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.
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