Jesus describes us confronting questions of risk--the king deciding whether he has enough soldiers to accomplish a defense, the builder deciding whether he has sufficient funds to complete a tower. As with other sayings of Jesus that the denominations don't really know what to do with, the standard notion is that Jesus is counseling his followers on prudence. Actually, he is really telling his followers about salvation--about the portal to the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God--from which Creation was thrust when being propelled to this side of the nothingness of the Genesis beginning--is, of course, that to which we would desire to return. The instants of internal nothingness that we experience with each shock of existence--such instants individually being sufficient as recapitulations of Creation--are outreachings of the divine. Each instance in which we don't know who or what we are is a mercy--a beckoning from God to return to uncontextualized faith in the goodness of our Maker. That we are inclined (though perhaps even in the smallest of increments) to view the visible--and even the scarcely describable--of all of our imaginings to be flawed or less-than-desirable, is a matter of little consequence. Jesus treats "Father" and "Son" as concepts with which humanity is confronted, and presumes that we can scarcely handle concepts themselves, let alone handle any prospect of our conceits sitting unperturbed inside us as framings of the divine.
There is no framing the divine. There is no building up of any foundation or structure of thought that allows for a predictable approach to the kingdom of God. Our relationship to the divine makes mock of any groundwork for salvation, because anything we can imagine--visible or invisible--is tainted by our limited qualities, and is therefore as ripe a source of dishonor to the divine, as a source of honor. Yet, of course, it is incumbent on us to strive for the kingdom of God--even as we are thankful for the invitations (as I described above) of the perplexity-moment regenerations of our perspective.
Our existence punctuated by such invitations necessitates responses, but we will never understand the call to such responses if we do not understand those responses properly as leapings out of context--as strivings that we cannot be sure will succeed, in part because we are not even sure of the conditions under which they are attempted. Our strivings for the kingdom of God are the necessitated reflections of the beckonings to the kingdom of God that are our perplexity-moments. Our strivings are leapings from nowhere into nowhere, based on the inescapable requirement of seeing risk as merely a conceit of limited beings, there being no chance-elements inherent in the ultimate divine order.
And so we puzzle, and we calculate, and we predict, and we reckon where our chances lie. All of this is to be expected of us in our conscious lives, and invariably we (having no choice) will make such risk-calculations as we can. And then we are confronted by moments when we must act on what we believe we bring to bear to crises. Our thoughts tell us that "maybe this will happen," or "maybe that will happen," but of course in the realm of the divine there are no "maybe's." Risk or chance or uncertainty are conceits of limited creatures, and human beings have made art forms of indulging fascination with such things. We purport to be unsettled by the "chance" elements of quantum theory, but we might just as well revel in the certainty we have indulged ourselves in, that this-or-that type of particle is exactly the same as another particle of that type. Meanwhile we can act as though mounds and measures and test tubes of compounds are predictably quantifiable--until we are confronted by the fact that our measures are fallible, and one patient in a million is given an overdose of some assiduously-measured concoction.
We cannot surmise or calculate about our relationship to the divine, because we don't really know who and what we are. Trying to figure such things out is what we do as human beings--though even describing our predicament so is a betrayal of our initial contention that "we don't really know who and what we are," because we actually have very settled (as though such things could be quantified by words like "very") ideas about who and what we are. Are we human beings? We certainly don't hesitate to describe ourselves so. Or are we better described as "creatures" or even as "aspects of creation?" If we are truly acting as though the existential questions about ourselves are to be confronted unsparingly, ought we not to reckon on the possibility that the fig tree might share with us the quality of moral responsibility? If we don't really know who and what we are, might we also reckon that we and the fig trees can be held responsible by our Maker to succeed in all tasks at all times? Are we not failures? Do we not deserve to be cursed? Or is it not generally more the case that we drag a universe of predispositions and calculations-of-what-is-probably-right along with us when we purport to examine unsparingly our predicaments?
All of this coalesces in the distinction that Jesus makes between how God thinks and how humanity thinks. Peter opens his mouth and says that Jesus is the Messiah. It should be noted that this is not the first time that a human being refers to Jesus as the Messiah--making all the more important Jesus' characterization of Peter's utterance (in terms of its origin rather than its originality.) Jesus tells Peter that Peter's realization of Jesus' messiahship came from above. Peter was confronted by a moment, and in that moment--in which we need not assume he was any more self-possessed than in his "did not know what to say" babblings at the Transfiguration--he leapt to an assertion about Jesus' nature. Peter did not draw his utterance forth as the product of any assessment he made about that character of the expected Messiah. Peter simply thrust his voice forward across the inscrutable abyss that exists between us and any hope of understanding the divine.
Of course, in a matter of mere moments Jesus is rebuking Peter for objecting to Jesus' predication of his own demise. In this instance Peter is measuring the prospect that Jesus has just mentioned against Peter's assessment of the Messiah--his assessment of what the Messiah's ministry must be. Peter is thinking as humanity thinks, not as God thinks.
We are all Peter. We are all consciousnesses who experience the most important experiences when we are not conscious of them. This blog is devoted to the notion that the most basic elements of human thought-life have been ignored in the two-thousand-year process of trying to understand the Gospels. The Gospels speak of moments leaping at us, and of moments in which we leap back. We could imagine that such moments happen in once-in-a-lifetime "in-breaking" calls from above and once-in-a-lifetime "conversion" moments, or we could imagine that such moments of call and response attend every flickering of our nervous systems, but the result is the same. Jesus tells us there is something to the idea of "thinking as God thinks." We have told ourselves that we can "figure out" the Gospels. We could scarcely have burdened ourselves with any more impossible task--with any more defiant and futile notion of how to respond to the accounts of Jesus' ministry.
If we spend our lifetimes on the projects, we might move some iota more toward understanding (in a depressingly backward progress) the very first words of the Gospels and of Genesis. It should be comforting that those very words tell us that the promised kingdom of God is to be found back across that abyss of nothingness-swallowing-nothingness, and that such a promise is implicit in the quaking and quickening aspects of our passing moments of unsettlement.
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