Our perception-lives, then, constitute of necessity a mere fragment of any appreciation we must cultivate about our surroundings. It is important that we maintain balanced estimations of our perception abilities. We are not, as I have described, mere loci of perception, poised most conventionally central to the eyes and ears and surveying Creation in 360-degree aspects on every tiltable plane. We are created with limitations to our perception, though of course we must reckon that some increments of perception are granted to us. To invert conceptually the conceit of ourselves as quintessential receptors of all that surrounds us, there is the opposing notion of ourselves possessing infinitesimal pin-holes through which we peer at our universe, as though a complementary universe of darkness constituted the virtual all of our inner lives--we being creatures of pervading internal darkness to whom the flickers beyond the pin-hole are but phantasms.
No, we are creatures who can in part perceive that which constitutes existence external to us (just as, as I have said, we can in part perceive where we end and where our surroundings begin.) We can, as Jesus admonishes us, attempt the "singleness" of vision that allows us to be filled with light, rather than to be filled with the darkness--that seed-bed of our fallen and twistedly-arising conceits--that slides into the vacuum created by our wavering attentions to truth. The important thing is that "singleness" of vision corresponds not to notions either of omni-competent perception or of squinting through a sensory pin-hole. Rather, the vision we possess (that is, the perception-realm we possess) is as a hazy-edged bubble, important to recognize in its intrinsic limitations as well as in how its limitations bind up any conceptual lives we possess.
Our time-and-space-bound experience-lives are paralleled by our time-and-space-bound conceptual capacities, and it is crucial always to cultivate an awareness of the pull of those fetters. An apt example is found in an (otherwise puzzling) passage from Luke. Jesus is speaking of the necessity of "hating" one's family and one's self, and of the necessity of taking up one's cross and following him. Renunciation is the theme here, and Jesus ends with, "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." What is remarkable is the fact that, between the hating one's parents part and the "cannot be my disciple" part, is what seems to be a digression about prudence.
In this apparent digression, Jesus speaks of a builder who must reckon if he has money enough to erect a tower, and of a king who must reckon if he has soldiers enough to repel a more numerous enemy. Better to abandon a plan to build a tower if careful attention would show there are not funds enough for it. Better to avoid war than to go into battle with insufficient forces. More particularly, the builder is shown to be wise who does not invite ridicule upon failure, and the king--the less fortunate of the two examples--is shown to be wise to attempt to placate the invader. In both parables, prudence is indeed indicated, yet the parables themselves involve attempts on the part of the protagonists to avoid loss, either of face or perhaps of a kingdom itself. What have these parables to do with the notion that one must forsake "all that he hath"?
The answer is both extremely simple and extremely frustrating. "Possession" as a fault involves a stable state (or, more properly, a conceit of a stable state) held onto by the possessor. Both the builder and the king are treating their possessions as elements of active schemes of consideration--the effective aspects of nominal possession of things by those two men are found in how they treat those things. A more usual type of "biblical" example is the virtuous householder, whose concern for the responsible use of his "possessions" makes those things mere props in the drama of the householder's attempts to do the will of God above all else--in the extreme examples of such householders, it might be said that they "possess" such things not at all, and are servants of humanity at large in how they tend those things. Certainly the wealthy in the Western World have been only too eager to embrace such imagery, even as they embrace most often the opportunity to enter through the eye of the needle.
In the extreme polarization of such examples, one wealthy person might be a renowned philanthropist, and another might be a renowned miser who (recognizing a certain reality about the grave) gives everything at the end to charity. Economists and social scientists might make a great game of looking at each such wealthy person in turn, and arguing the relative value of their bequests, but whether or not those wealthy persons were indeed "possessors" of their wealth might be gauged as effectively by how graciously they treated their household staffs at each passing moment.
More important than the idea of actual possession of things being a function of a stable state (and of "true" possession being a matter of how such things are treated) is the underlying conceits we have about stable states themselves--these conceits constituting (frustratingly, as I mentioned above) what are most often our most treasured possessions. We will have it be the case that this-or-that can be described in this-or-that state, and when we are forced to admit that any conceit of ours must bow before the majesty of the divine, we fall back still on the notions of "this-or-that" described state--in this case, the "state" of God. Maybe everything is contingent upon the will of God, we will say, but in the same breath we try to will into existence describable aspects of the divine.
A fascinating example of this is found in John, wherein it is stated (in an admittedly bewildering passage) that there was as yet no Spirit. Unsurprisingly, the translators have been in agony to manufacture logic by which the passage might be held to say that the Spirit had not yet been given, but the ancient texts are as impassive and unyielding as ever. However, only an insecure--and especially impious--mindset would require inventing language that is not present in the text. It is no more respectful to the divine to say that God has existed forever as to say that his existence is outside of time (and the notion that he existed "before time" would be simply silly.)
Moreover, God is deserving of being respected, and then (and only then) is God to be described in respect to any criteria--and we always show this latter respect in pitiful fashion. We don't know what we are talking about. God is, and was, and our understanding of "is" or "was" is as immeasurably inadequate as if our understanding was that God always "happens."
We cannot even handle the fact that our own life "happens," because we do not truly observe our life happening--what we observe is a tumble of shuddering conceits based on imperfect perceptions, and that understandable (to us) thing we call "life" is something we have constructed. Our understandings of our lives consist of things we consider major or minor, of things we remember and things we forget, of things that happened in earlier and hazier days and of things we anticipate in hazier days still.
The Gospels themselves consist of many things (or perhaps it would be better to say display many aspects) that we can recognize in terms of how life happens. The three gospels that seem to purport to be ascertained biography consist--surprise, surprise--of often differing "takes" on similar events. The remaining gospel, which seems to have an altogether different emphasis, has some quite different "takes" on events. Again, surprise, surprise. The gospels have beginnings and endings that seem to be tacked on, and this business of differing chronologies shows up most strikingly as the gospels wrap up. Some elements seem to have been inserted, and then the question arises whether the rest (or parts of the rest) of the New Testament have been tacked on--probably the most important question of how the gospels "wrap up."
And so the Gospels themselves echo the very thing that impinge on us as life happens--things major and minor, things remembered and things forgotten, things hazy in memory and things hazy in anticipation. I don't think that any person can look at the Gospels through anything other than the limited and cloudy "bubble" that I described above, and it is certainly open to the reader of the Gospels to opine that the books' contents seem to be viewed as through "bubbles"==here acute and insightful, here not so, here evocative and meaningful, here not so.
What is important to consider is the extent to which the teachings of Jesus reflect an anticipatory understanding of the readers' legitimate concerns. Why can't you decide for yourselves what is right, Jesus asks. You have heard this-or-that was said, Jesus says. In a given situation, would you yourselves not do this or that, Jesus asks. You, being evil, would do this-or-that for your children--would not God do the same for you, Jesus asks. In each instance, life as a thing in motion, life as a thing happening, is what matters, and it is this dynamic of life that is the template for understanding Jesus' teachings.
It is in the face of the dynamic of life that religion comes to the test. Take marriage. For some people marriage becomes a nightmare. It was not intended to be so, and to the extent to which the participants took it seriously, the notion to which Jesus subscribes--two becoming one--was at some point either the reality of the marriage, or at least the aspiration of the couple. Then there is the possibility of divorce, and in Jesus' day there was the prescription for divorce in the Mosaic law. Jesus, however, attributes this possibility either to Moses' invention or to the notion that the Law of God would be tailored in its inception to the baser attitudes of men. One wonders why Jesus was not executed for that.
And still Jesus relates that marriage is to be indissoluble--except in some vaguely defined circumstances, circumstances to which one or another of the marriage partners might be driven, so that the very guilt-ridden anguish of the couple might forge their own provision of the law. And while Jesus refers to the Genesis basis for marriage as indissoluble, this very Genesis describes (as the denominations ignore) marriage not as God's plan, but as the result of Adam's conceit. Small wonder that Jesus describes marriage as something that a person would probably do better to avoid.
Ultimately, any inhumanity in the question of divorce as worked out in the Gospels resides in the failings of the couple or in the failings of the prevailing religiosity. A bad marriage is a situation of anguish, and such things happen indeed in life. What I intend to describe here is not the Gospels as an answer to the question, nor any answers to the questions asked about the reliability of the Gospels. What I intend to describe here is how the teachings of Jesus, rather than simply reflecting the possible artifices of human authors, reflect instead an organic understanding of how human limitations work.
The first and most important test of the teachings of Jesus has nothing to do with whether or not they give answers to what people want to know. The first and most important test of the teachings of Jesus is whether or not they draw upon the abilities and opportunities to understand existence that are the abilities and opportunities that we cannot deny, and which we must apply.
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