To Be the Preserved

In the last post I wrote:

"For the purposes of this blog, I will contend that a person's conscience is as suitable (and as ineffable) a description of a person's basic existence as ‘soul,’ ‘spirit,’ or ‘heart’."  My use of the term "conscience" will be intended to have the full force of the prevailing definitions of the term, though I (and the reader) must consider that the postulation of this or that term being understood as "basic existence" is attended necessarily by a fading to inexactitude as this equivalence is made the more stringent.  At this point I refer again to the previous post, wherein I wrote, as a presentation of examples:

“. . . the distinction between ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ pertaining to us is a distinction that dissolves, not in a forced combination, but in a coalescence occasioned by the consideration that each concept represents a swallowing of conceits by an ineffable and untraceable--and time-less and space-less--anomaly.

"By ‘anomaly’ I mean that there is no reason--save the will of God--that we ought to exist.  Similarly, there are no reasons why any of our characteristics ought to exist.  We can think of cause and effect, as we imagine they occur within us, but for us to imagine that we can trace such things back to some source or sources identified as our ‘true’ selves is the same as to say that we can comprehend our very existence."

If "conscience" is to be our understanding of the basic cohesive element of our described "selves," then simple prudence will recall that the appearance of this Hellenistic conceptuality is represented in somewhat more organic and imprecise forms in the centuries before Jesus and in the daily milieu of his ministry.  The notion of a person knowing that he or she has done wrong, and "burns" therefore with "shame" (or the like) must be understood as the equivalent of "conscience," and indeed it is this more rather than less visceral manifestation-type of conscience that accords most closely with this blog's theme--that when the accretions and distractions of our lives are scaped away, "Shame Appears."

Jesus, as a moral philosopher, is nothing if he is not a scraper-away.  Nothing, indeed, scrapes more deeply into the layers of convention than Jesus' scouring (and literalist-confounding) declarations that "you have heard" this or that.  We have heard, "thou shalt not kill" (and the like), yet Jesus probes the matter like no one else.  According to Jesus, to as much as verbally abuse another person is to transgress against the commandment against murder (and, in another context, Jesus tells us that to imagine a deed is as bad as to commit it.)

What must be considered about such probing accusations of Jesus against us is the fact that they are condemnations not to be extracted from the Scriptures themselves.  Literalists can chant all they want about how "the Jews" or "the religious authorities" or even "the unsaved" simply "did not understand" the implications of "you shall not murder" (though, ironically, the literalists themselves are the first to limit to "murder" the quaint traditional rendering "thou shalt not kill"), yet the letter of the Scriptures is quite precise in representing gradations of assault culminating in "murder."

No, the reasoning behind verbal abuse being the equivalent of murder is not to be found in the text, but in the "heart"--what we call most usually "conscience."  Jesus peels the matters of misdeed all the way back (or at least as far back as we can understand) and lays bare the "heart" of the "soul" (or the "soul" of the "heart", or whatever) as being "evil."  Here we might be tempted to find the Calvinist's "total depravity" (and to engage in the Calvinist's frantic work of renouncing "works" in favor of baffled babbling about unmerited grace), yet it is precisely in the harrowing recesses of our revealed evil nature that Jesus demands that we be perfect, even as our heavenly Father is perfect.

The inescapable implication of all this is the very fact that we cannot escape having been launched upon our life's journeys in the spattering and the surging of shame.  To be human is to be afflicted with shame, or at least this is to be the best humans and the most human we can be.  Nothing can be understood (or begin to be understood) without the throbbing of conscience as the firm foundation (irony of imagery intended) of our lives.  And at least conscience, properly addressed, can drive us to assess our existences as we ought--as existences undeserving of those very conceits about life that "the world" holds so dear.  And by "the world," I do not mean to echo the radio-preachers' railing against "Hollywood", or the foul language one encounters at work, or even the flesh-world-devil construct so conveniently externalized to the believer's Sunday-morning mindset.

In warning against "those very conceits about life that 'the world' holds so dear" (as I put it), Jesus really puts forth a set of notions consistent, not with the devoting of life, but with the surrendering of life.  Life is up and down and side to side.  Life is here and now and there and then.  On the contrary, the existence that Jesus tells us we must embrace is that very existence of being cast adrift, adrift in a measureless (and therefore incalculable and un-anticipatable) rush of experiences.  This is the existence in which it is truly the case that Jesus, who fulfills the Old Testament command that we love one another, issues us a New Commandment that we love one another.

There is no time and no space in the Jesus-defined realm--which means there is no limit to our guilt and no limit to God's mercy toward our guilt.  There is only the rush of exhaustion (or the rush of unbidden conceits to crowd great stretches of tedium) to define our "lives" (the latter term employed because we cannot really ever shed the conceit of life.)  Where we really exist is in the realm of shame navigated (or, to our discredit, not navigated) by conscience, and when we wobble unpredictably toward our better realizations we glimpse in the shadows of our conceits our true selves--creatures thrust onward by our Creator and creatures best flourishing in our Creator's estimation when wilting in our own efforts and our own eyes.

It would be nothing to me to say these things were they not flimsy approximations of what Jesus himself says, revealed to us when we simply listen to what Jesus says.  Our role as passive observers of our own lives--which, yes, is the inescapable implication of our everyday duty to surrender our own lives--is a role that is revealed to be less dismal than conceivably the case, when we remember the fact that even the time and space by which we measure our existences are not really elements due us.  To be called to do things, when we are truly incapable of as much as orienting ourselves to the doing of things, is the greatest of unmerited privileges, and the greatest of challenges.

In this realm of no-dimension, there is only the unmeasurable measure of shame, of failed conscience.  To be enlivened and cohered by an internalized knot of tension for being other than what we ought is all we supply to our existences.  Otherwise we are just the creations of a Creator who cannot fail to be a perfect Creator.  That we can be less than what we ought when we have such an origin is unfathomable, and added to this is the One Great Scenario of the Intolerable--that we were created by and through Jesus the Son of God, who did all this (and who sustains all this, and who suffers all this) in the sight of his Father.

Our only hope is an unmerited covenant with our Creator, and by "covenant" there is only the timeless and spaceless shame-conscience fusion, for that is what a covenant with God must be.  The only relevant dimensions can be the measureless depths to which God reaches for us, and the too-small-to-be-measured reach of our aspirations.  All else would be meaningless, yet a table for a covenant in the midst of the meaningless is what Jesus spreads for us.  Centuries have been spent in the arguments about the Table of the Lord, yet scarcely have we even begun to wonder what is implicit in the strange passive phrasings Jesus uses--phrasings that frustrate year after year after year of theologians' pronouncements about ages and dispensations and institutions of sacraments.

"This is my body," "this is my blood"--these are statements of existence, and these are statements that presume those elements of existence are timeless and ubiquitous.  Jesus suffered, and suffers, everything that has ever been or will be suffered, and he suffers shame for the failings of his Creation.  Why we should ever exist as such torments for our Savior is beyond us, but even this is dwarfed by our Savior's incomprehensible determination to present us as offerings to his Father--to be the preserved among those given him by his Father.

For this is what should really strike our consciences.  We persist in our evils not merely as Jesus seeks to give us the things of God, but even more horribly do we persist as Jesus seeks to give us to the things of God.