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.
No comments:
Post a Comment