The Turmoil of Our Infantile Experiences

In a previous post I wrote, regarding God's warnings and stated punishments directed at humans in Genesis:

"Just what kind of 'punishments' are these handed out by God?  Cain, sentenced to be a vagabond upon the earth, becomes nothing of the sort.  Eve, of the greater pains in childbirth, exclaims how God has aided her through it.  Adam, sentenced to hard and bitterly unfruitful labor, finds sustenance for centuries, and if the ancient patriarchy pattern held for him, he spent more of his life sweating over his bed than over his crops.  And weren't they supposed to die, who ate of the tree?

"Jesus provides an explanation for this, and it is inherent in Jesus' casual use of the concept 'death.'  Within this framework . . . both the First Couple and their murderous first son died.  They were each thrust from the moral scenario they knew into an apparently--and therefore emotionally--more challenging one.  This is the punishment, but the lively and individualized nature of it does not sit well with Christianity . . . ."

Indeed, the "lively and individualized nature" of the truth about God's wrath is, in Jesus' teaching, a nature intrinsic to the very matter of sin and its remedy.  As foreshadowed in the numerous Old Testament relentings of God about things he has threatened--so hideously vexing to theologians who waste their lives on things like arguing for the "righteous wrath" of slaughtering Canaanite infants--God's moral examination of humans resides not so much in people being liable for prescribed punishments, but rather being responsible for digesting and acting upon the individual experience of acting wrongly.

It cannot be missed that Jesus sets great stock in persons being reconciled to each other, before they might presume to approach the realm of this or that sacerdotal relationship to God.  The very notion of vows or offerings to God as satisfaction for sin is ludicrous in even the merest moment of sober reflection, and Jesus' teachings are consonant with that realization.  Consciousness of guilt in the unbounded realm of the Perfect Infinite is the seedbed--whether or not God lays the seedbed, plants the seeds, or causes them to grow or fruit is a set of human conjectures that thrive precisely when we press away from ourselves the soul-saving gall of guilt.  The kingdom of God is the true realm, and its citizens know nothing but the kingdom, consisting of nothing in themselves.

It may be thought that I describe merely a self-delusional state in which guilty, damnable humanity promise themselves that they can will into effect their submergence into a mystical bliss of convenient, impersonal oblivion.  What then, it might be contended, of the ministry and divinity of Jesus?  Does not Jesus accuse humanity of sin, and prescribe a remedy?  In truth, Jesus' demands are as exacting as any concocted by theologians, but Jesus' remedy resides in the real-time experiences of persons--experiential moments as past-less and as primordial as the thought-writhings of the infant, and all the more so as the sin is horrid and its memory fresh.  The past is gone, and in the calculus of Jesus (excepting, of course, the possibility of amends to wronged parties) the past is irrelevant--what matters is the sin-resoundings of the present.

This is the pattern in the matters to which Jesus subscribes.  We are not so much as told in Genesis whether the sacrifices of Cain and Abel were meant as thanks, as pleadings for future blessings, or as propitiations for sin (or even if the brothers differed in their understandings), yet the theologians launch immediately into conjectures about whose sins were forgiven.  For all we know, nothing but Cain's downcast attitude counted against him, and it is this alone that God mentions.

Tragically, of course, Cain responded horribly to the episode.  When accused by God of the murder, however, the tenor of the accusation comports pivotally with the notion that Cain did not understand what he was doing, and had to have it impressed upon him.  And even then, the fugitive-and-vagabond-of-unfruitful-efforts prediction does not come true for Cain--for all we know (as distinct from his squirming, finger-pointing parents) Cain might be the first truly "redeemed" personage in history.

And what except the facing-up to horrid crimes, contrasted with a conviction of the innocence of Jesus, saves the romantically-titled Good Thief?  The idea that the wretched man had a "saving faith" in Jesus as God in the flesh (or whatever churchly concoction of statements-of-faith the propagation of which the churches are apparently necessary for) is not supported by the text, and by contrast even the most eager and assiduous of Jesus' followers did not grasp "the faith" before the Resurrection.

The Good Thief owned up to his sinfulness.  Judas Iscariot owned up to his sinfulness.  We know that those men were in agony, as--in the recounted episodes--Cain and his father were in agony.  Adam's great sin (were we to call it that) happened in a state to which we cannot lay claim, and the tale of Judas does not pass without him being invaded by Satan and goaded by his Master.  And yet typically the theories of sin and redemption and damnation supposedly encapsulated by those harrowing stories have been formulated on quiet, classical writing-tables, even as the voice of Jesus beseeches us to look for truth in the turmoil of our infantile experiences, arising--as the wind--we know not where.

The infant is admonished for wrongdoing in committing some doing that he or she does not understand--there is no denying that.  By God's grace the infant accepts such correction.  By God's grace we also can address the necessity of confronting the misdeeds that have overtaken us.  It is in such situations, and not in stagey and retrospectively-curated salvation moments, that operate the essentials of Jesus' teachings.