The Shame of Contemplation

In Luke's version of the Parable of the Talents, the story is prefaced by the master going off to be made king, with certain of his countrymen hard on his heels with the intention of frustrating his appointment.  This detail will emerge again later.

The first two of the servants, entrusted with a portion of the master's wealth, are notably successful in their investments on his behalf.  That the story means little or nothing to the success-religion fixation on Jesus' (numeric) emphasis on "money" references is evidenced by the fact that the story obviously uses the success of the servants' ventures as a proxy for their intents.  It would be vapid to image that Jesus intends the moral lessons of the parable to anticipate a situation in which a servant is found morally reprehensible because the rains of God perchance did not fall on the season's wheat crop.

Of course, Jesus' listeners will want to imagine themselves in the company of the venturous servants, and will want to think they have little in common with the despised servant who did nothing but salt his master's money away.  (To little avail, as it turns out, since we must assume that this wretch will fall lower in his master's estimation than would a bold servant who lost all in the market.  Unfortunately, the thrust of Jesus' parable here does not accommodate a master's statement of, "Nice try, thou good and faithful servant.")  The unsuccessful servant is castigated by the master for not having at least entrusted his talent to the bankers for the sake of the interest.

It is this last point that is probably of much more importance than the rousing stories of the two successful servants--whose stories are both one-dimensional and unsurprising.  We tend to be surprised, however, (and not a little discomfited) by the servant's explanation of his paralyzing fear--that the master is a hard man who reaps where he did not sow.  The master, most importantly, does not deny this characterization of himself--or at least he does not find it problematic that the servant views him so.  The master's subsequent declaration--that the despised servant should have at least deposited the talent with the bankers at interest--must of necessity translate into an instruction to the listener, and it would be as good a surmise as any to assume that Jesus means for us to persevere by such means as we can, even as we feel only an indifferent affinity with what we can understand about the character of God.

There is much about the character of God that we do not understand, and that is bound to leave us troubled.  Unquestionably the God of Jesus' teachings (for all that we want to associate Jesus with love) is the God of eternal (and therefore infinite) damnation for finite misdeeds.  It would be a foul lie to pretend that this prospect does not echo the notion of the master reaping more than he sows.  This is not the same as to say that humanity's lot is infinitely dismal in the exchange.  Jesus speaks much about salvation as generously offered and easily obtained.  The wretched servant is dealt with harshly, but the extent of his failing need be seen as no more than the difference between placing a talent with the bankers or placing it under a mattress.

And, as I promised, the matter of the opponents of the master's elevation to king is revisited at the end of the parable.  These persons are to be apprehended and slain in the presence of the master-now-king.  Harsh indeed are the master's judgments, but taking a deposit to the bank or refraining from contesting an official's elevation are scarcely such duties as would consume all available joy from a person's life.

And we must ask ourselves if life is ever to be free of plodding investment of time and energy in prospects of wavering, transient enticement.  We must ask ourselves if life is ever to be free of wondering about the divine we cannot see, about questions of infinitude we cannot comprehend.  How much, we must wonder, of our religious energies are wasted on fussing about questions of the eternal and the infinite, when it is quite possibly in the formulation of those popularly-embraced "great questions" that we waste what opportunity we might have, if not to answer such questions, at least to refrain from god-like picking and choosing which questions to contemplate?

I say that we draw lines out ahead of ourselves in our imagining, not merely that we can contemplate the infinite, but that we can tell ourselves that we have chosen proper lines to pursue.  I say that we concoct stories about humanity's relationships to the divine, and that we are masterful story-tellers in convincing ourselves and each other that the stories that matter to us are the stories that matter.  In short, our relationship to the divine is a question most typically of the story-lines we will pursue, and those we will not.

We embrace fantasy if we embrace the notion that the life of the believer is typified by the fantasy-existence of the favored servants of the parable.  Leaf but a few moments more through the gospels, and there are warnings aplenty against servants thinking they are other than worthless servants--worthless even as they have done their duty.  Collect for yourself ten cities or ten additional talents (or the modern equivalents thereof) and be prepared to hear, "You fool, this very night your life will be required of you!"  Step outside and wonder if you are stepping over a Lazarus, or wonder if you ought to concern yourself about who languishes at other doorways.

And, of course, thinking that the parable applies to the time of judgment is but a fantasy-projection of one's fate over the intervening moments or decades.  All of us are under the suspension of judgment about what we do with our "talents," and all of us harry the prospect of Jesus' enthronement as King with our pleadings about how we ought to be spared this or that trouble in our plodding lives.

And yet here we stand with Jesus' promise--nay, his fervent hope--that we have abundant lives.  And here we stand with Jesus' admonition not to worry about tomorrow.  And so are we to gather to ourselves the goods and the good things of the earth, and to trust that tomorrow will bring nothing but the continuation of such prospects?

And yet Jesus tells us that each day has troubles enough of its own.  And we are to live it abundantly.  Would any of the logic of the theologians, or any of the aspirations of the theologians, be empowered--were we but to contemplate for a moment--to sweep away the looming potential that Jesus' idea of an "abundant life" for his followers is a life bursting with daily realizations of personal sin and failings?  If we are to contemplate the infinite, then ought we not to contemplate the infinite ramifications of our sin?  If in rage or neglect we barrel over roads and highways, do we not share in the sin of our fellow humans who collect, in the horrid lottery of chance, the label of killer?  If we flare up in murderous rage, do we not share in the undiluted guilt of others who--given goads and opportunities that we are perhaps spared--actually commit the deed of murder?

And Jesus will not stop there.  Do we not actually murder those whom we assail with "harmless" words?  If we commit adultery even by the mere thinking of it, do we not commit murder even by the mere contemplation of speaking harmful "harmless" words?  In religion, there is the thinking about infinities of time, and there is the thinking about the relative foolishness of imagining we can conceptualize infinite time, and there is the thinking about how we must guard ourselves against madness in thinking about infinite time.  Do we not possess therefore a competent arsenal of thoughts to protect ourselves, insofar as practical, from madness at contemplating any infinity?  Might we not be both empowered and entrusted to consider infinities of questions about infinity?

Our questions about infinity--and particularly about our infinite God--radiate from our existences in an infinitude of expanding possibilities.  The merest notion that one question about the potentialities of God (or about how the potentialities of God impinge upon us) is more important than any other question is an act of horrid presumption.  I am thinking at present of merely on example.  Jesus describes an "unjust servant" who buys the gratitude of his fellow humans by shorting the master on what is owed him.  The master praises him.  Such a parable is taken wrongly if it is taken to provide answers about our existences, and it is taken half-wrongly if it is taken to provide "food for thought" in how it might illuminate our understandings about our relationship to God.  The parable is meant to blow the lid off how we think about ourselves and God.

Jesus tells us that we can gain for ourselves not merely the good wishes of our fellow humans by passing off to them what belongs to God--we can gain for ourselves welcome into heaven.  To get to heaven (or at least to get to where we need to be to strive for heaven) we must clear ourselves of accusations or hard feelings on the part of others.  We must plead to fellow creatures as our judges.  This does not make sense in terms of our contemplation of the sovereignty of God, but that is only because we choose to claim, for our psychological benefit, arbitrary boundaries to the question of God's sovereignty.  We do not say that we understand infinity or eternity, even as we can imagine that we are infinitely inferior to God and dwarfed by the eternity that is in turn dwarfed by God.  Why then would we say that there are bounds to the implications of our sin, sin of which we do not know the bounds?

View these matters so, and one can no longer entertain the artifices of the denominations' writhings.  Pick up a Catholic study Bible, and read about how the "Keys of the Kingdom" legitimize the pastoral role of the Bishop of Rome--or the College of Cardinals--and his (its) subordinate functionaries.  Pick up an evangelical study Bible, and read that the binding and loosing of--Peter's? the apostles? the believers?--Keys of the Kingdom is a function of pronouncement of what God has already decided.  Preferably, take the Gospels as a whole and the "answer" to the question is couched quite simply--though in a quasi-organic flow from the mundane to the abstract.

We look to our fellow creatures for salvation.  We look to the good or bad estimations we might receive from the Ninevites, or from the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.  We might expect to be appraised by Balaam's ass.  What of it?  Sin is question of an infinity of shortcomings in the sight of God.  Why then would we think of this particular question of infinity as being intrinsically different from any other?  All questions of infinity involve not merely our inability to get our minds around it, but also our inability to encompass the possibilities latent within it.

It is to be expected that, in our study of great ideas that bear upon our relationship to God, the sublime (to us) would rattle up against the ridiculous (to us).  We are to give up our lives.  We are to live abundant lives.  If we would but do the personally ridiculous thing of stepping back for only a moment of contemplation, we would realize that "no life" in the framework of "abundant life" amounts to a life of days of trouble--trouble of which there is aplenty.  In this simple yet challenging viewpoint the teachings of Jesus make most sense.

The Shame of Ourselves

Jesus tortures Peter.  Jesus does not tell Peter that Peter's love for him is sufficient, and Jesus only gives Peter an endless responsibility for the flock--an endlessness that is particularly dismal in that it involves not a burgeoning of Peter's agency, but an eventual diminishment of it.  Peter will be led in his old age against his will.

God tortures Cain.  God does not tell Cain that he will be protected from avengers of Abel's blood, but merely that such avengers will suffer sevenfold themselves.  God's design is presumably to protect Cain from physical vengeance, but that is not the same as to expunge from Cain's mind the possibility that vengeance yet looms.

Jesus tortures Nicodemus.  Jesus tells Nicodemus of a conceptuality applicable to the process of salvation, but only in connection to another conceptuality--the wind of which no one knows the origin--that describes the metaphorical basis of salvation as founded on something as mundane yet as unfathomable as the physical world.

In short, Jesus leaves Peter thinking about something, the question of his love--his already crisis-shaken love--for Jesus.  God leaves Cain with an "assurance" of safety that exists only insofar as Cain can convince himself of it, even as Cain must wrestle with God's tantalizing question, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?"  Jesus leaves Nicodemus with, "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" (KJV).

These human beings are left with impressions imparted by God that are impressions assimilable only as live experiences, not as objectifiable lessons.  This is the great secret of the Gospels, a "secret" only because the plain import of described experiences undergone by Gospel figures is turned by the interpreters into theological "truths"--as though the very process of translating some figure's confrontation with the ineffable into a humanly-described "truth" can be effected by us without blasphemous presumption.

The denominations formulate "truths" ostensibly extracted from the Gospels, and congregants are admonished not to forget those "truths."  In a subset of those admonishments, congregants are instructed to consider the emotional impact of the Bible stories on the stories' figures.  In a still lesser subset, congregants are instructed to place themselves in the stead of the stories' figures, so as to internalize the emotions of those moments in order to further the relevant teaching.

This manages still to miss the point.  In the teachings of Jesus, the emotions ARE the messages, and the forgetting of each message is in the dissipation of the emotion, not in the fleeting apprehension of the ostensible point to be taught.  Jesus in a single passage admonishes his disciples for failing to consider how two great crowds were fed by miraculous means.  Inasmuch as these are miracles demonstrating dominance over physical possibility, and not (say) ostensible miracles of perhaps-fortuitous timing, then the number of such feedings is irrelevant.  What IS relevant to Jesus' admonishment here is the repeated opportunity for the disciples to cultivate mindsets open to the miraculous.

What I have driven at in my writings has been a consideration of the undeniable fact that we humans are the occupants of worlds--that is to say, of lives--constructed by us moment-by-moment.  To give up one's life for Jesus is not to dedicate or devote or consecrate one's self-conceptualized "life" in favor of a life better suited than before to some prevailing notion of a "godly" life--this is mere conceit (perhaps admirable conceit, but conceit nonetheless.)  To give up one's life for Jesus is to render one's life void of everything but that which satisfies the conditions for salvation.  Inasmuch as we can reckon safely that we can never satisfy the conditions for salvation (on our own, at least), then it makes as much sense as anything to say that our predicament is a damned shame.

Our "life" is considered properly as the reduction of our existence to the consideration of our shame.  It would be dishonest to pretend that a reasonable person would not construe this as a form of torture.  On the other hand, it would be dishonest to pretend that we do not experience internal lives in which we juggle and contort our selectively-appreciated horizons so as to effectively create artificial worlds for ourselves.  In a "real" world (as far as we can tell, applying ourselves in general consideration) of suffering and evil, it takes no overt religious goad for us to admit (if we are so willing) that we have a responsibility to consider always that we are creating false internal worlds out of our own convenience or predilection.  How the moral import of this realization, and our responsibility to act to upon it, could differ in substance from any shame-based "torture" of Jesus' teachings is quite a lively question.

What is important here, insofar as I intend to discuss the teachings of Jesus, is how the teachings of Jesus do not really make sense when viewed in light of the denominations' insistence upon distilling ostensible lessons from the Gospels.  "Lessons" are things we pretend we can extract from the narratives of the Gospels, and therefore by virtual definition are things that we can transplant into our own lives by simple volition.  It is incredible what earth-shaking presumption is involved in this process, but any unbelievability we might experience momentarily disappears as soon as we draw a breath, or blink an eye, or have a thought about any passing moment, because all of these phenomena are collected by us continually in a process by which we construct and maintain internalized "worlds" that we do not intend to have shaken.

And so, in terms of the Gospels and everything else, we insist on translating our experiences into lessons that we pretend we apply to the world, when in reality we apply them most crucially to our constructed worlds, our constructed lives.  We live moment-by-moment in internal worlds, and if we halt ourselves at any given moment (or perhaps have truly earth-shaking moments thrust upon us), we realize this truth.  We just don't want to.

We don't want to burn with the shame that Jesus cast at Peter.  We don't want to have shame slosh and splash in its raw acrid nature through our precious internal worlds.  Each of us, however, has an internal world--an internal life--that we nurture simply because we want to, and we choose by the moment whether we furnish it with good things or bad.  That we collect to our lives good things or bad, or even that we can store away good or bad "Bible teachings," is, however, alien to any true understanding of the claims of Jesus' teachings upon us.  Jesus claims authority not merely over the content of each person's life, but the actual existence of it, and in the hollowing-out of any person's life the last particularly defining aspect of that life is the shame that has driven the self-denying process to begin with.

And as the process unfolds, we--in our usual fumbling manner--end up in the best case choosing good shame over bad.  We can always excoriate ourselves for invented misdeeds, but we can scarcely err if we attribute to ourselves the failings common to humanity.  This, however, is the great pivot-point of our relationship to Jesus.  We can decide that our "selves" are stained with things that bring us shame (and so claim humble-sounding membership in humanity), or we can decided that the very conceit that causes us to objectify ourselves as "selves" is a shame (and so appeal to God for mercy for our being God-knows-what, for indeed only God knows what we are.)

Or to put the matter more bluntly, we can attribute correctly to Jesus (who knows all of our thoughts) his claimed intention of supplanting our most personally-identifying conceits, or we can attribute to Jesus the status merely of a presenter of lessons (some potentially salvific, some not) for our consideration.  In the latter case, to speak again bluntly, we treat Jesus (who knows all of our thoughts) as acting as a perfect and transcendent teacher who decides unaccountably to comport himself as a relative moron.

Encroaching Conceits

Jesus says that his disciples individually must attempt discreetly to correct a person who is in the wrong.  If that does not avail, then the offended disciple in question must bring one or two witnesses from the assembly of believers.  If that does not avail, and the offender will not listen to the assembly as a whole, then the assembly is to treat the wayward party as one would a gentile or a tax collector.  This raises, then, a pertinent question, that is, how is one to treat a gentile or a tax collector (as this general classification is to be one of "offender"?)

Elsewhere, Jesus says that we are to forgive an offending person "seventy times seven."  Taken together, Jesus' instructions about the status of another annihilate--in the ultimate sense--any true notion of "othering" a person.  To come to view, in times of alienation, another person as distantly as one would a "gentile or tax collector" is to view that person in the intimate sense of an incipient friend.  The circle has closed upon itself, and the notion of alienation has been shown to have valid status only as part of an all-too-familiar cycle of frustration and exhaustion.

The notion of distancing oneself from another dissolves by necessity in the glare of Jesus' supervision.  In truth, the notion of distancing oneself from another is a shameful prospect.  "Distance," indeed, whether in terms of location, time, or any other conception, is--if seized upon as a supposed necessity--an affront to the ever-present Creator.  All of Creation shrinks down into the person of Jesus, and Jesus extends himself to all of Creation.

John says that Jesus came to his own, but like all concepts applied to the divine, it is the dynamic of momentary and passing contemplation of such an idea that is important, not its establishment as a dictum.  Who are Jesus' own?  The Creation he created?  The humanity, pre-Flood and post-Flood, that ever walk the earth?  The offspring of Noah?  The children of Abraham?  The child of Abraham (excluding, by brutal assignment, Ishmael?)  The tribe of Judah?  The tumbled-together and unequal remnants of the first century?  Galilee?  Nazareth?

It is of course conventional to say that Jesus came to the Jews, who rejected him.  Even if we regard as incidental the very fact that "Jews" or "Judea" as terms hinge upon the unequal proportion of ancient strains of Jacob's surviving progeny, we are left still with pointed questions about Jesus' "own."  Are not Samaritans of particular import to the Jesus stories precisely because they have in their mixed heritage that essence--questionable, to say the least, in our more expansive moments--of "Judaism" distinct from religion?  If "own" is a matter of kinship, is it not possible that many of the Samaritans were more of Jesus' "own" than were the Idumean though ostensibly "Jewish" Herods?

If descent (as a rough correlation, given the possibility of intermarriage or conversion) is the precipitating element of the description of Jesus' "own," then we can say that the broad range of humanity's primordial past contracts in the accounts into that tiny cohort called first-century Judaism.  As I wrote above, all of Creation shrinks down into the person of Jesus, and Jesus extends himself to all of Creation.  Neither Jesus nor his mission (and particularly as we consider here his mission, with its universal implications) can be contained within points of reference.  Of course Jesus strides into the territory of the Samaritans.  Of course Jesus ventures farther, into the realm of the gentiles.

On the fringes of Judaism's conceptualization of humanity, Jesus uses an analogy of scavenging dogs to describe gentiles, and a gentile woman draws up an image of those dogs as part of a master's household.  The "part" element is all that is necessary--humanity is not divided finally into distinctions except in the ravings of ideologues.  Here we find the rub of notions about inheritance and family connections.  Such things, rightly handled, are passed on and passed beyond.  Indeed, such things pass readily into the realm of the ridiculous--especially when the things of God are considered.  As said by John the Baptist, God might turn stones into children for Abraham.

So, in the musings above as in all concepts, we can see that the divine, when rightly considered, cannot be considered among points of reference.  Think of God in some connection, and have it revealed to you that all connections are broken, and it is only in the momentary experience of their sundering that any contemplation can occur.  We do not generally want God-experiences that are momentary and passing, and shamefully we engage in shameful conjuring of idea-schemes that allow us--though in final futility--to frame our religious experiences.  This is why shame, of all candidates for our assiduous examination, is of such importance.  Shame is without context, and in contemplation of shame we can be reminded of the encroaching conceits that are our attempts to define the divine.