Jesus tells a young man that he is not far from the kingdom of heaven, and then provides him with no further guidance. Jesus tells a another young man that all he lacks to gain eternal life is to do the single thing (and puzzling indeed that this might be called a "single" thing) of selling all he has, giving the proceeds to the poor, and following Jesus. For each of these young men, the way to salvation is both indefinite and continual--the indefinite stretching off into the infinite.
Jesus tells us all that we must have faith, and then he tells us we have no faith, nor any hope of having any. This indeed is the implication of the statement of Jesus that the merest mustard seed of faith would empower us to move mountains about. The indefinite stretching off into the infinite is more than the indefinite stretching off into the infinite--it is a doomed prospect as well.
This, on the part of the denominations, is the most punctiliously ignored aspect of the Gospels--that the Gospels describe not a collections of insights about how to gain salvation, but rather a collection of insights into how that "how" cannot be explained to us. The teachings of Jesus trail off into repeated illustrations of how salvation-yearning collapses into anguished pleading, just as the persistent widow petitions the unfeeling judge about the merits of her case. By "doomed," I describe our own plight--if it is at all to be understood in terms of the widow's experience--as a situation of our own eternal cases to be resolved never in this life. Before the end, our petitions never cease to rise nor cease to be ignored, and neither does the impassive countenance of the judge ever lighten.
And this last point is the key--salvation to be resolved never in this life. Unfortunately, we do not pursue our elusive salvation typically in this life, but in a phony "life" of contrived considerations, just as we read the story of the persistent widow from afar, and we re-read it knowing the ending. I am reminded of Paul's fascination with the idea that a truth about salvation (or not) is illustrated well by a pot being in no position to criticize its maker, or to complain about being formed for base purposes. Within the merest relationship of the pot to its maker--that is, a relationship excluding Paul's presumptuous air--is to be found one of the most persistent and resounding cries of the psalmist and the prophet, that is, the offering to God of the notion that he has abandoned his creatures. Moreover, Paul has not stopped there--having been provided as we all are with the Genesis description of a "very good" creation stumbling forth under curses, Paul then twists it all into a gruesome notion that God creates damned creatures anew.
It is extremely telling that Paul allows himself to be drawn into the trap of describing salvation experiences from the outside. The pot is neither more nor less than it is made to be, but it is Paul who supplies the third element to the scenario--the human contemplator who sits in judgment of the metaphorical pot's utterances, just as the reader contemplates juror-like the widow's plight. In each case the observer outside the parable can be observed and commented upon by another contrived observer, and so on into infinity. Nothing about any of this (and precious little of theology in general) has anything to do with the essential and solitary immediacy of the salvation dynamic taught by Jesus.
The young man who has found insight will find it further within himself, and is provided therefore with no direction by Jesus. The young man is his own landscape, and the extent to which he diminishes himself, so also is his internal landscape to become smaller and more traversable. The rich young man who has followed the commandments and yet is beset by Jesus' demand that he sell all he owns is going to be (if he surprises the commentators, as the text allows) a poor young man facing yet another demand, and then yet another. Salvation is offered to those men (and to us) if we travel along a way that says, "No way."
There is no way to salvation by contemplating it. There is no way to salvation by following Jesus to it. There is no way to salvation by faith. The Jesus who is the Way is so not because either a roadmap or a metaphor is provided thus to us--Jesus is the Way because all such concepts are subsumed into his character. Jesus is the point-source of all-present divinity who is separated from us by an infinite gulf that is as nothing to him. Salvation is our yearning, but the very concept that there is some sort of illustratable salvation dynamic is an obstacle to us. After the end, salvation is free. Before the end, salvation is more costly than we can manage.
I can do little more now than demonstrate how my interpretation of salvation is at least holistic to the Gospels, in distinction to that of the mass of commentators. All commentators have had to deal with Jesus' descriptions of the Unpardonable Sin. Suffice to say that anyone who has ever been confronted with those passages has concocted images, however fleeting or insubstantial, pertaining to the Holy Spirit. Since to think something is as bad as to say it (or at least prudence would so dictate), and since surely the mute or illiterate are not by definition exempted from the peril of the Unpardonable Sin, then this peril might be expected to haunt one and all. I cannot say for sure what goes on in the minds or souls of others, but it is worthy of note that there is one topic (unsurprisingly, I would say) upon which the commentators are both agreed and generous--either the Unpardonable Sin could only be committed in Jesus' lifetime, or the Unpardonable Sin cannot have been committed by one who retains as yet any capacity to try to avoid sin. A strange convenience is attached thereby to something that Jesus treats as supremely important.
We would do well to consider, however, whether we would or would not (called to give accounting for our lives) present any of our sins to the divine as "pardonable." Is not the Unpardonable Sin, upon any recounting we might make of any of the sins of humanity, a capstone of truth about the awfulness of sin that is a truth that extends to all of our transgressions? We make much of the mercy of Jesus, and of the ever-multiplying theories about how he says we can be saved, but rarely do we catalogue Jesus' descriptions of the manifold futilities of our attempts to avoid punishment for sin. Unsurprisingly, we do not like to hear that some sin might never be forgiven, yet what manner of elasticity ought we to allow as the difference between the ideas of "never to be forgiven" and "easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle"? (And are any of us ever free from the temptations that beset the "rich" who are warned in the latter phrase?")
We don't know how to get to heaven. We don't have any prospect of completing the tasks required to get to heaven. We don't have faith. We don't have the means to separate ourselves from the lures of the earth. To think of ourselves as being more-or-less okay as regards our stature before God, while yet we allow a diluted notion of sin impossible to forgive to float above us in our conjured detachment, is to flood ourselves in horrid delusion. All our petitions of God are impossibilities. That we might be reduced to pathetic creatures wondering if some impossibilities are less impossible than others is probably not the worst way to begin.
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