Fear is the Blood

I heard a radio preacher recently carry on at length about how the whole of Christianity's scorn in the eyes of the world--culminating in the done-in-the-name-of-mistaken-righteousness killing of Christians--is a scorn that can be seen arising in the sin of Cain (culminating, of course, in his killing of the righteous "prophet" Abel.)  Most particularly, the preacher's focus was on the salvation-economy represented by reliance on faith in the prototypical--foreshadowing the Crucifixion--sacrifice, in opposition to the world's revulsion at blood sacrifice and the corresponding determination of the world to make the journey to God through other beliefs, other rituals, other works.

It is not merely to the cynic, nor even to the skeptic, to point out that Genesis indicates in no way that Abel's "blood sacrifice" is superior to Cain's "bloodless sacrifice" by the simple fact of the animal death.  (The commentators are forced to admit that, under the Mosaic Law, bloodless sacrifice was entirely acceptable.)  Nor is it to be assumed that a faulty sacrifice--rather than the downcast attitude for which God upbraids Cain--is what puts God and Cain asunder.

Indeed, God charges Cain with the duties of doing well and of overcoming sin, not with some duty to merely possess such "faith" that would by some inexplicable means qualify Cain as a recipient of the unmerited salvation that comes to those who believe in Christ's gracious sacrifice--although of course in the glare of circumspect analysis, it would still be a "work" for Cain to exert such faith, even if the sacrifice he could offer and the righteous life he could live can be--Calvinism-like--called the outworking of a salvation already possessed through pure, unmerited grace.  Of course Calvinism in any undiluted measure is inane, and it is no surprise that any "unmerited faith alone" analysis would show the whole story of Cain and Abel to be insubstantial blather.

What is important to us here is the corresponding fact, found in the vaguely-described story of the two brothers' respective sacrifices, that the element of "blood" is not particularly mentioned--while in the ensuing story of the first murder God says that the blood of Abel cries out from the ground.  Then, after the Flood, Noah is described as sacrificing animals to God--again, without mention of blood.  Blood, rather, features in God's ensuing description of how humans--and animals, infused now with a dread of humans--would be liable for the blood of slain persons.  And the price of killing would be to have one's own blood be shed as punishment.

It is said in Scripture that the life is in the blood.  This leaves us with the awkward realization that creatures exist, and undeniably live, who possess no blood--whether these be one-celled organisms (or many more complex ones), or one-celled fertilized embryos (or those with many more cells.)  Inescapably, the notion of "blood as life" is possessed of two notable characteristics.  First, the notion is evocative rather than factual.  Second, the notion is of dwindling application in any event as a more and more expansive (and therefore simpler) conception of "life" is applied to other than the flesh-and-bone creatures that leap first to mind.  Plants live, and germs live, and viruses live, and replicating proteins live--and who-knows-what "live."  Describable as attentive to--and responding to--the voice of God (or even of believers), the entirety of Creation "lives."

In the conceptualities of the Creation addressed in the teachings of Jesus, everything can be roused to action, or guided in direction, by the speaking of the divine, and it would be insipid to insist that a bright-line demarcation can be drawn across any frontier of Creation in this regard.  Jesus cursed a fig tree for its fruitlessness by proclaiming that it would never bear fruit--that the fig tree withered away as a consequence would seem to be a withering from shame or despair, since withering is not necessitated by fruitlessness.  This might seem to be silly musing, but it really is true that Jesus commands the waves to be still, and says that faithful disciples of his could command the mountains to move.

All of Creation fears God--or at least is capable of fear.  All of Creation lives--or at least possesses innate life-capacity.  Most pointedly, all Creation is liable to being roused--willingly or not--by the ineffable, irresistible speaking of God, and all Creation is attuned to the holding of its animating essence--its "life's blood"--as against possible traumas, whether divinely-caused or not.  This is the Creation created by Jesus, and this is the Creation that has no existence without him.

What this all leads to are twin realizations that are really not at all profound, yet usually escape us because of our pitiful vantage-point as against our surroundings.  First, Creation--being never more than "very good" rather than perfectly suited in any regard for a perfect purpose of God--is a Creation that is spurred beyond its normal state by the commands of God, whenever and however such commands are issued.  The elements do not leap in perfect obeyance to the will of God, though our conceits or our poetry might contend so.  Understood in the searing light of logic, the elements of Creation are defined in their existence by fearfulness of God.

Second, the "blood" that is the "life" of the creature is not some particular fluid or corpuscular element, but rather a metaphor of life itself.  The Jesus who contended that food does not enter the body, but rather passes merely through, was not founding his authority upon biology, microscopic or otherwise.  Similarly, the "blood" that is the "life" in the context of Jesus' world-view is secondary in the application to the mysterious life-force that it represents.  The Jesus who created Creation infused it, and infuses it still, with the essence of himself (and it would be nothing without him.)  His is the blood of existence itself--understood in the searing light of logic, the elements of Creation are defined in their existence by the permeating ministrations of the Son of God.

This leads us to the Jesus of the great sacrifice of himself.  His blood to be poured out was himself, in sacrificial substitution for imperfect Creation, and his dread of his impending suffering was a sacrificial substitution for the experience of existence of Creation--a most acute experience for us, but an experience that we can only with revolting conceit assume to be spared the Creation which writhes under our sins.  In the most basic and rawest of conceptualities, fear is the blood of all that we can comprehend existing, and it is in a horrid yet perfectly holy progression that Jesus would spill the pure blood that Creation cannot, and would--resounding in the agony of his cries--endure the pure fear that we the created cannot.

Our Creaturely Predicaments

The Ryrie Study Bible (KJV) of 1978, which I imagine can lay claim to being one of the more conservative sources of commentary, says this about the Book of Job:

Though at times Job reacts with hostility, he always turns back to God.  Much of what he says later is exaggerated, untrue, and virtually blasphemous, but he never renounces God.

The perennially arduous task of the conservative commentator is plain here, and one would prefer not to dwell excessively on the travails of commentators who have to claim that a person can turn back to a God whom that person had never renounced--to say nothing of the need to come up with a phrase like "virtually blasphemous."

What is important for us to remember is the fact that this predicament of the commentator--this assumed requirement to spread a matter flat like some parchment on a table--is not only unnecessary, but positively deleterious.  The search for the "strait gate"--a pursuit that is seemingly left in its particulars to the efforts of theologians to resolve upon some "salvation economy"--is in fact understood properly as the believer stumbling from one non-resolution to another.

This deleterious tendency to insist upon resolution of matters is as old as humanity, and crouches in the very shadows of Genesis.  Year after year and age after age preachers lament how the devil's question to Eve, "Did God really say?" (or "Hath God said?") is what precipitates the somehow-not-describable-as-sin-yet quasi-sin of Eve "questioning the Word of God."  What should be lamentable most at the outset of such considerations is the usually-ignored fact that the devil is questioning Eve's recollection, not God's pronouncement.

Surely the "very good" pre-"Fall" Adam and Eve were no more perfect than anything else in Creation, including in the capacity for recollection.  Eve--especially an Eve unencumbered by the theologians' insipid notion that she or her mate were ever "without sin"--could wonder whether or not she recalled correctly a prohibition against eating the fruit.  This still leaves the fruit untasted, leaves Eve and Adam exquisitely well-nourished, and leaves the question of the prohibition a live issue for Eve to bring up at God's next cool-evening visit.

Eve, unfortunately, sets out to resolve the matter there and then.  That's the way we sinful humans are.  It may well be argued that self-actualization, or rather the impulse to self-actualization, is what makes us what we are.  "Actualization" hinges upon the existence (or the intellectually-conceived existence) of a set of circumstances, and "actualization" occurs when we exert our wills upon our circumstances.  None of this has to be real--what is "real" is our momentary, localized, time-and-space knot of experiences.

Eve acted within her self-conceived set of experiences.  Job acted within his self-conceived set of experiences.  Eve's subsequent set of experiences was less desirable than Job's--or was it?  Job, as it is credited to him, knew well enough to "repent in dust and ashes."  We know well enough of the account of Eve's "curse" from God after the "Fall," but do we know whether or not she (metaphorically, at least) repented "in dust and ashes"?  Does Eve not credit God later with having helped her "bring forth a man?"  This is the same Eve who is succored Job-like for the loss of an offspring, with Seth to replace Abel.

What we know about Eve in the immediacy of the great sin she committed is the fact that she sought a resolution of the question before her.  Job, in his anguish, can be characterized most charitably as having wrestled with temptations and questions about God--and having clung in some slipping yet frantic fashion to a countervailing notion of God as being just--unaccountably, mystifyingly just, but just nonetheless.  The question of Job's fate hung not on the presence or not within Job of that welter of sins that is the lot of humanity, but rather in Job's writhing engagement with his questions about God as being live--with questions that he spared the finality of his wife's taunting dare to "curse God and die."

These two Satan-mediated episodes encapsulate the proper understanding of Satan as a liar and the father of lies.  That "lies" exist in the communications of the universe is not the pivotal issue that we imagine it to be.  As long as we are imperfect beings, and imperfect thinkers, and imperfect communicators, then for so long we are bound to incessant, impenetrable blurrings between lies and mistakes.  When we speak, Job-like, of things we do not understand, are we lying--even though we imagine we are but speaking our best understandings?  Do we understand anything so thoroughly as to presents any such understanding as perfect before God?

It is the question of resolution that solidifies and renders potent the nature of lies.  Taken in themselves, Satan's supposedly "devilishly" penetrating assertions to Jesus in the Temptations episode are fascinatingly moronic.  Four thousand years to rehearse, we might imagine ourselves asking of Satan, and that's the best you can come up with?  Yet we who can never cease to remind ourselves of the extremity of Jesus' sufferings on the Cross, can scarcely imagine what Jesus in the earlier episode had endured for forty days in the desert.  It is not the saying of lies, or listening to lies, or considering lies, or weighing lies one against another, that is the true poison of falsehood--the true poison of falsehood is the elevation of any of the effectual falsehoods that constitute our thought-lives into ostensible "truths" that fester and grow rancid when hidden away from examination.

The notion of truth versus falsehood is the interface between the world we imagine that exists and the selves that we imagine we possess.  Just as our "selves" are things we live with--and I mean that in the true experiential sense of selves we observe as though outside them, selves that shift and throb with constituent, nebulous characters--our "worlds" are things we live within, things that are really shifting and throbbing conceits to which we assign variable values in veracity and importance.  We can cling to ourselves--or imagine we are clung onto by, it makes no difference--the various component thoughts and impulses that comprise us for good or ill, or we can wrench from God the privilege of defining ourselves, imagining that we know ourselves as stable point-sources of awareness.  We can remember that we are disparate, writhing parts that comport with the demon-traversed households of inner life of which Jesus speaks, or we can imagine that we are self-possessed souls of greater or lesser awareness of our own limitations--godlings of indifferent capacities other than our imagined abilities to know ourselves.

As I wrote just above, in comparison to our "selves," our "worlds" are things we live within, things that are really shifting and throbbing conceits to which we assign variable values in veracity and importance.  We can cling to the unresolved issues which bedevil us, thankful (as often as we can remind ourselves to be) for the ineffable overarching presence of God, holding onto as many live issues as we can as indefatigable wrestling-partners--for issues with which we wrestle are issues that can cede to us, however reluctantly, the wisps and whispers of as-yet-unimagined prospects.  Or we can pile up ostensible "truths"--that is to say, humanly-appreciated ostensible truths--that is to say, "lies."

Anything that comes out of our mouths is a lie--objective or scriptural warrant notwithstanding.  This is more than the fact that we cannot understand or communicate things perfectly, although even that set of limitations ought to give us pause in attempting to believe we speak "truth."  We do not even speak with single voices.  Our voices are produced by congregations of internal voices springing from disparate and shifting elements of our riotous inner lives, and the ears of our hearers are but conduits to their own internal crowds--if they are words that can even be heard by our hearers over their inner cacophonies.  This is the thrust of Jesus' admonitions to his opponents about how they followed the inventions of their forebears.  It mattered not if a commandment of the Law was genuine or rooted in Scripture--what mattered was the fact that the commandments (as, indeed, any notion of God or holiness that we utter) had been rendered the effectual property of generations and generations of crowd after crowd.

We are each knots of writhing internal voices, and we each live in worlds of wrestling world-conceits.  We can muster up thoughts and voices to cry unto God, and it seems scarcely a question, whether we would do better to issue such pleas from the self-appreciated roiling dust of our acknowledged inner confusion and confabulated world-views, or attempt to present our pleas to God from sedate notions of seemly humility before this or that conceptualized altar.  Jesus would have us resolve our potentially unresolvable issues with this world before we presume to approach the altar.

Better to cast our voices to the altar from afar, as ever we can, even as we scramble and slip in the dust and ashes of our creaturely predicaments.

By Necessity Off Center

Our understanding of our condition will be always in terms of metaphors.  When thinking of the things of God, a reserve to the effect that we will never understand such things completely--for surely this is simple prudence--will produce by logical necessity the realization that all of our thoughts are metaphors.  We do not "know" reality--we can do no more than cultivate an increasingly reflexive, responsive, and yielding apprehension of the conceptual figures that impose themselves upon us.

"Reality" does not "exist."  Reality happens--one figure after another of cognition striding alone or with myriad others in a jostling parade across time.  Reality happens--one figure after another of cognition looming alone or with myriad others out of a heaving landscape across space.  This is the reality of "reality," and we know this to be so.  All attempts to ground our conceptual existence upon what can be "known" are folly.

We can claim that we are but flickerings in some giant computer simulation, but of course, as long as "computer" as a term is applied as though the entire observable universe were but some humongous quantum computer (or that the "computer" of the conjectures could be greater in scope than the universe), then the conjecture is not falsifiable.  More importantly, a brand of conceptualities have been incorporated here to the effect that the "computer" in question is but a surrogate for a clumsily described "god."

We can claim--as an example meant in contradistinction to the immense materialism just described--that we are non-corporeal point-sources of awareness.  These, then, would be our souls (if the common religious term is applied), a term which would be applied most appropriately--in the lexicon of the religious believer--to our "selves."  Unfortunately, as long as we admit (as we must) that we can forget things or that we can be affected by our unconscious as well as our conscious minds, then the "soul" conjecture is not falsifiable.  More importantly, a brand of conceptualities have been incorporated here to the effect that the "self" can be the object of self-apprehension--the self asserting itself in a clumsy determination to claim the self-assessment of a "god."  (That the self's self-accorded right to self-assessment might be humble or apparently unsparing is to tend to magnify, rather than lessen, the horror of the original unwarranted assertion.)

To repeat the present blog description--God has no edge and we have no center.  We do not know ourselves, and we do not know God.  What we might say about God will be reflected back at us by the sphere of our limitations, and what we might say about ourselves will be reflected back at us by the cloud of all-in-parts and parts-in-all that is the self we think we know--as though the vantage-point of our knowledge was not by necessity off-center.

Joy Passing

The thrust of "Roused, Readied, Reaped" is humanity's existence as the self-experienced pattern of innumerable arcs or cycles of varying duration in simultaneous expression.  The thrust of "Aware, Away, Awry" is humanity's existence typified by those arcs or cycles impressing themselves on us as foundational experiences upon which we pile increasingly tenuous yet evocative conceits.  The thrust of the present blog, reckoning that the above-described phenomena are attended to by us fallible beings, is that upon any examination--either relatively frail or relatively robust in terms of truthfulness--"Shame Appears."

Any examination of the roots of humanity's shame before God, reckoning that the things of God are to be understood in terms of absolutes rather than in terms of quanta, will reveal that it is fatuous to contend that humanity was ever free of shame.  All entities that are not God are either shamed by that fact, or are encompassed by such effulgence of God's righteousness as to be understandable by us as being in fact God.  Jesus is God, and he is also understandable by us as distinguishable from God, and we cannot put together the first two clauses of this sentence without giving ourselves cause to experience the shame of our inadequacy.

On the other hand, we shame ourselves and our species by contending that Adam was ever without sin--or without the attendant cause for shame.  Adam is never described other than as giving God cause to respond to his first man's foibles.  Adam indeed was from the start "very good" rather than perfect.  Adam was also--as we are as well in this creaturely life--saddled with predispositions to take life's rousings of us to consciousness, and life's proddings of us to awareness, as the unquestionable (and scarcely conscious) institution of horizons against which our fortunes are displayed.

Adam sought, after that one described sin that is recounted so often as the cause of The Fall, to find comfort in remedy.  Adam sought to cover himself, and Adam sought to hide.  Both of these courses seemed preferable than to stand naked in shame before his God.  What is lost to us--when we make of Adam and Eve cartoon-characters rather than prototypes of real people--is the fact that the take-hopeful-action-rather-than-remain-in-the-despair-of-shame phenomenon is always, and has ever been, the condition of the human creature cursed to be not God.  If a creature is not cursed, and not expected to respond as one cursed, before a perfect God who extends only the praise, "very good," then the notion of being "sinful" has no substance.  How can a creature possess an iota of sin--no, less than an iota, for "iota" forces itself upon us as a quantum notion--and be described as other than "sin full"?

And so we creatures seek to squirm away from the despair of shame by lunging for horizons that we define for ourselves, by criteria just as murky as any far-away prospect to which we aspire, though as much as the thin comfort of swallowing hard, or of allowing ourselves to sit down and think for a moment, is as far away from us, and as murky in substance, as any grandiose scheme we might have in which we will redeem ourselves and find happiness.  It is small wonder that Jesus describes a desired kingdom that has no location, and a narrow path that has no direction, for it is our very desire to move, to act, to ponder, to do anything to conjure up some modicum of joy out of our shameful despair, that is the source of our still greater shame and despair.

This foundational quandary--and the pain that it brings to us as creatures--is what Jesus submitted himself to as a human.  There is much silly talk about how Jesus "became" this or that in the course of his life, as though he was ever less than the perfect Savior--or ever less than perfectly qualified to be so.  Just as Jesus might have beckoned to legions of angels to come to his defense, so also might he have deluged the minds of every person living with the sere truth of every question ever asked by preacher or lay person or wondering child.  The Jesus who created the universe and all in it was the Savior of the universe always, not just in the thirty-odd years he was "Jesus of Nazareth."

What Jesus submitted himself to on earth was the life-course, the moment-by-moment course, of existence that is the lot of the created being.  Jesus went from moment to moment, and in so doing experienced such joy as we humans might ever have.  The Jesus who dreaded the Crucifixion was the same Jesus who anticipated eagerly the meal he might have with his disciples just the evening before the trial.  We might call this nonsense, if we ignore the fact that our fascination with the unfolding of events in our own lives, and our conceits about how we can make such things unfold, is as old as Adam.  We can talk about sinfulness and righteousness, and about good and evil, but what we really yearn for in such matters is the chance to actualize our conceits.  Such change--such permutation in time and space, even if only in our minds--is what seems to succor us in our horror of the alternative--to stand naked in shame before God.

And Jesus was transfixed, in our stead, before God.  This was the experience Jesus was willing to undergo (displayed for us at the end and also in the wendings of a life to proceed it)--the experience we are unwilling to undergo ourselves.  The nothing-experience, the no-time, no-place, no-musing-nor-conjecture experience of shame.  Nothing to occupy us in our despair.

Joy is as diaphanous and as passing as the sages have ever called it.  Joy is despair in motion.

The Whisper of Satan

The remarkable thing about Judas' series of interactions with the devil in Luke and John is how mundane it is.

Luke's "then entered Satan into Judas" at the time of Judas' approach to the "chief priests and captains" is the parallel of John's account of "the devil having now put into the heart of Judas" to betray Jesus.  Only later in John is it said of Judas that "Satan entered into him."  The degree or the timing of the devil's influence over Judas--to say nothing of how the moralists will assign responsibility--is perhaps a series of puzzles, but if the Judas-Satan nexus is remarkable for anything at all, it is how organic, malleable, and variable it might be.

Christian commentators--wedded as they are to artifices of the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and also to conceits about the assignable individuality of persons--can only either stride metaphorically along, hands in pockets and whistling distractedly, or pause so as to render the question of Judas' responsibility separable from the rest of the Gospels, a discrete question about how it might be admitted that This Is A Problem.  Christianity has no use for Jesus' description of our self-conceits as houses riddled with door and windows and traversed by myriad entities.

In truth, there is no such thing as a neutral thought, or even a neutral observation.  This is not merely because we are limited, but also because we are under influences that assail us beyond the limits of our understanding.  There is no thought upon which we light that is unattended by the praise of an aggregate of internal voices (whether near or peripheral), and in this din there is always the whisper of Satan.

The Very Demon Itself

The "self" is a curated phantasm.  The "self" is an affront to coherence.

The self cannot be seated in the spiritual realm, and it cannot be located on any contiguous dimension in the physical realm.  The self is a thing that in its very "thing-ness" is a degradation of its ineffable origin, and also it is a perversion of any confrontation with the universe, which for the purposes of the self's "thing-ness" must be a universe divided into that which is within the self, and that which is without.

Chiefly, the self is a locus of desire, an amorphous cloud of desire permeated by an infinitude of permeable and endlessly permeated miasmas--miasmas of what can be imagined and what is unimaginable.  The self's greatest desire is to wince away from consideration of itself as--unfathomably--either an entity possessing and expressing appetites, or an indescribable non-entity generated by imposed appetites.

It is upon the matter of desire that the conjured existence of the self is of most relevance to the Scriptures and to Jesus.  The self generates a futile, frantic whorl of transient reflections within which it resides and by which it defines itself--there is that which is within, and also that which is without, the self.  This self-devised separation, this threshold, is that upon which crouches the sin-demon of Genesis.

The sin-demon of Genesis is the self's own creation, and the self by its own possession and own expression is that very demon itself.

The Agony of Existence

Jesus was hoisted up on a cross.  He was not killed with fire or sword.  I do not intend to make too much of any theory I would have about the manner of his death, but here I intend merely to relate how the imagery of the Crucifixion has impressed itself upon me and my other notions.

If any notion of Jesus as a shaker-up of humanity's conceits is pursued with vigor, that notion can scarcely escape an imagery of Jesus as incorporating both fire and sword within himself.  "Sword" is the most familiar of these conceits, evoking thoughts of how Jesus' unyielding criticism of our self-satisfactions confronts us with unsettling realizations.  Among the most poignant of those realizations is the fact that family (along with other conceits of emotional proximity) is a hindrance to our pursuit of proper orientation.  Our forcing upon Genesis the notion that Christianity ought to be a "family-centered" faith is manifestly unwarranted, but as if to seal that realization Jesus tears apart our notions of family as foundational to proper Jesus-following.

Jesus is the sword, the knife, the conceptual edge that sunders every preconceived connection (indeed, in the final analysis, every notion of necessary connection) between anything that exists in the universe and anything else that exists in the universe.  The universe is an ever-refreshed, incomprehensible, un-creaturely-encompassed congeries--a well of potentialities that we view as consisting of limited potentialities (the "laws" of nature or of physics) even as Jesus ascribes to us (or to the posited "us" that had at least a mustard-seed of faith) the power to transmute without limit at will.

And then there is "fire."  Everything in the universe is describable as "in the universe," and by that very inescapable definition all is connected to all.  Just as anything that we call a "thing" is separate from any other thing--at least upon the level of definition in question--so also is every "thing" connected to all others.  Nothing has any existence that is not encompassed within the realm--however attenuated--of the effect of every other thing, and as long as the universe endures every thing in it will be possessed of an energy imprint, a "fire" of itself.

Jesus is the fire, the searing energy, the vital fusion that binds all together, and this fact must perfuse any notion we have of our existence as a constellation of parcelings-out of things ostensibly separate one from another.  To recall Jesus' disdain for our preoccupations with "family," there is Jesus' strikingly passive description of Mary as the "mother" of "the disciple standing by, whom he loved"--as though it were more the case that Jesus was describing a pre-existing effectual reality, rather than assigning some adoptive familial relationship.

We are all of us of a family of all of us, and simultaneously we are none of us members of any family that can claim any validity other than how this or that "family" is an expression of the will of God.  We are all of us separate from all and bound to all, and the will of God as expressed by Jesus cuts everything apart as with a blade and fuses everything together as with a flame.

Indeed, we must reckon always that any scenario, any packaging-within-intellect, is describable and therefore analyzable in innumerable ways.  A hawk soaring in search of prey is describable as inhabiting the sky, or perhaps inhabiting the earth that is shrouded in the sky, but that is scarcely to exhaust the possible descriptions of the hawk's habitation.  To us the hawk is above us, or is above (in a much smaller relative increment) the earth, but we have decided that reference to the horizontal is what matters.  In the immediacy of flight, the hawk's habitation can just as well be understood as being in reference to the vertical.

The hawk can inhabit a column of rising air driven upwards by its heating over a relatively dark--that is, sunlight-absorbing--field or grove.  The hawk's world is a relative verticality of the earth's gravity, of its fiery core's contribution to the energy milieu, of the relative local quality of the earth's surface below, of the rising air, of the solar and cosmic radiation playing about the atmosphere's upper reaches.  We can imagine our world, or other worlds, or even a universe of worlds, and we can probe such matters in our thoughts or with inventions wrought with our thoughts, but we cannot escape our common creaturely finitude with the hawk--or with the God-numbered sparrows whose worlds are haunted by (and partially defined by) the terror of deadly silhouettes soaring above.

At best we can challenge ourselves with our limited understandings of the universe.  Or perhaps better yet, we can challenge ourselves about how we are loathe to give up our conceits once we have formed them, or have inherited them.  Genesis tells us that man and woman will become one flesh, yet other than leaving short-lived DNA traces (or, lamentably, rather more long-lived sexually-transmitted diseases, perhaps laced even with incorporated DNA from the previous hapless host), man and woman do not "really" become one flesh.  In the conceit espoused by Jesus, we do not even become "one" with the food that we eat--though of course we have learned much about how ingested nutrients can become part of the eater's body.

Inescapably, the process of giving up prior conceits--in our discussion, the testing of prior notions about how things are connected or not, separate or not--is a process to which we must be always open.  The "one flesh" that the man and woman become might quite easily be understood as the conceptus, or--to challenge prior notions even further--the "one flesh" can be the gamete-inhabited, nutrient-infused, cell-and-milieu commingling of the involved couple's coupling.  That this mostly-fluid "flesh" might be held conventionally to be outside of the couple's "bodies" proper is perhaps an outdated, parochial view of our bodies.  As a further consideration, a collection of evidence has been gathered that--for all practical purposes--the individual human's mostly-fluid gut biome is an "organ" as crucial as any other.  Add to this a body of emerging evidence that the gut biome can have profound effects on the mental and psychological states of the individual, and it can be considered at least that we have much--perhaps infinitely much--to learn about our very selves.

And into this world of many thousands of years, and many billions of lives, comes Jesus as God incarnate.  This is the world, as we cannot deny, in which we think we know things that we do not, and in which we do not even know the scope of things we do not know.  As the snake was raised up in the desert, rendered in bronze to be both imposing and impotent, so also was Jesus raised up.  Was the snake transported from the dust to an imposing height, or transfixed into powerless rendition for all to see?  Does not the same manner of question--whether we see Jesus raised to power or shorn of power, or both--confront us with the Crucifixion?

I have for years wondered about Jesus' declaration, at that final earthly meal, that he would not drink of the fruit of the vine until he did so in the heavenly kingdom.  Yet later he takes from a sponge of sour wine.  Is this just a matter of confusion, or of conflicting accounts?  Or is not Jesus, who is "raised up," deprived thereby of the merest powers to which we lay claim daily with nary a thought?  Jesus on the Cross could not eat, he could not--as we would in any decency understand it--drink (though he might try), and then finally he could not lift his frame, or scarcely even breathe.  Though a critic might contend that Jesus did indeed "drink," and that he held back enough breath to cry aloud in finality--effecting, so it would seem, a self-euthanasia in his distress--such criticism might be sliding easily and conveniently by without considering how Jesus' death (and, most importantly, his confrontation of his death) is incorporated into his ministry.

Jesus came with an expression of power, and I have tried to present a possible (among, admittedly, many other possibilities) set of pictures of that power.  Jesus wields a blade that cuts apart all of our notions about how existence is to be parceled up, and Jesus wields a flame that sears together all of the things that it pleases us to be kept apart.  Insofar as our experience of existence--indeed the experiences of us, and of the animals, and of the plants, and of who-knows-what-else--hinge of necessity on having some graspable ideas of conjoined and separated phenomena (as long as we exist on this plane) we--and the Jesus who made us--will endure suffering.  Things do not come together as we would wish, and things do not stay apart as we would wish, and in our permeating faithlessness we are powerless to remedy our state.  This is not just philosophizing--the "things that do not come together as we would wish" can be jigsaw puzzles, or they can be political federations that might or might not protect us from the most searing of horrors, or they might be things even worse.

And the Jesus who came with an expression of power met his death in humanity's most artfully-devised imposition of powerlessness.  Time being as nothing to the divine, we must understand that the Crucifixion is shrunken in our conceits when we think of it as something that happened.  As long as things can--as we understand them--"happen," then the Crucifixion is always happening, and will always happen.  The Jesus who gave us Creation--who gave us the experience of Creation wrapped in a "very good" world's worth of supportive ministrations--has endured throughout the agony of existence.