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.