The True True Joy

There are a few observations to be made after one concludes that life versus death is a mode of binary analysis that describes existence in the teachings of Jesus.  It is rather jarring to understand the progress of moral situations not as cases of greater or lesser infractions and greater or lesser positive deeds, but rather as cases of greater or lesser murders and greater or lesser life-savings.  More pointedly, it is jarring to understand that there are truly no cases of "lesser" things--every act, every moment, is a totality of existence.

This is not to say that proportion, in its consideration being a goad both to understanding and to action, is absent in Jesus' teaching--it is just that proportion nearly always ends up carrying as much irony as import.  Jesus might look at us and decide that we deserve to be castigated in the final analysis by the malefactors of Sodom and Gomorrah, but it would be insipid to contend that a true weighing and balancing of relative depravity is the actual substance of Jesus' pronouncement.  Every sinful act is always worse than every other sinful act.  The God who brought us into the sphere of moral action by giving us life acts in no unhinged way by deciding that moral failings on our part constitute our destruction of that very phenomenon of life.

Understandably, the notion that we are perennial destroyers of life will lead to terror, remorse, and guilt.  At this point the denominations reveal their shallowness in substance by attempting to reveal to their adherents (and potential adherents) how this or that theological formulation gives assurance that--given that the formulation is satisfied--terror, remorse, and guilt need be no more.  The denominations' brutal insistences grind over the surface of the earth, and over the thought-lives of humans, making the existence of terror, remorse, and guilt not, as that trio should be, stimuli for improved behavior, but rather making that threesome in the adherent's mind cause for him or her to doubt their own moral status, if not sanity.

Why shouldn't we be terrified, remorseful, and guilty?  In the end, the only thing we have to be terrified of is not having been always terrified in our lives.  The only thing we have to be remorseful of is not having been always remorseful in our lives.  The only thing we have to be guilty of is not having been always guilt-ridden in our lives.  It is ridiculous that any theologies that call themselves "Christian" would litter the earth with notions that a deathly misapprehension is evinced by people who can be staggered by sudden, perhaps unbidden, convulsions of realization of their own depravity.  To fall afoul of Jesus is to be called by him a child of the devil, and the slightest (and perhaps most "understandable") contradiction of Jesus' teaching can earn us "Get thee behind me, Satan."

I referred above to "shallowness" of denominations that "grind over the surface of the earth" because an attachment to that which is worldly is revealed in the standard understandings of that which is held to be the collection of opposites to terror, remorse, and guilt.  Surely, the notion goes, our loving God wanted us to be assured, to be soothed, and to be set free from guilt.  Surely the observable evidences of our God's love for us--life, nature, sustenance, even abundance--are meant to be sources of joy, and surely it is impious to believe that our loving Father would withhold such things.

What is lost to the denominations, however, is the fact that the element of command is the overarching logic of Jesus' teachings about God.  God is the Father who will not withhold good things from us--until (and possibly in a manner not distinguishing between "believer" and "heathen") he does withhold good things from us.  We are commanded to believe in a God who gives good things--we are not to believe that God will give good things.  We are to be free from worry about such things because the sovereign divine exists, and for no other reason.  "Evidences" of the benevolence of our Father God are just the scattered shards of happenstance, sunlit on the one side by a set of impressions that fill us with comfort, and shadowed on the other side by the reminder (the true blessing of any element of Creation) that we can forget the God who Is--and Who is all that can really claim to Be.

"True joy" (or any such formulation) as described by the denominations involves a "life" free from fear about salvation and a "life" rejoicing in the benevolence of God.  Such "joy" has causes understandable to the believer, but the very notion of true joy being understandable is paradoxical nonsense.  Adam was created to prefer existing over not.  Only then did Adam find himself surrounded by an existence.  Adam was created to enjoy communion with God.  Only then did Adam come to understand--falteringly, as with us all--of what that communion might consist.  The only joy is the existence of God, and the only true joy comes from a conceptual nothing that is the existence of God--not a "nothing" because of any lack, but because of the absolute absence of deficit--being therefore inconceivable to us.

The only joy in any earthly blessing is because God exists.  The only existence of any earthly blessing is because God exists.  The only persistence of any earthly blessing is because God exists.  All this is easy to say, but it is more sobering to understand that all that exists besides God must be less than God.  We might contend--to try to invert the issue--that some things that exist are better than the devil himself, but those very words should wither in our mouths.  We might as well argue over the relative depravity of Sodom versus Gomorrah, as to argue over whether anything that is not God is better than any other such thing.

Invariably, then, the only goodness of anything is because of the God in it.  Theologians can argue over whether God is separate from Creation, or whether Creation can only have its being in God.  As much as any other human beings, theologians can be damned.  Jesus taught that wine can be his blood, and bread can be his body.  Theologians have damned each other over the intricacies therein.  The Gospel of John, however, does not dwell on intricacies.  The Gospel of John makes Jesus' creation of Creation the signal fact of Creation--and makes this Creation "through" Jesus undecipherable by any process we can understand.  Just as joy springs from nothing other than the existence of God (and could just as well be said to spring from "nothing" as we understand it), so also everything that can be observed or experienced springs from nothing other than the existence of God--making all squabblings about such notions as "pantheism" meaningless.

To say that the elements of Creation can bring us joy is true enough, and it is also true to say that Creation is good (or was originally good and then was degraded by the Fall but still we should call it "good" in deference to its benevolent Creator--so silly can we be.)  What is most important is the fact that this "joy" in the "good" of Creation is, in the teachings of the Gospels, just as ineffable as to say that this joy springs from nothing but the existence of God, since Jesus sustains the burden of the non-Godness of Creation, and suffers all of its pains.  The counterbalance of every pleasure, every beauty, every invigoration we enjoy in Creation is the timeless pain of the crucified Jesus.

None of this should be really all that surprising.  For example, though institutional Christianity holds the bizarre notion that marriage was the "original design" for humanity--when Adam's untrammeled communion with God was the true original design--Jesus is not fooled.  Jesus expects that his hearers ought to understand that the reconciliation of the saved in heaven would be a return to the true original intended state, with the Scriptures making this plain, and with the power of God to effect this result being unquestioned.  There will be no marriages in heaven, though the dimensionless heaven will accommodate persons who arose from earthly marriages.

Similarly, as reflected in the teachings about bread and wine, the Scriptures teach that all that is good and abiding in Creation is indistinguishable from its benevolent Creator, and indeed it is only that which is "good" (and existing in manifestations frustrating all our lores and sciences) about anything presented to us that will abide.  Creation was created through Jesus, and the Jesus-bestowal in Creation will abide.  This is the Scripture, and this is the power of God.  That we eat Jesus and drink Jesus as the only abiding effect of eating and drinking--this ought to be as natural to us as, well, eating and drinking.

Joy comes from God, and he intended joy for us.  Joy does not come from Creation, as we might understand it.  Creation as we might understand it is the realm in which we experience terror, remorse, and guilt--and it is good that we do so.  Joy will intrude itself upon us in the process.

The True Greater Love

At the end of the preceding post, I wrote,

"Now we can begin to see Jesus' attentions to the ideas of life and death--at least in a more comprehensive view than as physical life and death, on the one hand, and eternal life and death on the other . . . . In the teaching of Jesus, the life-and-death binary is not of particular application.  Rather, it is the framework of all of our existence . . . When we buoy others up, we give them life.  When we drag them down, we give them death."

Of course, there are times and situations in which the desire to buoy others up might be misplaced--but giving others support or ratification when they need quite their opposites is not to give life at all.  Moreover, the same consideration need apply to ourselves as well.  Much of what we do for ourselves or regarding ourselves is done so that we might have a "life" as we understand it, and as we hope for it to be.

But "life," in the context of Jesus' teachings, is not a possession.  As a boundless condition inhabiting all of existence, life is understood as the manifestation of good--a manifestation present or absent in its degree of strength, not in its location.  In certain contexts, the objectively-existing life of another can be more of "life" to us than our own existence, just as the rejoicing in houses, land, or goods retained by others can be for us a possession of those things more deeply and abidingly than they are for the "owners."  In truth, we do not "own" even our personal physical lives, and the propensity (despite with what difficulty it might be dredged up) to share our lives with others must include by necessity the willingness to die (or to embrace any degree of death-like renunciation) in service to those we love.

This is the reasoning behind Jesus' otherwise-curious assertion that greater love has no person, than to give up life for his or her friends.  By "otherwise-curious," I refer to how awkwardly this expression of self-abnegation fits with the conventional understanding of "life" in Christianity.  Would not standard Christianity contend that a "greater love" than that described by Jesus would be a self-sacrifice in service to one's enemies, in contrast to one's friends?  Would not standard Christianity have to assert that a greater love than mere death would be a death by torturous means, perhaps after a near-lifetime of such torment?

And this is all gnarled up with Christianity's self-serving focus on Jesus' submission to death not, as Jesus treats it, an organic component of an ineffable relationship involving his Father, himself as the Son, and Creation identified simultaneously as an expression of the Son and as a subject of the Son's judgment--rather, Jesus' death in Christianity must be understood in some sacerdotal progression and therefore as some incomparable display of love for enemies and endurance of pain.  Whether expressed in ideation or not, Christianity's version of the Crucifixion must involve legions of frenzied, torturing demons and pains beyond compare.

Jesus' actual torments are (fortunately) to most of us unimaginable, but Christianity has a centuries-old tradition of embarrassing itself by simultaneously fixating on the willing torments of the martyred saints, while lingering on any number of conjured notions of what Jesus suffered--since each must be somehow greater than the other.  The most excruciating display we have in the Scriptures of the torments of Peter is when, by the Sea of Tiberias, he is given a thoroughly-undeserved chance to follow Jesus--no more poignant representation might be made of Peter given the single lifeline of heeding exactly to this command.  That anyone might contemplate this Peter seeking to out-do his master in humiliation by being crucified upside-down, is a matter scarcely to be paralleled in its futility.

In short, Jesus is an embarrassment to Christianity.  What sort of Christian would assert that there is "no greater love" than to give up one's life for one's friends?  More to the point, what sort of Jesus would redeem sinful humanity by accepting a surprisingly short tenure on the Cross, a tenure that the soldiers would have cut short at sundown in any event?  The Jesus who comforted the Good Thief with the prospect of paradise before sunset knew exactly what he we talking about.

Christianity does not understand life, as Jesus' teaching understands life.  Jesus' life--as ever we might experience it, understand it, "live" it--is presented to us in that expression of goodness contained in the Johannine introduction, wherein it is taught that Creation is inexplicably to be identified with Jesus.  Jesus gave up his life for his friends, but we could not in a million lifetimes encompass the thought of either "life" or "friends" as experienced by Jesus.  Every life--every birth--of a cell division must be experienced by Jesus, and every fear and every torment of every creature must be experienced by Jesus.  The notion that it is of signal importance that Jesus endured this or that earthly pain is ludicrous--Jesus experiences all earthly pain.

The eternal--the timeless--Jesus lived for a time on earth, yet he has always lived and earth has never lived without him.  Moreover, though our lives are short, we can never imagine a time when we did not live in the conception of God--as ever have lived Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--and we will never cease to exist (be that for good or ill--or what we might call "life" or not.)  Only with this grounding in the moral import of Jesus' teaching about life can we begin to understand the rest of our responsibilities, responsibilities that become all the more vexing as we appreciate the extent to which our self-conceptions are conceptions we have about the world, and our conceptions of the world constitute lives that draw us ever and ever to ourselves--to our detriment.

As I wrote above, much of what we do for ourselves or regarding ourselves is done so that we might have a "life" as we understand it, and as we hope for it to be.  We can experience life, but we cannot "have" it, and in an exploration of the teachings of Jesus we can come to understand how that knife-edge describes the boundary of good and evil.

Being Evil in Inclination

Enoch walked with God, and then God took him.  Enoch was not perfect, yet obviously, in the final analysis, God accounted him worthy of his favor.  Noah was a descendant of Enoch, though Noah was born after the lifetime of his estimable ancestor.  Noah's father Lamech, on the other hand, had lived for decades while Enoch remained yet on the earth, and it is this Lamech who prophesied that Noah would bring humanity comfort from the soil.  (Or some such construction of the prophecy--such is the character of our contentions that we "read" the ancient languages--but the "wine" episode, with its warm beginnings and its sour end, must be in some form foreshadowed.)

Though the pre-Flood generations are labeled with the idea that "every inclination of the thoughts of their heart were only evil all the time," this seems at first blush to account neither for Noah's character nor the admitted fact that some semblance of pre-deluge social order was maintained.  Jesus wanted those around him to find reference to the generations of Noah's day in their observations of their own time--hardly a helpful comparison, if the wicked pre-Flood generations are to be accounted wicked beyond compare.

Indeed, a second look at the narrative about Noah's origins can bring an intriguing imagery.  The description of Noah as "perfect in his generations"--or some such, there's that niggling "as we read the ancient languages" caveat--has lead some observers to conjecture that Noah's constitution was qualitatively different from his peers.  This has lead even to some cute contentions that Noah was a peerless genetic specimen--if not to some further musings along the lines of "ancient astronauts" and the like.

I contend that a more grounded sort of contention is in order for Noah.  Noah was the first of his line not to have been blessed potentially by the company, or at the least by the living example, of the renowned Enoch.  We might wonder if this exposure to a waning line, expressed in the conceptuality of Noah being of superior proclivity to his peers, is what is in play in the narrative, rather than some superhuman-though-not-quite-superhuman undefined internal quality of Noah's.  This Noah is, after all, in the same all-too-human mold of those depraved generations, and the narrative provides us no notion that his progeny-bearing wife and three daughters-in-law were other than depraved--making any "fresh start for humanity" idea rather vapid.

Indeed, all we might credit to Noah is a willingness to obey a superior command--perhaps just a reflection of a fortuitous upbringing in a relatively orderly family.  Place Noah in a scene in which he holds command himself, and you get a man who cannot govern himself, let alone others.  Before the rain starts, God says to Noah, "thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation" (scarcely a glowing appraisal), though the notion that there was an abiding esteem in God's "seen righteous," externally-conceptualized estimation of Noah is in question.  And Noah turns out to be quite a sordid man.  One is reminded, unavoidably, of the murderous and adulterous David being described as "after God's own heart."

To delve into the possible mindsets of humans, mindsets that merely approximate the behaviors of humans, is to challenge any first-blush impressions we might have of a generation described as having inclinations of the heart toward evil all the time.  If this inclination toward evil were expressed without inhibition all the time, it is hard to see how any generation might raise another.  We are left with the imagery--scarcely surprising if we reflect on what we see in us an around us--that there is very little of morality that cannot be understood as goodness in the service of evil.  In times of social upheaval or of deep-seated communal grievances, for example, it is all too common for parents of either sex to throw their nurturing and supportive inclinations into rearing children treasured first and foremost as warriors against some perceived enemy.

There must be examples aplenty of ostensible goodness working out from origins of wicked motivation.  I am reminded of the now-somewhat-quaint idea of "compassionate conservatism" in American politics.  I refer particularly to an interview I recall reading from some such conservative in the 1990's.  The gentleman maintained that it was compassionate to both Americans and to would-be, possibly imperiled immigrants to enforce border laws strictly; compassionate to innocent civilians worldwide for America to have a strong defense; compassionate to hardworking Americans to have a colorblind economic policy; compassionate to the unborn to have a prohibition on abortion.

I could not help but notice that the Americans and the civilians and the workers and the unborn ostensibly benefitted thereby need have been nothing more than numeric abstractions, while yet the "compassionate conservative" would have the opportunity--either directly or indirectly--to shove a finger in the face of a desperate immigrant; of a bombed-out civilian; of a disadvantaged minority person; of a pregnant woman in straitened circumstances, and to say, "No!"

Indeed, there is no type of person who might not be cherished in conceptuality as being the deserving recipient of moral largesse--as long as that person is distanced and unbothersome.  The Middle Ages in Europe had the oppressed pilgrims and Christian inhabitants of the Levant to worry about--persons, largely unpossessed of power and influence, who would have been given short shrift as ordinary inhabitants of Europe.  Our own era has the romanticized unborn to worry about--"babies" whose anticipated arrival (if they survive the inexcusable infant and maternal mortality of our pre-modern health system) is screamed for most loudly by political parties who would apportion the least to support struggling families--political parties as well that reign most typically where the afore-mentioned mortalities are most rampant.

What is most important to this argument is the realization that being evil in inclination, with all of the possible eternal implications, is of only approximate relation to actual behaviors.  If indeed humanity became more and more depraved as the Flood approached--and we must remember that the first really overt and unquestionable sin in the Bible is Cain's act of murder--then this must have involved merely more and more intricate and deep-seated levels of depravity.  Surely the pre-deluge world must have had parallels to the slave-owning Southern gentleman, possessed of honor in the eyes of society and scrupulously guarded of his behavior toward--and faithfulness to--the wife he took proudly to church on Sunday morning--after having slaked himself on some terrified, unaccounted slave girl the night before.

If indeed evil has this manner of amorphous and insidious existence--working its poison on people in greater or lesser (and often duplicitous) degree to externally-defined actions--then evil loses its conventional qualifications.  Now Cain's slaughter of Abel, no less a murder than ever, can be seen as part of a seamless whole with all other evils.  Cain's sulking indulgence of his disappointment, when he might have been engaged in wholesome interaction with others, including the younger brother who could have benefitted from his sibling's attentions, was a form of murder.  Cain, in focusing his attentions where he ought not, was murdering himself.

Now we can begin to see Jesus' attentions to the ideas of life and death--at least in a more comprehensive view than as physical life and death, on the one hand, and eternal life and death on the other.  Jesus accused his antagonists of trying to kill him, and many of such persons would have had more than sufficient grounds--in the mindset common to our age and theirs--to say that Jesus was speaking like a madman.  There is no cause to decide that most of his antagonists were lying, and that indeed they had contemplated Jesus' physical death--they simply did not understand the way Jesus spoke.

In the teaching of Jesus, the life-and-death binary is not of particular application.  Rather, it is the framework of all of our existence.  If life was not what it should have been for Adam and Eve, it was death.  Adam and Eve in their deathly horror were provided with life by God.  When we buoy others up, we give them life.  When we drag them down, we give them death.

The Rock of Stature and Permanence

In Matthew, Jesus says that "after the tribulation of those days," "all the tribes of the earth"

shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

And then, also in Matthew, the high priest questions Jesus with "I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God."  Jesus replies

Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

 , , , which answer enrages the council and causes them to condemn Jesus to death.

The above exchange, of course, does not stand the test of our modern standards of being "logical."  Jesus, however, is addressing the council members' internalization of certain imagery.  Jesus' statement to them might be parsed "logically" so as to seem, at worst, irrelevant to the charge presented to him.  The notion of the "Son of man," as the theologians never tire of telling us, was rooted in Old Testament imagery--there is nothing in Jesus' response in itself to indicate necessarily that he is speaking of himself.

Of course, there is the presumed backstory to the Jewish leaders' investigation, in which they have gotten prior information about Jesus (including his references to himself as the Son of man), and there is little profit in wondering whether their investigation was ever going to be more than a formality.  What seems to be little noticed, however, is the fact that Jesus is describing--as is evidenced by the "after the tribulation" quote above--his return from heaven at the time of the end, and moreover that Jesus' overall description of the end (as the critics never tire of telling us) was said by him to have been expected before all of that generation had died.  Moreover, Jesus' use of "hereafter" (or "from this time onward," or the like) is a challenge to the council about something that will appear and exist before their eyes, not something delayed until the end.

What Jesus is confronting the council with is an imagery that they have--for good or ill--internalized, and he is presenting them with an opportunity to respond to it from a similarly internal source.  The outwardly-voiced arguments are but incidentals.  The notions of time and place involved in relating the imagery are similarly incidentals.

Nothing is more malleable in Jesus' descriptions of the end than time and place.  Indeed, (aside from the way his prophecies telescope in and out from the world to Jerusalem and back again), Jesus actually directs his followers to attempt to influence the timing:

But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day.

Shorn of modern presumptions about what is logical and what is ascertainable--a set of presumptions the theologians discard gladly in myriad maneuverings about regnal years, and co-kingships, and who was high priest, and who got buried where, and who killed Goliath, and how big exactly is a mustard seed--the prophecies about the end times are as personal to the listener as was "the Son of man coming" to (and through) the remaining lifetimes of the council.  Jesus' descriptions to us about the end times tell us more about what to disbelieve than about what to believe, and there is nothing about the apocalypse more important than to be surprised while doing good--as we might always and everywhere.

Jesus addresses those things that are internal to persons.  Jesus approaches potential disciples and promises to make them "fishers of men."  (One might note that the gospels do not say whether those men were the first approached, or if they were the first to accept.)  Of course, one can always say that "there was something about Jesus" that attracted people to him, but that statement is simply raw convenience--and it makes a hollow exercise of that episode and indeed of Jesus' entire ministry.  (Moreover, the Gospel of John makes plain that certain of the prospective disciples were quite attuned to a contemporary--and relatively mundane--advent of the messiah.)  Jesus spoke to what was already in the prospective disciples, and it will become of greatest importance for us to consider from whence such things come.

This takes our discussion to the following (and, to some people, one of the most important) passages in Matthew:

He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?  And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.  And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.  And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.  Then he charged his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. (16:15-20.)

We can work backwards through this passage.  It ends with the "tell no man" directive, which is present in the parallel passages in Mark and Luke (without the "blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona" part), making this excerpt all the more understandable--we are going to be talking about finding things in ourselves, not in externally-exchanged arguments.

Prior to that is the "keys of the kingdom" part, which can make plain the import of the strange pairing of Jesus' command to exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees, on the one hand, while simultaneously telling his disciples, on the other hand, to find the true import in such religious strictures (such as reading "do not murder" as "do not kill others with harsh words or actions.")  The notions that people can decide what is right, and can forgive others for doing what is wrong, are notions that only with difficulty fit within the rigors of any religion (as understood from a Christian viewpoint), unless it is taken to be the case that revelation has a living presence in the unbidden experience-life of persons.  Revelation is as expected to reverberate within our fallen selves as to reverberate within a fallen Creation.

And now we have worked back to the "upon this rock" part.  What is "this rock"?  The very necessity of this question reveals the poignancy of the so-often-misdirected course of "the Church."  Asked in a different setting, it would be as the purest milk of truth to say that the "rock" of Christian belief is Jesus' actuality as the God-man Messiah.  This "rock" is of stature and permanence in itself--greater and more permanent than anything conceivable that exists--yet we human beings imagine that it can be argued by us into our own acceptance and into our communal appreciation.  We can voice abroad Jesus' messiahship, but its being grasped by any individual person is as reliant on God's grace as ever was its being grasped in Old Testament days or in the ministry-days when Jesus demanded that it not be noised about.

The substance of our Savior's outreach to us calls to us in our sleep, or in our drowsy hours, or in our inattentions, or in our unplanned flashes of insight, just a surely as the substance of our Savior's outreach calls to the newborn--or called to the awakening Eve or Adam.

The "rock" of the church of Jesus is the conception of Jesus that "flesh and blood hath not revealed," but which comes--unaccountably, of course--by the grace of God.  Simultaneously blessed and encumbered by this conception, the follower of Jesus goes step by step, day by day, doing well and repenting of not doing well, doing good and passing on the even greater good of the forgiveness that Jesus demands of us.