Of the Fruit and the Tree

There is yet something else to be said about trying to come to grips with the third kingdom I described in the previous post.  The third kingdom is that which we arrogated to ourselves when first we tried to make sense of our existences.  Of course, the absence of our trying to make sense of our existences is not something that can happen on our present plane.  We cannot merely repose in the comfort of a Creation bestowed upon us by a God who made everything to be beneficial, and who presented to us the means to assure both ourselves and our fortunes if we would but ask him.  We are human.  We are fallible.  We are not going to ask him--at least, not without interposing our own shameful inclinations.

Adam did not avail himself of God's proximity, and we are not going to do it either.  We even tell ourselves that God is far away--far away, that is, from the lungings of our urgings, when rarely we lunge for God rather than something less noble.

And so we surround ourselves with our own conceits.  Our conceits are what make sense of the worlds we think are around us, and out of our very conceits we construct those self-same worlds, and on and on it goes.  We exist on the brink of madness, and we are afraid that we will go mad if we let loose of that skein of little madnesses of which we each construct our lives.  I am no fan of apologetics that presume to tell people what they are thinking, but of necessity any adherent of Jesus' teachings must subscribe to Jesus' assertions about what goes on--or must go on--within people.

Jesus told people that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood.  John told people that all of Creation was created by and through Jesus.  This driving toward madness is the self-same striving toward understanding that, where the things of God are concerned, would take as the greatest application of Jesus' admonition to have people understand that Creation is identified with Jesus.  We see and touch and eat and drink Jesus--if only our eyes are open to the fact.

The above is not all that madness-inducing--in fact, it might seem rather trite.  Trite, that is, compared to the consternation among Jesus' hearers when first he presented them with the apparent prospect of actually eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  What might seem to be madness-inducing, however, is the understanding that holding Jesus to be the great permeating element of Creation, is simultaneously to hold Jesus to permeate the most intensely-wrought episodes of Scripture.

In particular, the Jesus who upbraided his followers by asking them why they could not themselves decide what is right from wrong, is the Jesus who is the one person to know in perfect detail precisely why people cannot decide right from wrong.  To decide right from wrong is to go about an absolute duty that one is bound--as against the judgments of God--to be wrong about.  The duty remains.  The inevitability of failure remains.

And yet this was always so "from the beginning," if we are to harken back to Jesus' derivation of human moral states from the shadows of Eden.  Adam and Eve reached for the fruit.  They were incapable of exercising the knowledge-capacity, and fulfilling the knowledge-requirement, that followed.  God's forbearance was exhausted, and innumerable regimens of punishment were to follow.

And Jesus bore the pain of all this.  Jesus bore the pain of Creation.  Jesus bore the pain of every distance of every created thing from the Creator.  Jesus bore the pain that Adam brought upon himself when first he looked for companionship elsewhere than his Creator.

Jesus bore the pain of humanity when he hung upon the Cross, and Jesus bore the pain of humanity when he hung upon the Forbidden Tree--for in the madness of striving in fitful throes to understand the majesty of God, we must reckon that our self-same Savior was in the very fruit plucked by the hand of Eve.

The eyes of Adam and Eve were opened, as the description goes, and the God-man Jesus of the fruit and the tree and the garden and the world has known--and yet knows, and always will know--every pain and failure and frustration of humanity's endless duty to but open our eyes.