A couple of years ago, I wrote a post in "Roused, Readied, Reaped" called "A Life is a World." I have finally realized what I was getting at. Our existence is conceptual--we stand before God not on the world of his making (in the moral calculus) but on what we have made of the world. That is what Jesus was getting at--the kingdom of God that we might ever approach but never reach. The approach--the determination of "Not my will, but thine"--is what matters. That is why Jesus never tells us "the Way"--there is no "Way." I would be ridiculous for Jesus to give a us path through the world, when simultaneously we mold the terrain in which we move.
Our lives--that is, the existences to which we hold and Jesus tells us to forsake--are our worlds. That is the true tragedy of Eden. "Did God really say . . . ?" functions most potently not as a forsaking of duty (for the first couple might have been admonished gently by God for millennia), but as the forging of a humanly-contemplated and therefore lesser reality. Even now, we human beings--we of the "it is not good to be alone"--make our worlds out of our social interactions.
This is why, for example, it is ridiculous to speak of "natural law." If it might be said that always and everywhere humanity has held that murder is wrong, then it might also be said that always and everywhere humanity has proclaimed various exceptions to that rule. To say that such exceptions reflect a degradation of moral resolve is too easy a retort, since those exceptions can be (and often are) held to be moral imperatives. It would be as apt to say, rather than that the "natural law" as apprehended by humans condemns murder, that instead the existence of conventions now approving, now condemning "murder" is the inevitable outgrowth of humanity's apprehension of its place in the natural order.
And it is the communal esteem for the existence of moral conventions that is the true foundation of our existences, our lives, and the conceptualized "worlds" against which we define ourselves. Adam and Eve crouched in terror in a world of their own making (and they would have it visited upon them with a vengeance.) And just Eve and the snake shared the making of a world of conceits. It is indeed ironic that Scripture is held simultaneously to espouse the "natural law" of God seen in Creation, and also to declare that the Creation was gravely distorted by The Fall.
And so Paul writes to this person and that person about how the nature of God is seen in Creation. Jesus is not fooled, and he is not so impious as to extrapolate God from the existing imperfection. The "foundation" of the existence of Paul the apostle (though he fails to expresses it) is not the God-evoking skies, but rather the God-invoking communication (or anticipated or hoped-for or imagined communication) among people, or between people and God. This is as much the "nature" of the "world" we inhabit as any ostensible concrete reality that Paul credits himself with estimating.
This is why, when a young man agrees with Jesus that what matters is love for God and people, Jesus does not tell him in what direction to travel next. The young man holds within himself not merely the desire to travel the path, but the terrain of the path itself--a dimension-less realm of connections with others and with God. This is why, when "two or three" gather "in his name," nothing will be withheld from actualization in the world defined by their communion.
This is also why we must relinquish our holds on our lives. That which we reserve to the realm of ourselves can never be part of the commonwealth to be shared with others, or the kingdom to be shared with God.
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