That Which Rushes Past Us

It would be difficult to come up with some dystopian version of a human society that is worse than the realities our species has produced.  I am considering here some not-too-implausible regime in which women are subjected to horrible cruelties for the least of transgressions.

Imagine if you will some nation in which a woman could expect a brutal death penalty for being present in the open country, or for driving a car--this much ought to be easy to conceptualize.  Imagine as well that some young woman was observed by the police doing both those things, and that she drove herself into a near-fatal traffic accident trying to escape.

The judge at her arraignment--a man reasonable enough (within the norms of that nation, at least)--might ask her why she drove off in a reckless hurry, abandoning all hope she might have of gaining some measure of leniency from the court.  The judge might believe that the young woman had thought to pursue some vanishingly-small chance of escape, but he would scarcely expect the young woman to say that she had fled in shame and dread because she was wearing a flimsy, low camisole--and did not want to be thought shameless in perhaps attempting to charm her way out of a ticket for driving without a license.

Of course, it would be her gender, and not her lack of documentation, that would be the pivotal point--and, without the vanishingly-small chance of gaining her parents' house, she would be executed for being out alone anyhow.  The young woman's assertion of her independence by her actions was what condemned her, and that was what she knew beyond doubt would condemn her.  The woman's purporting in the event to be transfixed by the thought of her immodest dress might claim the court's attention for a moment, but that attention would crumble quickly into exasperation and dismay.

And then there is for our consideration the young man Adam, asserting his independence (from God, at least, if not from his wife) by eating of the Forbidden Fruit.  That act was to gain for Adam the sentence of death, and yet he and his spouse are transfixed by the notion of being naked?  Naked before each other, as man and wife?  Naked before the God who sees all?  (For surely Adam knows this, and he responds to God who merely asks "Where are you?", and not something like, "Why are you hiding in that strawberry bush?")

No one really knows why Adam and Eve were not subjected then and there to the summary execution that is the obvious implication of God's original warning about the fruit.  It would be as humanly-understandable as anything (if the "judge" in this case were human) for the couple's bizarre fixation on the insignificant issue of "nakedness" to be taken as evidence of their moral immaturity and therefore of their blunted culpability, but this judge is not human.  It would be as flatly-understandable as anything for Adam and Eve's unfamiliarity with "death" as a concept to be cause for God to display leniency, but, again, this judge is God, not human.  There is also the latent notion, of course, that God can do whatever he pleases (or at least that whatever God does can seem to us nothing more than the caprices of his good-pleasure), but the commentators do not really want to entertain a sovereignty of God that is beyond understanding, even as they tell us that the falterings and fallings-off-at-the-edges of their postulations about God's sovereignty must be taken as mysteries beyond understanding.

So we have to listen to the commentators say that the First Couple were indeed to experience "death" that day, in that the innocence that was their shield "died," or that their "life"-giving fellowship with God was broken, or that they were to die by being denied access from that day to the Tree of Life, or that they experienced the "death of the soul" that is the lot of the (as yet) unredeemed.  Of course, if the (almost entirely) stark notion of raw physical death is therefore not to be understood as what God threatened, then we are really confronted with a two-fold and twice-indecipherable puzzle.  We must realize that the question of Adam and Eve's apparent reprieve is not merely a difficult-to-understand issue, but rather is really a meaningless issue--because death itself is not the difficult-to-understand issue we take it to be.  Death is a meaningless issue.

Absent annihilation, every human being is immortal.  Jesus toys with the meaning of the word "death."  Jesus says that he can lay down or take up his life at will--something we pretend we understand, but do not.  Jesus sends out the disciples to "raise the dead," but bizarrely it seems to be taken for granted by them that the only "dead" they can raise are the still-warm or scarcely-cold bodies of the recently (and usually "dearly") departed.  Apparently, poor Samuel cannot hope to be entirely "dead to the world," in that he is summoned by a most unworthy character, and Enoch and Elijah can pass without experiencing death--or did they die without experiencing it, in a manner melding into a spectrum of "quasi-experience" undergone in similar measure by those who pass in their sleep?

The mysteries latent in questions of life and death are of the greatest importance--so great, in fact, that by comparison the notions of "life" and "death" are devoid of meaning--"meaningless"--and they must be at all costs taken so.  No one gives up his or her life who hesitates in the service of Jesus, and, as the merest and most passing corollary, no one gives up his or her life who lingers over the meaning of "life" or "death."

Indeed, the only real way to pursue the giving up of life is to stumble from one instantly-perceived task to the next, and if it seems that conscientious application to every looming possibility in life would mean trying to explore one's relationship (and responsibilities) to it, even as it passes by before one can begin to explore so, then "life" has become more, not of what we travel through, but rather of what "looms" and rushes back behind us.  We are less and less what does the "living" in our lives--and that is all we can hope to live for.

What is to be taken from Scripture--no matter how carefully or assiduously we examine it--is that which rushes past us.  Existence burst forth from nothing--at least, as we might try to extrapolate back from the almost-nothing that is described for us.  That is how experiencing something works.  The imponderable gravity of Adam's transgression is stumbled through in our appreciations even as Adam babbles and flails at insubstantial considerations.  Can we think that humanity would have ever made the slow slog from the warm shadow of the Tree of Life to the other side of the flaming sword if "understanding" what happens to us is really a part of what belongs to us?