MIracles by the Moment

No person who wants to give a fair hearing to the religions of the world can ignore the overwhelming tendency of persons of any particular religious heritage to absorb the very philosophical underpinnings of their own inherited belief system and then--largely unconscious of what they are doing--to attempt in some dispassionate fashion to examine alien religions by the examiner's standards of what is considered unquestionable about existence.  In regard to the conveniently-phrased "Judeo-Christian" mode of analyzing religion, the Western emphasis on "rationality" is the standard (as though the yardstick of rationality was handed down from heaven), and unsurprisingly religions other than Judaism and Christianity fail in this analysis by the test of "rationality."

(Of course, Jews and Christians can accuse each other of being irrational, and the in-fighting among Christians about "rationality" is rife, and after some one or another ostensibly unassailable rational framework has been laid, many Christians are eager to claim that their detractors in the West have an overblown sense of their own rationality and fail to grasp the "foolishness of the Cross" or some such.  One way or another, the notion of rationality--ostensibly applied correctly, or incorrectly, or arrogantly in overweening error--is the controlling notion.)

One thing that is important to realize in all of this is the fact that "rationality" (along with its potential bedfellows "humanism" and "materialism") is only by popular acclaim held to be the special province of the Hellenistic influence that beset the Levant in the fourth century BCE.  There are elements of rationality that are so deeply embedded in the "Judeo-Christian" heritage that they are scarcely recognized for what they are.  One such element (which will become apparent to us in the importance it has regarding our emphasis on moment-by-moment digesting of experiences) is the concept of cause-and-effect as applied to the Creation.

The very "logic" of the literal Creation week (even when it is held to be metaphorical) provides the foundation for the "nature's God" or "clockwork" (or even deterministic) musings of the deistic Enlightenment.  Ostensibly, the First Cause set into motion the dependent cause-and-effect universe with which we are familiar--and the Rationality Set of Western apologetics (to include the Paul of Romans) have determined that the existence of a divine Creator is so unquestionably manifest in the palpable universe as to make belief in that Creator the epitome of logic--and the denial of that Creator the epitome of lamentable irrationality.

There are cracks, however, in the edifice of the cause-and-effect notion of an initial Creation (and I mean these in addition to the obvious fact that reliance on cause-and-effect in religion is an invitation to the cause-and-effect held by deterministic materialism.)  In the fourth chapter of Mark, Jesus says that the earth "bringeth forth fruit of herself"--which can be held to be deterministic only if one ignores the apparent anthropomorphism of the statement.  Earlier in Mark, Jesus in the Temptations is described as "with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him."  This is the Jesus who could certainly order mountains (or beasts) around--were he not (as apparently here) placed in a state of debilitation.  This is the Jesus of which it is said, "All things were made by him," and yet he who tells his followers that they can ask anything of him in his name, needs apparently in this moment to have his needs met, and to have dangers warded away from himself.

This is a Jesus, I would contend, whose creative role is not to be understood merely in a linear or narrative fashion--cause and effect be damned.  Jesus laments that Jerusalem will suffer a fate that--to the endless consternation of the commentators--Jesus describes in terms that reach undoubted implications about the world as a whole.  Jesus asks the daughters of Jerusalem to imagine what will happen when the wood is dry, considering what can happen when it is green.  Unavoidably, Jesus is describing a world in which his creative power is not one of initial, deistic clock-winding, but one of continual (and continually emerging) miraculous quality.  The flourishing of the green is a momentary miracle of God, and the sparseness of the dry is a momentary miracle of God.  Jesus administers a Creation in which the sparrow that falls to the ground is not of concern to God merely because the poor bird has fallen to some mishap of predation, accident, disease, or senescence, but rather because the bird has taken wing that very day because God bore him up.

In the immediacy of religious experience, the miracle of Creation is ongoing, and the ends and demises that we associate as latent determinants of the ends of cycles and arcs are no more capricious than the beginnings (with attendant life-oriented urges) that God's creatures experience.  The poor dumb creature that is placed in a precarious and ultimately deadly existence in also a poor dumb creature that is endowed individually with a desire to survive and--to some extent--to enjoy the advantages of that survival.  Even the interventions of God that seem brutal must be viewed as interventions among an innumerable cloud of other interventions--for good or ill.  The early Genesis framework is important in the teachings of Jesus, and so it is perhaps appropriate here to opine on the slaughter of the Flood.  All of those people were killed.  Their lives (or at least most of their lives), however, were not comparable to our expectations.  Only in the Flood tumult was the life-span of humans reduced to a hundred years or more--the unfortunate people (or unfortunate-to-be-so-evil people) before the Flood lived lives that dragged on and on.

In addition to the question of the immediacy of experience, is the question of the conceptual implications of creation understood as an ongoing process (or, perhaps better, as a process out of time and space.)  Paul describes the necessity of deducing the existence of God from the elements of the physical universe.  This is folly.  The non-existence of God can can be deduced as well from the elements of the physical universe.  Jesus, however, described a universe of unending potentialities, tended from moment to moment by his creative role and amenable from moment to moment to his gracious affirmation of his disciples' petitions.

Most importantly, Jesus simply described a universe of unending potentialities.  This, however, is distinct from a universe without end.  We must expect that, in a manner defying all authoritative quantification, the end will come.  The green wood will dry.  It will not be a happy moment, but it will be no less miraculous than any moment.

Only Curving Tendrils

I started upon this present blog "Aware, Away, Awry" because my thoughts seemed to have moved to a succeeding and yet distinct realm from my previous blog "Roused, Readied, Reaped."

"Roused, Readied, Reaped" has humanity experiencing existence as a practically infinite cascade of overlapping arcs of differing lengths and on parallel tracks.  "Aware, Away, Awry" has humanity experiencing the internal, time-mediated architecture of those tracks, that is, humanity from moment to moment knowing only each moment and guessing at what comes next.  This necessary guessing at what comes next is the seed-bed of our wandering conceits.  We experience the awareness of each new phenomenon in the real-time genuineness that hearkens back to our primordial birth, but we across our lives develop more and more the tendencies to recognize less and less pure confrontation with reality, and to substitute for it our conceits of moral authority.

"Aware, Away, Awry" seemed necessary to me because I am attempting to describe in generic terms the moral logic of the teachings of Jesus.  "Roused, Readied, Reaped" is the framework, and it serves somewhat to humanize our necessary processing of the related experiences of Jesus' contemporaries--as well as our own--but "Roused, Readied, Reaped" is unavoidably backward-looking, attempting to make sense of things that have happened (and things that we decide to understand in terms of our own arc-plans, which might be more or less consistent with those of the divine.)

"Aware, Away, Awry" is the distilled notion of the experience-type related in the beginning of Genesis, in which the first humans are startled into awareness and respond--in what has come to typify our kind--by attempting to understand things that cannot be understood.  Adam's very existence was relational, inasmuch as he was the pristine creation of an ever-present Creator, yet Adam insisted on explicit relations, such that his Creator moved in superintendence to assess and address Adam as a creature who was "alone."  Adam was never alone, and in this contradiction resides the base-level maladjustment that characterizes the story of humanity.  The "Fall" part of the Eden story--in some ways the parent in our mutual Western consciousness of the "Roused, Readied, Reaped" formulation--is actually only an out-playing of the original discomfiture of Adam.

In terms of our discussion, it becomes then transparently insipid to hold to the old innocent-before, guilty-after paradigm of the Fall.  Sin existed in humanity before the eating of the fruit, and sin--if understood in the permeating quality that Jesus relates in his chiding of humanity ("you, being evil")--is the quality of evil that retracts when backwardly-viewed into the inscrutable recesses of the moment after Creation.  Sin lurked in the heart of Adam--the heart casting about needlessly for explicit relations--long before the revelation of the dallying heart of Eve, or even the revelation of the devious mind of the snake.

The fruit-eating Fall, then, is merely the crystalizing of the progression of sin.  Here, of course, the "Roused, Readied, Reaped" progression is typically useful as a means of understanding the history of humanity, but it relates only clumsily the unfolding history of Adam and Eve, who of course experienced the "Fall" (and all the rest of their lives, as we ours) in moments as yet unrecognized as parts of (perhaps only more or less real) experience-arcs.  Yes, Adam and Eve sinned in the eating of the fruit, but the residing and lurking sin of their lives (as of ours) was the more basic tendency to take startling moments of awareness and proceed immediately to slot them into anticipated experience-arcs.  This is what we do still.  We seek to usurp the role of God--who knows all ends--and in the process we subsume the comparative innocence of genuine response to life, placing it under the purported "knowledge of good and evil" that we are shown to possess most obviously when we are shown to possess it--and to wield it--as the overweening adolescents that we adults are.

There are two elements of Jesus' teachings that Christianity emphasizes particularly.  One is the teaching that we must become like little children.  The other is the teaching that we must tend Jesus' flock.  Unsurprisingly, organized Christianity with its attachment to the notions of the Bible as a complete story, and of the history of the Church as a Book-of-Revelation-bound pre-completed story, is an organized Christianity fixated on a beginning-and-end paradigm (perhaps the greatest "Roused, Readied, Reaped" there is.)  What is missing is the moment-to-moment logic of Jesus' teachings.  The self-described "little children" of the denominations are adults who have drawn up the story-lines of their conversion (or confirmation) tales.  The mature, teaching-capable, "flock-tending" adults of the denominations are persons who have seized upon (and have had confirmed for them by others) the story-lines of their growth to religious seniority.  Neither of these conceptualities (child or shepherd) admits of real-time molding--each being institutionalized by a requisite story-arc--and the conceptualities themselves are strangers to each other.  The ossified child of the denominations is stiffened with some such branding as "humility" (when the humility of real children is displayed in the awe-struck exuberance that leads to the most impertinent of questions), and the petrified adult of the denominations is frozen in some such posture of orthodoxy upon which the communally-bestowed title of shepherd is based.

In contrast is the teaching of Jesus, which is enlivened from moment to moment, and which thrives from moment to moment on a continual cascade of instants of awareness.  Each of these instants is a story, or a part of a story, which has not yet ended.  The story-arcs (the essence of "Roused, Readied, Reaped") have not yet closed, and perhaps never will.  In the teaching of Jesus, the moments of awareness--the recapitulations of the experience-rush of infancy--are ever burgeoning.  In the teaching of Jesus, the experience and the expression of seniority are leapings toward the heights of understanding, leapings that might be of greater profit in their failures than they might be in any heights-attaining that they can seem to have.  One is reminded of Jesus' bemusement at the beginning of John--when he is hailed as the messiah on the slimmest of evidence--and then his incredulous (and soon to be ratified) doubt of his disciples' claims of understanding on the eve of his arrest.

Still later in John, Peter is admonished by Jesus to look after Jesus' flock.  One would be hard-pressed to invent an ordination that was a more deflating event than the agony session at the Sea of Tiberius.  It must not be lost, however, that Jesus emphasized "feed my sheep" as a concept over "tend my sheep."  This is the same Jesus who said he himself--in the most graphic terms--would feed the flock with his very body.  This is the same Jesus who, at the start of this same gospel, is described as the very means through which all Creation was formed--and this Creation is the source not merely of creatures but also of the means of their sustenance.

The enlivened core--the very heart--of Jesus' teachings is the uncompleted moment, the reaching for the next instant even as it portends of error and of alienation from the source of enlivening.  The heart of Jesus' teaching is the uncompleted arc--the unfinished story--not the fulfillment in this life of any aspirations of his creatures.  It is telling that Jesus speaks as often of the growth of the plant as he does of the life of the "breath of life" creatures, and yet organized Christianity does not really know what to do with the plant.  This is a tragedy.  The plant springs from a seed that Jesus calls dead, and yet we know that the seed is not dead other than as a metaphor.  Our souls--as Adam's--spring into this life from a seed-bed of unimaginable miraculous quality, and yet this seed-bed, being not God, is not perfect.  Who then can plumb the mystery of the source of our evil?  Who can say that evil does not permeate even the most prosaically biological--perhaps even mineral--phenomena?

This is the wrenching condition that afflicts Creation in the teachings of Jesus: the tracking of morality is not to be found in stories, but in the raw elements from which stories are created.  God does not wait, God does not need, to see the end of any story.  God knows, and God judges, the very primal urges of the least of his creatures.  The intention of God is that the fig tree be fruitful.  The insistence that such fruitfulness must be "in season" is an element of human arrogance.  God judges the creature's response to pre-conceptual urges, and urges are not comfortable residents of story-arcs--story-arcs develop when urges are frustrated and when urges conflict.  Jesus chided his disciples for thinking of harvest-times, and he told them to look around, for already the fields were white unto harvest.

This, then, is the proper conceptualization of moral matters in Jesus' teachings.  Moral matters are not described truly in stories--stories are the corpses of moral matters.  Stories start at beginnings, and yet moral matters have no beginnings, just jarring moments of awareness that moral scenarios have already begun.  Stories have endings, yet moral matters are decided in real-time by a judge who gives real judgments, not after-the-fact rationalizations of judgments.  It is as insipid for us to try to write or tell stories about such things as it would be insipid for us to tell a story on the one hand about how Jesus cursed one fig tree for being fruitless out of season, and a story on the other hand about how Jesus taught of a fig tree that was given a year's reprieve--and a full year at that.  Insipid, I say, because the mercy-story would seem to us to be complete and satisfying, while yet the out-of-season story would seem to be utterly jarring.  Or will we recognize at last that the God who judges all does indeed judge all--all moments, all thoughts, all urges, all responses to urges?

Jesus teaches that evil does not come from without, but rather from the heart.  There is no reason to think of this source of evil as any different from that which bedeviled Adam from the start.  The heart sends out urges, and the soul--that uncomfortable, ill-fitting, frustrated steward of the inner household--seeks (or should seek) to mold those urges into more wholesome things.  Those "things," however, are no more than sprouting tendrils reaching for the "skies" that are their aims.  Even the lowly plant reaches for the sky, or spreads itself upon the soil.  If the plant is not hewn down or chewed apart, it nonetheless will not describe an arc of seed-spreading and of crashing itself down to earth as some sort of "story"--it has lived merely moments, and the story (if imagined by any creature or categorized as such by the divine) is alien to that collection of urges that is the plant.

This is what connects us to all Creation, and this is what informs a truly enlivened moral sense.  Over and over again Jesus treats us as creatures who must live in moments, not because we are unable to foresee intended results or uncharged with attempting to attain them, but because the very act of foreseeing is as much treading on dangerous ground as it is laying prudent groundwork.  We are properly creatures of uncompleted arcs, creatures described through sprouting tendrils--twisting in winds and curved toward the decay of our energies or the expenditure of our lives.  What we must seek to incorporate into ourselves, and to give to each other, is every available sustenance we can collect.  We are properly nourishers of ourselves and our fellows, just as Jesus fed the sinner first (or encouraged others to do so) and tended to his or her moral conceptualizations later.  We are never to forget to feed the flock first, and to tend it later--because tending is what we do when we think we understand the courses of events--the story-arcs--of the Creation that only God understands.

I hope this will serve as a preface.

Into that Vortex in Courage

Jesus hits us with the greatest of challenges: "he that endureth to the end shall be saved" (Matthew 10:22).  What underlies such endurance is courage.  Courage is what remains when all else has been rationalized and temporized away.  Every other virtue can be channeled into an effectual vice because every other virtue can be seen to be "too much" within the conceptualizations of humanity.  Every other virtue can stand only when placed in some context of action.  Even love, which we are commanded to show to God and to all our neighbors, is operable only when it has an object.  Being less than perfect, our displays of love to God are always tinged by our less-than-perfect conceptualizations of God, and our displays of love to our neighbors can be effected only by us conjuring up more-than-deserved visions of our neighbors.

And so we might seek to elevate truthfulness to the paramount position, but to say that we must be ever more truthful in every regard means that we must be increasingly unsparing in our assessments of our own veracity--a task as ultimately doomed as it is necessary.  But to say that we must display love to God even when we know that we cannot conceptualize God, and to say that we must pursue truth even as we know that the twin of greater realizations of reality is the concomitant greater realization of our own ungenuine character--all this requires courage.

Courage needs no object.  Courage needs to have no object.  Courage operates all the more when its object is elusive.  In fact, to pursue courage in the service of some end is merely to display a fear of some adverse eventuality--that, in the final analysis, is not courage.  Courage in its true form is the determination to pursue the good even as all touchstones are removed.  Courage in its true form disavows all groundings in conceptuality.

Only Jesus, of course, in the framework of our thesis can display courage truly.  Jesus cries out in the end not to his Father, or to his Master, or to any of the other imaginings we humans have of the deity.  Indeed, as I have alluded to previously, only a perfect person can occupy the "child" position of the parent-child metaphor of God caring for us as a father cares for his children.  To say that God is the perfect Father is of limited comfort to us human children, who can neither remember perfect human fathers as models, nor can conceptualize perfectly of divine Fatherhood.  Paradoxically, of course, Jesus is the perfect Son to the perfect Father because Father and Son are one--at which point the metaphor breaks down, and is revealed to be of limited use to us.

Jesus calls out to the undefined God, and does so out of undiluted courage--which is the only courage that really exists, and which we cannot claim for ourselves.  We must settle for our pathetic imitations of courage, but that does not excuse our pathetic pretenses that our courage could ever suffice, or that our courage melded with other virtues could ever suffice.  Of course, theologians might protest that such admissions are intrinsic to the denominations' reliance on the various theories of "grace," but all such protests are unavailing whenever it might be shown that an attenuated notion of courage underlies, not merely our moral failings, but also our failings of understanding the simple words of Jesus and the Scriptures to which he subscribes.

Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil--and endless jibes have been thrown up against the notion that persons not knowing Good or Evil could be punished for the evil of disobedience.  Of course, those jibes rely on it being pivotal to the Eden story that good or evil are particularized entities or sets of entities.  Inasmuch as existence demands responses, and inasmuch as Adam was created as interacting with his surroundings, then the groundwork for courage has been laid.  Adam could have reached out for the Creator at hand, and have satisfied himself that exertion for that ineffable object was sufficient.  Adam's need for something else to keep him from being "alone" can be placed arguably at the feet of God, but that is mere conjecture about the abyss of conjectures surrounding Creation itself--to which the reader is welcome.

The forbidden Tree of Eden story makes sense only if morality--distilled in our argument into courage and also understood to be operable without conceptualizable context--existed already for Adam and Eve.  Adam and Eve sinned when they asked for the context--the knowledge privileged to God--of morality.  The grasping for the prize of the fruit was an act of cowardice, and was punished by an avalanche of fears.  This truth must also be seen in the gospel insistence (most puzzling otherwise) that the people at large were taught only in parables--while the disciples were seemingly privileged to hear the analyses of the parables.  This standard construction of the parable theme relies on two notions.  First, that the people at large were being deprived of a good, and second that some sort of blessing was being bestowed on the disciples.  A cursory search of the gospels will show that Jesus rewarded again and again the grasping attempts of the unlearned to brave new thresholds of understanding through intuitive means, and a cursory search of the scriptures will show the generalized disdain for conceptualized and categorized "wisdom" that Jesus must have reckoned lurked behind any ostensible blessing of hearing parables explained.

Subsuming (nay, discarding) particular contexts of morality under a generalized determination to lunge toward the ineffable at all costs is what it is to surrender one's life.  This is what it is to surrender one's world.  Courage is what this requires, both the courage to make the leap and also the courage to trust that an aversion to the contexts of conceptualized life does not deprive a person of the ability to remain still a responsible actor within the bounds of reality.  This is what the "Lord's Prayer" is about, and it is telling that conventional Christianity cannot grasp this.

Our Father which art in heaven: We must conceptualize God in some manner, but we cannot forget that the heavenly manifestation of any such concept is infinitely more perfect than we can even imagine, and it must be understood first and foremost as existing, as it were, in an infinitely unimaginable heavenly realm.

Hallowed be thy name: This is the inescapable implication of God being the master, not of some kingdom in the sky (the nature of which and therefore the master of which is open to conjecture) but rather of a realm so remote in perfection as to be something we can only rally our courage to lunge for.

Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven: The only proper expenditure of our energies is to act in accordance with a boundless kingdom that leaps to the will of God, not a theologian's imagined kingdom of constrained righteousness.  In the kingdom of God's will mountains leap to do the will of the believer's prayer, and in the kingdom of God's will all parochialism (from families to nations) bows before the believer's unutterable aspiration to live in the rarefied nature of God's angels.

Give us this day our daily bread: Reality intrudes, as it must, but it must not be acceded to any more than necessary.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors: This awesome statement of courage can exist in practice only when the believer trusts God to be awesomely generous in mercy.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: And, finally, the believer must fall back on petition, expressed (as most starkly here) in asking for the particulars of moral burdens to be lifted away, even as the onus of life's particulars remains for the person.

The world of the Lord's Prayer's aspirations is a ceaseless vortex that devours the particulars, the categories, and the conceptions of our accursed world, and to dive into that vortex in courage is to display morality in the only manner understandable in Jesus' teaching.

The Purses of Our Conceits

As I wrote in "Roused, Readied, Reaped," the substance of Jesus' conceptualization of the soul's proper outset to the journey of faith is the infant's first confrontation with existence.  To the newborn, existence is the manifestation of the (pre-conceptualized) Creator's beneficence.  Cries will be responded to, and the infant's touch will be reciprocated by the surrounding familial and social milieu.

It is true that--tragically--all too often such supports do not exist to a proper extent in a child's life.  This is the lamentable backdrop to the scriptural reassurance that the love of God is as a parent's--or, rather, as a parent's should be.  As the child grows to adulthood, it is ever more important that faith in the ultimate beneficence of the Creator is retained.  It is almost insulting, of course, to contend that the individual human being is required to conjure up a contention that existence as experienced is ultimately or objectively good--sometimes life is just lousy,

If the teachings of Jesus are to be adhered to, then the initial experience of earthly existence--the child's first confrontation with existence--must be recalled by the believer to an increasing--and increasingly more acute--extent.  This is the primordial experience of the individual locating himself or herself in the indiscernible mist--as indicated in John Chapter Three.  This "primordial experience" is to be contrasted with the unfortunate conceptualization so often abroad among humanity: that the "faith journey" (when viewed in terms of overt considerations) is something launched into at adolescence, when the individual can no longer assign the responsibility of religion to his or her parents.

However, with adulthood comes increasing weight to the considerations applicable to reiterations of the primordial experience.  Rather than becoming more and more assured of salvation, the adult in comparison to the child is better able to conceptualize damnation (and better able to view damnation as a lamentable end rather than as a set of scary phantasms)--to say nothing of the fact that death is getting nearer and nearer.

All this might seem rather harsh, but certainly no more harsh than the condemnations that Jesus leveled even at his closest companions in the space of an instant.  The glory of one's continual rebirth and the horror of one's continual defiling of the original purity of the newborn should clash in fruitful dialog in the mind of the believer.  And it is a necessary corollary to this that the teachings of Jesus do not, in fact, include the assurances attached to the sacraments or the conversion experiences that the denominations sell.

The Gospel of John is the perfect example of this.  Evangelists have differed vastly over the years about whether John is the proper gospel with which to first confront the prospective convert.  It is true that John begins with a sort of Creation Story (particularly enticing to the evangelist to use when the prospect seems passably familiar with Genesis), but there is one thing the Gospel of John lacks when employed by the evangelist who must sell the prospect on a denomination's take on the "salvation economy"--John has no salvation economy.

In the Gospel of John all Jesus promises the individual is the opportunity of service.  The only assurance Jesus gives to the awestruck Doubting Thomas is the opportunity to believe.  The only assurance Jesus gives to the grieving Peter who has shirked his duty is the opportunity to perform his duties.  The Gospel of John is shot through with Jesus telling people to do things.  Doing things is what Jesus requires of us, and if Jesus is really who we claim he is, then even the most basic conceptualizations we have about ourselves must melt away as we subsume ourselves to those duties.

Asking Jesus to give us perfect assurances (or asking Jesus' purported ministers to give us sacerdotal assurances, which is the same thing) is as foolish as asking our parents to be perfect for us.  "For us" is the important element in the above equation, because even if we substitute the perfect God for our parents in the equation, still we exist ourselves as the other calculated element--and we likely will not even know what we want, or what we should want.

The only salvation economy is for us to empty the purses of our conceits.

The Risk of Fear of Risk

Belief, especially as it is viewed realistically in its tenuous nature, is entwined necessarily with fear.  We hold beliefs as against those things we are afraid of, and we are afraid of losing our beliefs.

The Gospels, also as viewed realistically, begin and end with fear.  Mark starts with the dread--no matter how infused with joyful expectation--that attended the approach of an ancient oriental monarch.  Mark ends with the so-called "short ending," as they "fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid."  To say that this gospel is therefore necessarily "incomplete," is to decree that a gospel that begins with an expectation of the awesome advent of the monarch ought somehow to be discounted for ending with an expectation of the awesome advent of the monarch.

Matthew begins with apologetic maneuverings so fantastic as to draw up in their wake a slaughtering of infants apparently for no other purpose than to fulfill a prophecy about "Rachel" and "Bethlehem."  Matthew proper jolts to a start with the unsettling appearance of John the Baptist--as in Mark--and also, much as in Mark, the ending of Matthew has its "sepulchre" and "fear and great joy."  Matthew adds the promised appearance of Jesus to the Eleven in Galilee (with the sobering proviso that, even then, "some doubted"), but it should be noted that Jesus' recorded speech there--while of fundamental importance--is a natural extension of the basic Gospel message.  (What is not so natural, unfortunately, is the clumsy apologetic just previously, wherein the guards are bribed so as to accomplish something that could be arrived at just as easily by rolling the stone again over the tomb--especially considering that the local graveyards were pocked with empty tombs from the earthquake, and the streets of Jerusalem suddenly traversed by the resurrected "many bodies of the saints.")

The Gospel of John begins with the enigmatic poetry of its prologue, but as opposed to some sort of Infancy Narrative, what is presented is a challenging declaration of the cosmic nature of Jesus Christ--a presentation against the greatest of imaginable backdrops that is a presentation of the logic of the greatest of imaginable reigns.  After this, the narrative descends to the particulars of John from the desert, proclaiming the expectation of the monarch.  Finally we read the harrowing commission given to Peter by the "sea of Tiberius."  For all of its cosmic qualities, the idiosyncratic Gospel of John begins and ends like all the others--with awesome fear.

Then there is Luke/Acts.  Actually, the very necessity of the phrase "Luke/Acts" attests to the questionable quality of the apologetic that bookends the gospel.  The frantic pastings-together of a belief system in Acts are aptly presaged by the contrivances of Luke's gospel.  The very description in Luke Chapter One of John's parents ("they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless") would, were it part of an apocryphal gospel, be taken as thumping evidence of  the writing's falsity.  And the final business in Luke's gospel--at such variance with the others--of the disciples remaining in Jerusalem?  One need merely survey the politicking of the Book of Acts to see how important it was to the Jerusalem church to assert primacy.

Of course, the real substance of Luke begins with the unsettling words of John the Baptist and ends with the awestruck incomprehension of the disciples.  That is something Gospels do.  Fear is both the language and the logic of the Gospels.  Unfortunately, what theologians do typically is ordain themselves the dispellers of fear--after, of course, the faithful or prospectively-faithful have been prepped with a large dose of fear.  The chief appeal of Christian belief systems, as curated by the clergy, is the appeal--not of comfort--but of brands of fear-antidotes.

The comfort that Jesus promises can be understood as acting both benignly and in perfect organic harmony with the particulars of a situation.  The comfort that the denominations provide must be formulated and formalized.  This distinction exerts itself in particular as regards the element of risk in real life--and I will contend that the entire subject of "risk-fear" is shunned by the denominations.  This goes all the way back to the centuries of persecution endured by the early Church (before, of course, the early Church set itself to persecuting.)  Great theological controversy attended the question of admittance to communion of those who forswore Christianity under persecution--but at every turn there lurked the undeniable question: Might not simple chance or inexplicable circumstances occasion a setting in which one Christian was subject to persecution, and another not?  Could not the Almighty look into the heart of a person and know whether that person would withstand the temptation to recant, regardless of whether that situation arose in outward circumstances?

Indeed, when the element of risk is included in moral questionings, do not the contrivances of many theological assertions become apparent?  John the Baptist courted disaster when he decried the marriage of Herod and Herodias, and yet John must have known--as Jesus asserted continually--how "adulterous" was their entire generation.  Could John have considered seriously that Herod was viewed as a moral exemplar, and was leading anybody astray?  And if John did well to criticize Herod, why did Jesus not do the same?  Was Jesus weighing the element of risk?  Or was John perhaps just a cantankerous busybody?

And the question of risk involves the element of fear--or does it?  When Jesus walked through a crowd that saw fit to stone him, was Jesus beset at that moment with fear, or was he just going through an ugly pageant?  Might Jesus have merely prevented the crowd from dragging him to the precipice to begin with?  And when Jesus at Cana told his mother that his time had not yet come, was there an element in his assertion to the effect that his doom might be thereby hastened?  When Jesus in that same Gospel of John is described as "cleansing" the Temple much earlier in his ministry than in the other gospels, is there perhaps a hint that he was in the habit of going to Jerusalem to cause trouble, not knowing which venture would be his last?

The question of risk attends all examinations of fear, yet any examination of the human person by God can operate independently of the happenings of limited lifetimes of finite situations, or of opportunities for situations.  Any human indulgence, when seen in light of some selfless service that it might supplant, could be thought to involve risk.  The ancient (or at least as-old-as-the-Reformation) question of whether a person can lose his or her salvation can arise here, but it can also be revealed here to be essentially quirky.  Can an unreformed glutton be nonetheless a redeemed soul?  If yes, then cannot any other "sin" (and gluttony, quaintly, was once thought a great sin) be essentially overlooked as long as "saving faith" is active?  If no, then would not any other sin--regardless of the moral theologians' endless rankings and categorizations--suffice to damn a soul, all other considerations aside?

Here is where the antidotes come in, whether in the form of sacraments, or contentions that salvation once gained can never be lost, or that remorse in times of abstinence (perhaps occasioned by mere satiation) can suffice.  None of this, however, answers the question of whether a person's moral state is not merely a question of simple circumstances.  Some of the surviving Eleven doubted they saw Jesus in Galilee, even when he stood in his flesh before him.  We might claim that we would have been among the un-doubters, but that is easily enough said.  Easy enough, would it be also to say, that Jesus would have not been betrayed if not for Judas.  Do we know this?  If Judas had fallen away before the Transfiguration, would that have left enough time for a new purse-bearer to be corrupted?

Of course, it might be said that Judas' acts were foreseen by the divine (though the tantalizing notion of what the incarnate Jesus knew at any given point can arise), but that scarcely answers the question of what any of the other disciples (or we) would have done under the same influences as Judas.  Indeed, as I have written in "Roused, Readied, Reaped," it might well be said that all of the Eleven betrayed Jesus.  Moreover, for some time the apostles were of as little use to Jesus and to the truth, after the crucifixion, as were the guards who became like dead men.  For all we know, in every moral import the judgment might be that all of the Twelve rendered themselves effectively as dead men.  Judas just used a rope.

This leads to the sort of place to which the Gospels should be seen to be going.  Jesus, at the end of John, does not provide Peter with some formalized absolution, or indeed with any comfort except that he expects Peter to render further service.  Peter is told three times that he must be of service to the flock--with the "service" and the "flock" being excruciatingly undefined (as Peter's expected unfortunate end is excruciatingly undefined.)  In short, Peter is expected to bear the burdens of all humanity, to the extent to which he is capable.  That burden is indistinguishable from penance, and Peter embarks upon it in anguish.

Essentially, for Peter (as for us all) the extent and manner and depth of his sinfulness is such as to encompass every foul act in every foul circumstance to which humanity might be subject.  Certainly, no conception of deserved damnation would be utterable in very different terms.  That is the very business that we as humans must be about, avoiding every risk of evil when we can, and reckoning that the very final reckoning to which we must be subject is one in which God knows not only all we do in every situation we face, but in every situation that such beings as we might face.

This is as close as Peter gets to a pronouncement of absolution, and the fact that he still has duties to perform for God is as close as Peter gets to comfort.  Of course, none of this changes the fact that finite, particular situations will face Peter (and us), but here--as ever--it is the duty of the believer to assume the mantle of the least deserving, and to accord the higher place (or at least the benefit of every assumption) to others.  Peter is reminded of his duties.  Peter is made mindful of his duties to all, regardless of circumstances.  It is entirely fitting that the gospel ends with Peter being admonished that the fate of "the disciple whom Jesus loved" is none of Peter's business (just as Jesus refrains from promising that disciple anything definite.  Indeed, if the fancy of the early Church about the beloved John is entertained, the fate of Peter, "when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not," would apply with almost equal salience to the fate of John on Patmos.")