There is an echoing, even achingly mournful quality to the way in which Jesus enters upon and discusses the topic of salvation with The Woman at the Well in John 5. "Thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water," is a phrase that describes most potently an emptiness, an emptiness refrained in Jesus' subsequent declaration that the woman and her fellow Samaritans "worship ye know not what." Eventually, of course, Jesus--though he declares that "salvation is of the Jews"--says that true worship ("in spirit and in truth") will transcend place and denomination.
We will visit this well again, because it shows the proper outworking of the proper understanding of "the beginning" (as Jesus phrases it) of humanity. The foundation of Jesus' thought as a logical process is located in Genesis, but we have chosen over the ages to misunderstand Genesis. Eden was not a paradise as we would like to understand it. In our general conceptions, "paradise" is a place without any down-sides. This does not hold true for the Eden that Genesis describes, though the denominations have tried to squirm away from that fact.
With Edenic humanity there was sin. I have written at length--because everything seems to circle back to it--that the declaration that "it is not good for the man to be alone" shows a moral disconnect between God and Adam. That there was sin before "The Fall" is, I believe, indicated at the "to be alone" stage, but in any event there had to be the sins of doubt and of dalliance with evil for either of the First Couple to have as much as entertained the serpent's entreaties. We would do well to try--without saying too much or too little--to specify the moral failings that antedated "The Fall."
And those moral failings could never be too small to be--over the course of who-knows-how-long--corrosive eventually. Yet what were those trace elements of sin, even of sin-in-the-making? Genesis says that Adam was charged with responsibilities to the Garden. Though such tasks might have been (in our estimations) light, even enjoyable, nonetheless they were tasks, and the inklings at least of fear must have resided in Adam's daily choices of how diligently to perform God's demands. And, of course, fear was the motivation employed by God to dissuade Eve and Adam from eating of the forbidden tree. So there was fear in Eden, and no human--no matter how close to the perfection that only God possesses--can ever process and respond to fear perfectly. Fear occasions sin.
And there was falsehood in the Garden. The first humans were given to understand time, and time invites memory and anticipation, and limitations of thought and especially of moral capacity produce inevitably fantasies about the past and fancies about the future. "Did God really say . . . ?" need have been nothing more nor less than any other question about objective reality with which we humans are faced. Raw doubt, of course, is not sinful, but we do not stop there. We misremember things, and we help ourselves misremember things. We anticipate things (and gauge risks) in fanciful fashions, infused always with our less-than-elevated desires. For us to think is for us to engender falsehood. Falsehood occasions sin.
The first couple (indeed, we must assume the first man alone) knew sin. Adam is not recorded (at least, pre-"Fall") as experiencing shame, or jealousy, or anger, or self-pity, or pride, or lust--though of course Genesis is soon awash with such things. Eden seems besmirched only with fear and falsehood, and I suppose some moral theologian might wish to examine whether those two deleterious elements might be thought to engender all other sins. That need not concern us here.
What we do need to consider here is the notion of how God might have addressed fear and falsehood in Adam (in a way that Adam's desires appear to have invited.) The Adam who did not do well alone is provided (after some experimentation) with a companion whom he did not have to fear--as he feared God. This Adam--who could never be thought to grasp the concept of the Almighty, and who can only be expected to have incubated some falsehoods thereby--was provided with a companion whom he might hope to understand. Eve was an "help meet," and--at least to our limited and troubled understandings--one could scarcely imagine a more nearly-perfect set of conditions for a humanity that consisted of a population of two.
Of course, "nearly-perfect" was not going to be good enough. We might only conjecture how such things might play out, but as good a theory as any would have Adam and Eve getting along with themselves and with God for nearly measureless eons--and then things might start to go awry. Even if the degradations presaging the serpent's triumph occurred over the passing of centuries, still that would appear in the general accounting to be a precipitous decline. And this precipitous decline might have taken the form a such a steep plunging as to be recorded as the misdeeds of mere minutes, of mere moments.
Yet for what did Adam and Eve exchange their dive into fear and falsehood? (For surely their fear and falsehood increased.) They ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, yet they had always had recourse, when presented with moral questions, to ask the advice of God. "Ask, and it shall be given you" would have applied to them as surely as to us. They are perfect examples to us of how human beings shunt aside the blessings offered by God. Moreover, they would presumably have been less burdened than we by many miles and many centuries of confusion and obfuscation.
And now Jesus presents us with the notion that the blessings of God are ours for the asking--if we ask in faith. Just as they were Adam's and Eve's for the asking. Just as they were the Samaritan Woman-at-the-Well's for the asking--even as the Samaritan populace had known so many confusing "miles and centuries." And so--though often clouded and confused by circumstances--the offering of Christ has been extended from the very "beginning" (that is, the very beginning of Adam's existence.) There is no need for "Fall's" and "covenants" and "dispensations," and indeed Jesus plays with such concepts like markers in a children's game. Now something is marked in time, now it is forever. Now something is local, now it is ubiquitous. The elements of existence manifest in a swirling confusion below the majesty of God, while yet we humans think of piety as wrestling and restraining into place some version of contemplated existence over which we can drape our fancies of the divine.
And so we are left with our wants and our worries, just like the Woman at the Well. And, like her, we are told that the blessings of God are ours for the asking. Indeed, they have always been humanity's for the asking. Adam scratched a living from the soil, because getting a living from the soil involved scratching and sweating. It is not to be forgotten that this "curse" is phrased as a prediction, though Adam's limitations (and ours) make the prediction true, and make the prediction the same as a sentence. If we really had faith, we could solve every drought and every famine by compelling the oceans in Jesus' name to surge forth with fresh water and ripe grain. Jesus tells us that we could do such things if only we had the slightest faith, or was he just wasting his breath about trees and mountains leaping into the sea?
This is the horror and the waste of humanity's existence, as it has been from Adam's time. It should be as nothing of an intellectual stretch (as indeed Jesus treats it as nothing of an intellectual stretch) for us to see our world as a great feast offered to us by the most intimate ministrations of Jesus--by Jesus presenting his very self, the self by whom and through whom Creation was made, as the flesh and blood by which we are fed. The conceptualization may be believed or not, but the conceptualization can be at least articulated in a taste of its power. More than the rain from heaven does the blood of Jesus pour itself out for us if we will but accept it, and more than all the "meat" that is the bounty of the earth does the flesh of Jesus nourish those who will accept it. Again, there is not compulsion to believe this, but the denominations are in such fervor to produce something that will be believed that they squeeze the offered blessings of Jesus down into the articles and the accoutrements of ritual, and into metaphors small enough to be accepted as tokens of communal religious exchange.
No comments:
Post a Comment