmetry.  We have expended lifetimes and generations and millennia bemoaning the pitiful, limited understanding of humans, but our realization of our state in this regard contains almost always the germ of our most crucial self-deception: we grasp typically at the notion that our existences should "make sense" or "have meaning."

To this notion of meaningfulness--this attempt to right the ship of our heaving and battered understandings--the answer from humans has sometimes been, "Why?  Why should existence make sense in reference to the individual, or in reference to any corporate entity in which the individual might possess membership?"  But what then?

To take the experience of perceived meaninglessness to the extreme, one might imagine the perceiving individual collapsing as an unmotivated and unstimulated pile of flesh.  Of course that doesn't happen.  And as we conceive of ourselves, the problem of meaning versus meaninglessness persists, even as we persist.  (The reader is free to postulate an entirely emotionless and relaxed composure in some suicide committing the act as a response to life's meaninglessness, but if we can pretend that such a person could be "an unmotivated and unstimulated pile of flesh," then we might as well concede that no discussion of shared emotional experiences in humanity has standing against any participant's fancy about what a person might think or feel in a situation.)

And yet we do have a shared experience of meaninglessness.  We were all born.  We grasped for what mattered to us before we knew what mattered to us.  As infants and children we sometimes got what we wanted, and we sometimes were confronted not with yes's or no's or explanations but rather with--nothing.  We got yes's and not's.  Of course questions and concerns come faster to children than their little lives can contain them--and so children hope to grow up "to understand someday"--or are at least told that they "will understand someday."

This is wrong--at least insofar as we as adults internalize such admonitions.  We should not spend our adult lives on binary "yes's and no's" (or even on explanations.)  We should not spend our adult lives seeking understanding, seeking answers.  The crux of my statement is the word "spend," which implies an undertaking or an investment.  It is foolish to attach an idea of expenditure to the search for meaning, since that grasping--no matter how elevated or base--is the default state of humanity.  Our proper undertaking--as especially I see in the teachings of Jesus--is one characterized by the scraping away of the notion of "meaning," an action essential to the working-out of the statement with which I concluded my last post but one:

'The miracle is existence.  The truth is the fact that we ourselves exist.  The faith is a sincere response to truth."

No "meaning," just existence embraced.

Yes and Not Three Letters Each

Yes and not.  Three letters each.

The Zombies That Did Not Appear to Us

I read a blog post recently about the "zombies" that arose from the dead at Jesus's death and entered Jerusalem after Jesus' resurrection.  The blog, which does not claim to be original in this thought, remarks on how curious it is that no gospel but Matthew includes such a statement, and how doubly curious it is that Thomas' doubt about Jesus' resurrection persisted even when--as the critics suggest--Jerusalem was overrun by resurrected persons.

Surely we cannot think that such a jibe would be unanswerable by the faithful.  After all, Jesus had stated that the Rich Man of "The Rich Man and Lazarus" was told that even if resurrected persons were sent to preach to the Rich Man's benighted still-living brothers, those lost souls would not believe.  Surely the post-Resurrection "zombies" (described as holy but not necessarily Christian) could be thought to have shown themselves only to the living righteous--persons like Anna and Simeon--who would have been neither tale-bearers nor people who would have needed communion or communication with Jesus' disciples.

There--we have an answer.  Perhaps not a very good answer, but an answer nonetheless.  What foolishness emits from both sides about miracles and the supernatural.

The miracle is existence.  The truth is the fact that we ourselves exist.  The faith is a sincere response to truth.

The Big Broken Lie

The great lie afflicting Christianity must be called out and defeated.  The great lie is the doctrine that the disease of sin is to be understood--in an always-awkward mixing of metaphors--as a state of brokenness.  In the most important application, "disease" ought really to be addressed with careful individual remedy, and whether or not it is fatal to the soul is a matter for God alone.  "Brokenness," on the other hand, invites the ministrations of the clergy--those purported doctors of the soul whose diagnoses are always correct (if invariably all patients fall short of perfection), and whose remedies can be packaged for sale.

God addresses with remedy--wholesome correctives meant to salvage, bolster, and heal us in our diseased state.  If  metaphor is anything, God's remedy is an organic, fluid process.  God's remedy is embodied and mediated by Jesus, a rather unsurprising fact, since all of Creation is embodied and mediated by Jesus.  At the start of the most elemental gospel, Mark, we are confronted with a quote from Malachi and a quote from Isaiah (introduced together as both being from Isaiah).  Both are imprecisely rendered from the Hebrew, and both speak of God applying correctives to his people.

The gospels pull toward a new way for people to live.  The clergy pull toward new people doing the living.  Something will have to give.