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.

Why the Gospels are Such as They Are

To expand on my notion of the Gospels as "thematic representations," I will turn simply to the present blog's theme of "roused, readied, reaped."  While it is perhaps possible to maintain that there is some semblance of natural order to "roused, readied, reaped" being understood as, say, "beginning, middle, end"--evoking thereby connotations of regularity and completeness to the assumed cycles--this assumption of natural order cannot be held to be warranted by actual experience.  Those persons "roused, readied, reaped" over a lifetime of three score and ten are neither more nor less "roused, readied, reaped" than those cut off in the flower of youth--the former instance simply seems to be more "natural" to us.

What "roused, readied, reaped" means in the context of the Gospels is the experiential phenomenon of human beings understanding that things begin, last for a time, and end--and in each instance of experience there is the possibility that a unique duration or degree of profundity will be evidenced.  Our lives--even viewed in our conceit of concrete, objective reality--are characterized by experienced cycles long or short, deep or superficial, mundane or surprising.  If we believe that divine superintendence is in play, then we are challenged to find meaning in experiences--or at least to find meaning in lives shot through with unanticipated and often unwelcome experience-arcs of greater or lesser import.

What I mean by the Gospels as "thematic representations" is that the Gospels seen as repositories of information about Jesus are best seen as writings that present themes themselves as being preeminent over the conceptions of humans about the expected workings-out of those themes.  What the Gospels talk about are themes before which are subsumed any possible illustrations of those themes.  For example, the Gospels speak of Jesus as the one-and-the-same Creator of Creation, but this theme--similarly with all other contentions about God--cannot be ratified by expectations that the theme will fulfill the conditions of some conceptualizable warrant.

Jesus created the fig trees.  In one parable, he speaks of a fruitless fig tree, the owner of which declares that it ought to be rooted out and replaced with something more productive.  The gardener suggests that the tree ought to be tended for another year in hopes that it will become fruitful.  The listener can nod sagely at the message of the parable--but there is no message.  The parable does not illustrate a theme--the parable exists because a pre-existing and pre-eminent theme overshadows it.  The shadow of the Reaper hangs over all in the mortal realm, and this truth is founded in the existence of the sovereign Creator.  The parable does not teach something because it conveys a message--the parable teaches something because it exists, and it exists because Creator Jesus exists.

Then there is the fig tree that Jesus curses.  Any notion that Jesus curses it because he can tell that it will fail in the coming season of harvest is folly--because the story has it that Jesus is hungry.  Jesus curses the fig tree because it has not borne fruit out of season.  The fig tree has been roused, and it has--to the purposes of God--been readied, and it is then (in the parlance of this blog) reaped.  The fig tree has displeased its Creator.  One might contend that Jesus is not being "fair," but the speaker cannot conjure up any notion that the fig tree deserved its existence to begin with, nor any notion that there are rules by which the Creator is bound.  One might as well--and as saliently--contend that is it "unfair" that the fig tree (or any creature) has a finite lifespan, it being accepted that Jesus could have made all creatures immortal.

The point is that any parable or illustration or story about the qualities of Jesus must exist either as something struck off as a spark or a shard from the ineffable and infinite essence of Jesus, or it must exist as a warrant-condition attached to his person--a warrant-condition that, if not co-equal with Jesus, is by necessity co-equal with some corresponding quality of Jesus, and is therefore a most blasphemous presumption.  There are no teachings about Jesus--there are simply teachings that exist because Jesus exists, and his existence leads to inescapable implications.  This is why the Gospels are such as they are, and--unsurprisingly--that "such as they are" quality is displayed in the Gospels being unanalyzable either as literature or as history.

Literature develops themes, and history uncovers themes, but the divine--as the author of themes--cannot be comprehended thematically.  That is why the Gospels read like plays.  The effulgence of God dances about the scenery, and it highlights from moment to moment the actions of particular characters, but its withdrawal will leave the stage dark and the action suspended--there are no self-existing nor self-actuated themes at play in themselves.  In the Gospels, the reality is always latent offstage, and the "reality" expressed in terms relatable to our concrete surroundings is always provisional.

The Gospels as Thematic Representations

There is a notion about the gospels that has impressed itself upon me while trying to write a "plotting"--as it were--of the Gospel of Mark.  I don't hold with the idea that the gospels are myths or fictions or satires or even symbolic representations.  Of course there are certain tenacious problems with maintaining that the gospels are factual accounts or even "histories" (the latter notion from commentators often attended by assertions that we must have a more or less flexible idea of what "history" meant to the ancients.)

All of the above ideas, I am afraid, ranging from the "history" of the literalists to the "myth" of the critics, address the notion of reliability of the gospels from a set standpoint of presumed representation about our world and about the place of "the man or the myth" of Jesus in our world.  What if the gospels were never intended to be representations about our world?  I know I am introducing here the idea that the religious quality of the gospels might presume a reality of more ostensible substance than our collective notions of "hard and fast" concrete reality--manifestations of physical reality as a norm being accepted presumptively by nearly all of the interpretation camps I alluded to above.

But to say (as we might reflexively) that there is a reality of more objective substance than that of some ideation of the gospels as addressing a "hyper-reality" (or some such) detracts in no way from the tentative assertion that the gospels as intended were written in light of contentions about how Jesus' realm is rightly viewed in distinction to the realm of our concrete reality.  One need not accept the contentions of an author's premises, in order to understand those premises as being key to understanding the author's intended message.

At the beginning of Mark there is a mention of John's ministry in light of some more-or-less correctly attributed, more-or-less correctly translated Old Testament passages.  The passages as presented in Mark speak of one crying out in the desert to make way for the Lord; the passages as presented in the Old Testament speak of one crying out to make a way for the Lord in the desert.  Much might be made of notions about the attribution, translation, and application of those passages--but conventionally those considerations are held in light of a notion that the Gospels are going to show how the lordship of Jesus is to be established through the workings-out of the Gospels, gospels that end in the deserved lordship of Jesus displayed in the Resurrection and in the effectual lordship of Jesus over the evil-ridden world existing as a promise of the End Times.

But Jesus is, in the conceptualizations of the messiah playing out through the Gospels, always the Lord.  However the passages about John's appearance play out, one thing they do not convey is the notion that Jesus is an aspirant to the lordship of the world.  We are confronted by the approach of the King, not of the man or god or god-man who Would Be King.  When Jesus (in gospels other than Mark) is offered the world by Satan, Jesus' refusal to Satan's offer is founded on piety--on rightful worship given only to God--rather than on ratification of Satan's "possession" of the kingdoms of the world as being of any substance in the realm of Jesus' lordship.

Even the lowliest of Jesus' followers is--in the conceptualities presented by Jesus--possessor of houses and fields and family innumerable, as the consequence and reward of renouncing such houses and fields and family as they might exist in our visions of concrete reality.  The price of such possession--training ourselves to thank God for his blessings on people who might not be ourselves but who yet are manifestations of our Savior--can be a difficult price to pay, but we are assured that in the eyes of God we are credited with offering back to God an entire world with our thanks for having created the entire world.

The world that we offer back to God is only in some manner of representation ours to give (or ever to possess) yet such notions are critical to understanding the ministry of Jesus and the message of the Gospels.  How much more, we might say, are the kingdoms of the world (now and ever and always) the possession of Jesus.  This is no small consideration, in that the standard conceptualizations of proper Gospel interpretation are founded on the idea that God has intruded thereby on the pitiable realm of humanity.  (Commentators like to use such terms as "in-breaking" and the like.)  This is not so.  The Gospels do not show Jesus coming in to the realm of humanity.  The Gospels show humanity--by such means as we have eyes to see and ears to hear--being provided glimpses and whispers of the overriding reality of Jesus' lordship that the Gospels presume.

The notions above are my attempt to show what I think the Gospel writers took as foundational premises.  Accepted or not as they might be by any critic--their believability or their savor is of scant import as to meaningful interpretation of the Gospel writers' intent.  It remains to my feeble efforts to name what I think is the best conceptualization of what the Gospels are (rather than myth, fiction, satire, symbolism, etc.): I think the Gospels are best understood as "thematic representations," such themes being of varied length and import and relationship respectively to the most basic intelligible premises of the Gospels' content.  One of the chief of those themes, as I have described above, is the perpetual lordship of Jesus, as against a persistent and mistaken theme evinced by most other commentaries: that the Gospels tell the story of Jesus attaining (or re-attaining) his lordship.

The truths about Jesus are themes that exist always, not stories about this or that coming or going, and the only way to understand this reality effectively is to understand that Jesus exists in the true reality, and our mutable concrete world is but a shadow of that.

The Prodigal Son and His Brother

There is an aspect of the gospels that has struck me of late.  It has to do with the experience-life of Jesus, and it has to do more broadly with the idea of the genuinely human Jesus as the divine Son of God.

That Jesus would be by some objective standard "perfect," is of little application to us, in that it is we who must presume thereby on analyzing such an ostensible standard.  This, of course, we cannot do perfectly, and if we fuss over the notion that Jesus was perfect because of this or that we merely make ourselves ridiculous.

Then we are left with the only sort of legitimate (or at least honest) assessment we can make about Jesus' perfection: it seems to us that the case must be so--it seems to us that Jesus is perfect.  At least by accepting our limited means of assessing the perfection of Jesus we can draw ourselves up to responsible assessment of what we do know about Jesus.

For example, Jesus complained.  The utterance "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" is a complaint.  There is no pretending otherwise, though in the Jewish heritage the notion of a supplicating complaint is distinguished from a sinful complaint.  Jesus was behaving genuinely, and he was behaving so while in the throes of suffering that would make no sense as a sharing in humanity's torments if Jesus was not sharing simultaneously in the contortions of thought that accompany human suffering.

That is not the only time Jesus complained--though the commentators seem eager to ignore that reality.  Repetition as a motif in Scripture--something said (or done) twice or three times--is taken usually to indicate authoritative finality.  If Jesus, having asked in the garden to be spared his suffering, had accepted God's refusal the first time and returned to his place of prayer twice again only to ratify that acceptance, the notion of repetition in that sequence would surely be taken by the commentators to indicate the profundity of Jesus' resignation to his fate.

But Jesus was not resigned in such manner to his fate.  He prayed to escape it, and then he prayed twice more to escape it--having evinced an initial resignation.  He did what human beings would do.  He did perfectly what human beings would do, an ideation of Jesus' incarnation that is infinitely more profound than the centuries'-worth of cant from the churches to the effect that their Jesus did "God-things" while hauling around a human husk.  It is no wonder that the harrowing repetition of Jesus' agonized complaint to his Father is overlooked so routinely by the denominations.

This realization about the character of Jesus is attached for me to the story of the Prodigal Son (and indeed this realization is crucial if we are to understand a large part of that parable.)  We all know about the younger son who wasted his inheritance, and we all understand the father in the parable to represent our loving and forgiving Father.  It is not surprising that the prodigal's journey and the father's welcome capture our attention.  Nor is it surprising that the elder brother's anger is less captivating to us.  I have heard the second part of the parable brushed aside as merely a sorry (though cautionary) reference to a "legalistic older brother," or some such.

But the elder brother's complaints have the virtue of being entirely true (or at least ratified as such by the father.)  "Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment . . . . And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine" (Luke 15:29).  The profundity of these two statements from the father ("thou art ever with me" and "all that I have is thine") could not have been greater in the milieu of the gospels.  The second is perhaps more pertinent to the parable at hand, in that it concerns the (as-yet-to-be-settled) fate of the younger son.  The younger will not be as one of the hired hands of the estate, but neither--having forsaken his patrimony--will he be elevated again to the stature he might once have held.  Moreover--and this seems to be forever lost to the commentators--the younger son's diminishment will be two-fold.  Not only will his stature be lessened, but the unavoidable implication of his father's blessing on the elder ("all that I have is thine") is a conferring upon the elder of the headship of the family.  The father and the elder are bound in such manner as could never be experienced by any others of the household--certainly not a lesser son.

The first statement from the father ("thou art ever with me") is even more profound.  The elder son is blessed perpetually with an unequalled fellowship with the father.  In that the implication of the parable is as a model of the forgiving and merciful love of God, the most logical conclusion about the figurative character of the elder brother is as a representation of Jesus.  Jesus has complaints against his siblings, complaints that have the unquestioned virtue of being entirely true.  There is nothing wrong with voicing complaints, as long as one is willing to accept a legitimate answer.  Moreover, there is nothing wrong with repeatedly voicing the same complaint, so long as one is working genuinely to try to understand and be reconciled to the situation.  That is how one can approach perfection as a genuine human being, and we should not be surprised that scenarios (such as the Parable of the Prodigal Son's Brother) that illustrate the moral character of Jesus depict Jesus as a perfect human being, not as a perfect being pretending to be human.

Plotting Mark Through the Passion Predictions

I ended the last post with:

"Three times Jesus predicts his fate, and still it seems that the disciples never get the message.  As we will see, however, when Jesus predicts his fate he always foretells the fate of humanity--though all the ages of Christianity seem not to have gotten that message."

This is one of the places where "roused, readied, reaped" rises to the fore as a mode of analysis.  The fate of humanity is usually displayed by Jesus in the form of experience--how people will feel about what happens to them--and this can be represented by the notion of "experience-arcs" as espoused by this blog.  We will experience things in consequence of, and in concert with, the elements of Jesus' ministry.  Inasmuch as Jesus demands transformation, there is very little in the spectrum of expected experience-arcs that will not be unsettling--to say the least.

Jesus came to the world to give up his life, and to get us to give up our lives (usually a rather more piecemeal and partial occurrence.)  Three times in the Gospel of Mark Jesus predicts his death (or so have the conventional commentators numbered it), and I will not fail to note that the conventional view is as well that Mark is the earliest and most straightforward of the gospels.  Each of these predictions, however, is followed by a series of events that cinches together the elements of Jesus' fate with those of his followers.  This phenomenon of reflection of our experiences against those of Jesus has apparently escaped the commentators, who have superimposed upon the experienceable workings of the organ of Creation their own conceit--that is, this or that set of contentions about the interactions of discrete characters on the fancied stage of a surveyable Creation.

The three instances of Jesus predicting his own death are in Mark 8:31-33, Mark 9:31-32, and Mark 10:32-34.  We will see how each prediction introduces and is followed by an exposition of the disciples' experiences as participative in the elements of the prophecy.

Mark 8:31-33: And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. (KJV)

". . . the Son of man . . ." :  Here, as in the other two predictions, that which is quoted or described as the actual utterances of Jesus always uses this enigmatic phrase.  That choice of phraseology is at the least worth pondering.

". . . must suffer many things . . ." :  After excoriating Peter for attempting to rebuke him for the prophecy, Jesus is described as convening "the people unto him with his disciples also" and he launches into, "Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me."

". . . and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes . . ." :  The next narrative element has Jesus take Peter, James, and John--the most prominent candidates for leadership among the disciples--up onto the mountain to view the Transfiguration.  This is an episode that--for all its evocative quality--drives home the logical point that the very nature of Jesus as the Son of God (shown here in a radiance that must eclipse Moses and Elijah) annihilates any notion that Jesus is some sort of outgrowth of Judaism or some sort of enhanced manifestation of "the elders . . . chief priests, and scribes."  Even Moses and Elijah are lost into the cloud, and similarly is lost to the disciples any hope of fellowship with the authorities of Judaism as authorities in themselves.  Affinity on some levels with the leaders of the Jews might yet exist for the followers of Jesus, and well as some hope that such leaders might join the company of believers, but the burgeoning seed of mutual rejection is sown with, "This is my beloved Son: hear him."

". . . and be killed, and after three days rise again . . ." :  Immediately following the Transfiguration the narrative deals with the notion of the now-murdered John the Baptist having constituted in some way the re-animated (one hesitates to say "resurrected") Elijah.  Then, having just come down from the mountain, Jesus and his three companions are confronted with a large crowd disputing about a demon-possessed boy.  Naturally, Jesus cures the lad, but not before we are provided with the detail that "he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead.  But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose."  The business of dying, and of death not being the end, is meant by Jesus to be an ever-present experience of the believer.

". . . and after three days rise again . . ." :  This is, of course, a detail idiosyncratic to Jesus' death (though only a matter of some approximation, as if exactitude mattered), but such notions as "three days" or even "a thousand years" or "a watch in the night" are of small consequence against the underlying notion that, for the believer, death is not final.

The experiences of suffering, of rejection, of death, and of the prospect of new life (or, as I would put it, the experience-arcs of moments and moods attendant to such things) are intrinsic to the teachings of Jesus and are intrinsic to the logic of the Gospel of Mark.  This is evident in the first prediction by Jesus of his own death, and we will see the same things in the following two, which appear in quick succession.

Mark 9:31-32: For he taught his disciples, and said unto them, The Son of man is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him; and after that he is killed, he shall rise the third day.  But they understood not that saying, and were afraid to ask him.

". . . delivered into the hands of men . . ." :  This is the chief difference between the second prediction and the first, standing in the place of the first prediction's mention of suffering and rejection.  So what is the second prediction, including "delivered into the hands of men," followed by?  A lengthy and multi-part discourse on the things that people do to each other, particularly when in positions of power.  The disciples "were afraid to ask him" about "the saying" that they did not understand, but that does not stop Jesus from teaching about the ramifications of power, about "the hands of men."

Jesus launches unbidden into teaching about how, "If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all."  As regarding children, "Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me."  As regarding those of other denominations, "Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me."  As regarding charity from outsiders, "For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward."

Of course, there are dark aspects to human power: "And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea."  And of what little power we have over ourselves: ". . . if thy hand offend thee, cut it off . . . ."  This leads still further, into the notion of being "salted" with the "fire" of self-appraisal, and of negotiating the delicate matter of supportive yet responsible social interactions: "Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another."

And when confronted shortly with the matter of divorce, it is not the question of licentiousness that occupies Jesus, but the question of harsh power--the question of what people do to others who have fallen into their hands.  "For the hardness of your heart he [Moses] wrote you this precept [divorce]."  "Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her.  And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, committeth adultery"--the latter a fascinating manifestation of first-century feminism.

It is the powerless little child, or the person who attains a like status, who is "of the kingdom of God."  And it is the rich man who cannot part with his goods who will fail to "inherit eternal life," while those who willingly give up all will gain all.  All these lessons about power crowd the interval between Jesus' second prediction of his death and his third.

Mark 10:32-34: . . . And he took again the twelve, and began to tell them what things should happen unto him, Saying, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man shall be delivered unto the chief priests, and unto the scribes; and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles: And they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again.

". . . and the Son of man shall be delivered . . ." :  And presently the sons of Zebedee, desiring the places of preference in glory, deliver themselves to their fate: "But Jesus said unto them, ye know not what ye ask."

". . . and they shall condemn him to death . . . " :  Asked by Jesus if they can "drink of the cup" that awaits Jesus, the sons of Zebedee say, "We can."  "And Jesus said unto them, Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of."

". . . and shall deliver him to the Gentiles . . . " :  To admonish the twelve over the dissention that follows the presumption of the sons of Zebedee, Jesus says, "Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them.  But so shall it not be among you."

And then lastly, before the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, there is the episode of blind Bartimaeus who, regardless of his nationality, addresses Jesus as "thou son of David"--strikingly reminiscent of the pleading Gentile "woman of Canaan" of Matthew 15.  The episode of the blind man is short, but not so short as to fail to mention that "many charged him that he should hold his peace."  The savior who was soon to face the degradations he listed in his prediction did not fail to succor a lowly man who apparently was routinely degraded.

It is usually the matter of experience--the simple, accessible matter of what human beings think and feel--that provides the best understanding of the teachings of Jesus.

Plotting Mark to the Caesarea Foreboding

I ended the last post with:

"To envision the Creation as a landscape of comprehensible references that we can piously call the rightful possession of God is in fact an appalling act of arrogance.  All that we can truly call the rightful possession of God is everything that we think and feel.  This is where the Gospel of Mark is going from here--indeed, this is where it has been going all along."

8:27-9:1)  "And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am?"  The disciples list briefly the conjectures abroad about Jesus, and then--in response to Jesus' query about what they themselves think, Peter responds with the famous, "Thou art the Christ."  (Across all these years, it is impossible to know--in the limited context of Mark--whether Peter is answering for himself or for the group.  It is perhaps telling that the only follow-up here is "And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.")

Any notion of stellar performance on the part of Peter is, of course, quashed by what follows immediately.  Jesus predicts his death, Peter tries to rebuke him for that, and Jesus calls him "Satan," "for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men."  Peter is thinking as humans think, not as God thinks, and then Jesus gives a discourse on how humans should think.  Humans should reckon their lives as nothing, and should give up their lives willingly in the service of Jesus and his teachings.

Only by such means can true and eternal life be obtained.  Of course, at this point the churches will usually interject that Jesus means we should be "dead to sin," or some such, and can continue to wallow riotously in the earthly blessings accorded to faithful children of God.  This might seem unfair to Christians who undoubtedly hold to the notion that one ought to display at least a modicum of abstemiousness, but a "modicum" (or some such) of this or that does not seem to fit with Jesus' pronouncements: "Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me."

This brings us back to my statement above, "All that we can truly call the rightful possession of God is everything we think and feel."  I would hope to be spared the notion that I espouse "pantheism," in that I attempt--in concert with Peter's assignment--to think as God thinks.  This endeavor, inescapably, will abut the unfathomable mystery of anything but God existing of its own--which of course includes the possibility that what we might call "pantheism" exists in some unfathomable way in the mind of God.  However, Jesus' charge to think as God does has its chief application in trying not to think as humans do--and we humans think of a surveyable universe of distinct phenomena against which we are ourselves distinct phenomena.  In this universe of conceit we range ourselves as pawns or cogs or actors or whatever, and concoct our religious schemes.  It is better that we think of the boundless and volatile implications of God's existence, and in doing so we can remember that we are charged to think as God does--we are not charged with doing that thinking particularly well, as if ever we could.

The main thing about Jesus' teaching here is the necessary embrace of his demand of total renunciation, not--as the churches will have it--the embrace of Jesus as savior, nor--as our natures will disallow--the practice of perfect self-abnegation.  It is the nexus of Jesus as living person and Jesus as living instruction--the divine manifested for the salvation of the world--that is focused upon here:

"For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it . . . . Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

Three times Jesus predicts his fate, and still it seems that the disciples never get the message.  As we will see, however, when Jesus predicts his fate he always foretells the fate of humanity--though all the ages of Christianity seem not to have gotten that message.

Plotting Mark to the Bethsaida Foreshadowing

8:22-26)  We ended the last post after the episode in which Jesus reminds the disciples of the two miracles of the loaves, and then he asks, "How is it that ye do not understand?" (8:21)  We are now going to learn of the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida, in which we learn also of the derivation of the curious phrase, "men like trees walking."  Jesus sets out to give sight to a blind man, and it takes two gestures of ministration.  Then in a little while we are going to learn of the man with the demoniac son, the man who utters the plaintive cry, "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief."  And this episode ends with the disciples, frustrated and bewildered after their former ability to work wonders, asking Jesus "Why could we not cast him out?"  Jesus responds by saying that the kind of demon presented here can be driven out only by prayer (though the source used by the KJV would have it as "prayer and fasting.")

It is not immediately obvious (especially given the obfuscations fostered by the churches) that here we are confronted by the inescapable manifestation of the kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God does not so much have to do with fellowship with God, nor with access to God, nor to the promise of salvation from God, nor with comfort from God, nor with obedience of God, or indeed with anything but one overriding element of the believer's relationship with God: The believer is the possession of God--as the kingdoms of old were understood to be the possessions of the monarchs--and (as is implicit in human relations and inescapable in spiritual matters)--possession by the monarch is not qualified.  That is, the thing possessed by the monarch is an element of the monarch's very self, and retains nothing but provisional identity.

The subject is nothing as against the will--even the very nature--of the monarch, and all the more so the believer is nothing as against the will and nature of God.  Inescapably, then, the thought life of the believer--of the subject of the kingdom of God--is understood truly in its barest essentials as consisting either of the ineffable joy of fellowship of God, or of the bottomless despair of alienation from God.  The notion of the equanimity of the more-or-less (and hopefully improving) faithful in the service of God is a perfidious sin-state (and all the more so as it is celebrated as some sort of quaint journey of foibles and failings.)

Only the dullness of inattention to God and the habit of presumption on God's patience constitute that part of the believer's life that might be called routine.  In the teachings of Jesus, the believer's consciousness is borne upon the ecstasy of fellowship with God or it is cast into utter agony at the sundering of that fellowship.  This is the experience of humanity, and it would be strange indeed if the experiences of Jesus did not range from the intimacy of "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," to "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

To compress the above, the experience of God's mercy (like that shown to the blind man) can be incomplete, though such would seem to be counterintuitive; the experience of asking for mercy (like the frantic father) can hinge not on belief but on the realization of its lack; and the desire to work the will of God (like the disciples) can be chiefly about the impossibility of truly doing so.  This, we will be reminded, is the province of the Jesus who promises us that we can do virtually anything if we have but the slightest faith--and we are scarcely distinguished by the ability to do virtually anything.

If we are to understand the gospels--indeed, if we are to understand anything--then we must look past our tendency to see the gospels as the playing-out of matters of religion on the stage of Creation.  Religion that attends truly to the One God does not see anything that is other than God as being this or that entity engaged in activity against a backdrop of reference.  Existence--that mystery that we cannot comprehend even as we extend ourselves ridiculously to imagine that we can begin to comprehend God--is not an existence of parts against a backdrop we in our conceit call "reality."  Existence is one great organ writhing in its interactions, with us among its twitching parts.

To envision the Creation as a landscape of comprehensible references that we can piously call the rightful possession of God is in fact an appalling act of arrogance.  All that we can truly call the rightful possession of God is everything that we think and feel.  This is where the Gospel of Mark is going from here--indeed, this is where it has been going all along.