The things of God are independent of time and space. Our inability to conceptualize this reality makes plain the fact that we cannot hope to treat the things of God as time-and-space independent. What we can do, however--and this Jesus indeed requires of us--is to reckon that our time-and-space limitation is no warrant to construct an effectual defiance of that realization by assembling some one or another view of our existence as constellations of settled points on smooth surfaces of time and place. This indeed we do. We think of ourselves as neatly localized persons in an idealized "now" of time.
When Jesus tells us that our hearts will be in heaven if our treasure is in heaven, we insist unfortunately (and predictably) on reckoning that what Jesus is describing is some optimal internalized heart-attitude as distinct from the attempt wickedly to encompass within ourselves the aggrandizement lodged in selfish desires. We will at most charge ourselves with having set our minds upon the wrong things, but we insist that this galaxy of thoughts exists within ourselves--we are in this conceit point-centered personages by whom the passages of time and place glide as "out there" vistas.
There is no "out there" populated by beings with whom we interact merely at our internally-conceived interface between our consciousness and everything our consciousness perceives. There is no "out there" time when we did good or ill from which we can draw present comfort or extract present warning--and there is no "out there" future but for the prospect of the fleeting and undeserved possibility of learning always to pour ourselves into the moment. There is no "out there" place littered with amusements or distractions or--as we might hope--raw materials and possibilities for doing good things.
When Jesus says that our hearts are where our treasure is, he means it. For us to attach ourselves to this or that is for us to cede a part of ourselves to that very thing. In the un-plumbable recesses of the Creation moment--and in the realm of wonderings in which we might no more than almost tread--there lies the possibility of there having been untrammeled communion between God and Adam. However, "the man"--that is, the humanity experienced by us in any manner we might assimilate--cannot possibly encompass of what that communion might have consisted. We would do as well to say that Adam in that state did not exist, as to assert that we might conjecture as to his substance in that state--neither statement could surpass the other in sublime nature, or in blasphemy.
"The man" for whom it was not good to "be alone" exists in the Genesis account such that he must be viewed either as completely subsumed into his Creator or as being infused in part into those surroundings that captured his attentions. There might have been untold eons in which he tended the Garden in perfect satisfaction, but again, the question of the substance of Adam's state while in perfect moral quiescence is beyond us. If in the perfect will of God, all that would have mattered to Adam was God, and therefore we cannot understand the Garden (at least before the first unimaginably small murmurings of rebellion) as other than a setting described for us to introduce the narrative.
When we do come to understand Adam as being captured by the creaturely objects of his attentions, the narrative shifts immediately to the procuring of an "help meet" for the man. Adam is not presented with a menagerie of potential new attention-objects, objects meant for his amusement that fail in this regard, objects that are allowed by God to pass aside as the narrative shifts to the idea that the man needs not diversion, but rather that which is encompassed by the sublime notion of "help meet." No, the animals are failed "help meet's," so to speak, and we are presented here with the first of a number of Scriptural opportunities for the amusement of puerile critics.
What ought to be seized upon by sincere critics of institutional Christianity (and what I have attempted to describe before) is the fact that the elements of "rebellion" exist in the Genesis account such that they are coterminous with any description of Adam as a creature possessing will. The Adam who will not allow all of himself to rest in God is shown to collect himself into a locus of attention toward his surroundings, surroundings that (in the fashion we can recognize in all our times and places) are always cloying and needing refreshment. This is the germ of rebellion. What is most important to recognize, however, is that the business of human beings drawing themselves up into self-centered individuals (the prideful, God-defying imagery of the preachers' condemnation of humanity's futility) cannot be imagined fantastically to succeed in that very endeavor of personal drawing-up into discrete beings. We sinful humans are no more "individuals" than we have ever been, and we are not "individuals" in the Eden account--we are subsumed into God or we are subsumed into the fusion of persons expressed by the scriptural recounting of the "help meet" process.
This is one of the most important aspects of the conceptual terrain of Genesis, and of the Gospels. Conventionally, our attentions in interpreting the Scriptures are ever and always drawn to the imagery of the puffed-up person, the person who stuffs himself or herself with the pleasures of Creation, the person who fills himself or herself with evil thoughts and evil desires. We would be fortunate--though undeservedly fortunate--were that the only type of imagery that can define us. What is most important when looking at the Genesis account, however, is the giving-away of ourselves, the imparting of elements of ourselves to other persons and other things. The idea of the evil person who is draining, or devouring, or who robs others of opportunities and of the support they are due, is but one aspect (and not necessarily the chief aspect) of our evil tendencies. The continual revolution of the Scriptures, however, is the perverse and unintentional "generosity" we display when we exude essential elements of ourselves into our surroundings.
Our selves are not our own, but neither are our abilities selfishly to command our intentions (as we might imagine) in times and places to deny elements of our selves to others, or to other things. Adam is presented with Eve. Theologians might argue whether, after Adam calls her flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, it is God or Adam who says that for this reason the man and the woman shall become one flesh, but for our purposes the distinction is immaterial. Either God made that determination, or he made the man who made that determination. What is really important here is the denominations' unfortunate determination to limit the shared-person imagery of the first coupling to the greatest possible (and most fleshly) extent. In truth, Adam and Eve share their persons with each other, and we all therefore share our persons with each other, and (as with our "treasure in heaven") we share our persons with whatever we have attached ourselves to. Even more important than the question of what we grasp to ourselves, is the question of what we have dispatched elements of ourselves to--and the extent to which we lose, and risk, and deposit to the care of others our eternal fates is greater than we dare imagine.
We marry someone, we entrust a part of our damnable selves to them. We dally with someone, we entrust a part of our damnable selves to them. We bear or sire someone, we entrust a part of our damnable selves to them. We abuse someone, we place a part of our damnable selves at the mercy of their judgment. This step-wise but logical decline from the bliss of the first union to the horror of thinking ourselves placed before judgment at the hands of those we have ill used, frightening though it might be, is a notion neither to be ignored nor to be decreed alien to the teachings of Jesus. I will try to deal with this more later, but for now it would probably suffice to mention the Parable of the Unjust Steward, and the fascinating way Jesus describes a person's fellows as being empowered to shield him that person from judgment from above.
More to the point here is the simple mechanics of how Jesus' conceptualization of personhood differs from other New Testament voices. To Jesus what matters is what comes out of a person, and he describes the intake of forbidden foods as immaterial. His assertion that ingested food merely passes out "in the draught" is of course biologically questionable, but that is scarcely the point--Jesus' conceptualization of the human being as a source of so much is a conceptualization of the unquantifiable effulgence of the soul. Contrast this to the (chronologically-challenged) fussing over dietary restrictions in the "early Church," who cannot but think of persons as body-bounded individuals. To Jesus, the thoughts of adultery (which come "out" of the heart) defile not merely the sinful thinker, but defile as well the Genesis-defined personage of the marital union. In the epistles, the sophomoric notion is offered that sexual sin is worse than others because it is introduced into the body.
Most importantly, our conceptualizations of ourselves in time and place are but trembling shadows, shadows defined for us by the comings and goings of our attentions, shadows that fall near to us or that extend in moments to our farthest horizons. This is the realm in which we were born, and which we are born to. This is the realm in which the teachings of Jesus apply--not in the setting of our most concerted attempts to define our times and our places and our selves within them.
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