Not So Foreign and Forbidding

And now, of course, we have to deal with the unfortunate typically Christian regard for Jesus-as-homunculus--the attitude, for example, that the Jesus who feels the anguish of every rape victim could not have been violated by Pilate's garrison, or that the Jesus who cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsake me?" meant something other than, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Christianity has not been able to squirm away from the realization that Jesus is fully God and fully human, but Christianity has been more than adept at shrinking Jesus into a theologians'-realm of limited and qualified interpretations of his statements.

This affects most acutely the "how" of salvation, and in an even more monument fashion than, for example, the way that Christianity can transmute Jesus' warning to the metaphorical steward (on pain of horrible punishment) into a finger-waggling at grace-assured "saints" (on pain of momentary embarrassment before the Throne of Judgment, followed by an imperceptibly-diminished experience of unimaginable bliss through eternity.)

The "how" of salvation can never be presented in some watered-down version of its psychological and emotional intensity.  Twice in the Gospels is the story told of Jesus being asked for his right hand and left hand in heaven.  Jesus says to the petitioners, "can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?  and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"  While "drink" can be interpreted as straightforward suffering (like how some Christians claim a portion of Christ's agonies by being forced to work the occasional Sunday for a secular government), "baptism" implies a discrete and transformational passage--and an apparently inescapable passage, given that none of humanity can claim beforehand the closeness to Jesus to which all must aspire.

Simple prudence, when deprived of group-think and the contrivances of winnowed "apostolic" inheritance, will dictate that Jesus--who said we might perform greater works than he--intended his suffering to be a pattern of salvation, not a commentators'-template of musings about substitution.  The Jesus by whom and through whom Creation was made (and is sustained) is a substitute for all--else the "very good" of the Creation be annihilated by the perfection of God.

And so we do not know the "how" of salvation.  Might we deduce that "how" if we understood the "who, what, where, when, and why" of our existences?  Who knows?  We know we don't understand such things.  The Jesus who said to "seek" did not tell us to stack ostensible "knowns" one upon another, as is done in insipid catechisms or the condescending "Let us reason together" prating of radio preachers.

The "seeking" of Jesus is a path, or a gate, or a pearl found while shopping for something else, or a treasure stumbled over in a field--or a parentage of ineffable longing grasped when the parentage apparently rooted in the things of the earth is seen to be as solid as the wind.  On the other hand, the "how" of salvation--and who knows how such longing arises?--is not so foreign and forbidding a challenge when we realize we don't really know anything else.