Blasted and Drained

Francis Schaeffer wrote a famous book, extolled widely in conservative Christian circles, entitled How Should We Then Live?  I submit that the most suitable title for a book about Jesus and his demands of us would be Why Should We Then Live?--and I am being neither literal (of course) nor flippantly disparaging (I hope).  The most disheartening thing about trying to evaluate institutional Christianity is the very fact that Christianity as an institution is engrossed in providing either sacerdotal or experiential mechanisms by which the believer can take the necessity--undeniable in Jesus' teachings--of forsaking life, and turn that forsaking into embracing.

This very un-Jesus-like Christian fixation on living the abundant Christian life is, as I have written before, an attachment possible when the believer does not understand "life" as Jesus does.  To die for Jesus or for one's fellows is "life," as Jesus would have it, and the deprivations of giving up this or that (or a lot of this or that) for the cause of Jesus--that is, "throwing one's life away," as the cynics would have it--is what it is to find truly "abundant" life.  Life truly lived is life lived by the parts of ourselves that we have surrendered gladly.

Humanity has not truly lived since a time before humanity was ever able to understand life.  This notion (a notion, which--pointedly--I will associate with the fleeting, disappearing, and indescribable experience-realm of the newborn) is a notion inherent in our present perception abilities.  We reckon Adam's enviable pristine state to be desirable in that it would be an escape from our troubles--but Adam had as yet to experience trouble.  What is here important to note about prevalent interpretations of the Gospels is the fact that the idea of Jesus "leading us back to the garden" is associated mistakenly with only either eventual salvation or with the more-or-less blessed state of being granted anticipation of that final resolution.

However, Jesus presents repeated recapitulations of the Eden-state as a template of his ministry.  In fact, those recapitulations are linked more closely than might be apparent at first.  Jesus responds to questioners sent by John asking if Jesus is the awaited one, and Jesus gives instructions to those of his disciples he sends out two by two.  In both types of instances Jesus describes the dead being raised to life.  As I have written before, a rather unseemly delight has entertained me with the notion that an unbounded move-mountains-with-a-grain-of-faith determination on the part of the disciples would in all of those instances involve all of humanity who ever lived being brought back with a single petition.  Of course, limitations are exercised in the situations--Jesus' ministry as described to John, Jesus' imparting of both instructions and abilities to the itinerant disciples--and it is precisely that set of limitations that shows that a re-creation of the Eden state is in mind.

The traveling disciples are sent only to the towns of Israel (such geography notable more for its physical rather than absolutely demographic quality) and the disciples are told to refrain from saluting people on the road.  This would seem to be associated with the enlivening and succoring of an idealized setting--a re-created Eden.  In this multi-partite Eden, there would be no infirmity, no disease, and apparently no death ("raising from the dead" being restricted apparently to those witnessed as dying, and experiencing momentary dying within the "Eden-population.")

This same sort of Eden-state is what prevails in the setting that Jesus describes to the questioners from John.  That the Gospel being preached to the poor is of such emphasis is not, apparently, because it was being withheld from all people, but because access both to explicit teaching, and to the chance to reflect upon such teaching, is restricted for those hard-pressed in our very un-Eden world.  And this Eden-recapitulation described by Jesus is as full of temptation as the first Eden.  Jesus expresses concern that persons exposed to his presence might fall away, and Jesus tells the traveling disciples to expect that some people and places will reject them.  Both the delights and the perils of Eden are being highlighted in these scenarios.

Something more, however, is being highlighted in the re-created Eden settings I have described.  The disciples are delighted with their successes, and in one instance they are greeted by Jesus' response (in a very recalling-the-Genesis-events way) of how he saw Satan fall from heaven.  Unfortunately, any association of "abundant" personal life to the situations I have described is precisely antithetical to what Jesus seems to be teaching.  The returning disciples are admonished not to rejoice in their successes, but in their favorable status in the invisible kingdom.  Indeed, it is notable that their missionary experiences, "lively" though they might be, are in a certain vein drained of what we might recognize as life.

There is a singular lack of agency on the part of the disciples in the description given by Jesus of their mission.  "How" they are to make any of the decisions, and "how" they are to undertake any of the actions, are described not at all in the text we have of the disciples' instructions.  The disciples are rendered almost empty-handed and almost naked on their travels, and their "supernatural" powers (temporary, it would seem) are as likely channeled through them as placed at their disposal.  In the end, Jesus grants them little more of an assessment of agency than if they had been mere witnesses.

We are creatures who navigate our existences in terms of proportionality and of reference, and who reckon our selves as contained in our bodies and our thoughts.  There is an intrinsic strangeness to us in being made to understand that we must seek to undo all the evils of our lives, and made to understand simultaneously that a lifetime of penitence might be dwarfed by a cup of cold water to a child.  There is an intrinsic strangeness to us in being held rightfully to account for our bodies and our thoughts--estranged, it seems, by an abyss from God--and being held simultaneously to account for failing to recognize our savior in a distressed human being near at hand.

We are not alone in our failings, as we witness in Jesus' assessment of John the Baptist.  John himself must be reminded that casting ourselves aside, not for some convoluted "salvation economy" of the theologians, but for the simple and unprepossessing performance of our rightful Eden-tasks, is what is required of us.  This simple and unprepossessing approach is not that of the accomplished and dogma-equipped believer, but that of the blasted and drained person who has watched himself or herself be siphoned off willingly into vain pursuits, and who calls upon Jesus to fill the voids and undo the damages.

It is perhaps worthwhile to note that, while the "beheading" story certainly does not show Herod in a good light, there is a singular lack of ratification in the various Gospels for John's choice of an individual sin to take particular exception to in a sinful world.  Certainly John made more of a mark in secular--to use the word perhaps anachronistically--history than did Jesus, but John was a human being after all.  Even from the outset of the John the Baptist accounts a dissonance intrudes itself.  The prophetic "voice" introducing Johns' ministry would (if the Old Testament Scripture be taken as controlling) have been a voice calling for a way to be made in the wilderness--with no speaker described.  In the Gospel accounts, we have John's "voice in the wilderness."

Whether in the recesses of Eden at first, or in the Judean wilderness at the start of the Gospel stories, our first points of reference must be people, places, and things--and the God of our worship can render such things meaningless.  To reckon that our lives--like Adam's life--are lacking precisely because they have things in them (and are "abundant" because we give things away) is our first infantile step toward the annihilation of our "lives" that Jesus championed and personified.