Shame is the Framework

I see now that, even before returning to the first few verses of John, I must deal with a "beginning and ending" aspect of the synoptic Gospels.  The "beginning" of what I will describe is found in the Lord's Prayer, presented in slightly differing versions in Matthew and Luke.

Both begin with, "Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name."  We might notice straightaway that the petitioner does not refer directly to the name of the Father as being "hallowed," but rather to the voiced aspiration that the holy nature of God's name be kept inviolate.  Of course no being not God can truly approach God's name as it deserves, and so an indispensable predicate of the petitioner's request is the inherent shame of Creation before the name of God, as before God himself.

Then we have (in the more familiar version of Matthew), "Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven."  The petitioner does not anticipate the goodness of God's rule on the earth, and neither does the petitioner anticipate a raising of his or her status or fortunes as a result of the requested imposition of God's will on earth.  The person who says the Lord's Prayer is declaring an openness to the realization of God's will--and we might wonder if any degree of prudence would exist in a petitioner forgetting the possibility of personal shame when God's proper ordering of Creation be made evident.

What God will find upon the earth, it would seem unnecessary to say, is a world of needs and wants underscored by a near-total failure of humanity to follow up on Jesus' admonition that all of everything that is wholesome is available to us if only we ask in faith.  Obviously, we are perennially incapable of mustering up even the mustard-seeds of faith that would move mountains.  Jesus would not command stones to turn to bread, but surely Jesus must lament our faithless inability to request that such things happen, thus to provide for others and ourselves.  And so we must ask, shame-facedly, "Give us this day our daily bread," even as we scratch like true children of Adam to draw our livelihoods from the soil--one way or another.

The situation gets even worse.  The prayer says, "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors"--which, taken in full force (and taken with the straightforward notion that unforgiven debts bring damnation) would amount to us asking for the most horrible of unending ends.  The last thing that any human being should want is to be judged (and the judgment must be on the order of perfection, not on any sophomoric "more righteous than sinful" scale.)

To this point, the Lord's Prayer in both Matthew and Luke amounts to a conceptualized realization of God's sovereignty--but this realization is couched in terms of a tension between positive anticipation and negative apprehension.  The undiluted fulfillment of the requests of the prayer would result in a torrent of shame for the petitioner.  The God who demands that we show mercy to others if we are to hope for divine mercy for ourselves, is the God to whom we must appeal for mercy in regard to the abovementioned, proceeding aspects of the prayer.

Shame is the undeniable, persistent counterpoint of mercy.  A person ashamed of his or her actions before some earthly authority might ask for mercy, as something undeserved.  So also might we ask mercy from God.  There is, however, another chief application of the concept of mercy.  An unoffending victim of a looming earthly authority might hope for mercy (or, that is, might hope that a glimmer of responsibility for mercy exists in the mindset of the oppressor) so that the victim might be spared the worst of it.  Perhaps the oppressor might be shamed into displaying some semblance of mercy.

When the looming authority is God, of course, the notion that God will be shamed into displaying mercy is a shameful notion in itself.  (Though, it must be noted, the Scriptures do not flinch from nearly scraping against such a notion.  God is reminded by certain of the prophets that he will be mocked--as if he should care--by the surrounding nations if Israel is left bereft before the world, and Jesus says that he will be ashamed of unworthy followers of his.)  Undeniably, the very notion of "mercy" as it can be assimilated by any human being is a notion attended by shame, and it is often a whirlpool of shame-after-shame--we are ashamed of that we have done, and we find ourselves asking for mercy from God simply because he is all-powerful and could grant such mercy, and then we are ashamed of ourselves for thinking of God as one who would decide arbitrarily to extend mercy, or not.

It is the very fact that God cannot be thought of as ineffable without being thought of as arbitrary that forms the very nucleus of the conundrum.  In every aspect of our considerations of the divine, we are driven here and there between at least two objects of contemplation.  That we are driven by virtual necessity to see things backwardly--that is, in terms of cause preceding effect--is one of our chief limitations, and this limitation is of difficulty to us not merely as a result of the fact that we can see things in only one way, backwards.  We are also limited in that we can only "arrive" at the resolution of some such issue by flitting back and forth between the concepts with which we frame it.  When confronted with issues about the divine, or with issues of substance about our status in the world of divine creation, such as in the Lord's Prayer, we do not "arrive" at any conclusion.  We enclose the conclusion (as though that were not a shameful presumption in itself) within the framework of our understandings.  And then the moment passes, and we find ourselves seemingly at a great distance from that which we thought we understood.

In short, when thinking about the divine, we are in an analogous situation to Nicodemus, being told that we do not know where we come from (or where anything else comes from.)  That the "John 3" theological camps would turn the mind-melting implications of Jesus interview with Nicodemus into, rather, supposed simple building-blocks of a "salvation economy," is a tragedy for the ages.

And so at last we read of how the petitioner in the Lord's Prayer is to say, "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."  Some more modern translations will render the key phrase as "do not put us to the test."  While "test" is the application that I find most revealing, it is proper first to make clear that, in terms of my thesis, "lead us not into temptation" and "do not put us to the test" are of equal import.  A person saying "lead us not into temptation" could be rendering a petition in the most plaintive tones (as a tormented victim's plea might often be characterized, without proper punctuation or fair context, as an order to the tormentor.)  Or a person saying "lead us not into temptation" could be fulfilling a duty that might be expected to lead to a lessening of the strictures of obedience on the petitioner (as though God cannot assess perfectly a person's response to temptation in direct proportion to the magnitude of that temptation.)  In all of the applications in this paragraph, "test" might be substituted for "temptation" with negligible adjustments.

Where "do not put us to the test" shows itself to be preferable to--and, I assume, more in line with modern scholarship than--"lead us not into temptation," is that the idea of "test" resides more comfortably with the notion of God as the agent of assessment, rather than the scatterer of "temptations," and the relative immediacy of "test" to the sovereignty of God is the important point here.  Jesus has his followers ask, in the Lord's Prayer, to be spared "the test."  And then, in Gethsemane, Jesus bids his few companions to ask to be spared "the test."  The "test" in Gethsemane (if it is to be compared to the awkwardness of "temptation") is for Jesus' followers to courageously declare their allegiance to him.  They are supposed to be the equal of this temptation (and of the multiple foreseeable temptations to forswear Jesus under torture), though Jesus knows they will fail, as he told them.  They are to invite the temptation--for to confront it is their duty--while they are to ask to be spared the test.  Inescapably, the test is God's ineffable countenance (or lack thereof) to any person.

The test is not some "salvation economy" or some sacerdotal or even intensely personal devotion.  The test is that which we will never know or understand about God's relationship to us.  What we can know (or strive productively to know) about our relationship to God, in every vein in which we might confront that relationship, is ever and always framed in convergences (backward, as we view them) of individually insufficient concepts.  This is the origin, which we will never understand, to which Jesus alludes in his conversation with Nicodemus.  The most important thing about our confrontation with the test, both in terms of how we will flaccidly meet it and almost-as-flaccidly beseech to be spared it, is our attention to the most central of our responsibilities before God--our recognition of shame.

Take the Lord's Prayer as a whole, and as driving to a central point, and that central point will be revealed to be shame.  In shame we confront (and usually fail to confront) our misdeeds, and in shame we appeal to God to dispense for us, out of his limitless reserve, the mercy that we--in our typical shameful predispositions--imagine he ought to give us, as though we are "close enough" to be asking for it with pure motives.  Shame is the framework not merely of the Lord's Prayer, but of Jesus' ministry as a whole.

End in Shame

Important considerations must be faced before one is to speak of "narratives" in the Gospels.  On the one hand, the Gospels scarcely make sense if they are to be taken as mere collections of sayings of Jesus and or listings of his deeds.  Unavoidably, there is a larger, more generalized "story" of the ministry of Jesus--a collective "biography" of Jesus.  The existence or not of this "biography" as "historical" is the province of students of religion, of the persons who will examine the outlines of the ostensible birth, notoriety, and death of Jesus as related in the Gospels (and in the admittedly scarce sources that might be considered contemporaneous.)

On the other hand, there is no warrant to assume that the Gospels respectively are representations of viewpoints understood as ranged about some communal mega-story of Jesus held by his followers.  This is one of the most insidious conceits of the bulk of orthodox, believing Christian schools of thought.  If the Gospels differ among themselves (as manifestly they do), conventional interpretations of these differing stories focus on interpretations of ostensible motivations of the authors in presenting "the Gospel" to various audiences.  One gospel is to the Jews, another to the Greeks, another to the larger world, another to Christians--and so on, as the commentators will have it.

Attached to the notion of the authors of the gospels presenting their versions to differing audiences is the notion that the authors themselves can be understood (or at least be postulated to be understood) as characterizable personalities themselves, and therefore conceptualized as members of their target audiences--Jew writing for Jews, gentile writing for gentiles, and so on.  These characterized personalities can then be understood as eyewitnesses (or the confidants of eyewitnesses) so that different emphases in the Gospels (and, more importantly, ostensible "contradictions" among the Gospels) can be understood and explained.  From this we get the fatuous (and interpretively malleable) notion that we are really reading the assiduous observations offered by "Matthew," "Mark," "Luke," and "John."

Of course, a step back from the fray of vigorous interpretation and a--metaphorical, at least--breath of fresh air will reveal the silliness of all this.  Commentators will bury themselves in postulation about the peregrinations of their imagined "eyewitnesses" so as to pronounce such things as a confidence that a gospel author interviewed the woman who was healed by touching the hem of Jesus' garment--for how else would the gospel author know that she had suffered so for twelve years and visited many physicians?  For that matter, how did the gospel authors know that Jesus bested the devil in the episode of The Temptations?  Surely, of course, Jesus could have related the latter story himself, though such a self-describing account coming from the lips of the silent-suffering prevalent figure of Jesus (for surely this is his overall characterization in the Gospels) would strike one as thoroughly odd.

Manifestly, the Gospels are presented as accounts from "omniscient" narrators, accounts that tell authoritative stories, not accounts that purport to be witnesses (and certainly not witnesses among a cohort of supportive yet idiosyncratic fellow witnesses.)  The gospel authors are relators of stories from the divine, not witnesses recounting stories about the "divine"--and I use quotation marks around this latter use of "divine" because such characterization is all that might be extracted from the testimony of witnesses.

The Gospel of John illustrates succinctly this silliness of the Gospels taken as eyewitness accounts.  This gospel, that ends with Jesus' searing rejoinder to Peter (about "the disciple whom Jesus loved"), "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?  follow thou me," is then burdened in the surviving texts with the ham-handed addition:

Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?  This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true.  And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.  Amen. (21:23-25)

In substance, the Gospel of John ends with "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?  follow thou me" (v. 22)--and we will see in a moment just how this effectual ending is so important.  Meanwhile we must note how the ensuing verses 23-25 are both jarring and patently ridiculous.  A particular blend of quaintness and cringe-worthiness is embodied in that ancient protestation to the effect that a document (or a part thereof) cannot be a forgery, because it says right there in its own text that it is not a forgery.

The Gospels are stories.  They are meant to be taken as stories.  The Gospels are not collections of moments, and the Gospels are not mere facets of some presumed meta-Gospel "abroad among the brethren."  (On this latter score the author of the appendix to John is revealingly frank--the author of the appendix to John knows full well what balderdash people can collect among themselves.)  Accordingly, the perennial business of commentators interpreting the Gospels in light of each other is a fool's errand or worse, in that each Gospel's outline is rounded off thereby, and its impact diminished.  The reader will not be surprised that I will say that the most diluted and wasted impact of the Gospels in Christianity--a deficit attributable to the machinations of the commentators--is the impact of shame.

We have started already with John.  The ending of John is the shaming of Peter--albeit a shaming predicated on the notion that Peter is salvageable--and, taken squarely, the episode is harrowing.  The fishing in the sea of Tiberias, the casting of the net for fish, the hauling in of the great catch of fish, the counting of the fish, the eating of still more fish--all of this is as nothing, a great smelly nothing on the shore, as against Jesus' query of Peter, "lovest thou me more than these?"

Similarly ends the Gospel of Mark (the authoritative Gospel of Mark, though like John it is similarly burdened with an unsupportable appendix.)  The women are told to go and inform the brethren, yet to their shame they run away and fail to fulfill Jesus' command.

And before the final Great Commission in Matthew, the last actual narrative reference to "the eleven disciples" is "some doubted," even as "they saw him, and worshipped him."

And, to work backward from the ending of Luke, backward through the awkward--and downright "contradictory," as compared to the other Gospels--"tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem," backward from the last of seemingly innumerable revealings of how Jesus was prophesied of old, we arrive at an episode that is extremely revealing.  Jesus eats "a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb," but not before he puts all the disciples through a shaming identical to that of John's "Doubting Thomas."  (This is a perfect example of how a "meta-Gospel" conceptuality dilutes the Gospels' messages--Luke and John are independent stories, yet their artificial combining by the interpreters leaves poor Thomas as a particular and misleading focus of what should be taken as a generalized burden of shame among the disciples.)

This is how the Gospels end, in shame.  Yet I have scarcely even begun with the Gospel of John, to which I now intend to return.

What Comes Before Shame

We must make the determination from the start, whether or not we are willing to consider the implications of shame in interpretations of the Gospels.  By "determination" I do not intend to say that "shame" is warranted as an exclusive theme of analysis.  Rather, I contend that keeping in mind the notion of shame (just as we must keep in mind our imperfect role in the analysis) is of pivotal importance--and the notion of shame is at least as likely as any other to emerge from our interaction with the texts.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.

John 1:1-2 confronts us with, well, the experience of being confronted.  We know what the word "word" means, and we like to think that we know what is meant by the word "Word" in the text, but already a candid approach to interpretation of the text will show us what we have granted ourselves without warrant.  "Word" stands for God, and "Word" stands for his Son, and simultaneously "Word" stands for the perfection of effulgent and pre-existing potent meaning from which we see emanating the Word of God.

Already, of course, that which we consider the "Word of God" is of two-fold declension from what we hold to be the original, unqualified (and un-quotation-marked) Word of God.  The "Word of God" that we might also call "the Scriptures" is of imperfect provenance and is a representation of a perfect communication through the imperfections and limitations of language.

What is most important to remember, at this stage of the analysis, is the almost-infinitely-elastic potential degree to which a partial disconnect exists between the things of God and the things of his Creation.  This would seem, of course, to be trite statement, but it is not the existence of the disconnect that I want to emphasize here--it is the conceptual twinning of something viewed as potentially infinitesimal and of that same thing viewed as germinating in the perceptibly vanishing void of the separation of God and his Creation.  That it is counterintuitive to see something as vanishing backwards into its origins, and that it is counterintuitive to think of "twinning of something" when that something is merely being compared to itself, is part and parcel of the conundrum.

We can say we know what "God" means, but only insofar as we refrain from attaching to God (or to any other term, or personality-reference, meaning "God") any necessary qualities describable in words.  The term "necessary" is pivotal here.  We did not "come from" God, any more than we arose outside of God, and to say that we are a product of "God's will" is really a tautology--unless we reckon ourselves qualified to perceive God as an accumulation of his parts.  God is not "necessarily" any thing, or any conglomeration of things--a truth that is represented to us in the Genesis language of the One God saying, "Let us make . . . "

Our creation, then, is a process understandable responsibly only in terms of aspects of ourselves as existing not as discrete attributes (though describable separately) but rather in terms of aspects of ourselves disappearing--in backward analysis--into the miasma of our origins.  We see ourselves arising as inscrutably (to us) as the ineffable wind of John 3.  That we might be born to virtue and vice (and Jesus has no patience for us clinging to either one, at the exclusion of the other) does not preclude the possibility that those attributes in their creation might be better termed "pre-virtue" and "pre-vice."

And, of course, I am going to write about "pre-shame."