What We Have Piled Up

I will try to run through three contentions rather quickly.

First, perhaps the most important negative consequence of us humans pretending we can actually "own" our impressions or immediate responses to instantaneous developments (a pretense I have tried to describe before) is the fact that such pretense includes by virtual necessity the invocation of a personal history of thoughts and behaviors to try to make it believable that a thought or impression is voluntary rather than not.  With every unbidden phenomenon that we are tempted to understand as explicably caused within ourselves, there is a corresponding collection of contrived memories and postulated rational explanations.

This phenomenon causes us to cast before ourselves an array of unnecessary explanations.

Second, perhaps the most revealing connection we have with our origin as created beings is in the fact that our impression-schemes are tied up with polarity, that is, from our first experiences onward we view the world as in front of us (or, in a minority of persons, experience a sightless world most acutely through the sense-concentration in facial areas.)  Just as (as I have described before) the nascent Big-Bang universe must have included fault-lines such that the initial expansion divided into this or that particle here rather than there, our experiences from the very first have been divided such that (as an example) we have been presented with experiences from the fore more acutely (and, we imagine, more securely) than from the vulnerable rear.

This phenomenon causes us to cast before ourselves an often arbitrary concentration of attentions.

And third, as social beings we harbor the possibility of unattended rear-guards in our communal conceits even as we surround ourselves with what we assume are circumspect and well established thought schemes.  In this third regard I will offer an example from the "Judeo-Christian" heritage.  Such an example is more complicated than the notions I have offered above, but such I believe must be the nature of the thought schemes we hold as peoples.

In the "Holy Land," there were numerous geographic vistas presented to the communal awareness of the people of the Levant (and particularly Canaan.)  These vistas, unfortunately, were usually conceptualized as potential sources of hostile invasion--though occasionally more benign visions were entertained.  To move clockwise on the map, there was Egypt, a fertile land of reckoned accessibility although either Sinai or the Philistine coast had lurking dangers.  Then there was Philistia itself, with its brooding possibility of further intervention of Mediterranean Sea Peoples.  Then Tyre and Sidon, and above them an Asia minor set to burst forth with Hittites, Greeks, or Macedonians.  Then the eastward arc of the Fertile Crescent, with its seemingly endless list of invaders.  This is not the end of the list, though speaking glibly of "India" in this conceptualization is usually contrived.

As if to make my point before I even get to it, there are vague references to "Cush," which is one or more places roughly to the west and south of India, or east and south of Egypt, or both.  "Sheba" one might thrown in as well, approximately in the area of Abyssinia (or it it Yemen?)  To conclude our circumnavigation (and we have, it must be noted, included in the proximity of Israel/Judah the lands of Moab, Ammon, and Edom/Idumea), we must reckon that the only great unknown of conceptualizable potential was the vast forbidding landscape of Arabia (characterized typically by maps of the Roman Empire that show the imprint of a vise-grip only to the east and west of the great interior of the Arabian peninsula.

That Arabia included features of vibrant civilization is beside our point here.  These features were, apparently, lost to the conceits of the ancient Levant, and--if ever considered--the conceptualized prospects of that "wilderness" were as shifting as those proverbial "shifting sands," making that terrain the assumed (though not perhaps geographically correct) haunts of the descendants of the untamed and contentious Ishmael.

What is important here is that the scriptural heritage concerning us is one of peoples in the region of Israel confronted with a sweeping vista of swelling and falling confrontations and fortunes, while there was ever a rarely-considered and lurking hinterland of nameless menace--the great Wilderness that stood as the backdrop of a lesser collection of wildernesses closer at hand.  Sinai and the "wilderness of Judea" could be traversed, but then there was the Wilderness--existing more in postulation (and in the generic fever-dream constructions as a fitting playground of Satan) than in understood reality.

I mention this third contention--exemplified by the great Wilderness conceptuality--because it was part of my wonderings about the convoluted (and really unnecessary) postulations about the ostensible geography of early Genesis.  "Where" such things occurred would probably be all-but-impossible to figure out (and we have the world-wide Flood proponents to provide the notion of a convenient scrambling of mountains and valleys), but it is perhaps most important to consider not so much "where's" of geography as "where's" of conceptuality.

The location of Eden, particularly considering the four mentioned rivers, does not have to be any more than a relatively central location in the Scriptural landscape--and there might certainly be less apt intimations of centrality than the surrounding of four rivers.  Then Adam and Eve went east of Eden, which might as well as anything have been lower Mesopotamia.  Eden, then, might have been at some relatively northern aspect of the great Arabian desert--lying to the west of fertile Mesopotamia and perhaps lying on ground blasted by a spreading curse attending humanity's expulsion from paradise.

In the midst of the cursed land would be the tree surrounded by fire, though--to fulfil God's intention to sequester the Tree of Life--this fire-ringed spot might be quite small.  The reader might be guessing that I am going to put forward the cute notion that the remnant of cursed Eden (which might not be so much as noticed or visible by any other than those chosen by God) could be no other than the Burning Bush, seen by Moses in the appropriate spot in the general vicinity of the harsh near-Arabian Midian of Moses' father-in-law.

This spot visited by Moses is described quite enigmatically by the scripture as "holy ground"--a curious description indeed for a spot never, apparently, to be visited again nor described as ever being encountered by any means whatsoever by any person whomsoever.  The holy ground of the burning bush lives in the scripture as phenomenon rather than as a place--a description that applies as well to Eden.  That the two locations might be identical is not nearly so important as the fact that their descriptions might be identical.

Lurking, then, in the background of the Scriptures is what has been--even for many of the most ardent believers--an unresolved and even unconsidered prospect.  The progress of Christian belief has been wedded to the notion of the necessity of time as a matrix of conceptuality.  Jesus, as I have described, frustrates persistently conceptions of time (or place) as integral to saving belief.  Jesus describes God taking care of even the little birds.  And Jesus describes the demise of little birds, something that--presumably--would not happen if God had not decided to include such innocents in the curses on humanity.  It is the reader of the Gospels, however, who might decide that there must be some Solomonic solution to this dissonance--and the variations on this notion of theodicy are endless.

But what if there is no "God takes care of the little birds even as he kills them" problem?  (And I am not talking about any nonsense like "it is the sin of Adam and Eve and all of us that kills them"--God is sovereign.)  The answer, I believe, is not that the curse is in force now, but rather that it is happening now, and by "now" I am talking about time as Jesus presents it.  Abraham is living now.  Elijah is living now.  God through Jesus is giving life to all creatures "now."  God is bringing down the curses on Creation "now."

The curses are spreading from Eden now even as Eden is being blasted now.  There is no time-frame in question here.  And, by logical extension, there is no place in question now.  A major problem with us as humans is our tendency to imagine we are categorizing and conceptualizing (and, let's face it, capturing and containing) our existences when every niggling voice of our internal life tells us we are trying to do the impossible.  We are past every experience of time (and place) that we try to understand and that we try to understand as still being before us--when the moment has passed and we have had to move on and we would (were we honest) admit that we really do not know from moment to moment and step by step what we do, or why.  But instead we busy ourselves with trying to keep our rationalizations of our actions before us, as though we might by shear will sweep up our experience-lives in mounting waves before ourselves, imagining in that sometime, somewhere, we will sort through the accumulating mess.  Or we try to "get over things" by pronouncing without warrant that we understand them, or that we can insist on being "understood" about our actions solely because we have voiced some rationalization.

This is a fundamental dynamic of our lives as we try to understand them in light of the teachings of Jesus.  The life that seemingly spreads out before us on a matrix of time and space is really a life that is being created in all its aspects at the once.  To take a step in Creation is to take a step in a new Creation, even as that very human (and therefore troubled) step is a step into a newly troubled Creation.  Both things are true--they are not components of an amalgamated "truth," just as our merciful and just God is not some amalgamation of mercy and justice.  Some aspects of this reality then become unsurprising.  Jesus tells us that we have heard the biblical definition of murder.  Then Jesus gives us a new definition of murder.  Both are true--moreover, both are being voiced at this moment.  When Jesus speaks of a trained scribe taking out from a storehouse things new and old, he is not talking of a process of synthesis, for that would result in things, hybrid things, newer still.

Jesus is confronting us with wave-front of ever-new reality.  We can never travel through that swelling prospect as we ought, but we can at least try.  Our chief problem is that we refuse even to try what Jesus asks of us, instead conjuring up a counterfeit exercise.  We invent our own wave-front.  To repeat what I wrote above, we cast before ourselves a array of unnecessary explanations.  To repeat what I wrote above, we cast before ourselves an often arbitrary concentration of attentions.  And to say again what I intended about the immediacy of realities imposed by God's attentions to us, we (ignoring that immediacy) cast before ourselves a mounting wave of attempted pronouncement about our largely inexplicable selves--succeeding in wasting ourselves rationalizing things we scarcely own while failing to even see (beyond the trivialities we have piled up) the larger vista of what God can expect of us when he can expect us to rally to such things.

Not What They Mean

There is something very important missing in how the western world in general understands religion.

There are usually taken to be three main components of what we call "life."  There is spiritual life, thought life, and physical life.  Spiritual life is, of course, taken to be of the most immediate importance to religion, and the single most pervasive notion abroad in the western world is the idea of faith versus works in Christian salvation ideology.  I say "idea of faith versus works" not because the matter is so simple, but because it is the fulcrum of so much controversy.  All the way from "living a good life" to "signing a prayer card after an unaccountable moment of ostensibly unmerited grace," the "way" in which a person can be saved is attached almost invariably in some manner to the "faith versus works" dynamic.

I will not attempt to address "faith versus works" in any more detail than to point out that there is a single detail of the argument that is ever-present.  Probe in any depth, and even the most works-oriented construction of Christian theology will arrive at the notion that, yes, it is ultimately God's sovereign determination to be merciful that saves the person--and one might even throw in the notion that God will save the well-intentioned person who never heard of Christ.  Whether it be the intention to do the will of a broadly-defined deity or even the intention to do well for its own sake, the germ of unaccountably present "faith" can be postulated as inhabiting the person of anyone saved.  One might say that the more non-committal term "grace" ought to be used to describe this merciful extension of God's sovereignty, but here we are debating over what term to use to name something that is important to our argument precisely to the extent to which it is both infinitesimal to our estimations and inscrutable to our conceits.  It is best not to make too much of any such distinctions.

If we skip over the middle element of the conventional trio of spiritual life, thought life, and physical life, we will see that our lives as physical beings are as infused with objectively-unaccountable experiences as our lives as spiritual beings are infused with objectively-unaccountable experiences.  We can learn all that is to be known about how our bodies work, and we can manipulate (and abuse) our physicality in many ways, but we can never place ourselves out of the reach of surprise as far as our bodies are concerned.  Once in a minute or once in a lifetime, our bodies (and the interaction of our bodies with our environment) can startle us, and can inform and shape our experience-lives in manners that we have not anticipated and that we can never translate with confidence to others.  Some experiences in our physicality can intrude upon us as though from above, just as some experiences in our spirituality can intrude upon us as though from above.

I realize that some persons will contend that they have no spirituality--and might contend even that "spirituality" does not exist--but for the purposes of my argument I can do nothing other than toss in as well the contentions on the part of some people that their individual physical life has no unaccountable elements to them.  Persons can say they have ultimate control over their bodies by virtue of their thought processes; persons can say that they can translate spiritually their apparent physical natures into some alternate plane; persons can say that physicality itself is an illusion--it is not my intent here to either denigrate such ideas or defer to them, but rather merely to employ what I will admit is my predisposition (and that of the western world) to the effect that we have spiritual lives, thought lives, and physical lives--each of which have their more-or-less understood aspects.

What I must describe now about our spiritual lives and our physical lives is the extent to which they are unsurprising, that is, the extent to which they provide established and familiar matrices upon which our larger experience-lives operate.  We can develop--indeed many of us cultivate--relationships with the elements of our spiritual lives to some extent to which they become reflexive, and this phenomenon is even more plainly established as regards our physical lives.  The things that strike us about our spiritual lives and our physical lives are those things that seem to come from nowhere--indeed, I know this is something of a tautology--but when the matrices of our spirituality and physicality have become "second nature," then it becomes a lively question (pardon the pun) whether or not we are really "living" them.  More importantly, it is surely not our ingrained attachments to spiritual or physical elements (which we cannot hope to examine or revise completely at every moment) that Jesus commands us to surrender in order to give up our lives. 

What Jesus asks us to give up is any tendency to attempt control of the interface of ourselves with unaccountable developments.  Any such change or challenge that we will be expected to embrace will come upon us as devoid of earthly contexts as does the experience of our very birth.  We can hope to study religion as we anticipate some spiritual awakening, and we can cultivate our physical natures as we anticipate some such challenge as God might make of us, but ultimately any confrontation we must endure with God's sovereignty will come upon us as unprepared as is the infant for the sunlight.

And so now, as might be expected, I will attempt to apply the above to the missing middle element of the trio of spiritual life, thought life, and physical life.  I will embark upon this bluntly by stating that we really have no thought life.  This should not be all that surprising, since I have as good as said that, for one, we have no spiritual life.  Surely our habits on the topic of spirituality do not deserve to be called "life," and our true experiences of spirituality are meant to be understood as blasting away anything that (at least at that moment) we would call "life."  In Jesus' teaching, what we have in any static moment is dead, and the enlivening of any moment of spiritual growth or progress exists merely to the extent our "selves" that do the living are annihilated.  The same is true of our nonexistent physical life.  Whatever we do is no more in substance than the momentary crumbling of decrepit sepulchers, and what is asked of us--either in terms of physical feats or of rallying ourselves to prayer--is impossible absent the unaccountable grace of God.

We have no spiritual life.  What we attempt to gain in spirituality slips from our grasp, and what we have once possessed and filed away is unworthy of mention.  Our spiritual "lives" are really enlivening by extension from God, experienced by us as we have allowed ourselves unaccountably to be overwhelmed by the life of Jesus.  Correspondingly, our physical "lives" are really enlivening by extension from God, experienced by us as we have allowed ourselves unaccountably to be overwhelmed by the life of Jesus.  In all other contexts we are in these regards mere creatures of reflexive response.

This is of the greatest importance in our so-called thought lives.  We can argue about whether it is really "thought" that causes us to lurch away from a source of pain, but the effectual non-existence of ourselves at that moment (as other than creatures of response, that is) is in no substantive manner different from that shadow of a "self" that lurches from the bed when suddenly aware that an alarm clock was not set the night before.  In the context of what Jesus teaches about "thinking," all such things are lacking not only in substance, but in life as well.  We must consider then, what Jesus might mean by thinking, and also what Jesus might presume is necessary for true thought to occur.

First, I must attempt to recapitulate what I have tried to describe above.  The western world can reckon (and most usually does) that spiritual enlightenment comes unbidden and unaccounted from God.  The western world can reckon (and most usually does) that a person's physical experiences come unbidden and unaccounted from somewhere--and this is evidenced by the strange (but usually heartening) parallel of science explaining how our bodies work and of science explaining how exhaustive our attempts must be to respond to individual psychological and psychosomatic responses to physicality.  In short, we treat the spiritual and the physical as understandable in terms of unanticipated events.  One the other hand, we treat the intellectual as springing from traceable and reproducible steps of logic, and if this sounds at first like the stereotypical preachers' diatribe against "materialism," that is only because recognizing the extent to which Christianity has fallen prey to this hiving-off of thought life has been of no profit to the religious and of no interest to the secular.

I can introduce this topic only briefly here, and it is done best by providing a few of the Gospels' chief examples.  A young man--who has obviously devoted himself to such matters--gives a good answer to Jesus, and Jesus responds by telling him that he is not far from the kingdom of heaven.  What better time for Jesus to tell us the final necessary step or steps?  And yet both we and the young man are given nothing further.  Peter upbraids Jesus for describing and accepting his future martyrdom, and Jesus responds that Peter is thinking in the manner of humanity rather than in the manner of God.  How does God think?  If "how God thinks" is a necessary topic of logical study, then the denominations might be credited with having pursued the matter vigorously over two thousand years--though it is of course lamentable that the greater bulk of horror of Christians upon each other--and upon the world--has had its perennial rallying points phrased in terms of "how God thinks."

Is it not perhaps the case that "how God thinks" is relatable--by his sovereign will--as ineffably as is faith in God?  Is it not perhaps the case that when we read a story or a parable from the Gospels we are drawn unprofitably to ponder what it means rather than what it contains?  I am reminded of the parable of the seeds scattered on the path and on the rocky ground and in the weeds and on the good soil.  Christians are intent on understanding the parable as presenting a "meaning" about how theologies must be sifted and sorted in logical manners (yet, unfortunately, with as many "logics" as there are denominations.)  Read the parable.  If it is about "how God thinks" in this or that "salvation economy," then is the potential believer the trodden path, deserving to be robbed of the seeds by the birds, or is the potential believer the shallow-rooted plant unfortunate enough to start on rocky soil?  What the parable really "says" is not amenable to logical analysis, unless one is to "logically" conclude that salvation is an ineffable confluence of preparation on the part of the potential believer blessed by a ratifying and consummating bestowal of mercy by God.

There is no "lesson" in this parable, unless it is the meta-lesson that all bestowed by God defies all logic.  The young man who gave the good answer to Jesus might have applied his accumulated skills to arrive at his next necessary step.  Or he might have relied on his accustomed skills and cost himself the wisdom that could come from adopting a differing methodology.  Or--blasted out of the skein of conceits he associated with his idea of wholesome existence before he met Jesus--he could have reached out his hand to succor the nearest suffering creature, or the one he could have helped most.  What would have been the "logical" step to the kingdom, if not this last "illogical" one?

And so, if in the final analysis being the soil is the same as being the plant springing from that soil, I must admit that my "plant" analogy seems to have run its course.  In my attempts to understand, I have written of arcs, tendrils, seed-pods, bursting of seed-pods--and now I must add also springing anew from the soil--as conceptualizations of our experience-lives within the teachings of Jesus.  These experience-lives happen in all their aspects at once, just as Jesus declares that the fields are always white with harvest.  In the teachings of Jesus there are neither times nor places.  I imagine that is because time-and-place assessments involve that which must be traversed in complying with the will of God.  There is no such time-and-place, and no planning or assessing in doing the will of God.  That is what the Gospels say, not what they "mean."

The Most Generous Orthodoxy

The various conceptualities about what constitutes a "gospel"--some of which I have tried to deal with recently--lead to some interesting questions, such as, "If Jesus' hearers among the Jews had been provided with such information through their heritage such that they should have been prepared for Jesus' challenges--and to be sure Jesus takes them to task for not understanding the basics of where he is coming from--then might it not be said that the Old Testament as a whole constitutes a "gospel"?

And if it be said that the Old Testament as a whole constitutes a gospel, then are not the themes of humanity's relationship to God, and also of the essentials of salvation, themes that can be understood independently of a believer's attachment to the "name" of Jesus, Jesus in our postulated B.C. gospel being as yet unnamed?  And is not the sacrifice of deity to itself as a necessity of Creation's essential unworthiness a sacrifice that can be understood independently of the manner of the sacrifice, or the of manner in which that sufficient sacrifice is simultaneously unable to vanquish the sovereignty of the deity?  Are not the Cross and the Resurrection (of which so many Old Testament figures are held to be "types") not merely types themselves of more general truths?

Ultimately, of course, one is led to such conjectures as would include the idea that the great religions of the world--or perhaps even just the manifestations of "religion" as it might be thought to have circumspect and conscientious adherents throughout the world--constitute merely a multi-faceted faith system that is essentially one.  Certainly Jesus' assertion that he has followers we know not of raises some pertinent questions along these lines,

There is a corollary to this notion of universal faith--a corollary as distasteful to the denominations as its precipitating notion of such faith--and that is the idea that, if all religions are one, then under any potent scrutiny, each of these religions is a collection of essential "nothings" that is aggregated around that essential religious "something."  I will present here the idea that the Book of Malachi--not merely as an example but in fact as a quite salient example in that it is often taken as an introduction to the advent of the Christian messiah--is in fact a book dedicated to making nothings of what are conventionally taken to be great somethings of both Judaism and Christianity.

Malachi begins with an assertion of God's love for Israel and hatred for Edom.  This is, of course, a rather stern distillation of the Genesis story of hapless, untamed Esau and his favored brother Jacob--Jacob being, incidentally, an example of God's favor shown on a person who, absent that partiality, would be rightly adjudged a scurrilous character (to frame the matter quite charitably.)  Shown one of the greatest of all biblical visions at the place he would call "house of God," Jacob proceeds to impose upon his God a transactional relationship as a condition of following God.  Let a person make such a challenge to the divine before a priest or preacher today, and that presumptuous person would be chastised roundly.

In reality, the standard notions of Esau's supposed unworthiness are undercut even in the Genesis text.  Having neither birthright nor blessing, Esau is given nonetheless a "blessing" from Isaac that includes the notion that Esau will throw off his brother's yoke.  Indeed, Esau becomes a great nation and, in the picture given of his eventual reunion with his cringing, maneuvering sibling, there seems to be no reason (absent, again, the unaccountable favor of God) to think of Esau (the eventual Edom) as less than Jacob (the eventual Israel.)

And yet the book of Malachi has Edom held in the greatest disdain, accounted a "land of wickedness" with which God will be angry forever.  As it turns out, though, the Edomites as a people are not tied to that single land, and later they will relocate as the Idumeans who supply Judea and its environs with the House of Herod--scarcely the most noble of noble houses, it is true, but scarcely also the blasted remnant of Esau that Malachi must be taken to indicate.  Actually, the book of Malachi says particularly that what is meant to be indicated by the Jacob-versus-Esau depiction is the potency of Israel's God beyond the boundaries of Israel.  In essence, the Israel-versus-Edom parochial rivalry ends up being an instance of ephemera, paling in the light of the greater truth of God' sovereignty.  The particular falls away in the face of the universal.

Malachi goes on then to disparage the contemporary practice--or rather malpractice--of sacrifice in the Temple, holding it to be unworthy of God.  It would be better that no sacrifice be made at all, and this while the text maintains that God's name is feared among the nations, even as it is profaned by the practices prevailing in Israel.  The notion that God is Israel's God is here turned on its head, and Israel is shown as lacking in piety what the world at large is providing.  As if to add an insult, the priests--the beneficiaries of God's covenant with Levi--are held to be unworthy of their ancestor, who Malachi describes as having deserved God's favor for being a man of "peace and equity," even as Jacob's prophecy at the end of Genesis excoriates Levi (along with Simeon) for being violent and malicious.  Again, the particular falls away in the face of the universal, and in this instance the essence of sacrifice is taken to be unbounded by the precincts of the temple or by the edicts of the Mosaic law.

And then the men of Israel are taken to task for having married daughters "of a strange god."  Surely here the particulars of biblical parochialism are to be shown, one might think, as we revisit the matter of mixed marriages that so exercised Ezra and Nehemiah.  However, the notion of "a daughter of a strange god" does not equate by necessity to "a daughter of a lineage excluded by being not of God's people."  Having the testimony of the Book of Ruth at hand, the generation of Malachi--the book of Malachi that has God saying, "I hate divorce"--has also at hand the possibility of such "daughters of a strange god" being converted to Judaism (or at least persuaded not to perpetuate the beliefs of their youth.)  As if to underscore the point, this passage begins with Malachi asking, "Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us?"

And then the searing notion of the universal over the particular is laid upon the people, who are at once reassured that they are children of the forebear Jacob, and excoriated for being the children of the trickster Jacob:

For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.  Even from the days of your fathers ye are gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them.

In short, the Book of Malachi is a marvel of the universal stature of humanity being run through the mill of particularized religion.  This is nothing more nor less than the corollary of the often-plumbed notion among theologians, to the effect that true religion leaps over the boundaries of particularized conceptions.  Of course, the essence of any denomination is in its particulars, just as the essence of any religion is in its particulars.  In any effort to claim hegemony over the universal truths of existence, while still retaining an institutional identity, many theologians will engage one upon the other in a sort of cosmic chicken, each straining to out-do the others in being more universal, while hoping that the others will fall away short enough of dissipation into generalities so that the winner can still effectively claim an orthodoxy of the most generous-minded sort.

No Time for Gospels

My previous contention that "John is many gospels" relies, of course, on an untypical use of the term "gospel."  In this I am scarcely unique, as it is one of the staple aspects of theologians to use "gospel" variously.  Perhaps most striking of these uses is the radio-preacher type of insistence that the "full gospel" consists of the entire Bible--the entire Bible, that is, as it is taken to include at every pivotal juncture some one or another reference (usually a reference that has escaped unaccountably the "Jews," or the "Roman Church," or whoever) and this reference is elucidated by the preacher as being yet another part of the "gospel."  This is where we get unsubstantial contentions of the sort that Jesus' foot pressed against the Cross is foreshadowed (for the properly discerning) in the snake's target being the heel of Eve's offspring.

This "gospel" does not suffer limitations even to the text of the Bible.  Preachers will preach to Jews about how various aspects of Judaism's written and unwritten heritages contain "gospel" truths that Jews have forgotten even as they have clung to mystifying traditions, and if a person so desires he or she might might subscribe to preachers' resources that find the essence of the gospel in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

And then there is the unedifying derivation of "gospel" from "good news" in the Greek (or, rather, in a simplistic reading of the Greek.)  Suffice to say that "the gospel" in its largest and easiest application is a phrase taken to mean "the message of Christian salvation"--though this will not obviate the difficulty of a rejoinder that is pregnant in all the talk about how Judaism has misunderstood the Old Testament message that--surely--told the few "saints" of the centuries B.C. how to be saved.  This rejoinder is of such a type as, "If the elements of the gospel are present in the Old Testament, and were presented thereby to the Jews, what then did they lack as far as conceptual resources (and moral obligations) regarding salvation when the Baptist appeared from the wilderness?  What was the ostensibly revolutionary teaching of Jesus all about?"

The essence of the institutional manifestation of Jesus' teaching--the "Church" described as variously and conveniently as is the "gospel"--is as a custodian of the covenant that Jesus describes as "new."  Unfortunately (if one is looking for a rationale for an earthly institution), Jesus does not hew to a conception of time that is either linear or consistent.  Abraham lives always; Elijah arrives always and departs always; Abiathar lives in the person of his father; a Jew who owns being a descendant of a people who killed the prophets is a prophet-killer himself.

"New," as a term applied to the covenant, is as if to describe a covenant that is always new, and that never appeared but from the first--the pouring out of Jesus' blood being one with his suffering for the Creation of a world that, being not God, is ever an evanescence of virtue suspended over an abyss of damnation.  And, of course, Jesus suffers for this damnation as surely as he suffers the pain of all of his creation.  This is a conception of "good news" that--held by mere mortals--must surely fall short, but at least it does not embrace limitations held as matters of misdirected faith.

It is important to note that the Last Supper and the sacrifice of Jesus' body and blood is not described by him as separate from a larger scope of time.  When Jesus tells the crowds that they must eat of his flesh, his is confronting them with the conceptuality then and there--he is not announcing some prayer meeting or convocation in which he will fulfill some promise to make the teaching henceforth applicable (to say nothing of comprehensible.)  When Jesus breaks the bread and passes the cup at the Last supper, his somber pronouncement that each of the elements "is" a manifestation of the covenant has great literary resonance--and it also does not include the conventionally expected (and ecclesiastically supplied) presumption that the giving of flesh and surrendering of blood is to happen on the paving stones and on the Cross.  Jesus' sacrifice for Creation is represented by him as occurring in time, and is actualized out of time.

For the purposes of our understanding here, it must be held, not that the term "gospel" is stretched out of shape by the preachers, but rather that the very application of the idea of the gospel is inherent in the breadth of the Creation to which it ministers.  This is an idea--the idea of human confrontation with the realities of existence as being of one cloth with the idea of the gospel--that I must attend to soon (along with my promised presentation of the remaining many "gospels of John.")  That gospels can be both momentary and timeless ought to be one of the foundation-stones of our understanding.

John is Many Gospels

I have explored recently two notions about our experience-lives and our relationship to God.  One has been about the progress of our existences as imaged in terms of seed-pods bursting forth.  The other has been about the implications of our very existence--indeed, the very existence of anything that is not God--as being an existence described most aptly in terms of the negative, that is, in terms of everything being bad that is not God.

The overall implication of "existence" as applying to that which is not God is the inescapable conclusion that any "progress" we might experience is only the pressing forward in time of ourselves through states of change--and any change must be assumed to be for ill rather than good.  As we move beyond the first infantile experience, we must deal first and foremost with our propensity to lose our way--"aware, away, awry."  As the seedpod hangs from the plant--and diminishes the plant in terms of the expenditure of resources--we are as total creatures diminished, and the most we can hope for in our "burstings-forth" is a greater-or-lesser recapturing of our original states.  We can grow in knowledge of God, even in experience of God (and we can even do some service to God), but we cannot become more than we were at the first.

We are then, in the most general proposition, always in the process of dying, and the only life we can possess is drawn from beyond ourselves, as God infuses us with life to the extent to which we allow our own possession of life to slip from us.  Life and death are not opposites, then, but rather complementary arrays of threads that interweave the fabric of our existences.  First one or the other--life or death--predominates in any experience-arc, and then the remaining other (its inevitable complement) surges forth.  Most typically, of course, we see ourselves as becoming "alive" to some scenario, and then collecting the set of experiences that flesh out the arc, and then we understand the arc as reaching its fruition (or its decay--often the difference matters little.)  We are "roused, readied, reaped."  The most important thing is that we yield to the hand of God--that we "die" to ourselves, so as gain the benefit of experience that--without God--would always diminish us in what matters.

Adam was created into communion with God, and then Adam yearned for more, and his needs demanded a more and more refined stipulation of a proper "help meet," and then Adam became part of a couple who, on balance, could not help each other.  Cain made a presentation of himself to God, and then Cain was confronted by a rejection, and then Cain drew apart from his Creator, and then Cain slew one of God's precious creatures, bringing upon himself the notorious curse.  Noah made a sacrifice to his God, followed by a pressing of the vine into drink and imbibing it profusely, followed by an estrangement from certain of his offspring--and history knows how horrid were the results of letting human beings make slaves of each other.

In each of these instances is present a horrifying cycle of celebration, confrontation, alienation, and culmination.  The reason I use the term "horrifying cycle" is because any arc of human experience--absent an ineffable, merciful blessing of God--is always more or less horrible (the more so as we do not see the horror present.)  For us to be is for us to be less than God, and therefore in the general balance bad.  It is not for nothing that Jesus says that our optimal state is that of the innocent, experience-free infant, and it is not for nothing that--in the extremity of distress--the Old Testament found the greatest of imaginable reliefs would be in the imagined conception of the stillborn, hidden away in the earth and hidden away from the travails of the earth.

Celebration, confrontation, alienation, culmination--such is the architecture of our experiences, and within this framework is presented to us the ministry of Jesus.  Of course, the content of the teachings Jesus presents is at least as important as the structuring of those teachings, but when we misunderstand the structures, we can be led to direct our attentions to the wrong things.  Of unsurpassed importance in those misunderstandings is the insistence we display in trying to make a "story" of the ministry of Jesus.

We imagine we can understand the teachings of Jesus all the more as we pound into our minds the "gospel story," but--if anything--the proceeding gospel narrative is about people learning how to not understand.  Jesus starts the Gospel of John making fun of the first disciples' credulous nature, and on the very eve of his betrayal he responds to their claim of understanding him plainly,

Do ye now believe?  Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone . . . .

And then in a few verses we read, not how the disciples have come to understand Jesus, but how they have come to embrace him as being of God, and coming from God--a collection of insights that date back with them at least as far as Peter's confession.  If they do not gather that Jesus is God--and all of us will have always some manner of difficulty in understanding that totality--Jesus does not phrase that totality as being the essential point:

I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word.  Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee.  For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.

Jesus says that his disciples understand that he speaks the words of God.  Jesus does not say that his disciples understand the words of God--the disciples' understanding of the essential points is not, apparently, different in any fundamental way from the "Syrophenician" woman's "Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David."

As the gospel narratives are spread before us, we can see--in a manner neither unsurprising nor unduly upsetting--how the persons who experienced Jesus went through episodes and cycles of greater and lesser engagement with his teaching.  This is how religion impacts us, and this is how we might expect religion to impact the disciples, yet the prevailing focus on the "gospel story" obscures that reality in favor of a notion that Jesus is packaging a theology for us.  There must be a story, a biography, even a history, of Jesus in the gospels (or so maintain the denominations), and in this contention the denominations will be scarcely shaken.  This is where we obtain such silly notions as the multiple "cleansings of the temple" necessitated by the different chronologies of the Synoptics versus John.

Each of the "celebration, confrontation, alienation, culmination" cycles (which I described above in reference to Genesis) in the Gospels is a gospel in itself.  I have described in earlier posts my contention that it is indeed entirely possible that there were multiple "cleansings of the temple," but this contention makes sense only in a larger context of the possibility that Jesus presented himself on numerous occasions in a manner more or less approximate to his final, precipitous engagement with the authorities.  Jesus told his mother that his time had not yet come, and yet he acceded to her insistence that he perform a miracle that might indeed have hastened the end of his ministry.

In short, the Gospel of John is many gospels.

The introduction celebrates creation, then describes Jesus coming to his own, being rejected, and bestowing his "fulness" on the world.  Celebration, confrontation, alienation, culmination.

John the Baptist celebrates the advent of Jesus, and then in the role of messenger not only confronts the authorities, but describes Jesus as both his greater and as a timeless being--John's presentation itself being probably as close as any mere mortal might come to encapsulating a gospel.

John the Baptist celebrates the sighting of Jesus, and then Jesus gently confronts the first disciples with their amateurish understanding of the messiah, and then hits he them almost immediately with the most profound of culminations: "Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man."

Jesus celebrates at a wedding, is confronted in a momentary struggle over the timing of his public appearing, and "manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him"--which differs little from how they are (in the general theologies) thought to have believed so profoundly at the Last Supper.

Jesus goes up to a Passover celebration, cleanses the temple (with all of the attendant confrontations and alienations), and is described already as prophesying his resurrection.

Nicodemus comes to praise Jesus, Jesus confronts him with the disturbing demand that he must be "born again," and then Jesus hits Nicodemus with a gospel-concluding statement: "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already" and moreover, "this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world"--a gospel with neither a crucifixion nor a resurrection.

Jesus and his followers go to celebrate baptism with John and his followers, there is a confrontation between John's disciples and some Jews, and the episode ends with John saying, "The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand.  He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him."

Celebration, confrontation, alienation, culmination--the pattern (as we shall see) continues through the Gospel of John.  The rather striking, almost continual, initiating theme of "celebration" seems surprising, although not so much so if we remember that the beginning state of any arc of human experience is, at best, a relatively stable state.  For us imperfect beings, change is properly understood as degradation, or at least the potential evil of degradation.  Only the mercy and help of God can place us again at such state for which we might reasonably hope--with also such gains and lessons as we might reasonably hope for.

The True True Joy

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.

The True Greater Love

At the end of the preceding post, I wrote,

"Now we can begin to see Jesus' attentions to the ideas of life and death--at least in a more comprehensive view than as physical life and death, on the one hand, and eternal life and death on the other . . . . In the teaching of Jesus, the life-and-death binary is not of particular application.  Rather, it is the framework of all of our existence . . . When we buoy others up, we give them life.  When we drag them down, we give them death."

Of course, there are times and situations in which the desire to buoy others up might be misplaced--but giving others support or ratification when they need quite their opposites is not to give life at all.  Moreover, the same consideration need apply to ourselves as well.  Much of what we do for ourselves or regarding ourselves is done so that we might have a "life" as we understand it, and as we hope for it to be.

But "life," in the context of Jesus' teachings, is not a possession.  As a boundless condition inhabiting all of existence, life is understood as the manifestation of good--a manifestation present or absent in its degree of strength, not in its location.  In certain contexts, the objectively-existing life of another can be more of "life" to us than our own existence, just as the rejoicing in houses, land, or goods retained by others can be for us a possession of those things more deeply and abidingly than they are for the "owners."  In truth, we do not "own" even our personal physical lives, and the propensity (despite with what difficulty it might be dredged up) to share our lives with others must include by necessity the willingness to die (or to embrace any degree of death-like renunciation) in service to those we love.

This is the reasoning behind Jesus' otherwise-curious assertion that greater love has no person, than to give up life for his or her friends.  By "otherwise-curious," I refer to how awkwardly this expression of self-abnegation fits with the conventional understanding of "life" in Christianity.  Would not standard Christianity contend that a "greater love" than that described by Jesus would be a self-sacrifice in service to one's enemies, in contrast to one's friends?  Would not standard Christianity have to assert that a greater love than mere death would be a death by torturous means, perhaps after a near-lifetime of such torment?

And this is all gnarled up with Christianity's self-serving focus on Jesus' submission to death not, as Jesus treats it, an organic component of an ineffable relationship involving his Father, himself as the Son, and Creation identified simultaneously as an expression of the Son and as a subject of the Son's judgment--rather, Jesus' death in Christianity must be understood in some sacerdotal progression and therefore as some incomparable display of love for enemies and endurance of pain.  Whether expressed in ideation or not, Christianity's version of the Crucifixion must involve legions of frenzied, torturing demons and pains beyond compare.

Jesus' actual torments are (fortunately) to most of us unimaginable, but Christianity has a centuries-old tradition of embarrassing itself by simultaneously fixating on the willing torments of the martyred saints, while lingering on any number of conjured notions of what Jesus suffered--since each must be somehow greater than the other.  The most excruciating display we have in the Scriptures of the torments of Peter is when, by the Sea of Tiberias, he is given a thoroughly-undeserved chance to follow Jesus--no more poignant representation might be made of Peter given the single lifeline of heeding exactly to this command.  That anyone might contemplate this Peter seeking to out-do his master in humiliation by being crucified upside-down, is a matter scarcely to be paralleled in its futility.

In short, Jesus is an embarrassment to Christianity.  What sort of Christian would assert that there is "no greater love" than to give up one's life for one's friends?  More to the point, what sort of Jesus would redeem sinful humanity by accepting a surprisingly short tenure on the Cross, a tenure that the soldiers would have cut short at sundown in any event?  The Jesus who comforted the Good Thief with the prospect of paradise before sunset knew exactly what he we talking about.

Christianity does not understand life, as Jesus' teaching understands life.  Jesus' life--as ever we might experience it, understand it, "live" it--is presented to us in that expression of goodness contained in the Johannine introduction, wherein it is taught that Creation is inexplicably to be identified with Jesus.  Jesus gave up his life for his friends, but we could not in a million lifetimes encompass the thought of either "life" or "friends" as experienced by Jesus.  Every life--every birth--of a cell division must be experienced by Jesus, and every fear and every torment of every creature must be experienced by Jesus.  The notion that it is of signal importance that Jesus endured this or that earthly pain is ludicrous--Jesus experiences all earthly pain.

The eternal--the timeless--Jesus lived for a time on earth, yet he has always lived and earth has never lived without him.  Moreover, though our lives are short, we can never imagine a time when we did not live in the conception of God--as ever have lived Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--and we will never cease to exist (be that for good or ill--or what we might call "life" or not.)  Only with this grounding in the moral import of Jesus' teaching about life can we begin to understand the rest of our responsibilities, responsibilities that become all the more vexing as we appreciate the extent to which our self-conceptions are conceptions we have about the world, and our conceptions of the world constitute lives that draw us ever and ever to ourselves--to our detriment.

As I wrote above, much of what we do for ourselves or regarding ourselves is done so that we might have a "life" as we understand it, and as we hope for it to be.  We can experience life, but we cannot "have" it, and in an exploration of the teachings of Jesus we can come to understand how that knife-edge describes the boundary of good and evil.