To Hide Us Too Late

I am pursuing still my ambition to work through the Bible according to the mode of interpretation I think most apt.  It has not gone well--or at least smoothly--before.

Since my last post dealt with the notion that death-and-fruition is the proper overall theme of earthly existence, I will take the opportunity to apply this theme to a unique, particular part of Scripture that it brings to mind--and from there I will begin again.

In Luke 23, Jesus is followed on the Way of the Cross not merely by the cross-bar carrying Simon of Cyrene, but also by a crowd within which is mentioned particularly women lamenting and weeping over Jesus.  Jesus then confronts the women with this fantastic passage,

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.  For behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.  Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.  For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?

Notably, the image of Jesus-incarnate suffering beyond human imagination is absent.  Absent also, of course, is any notion of Jesus offering the women "comfort."  I contend that the idea of Jesus as the divine Son of God suffering for his Creation is implicit in Jesus' invocation of the overarching green-to-dry imagery he presents--and against this backdrop is to be seen his representation to the women of how the fate of humanity is to be worked out.

The course of any person's life is played out against the twinned elements of fruition and death.  Little, of course, do any of us really produce in terms of fruit, but this lack of production (to say nothing of outright bearing evil fruit) is to be ascribed to us in the end as revealing shame.  We usually think of our lacks and of our proclivities for evil acts as "sinful," and of course that is true.  What is not true is humanity's fixation on the notion of "guilt"--the burden of unabsolved sin--as that which marks our estrangement from God.

God's ceaseless mercy--for which we return to him the easily-spoken adjective "ever-merciful"--is never in doubt.  Within a few ensuing sentences in Luke, Jesus is going to offer the unqualified intercession, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."  This was no small statement, considering the plenitude of mentionings in the Gospels of various ways in which the most informed and therefore culpable of powerful persons knew--at least as far as the mere prospect of condemning the innocent goes--exactly what they were doing.

Between the immediacy of the women's horror and grief for Jesus' sufferings, and the backdrop of a withering and dying Creation, is the arena of the challenge with which Jesus confronts the women.  All of us exist in the unceasing procession of Creation withering and dying--all of us must understand our lives as devolving, less-and-less-living resolutions of happenings that will pass away from us.  The fruition of child-bearing (to focus here on Jesus' words in this passage) will drop away from women, as will any possession they know of children as parts of themselves.  We must choose either to understand Jesus' words to them as unspeakably cruel, or to understand those "Daughters of Jerusalem" as unimaginably privileged figures so as to represent to humanity its communal fate.

The sorrowful imagery of the blessedness-of-barrenness is echoed in Matthew 24, in which a succession of future cataclysms is described by Jesus as especially hard on the pregnant or nursing.  That apocalyptic section of Matthew presents a particular problem for commentators who must contend that it begins and ends with the Time of the End and is parted unaccountably in the middle with supposed particular references to the first-century fall of Jerusalem, but we need not countenance such silliness.  

The "Woe unto them that are with child" and "Blessed are the barren" imageries refer, as I mentioned above, to the communal fate of humanity.  We are all to know the looming reality of death, and we are all to know the shrinking of every conceit we have about the fruitfulness of our lives.  Our lives will end with little enough to show for them, and we can expect very dismal showings of how little.  We can expect concomitant shame, and unfortunately--and no thanks to Christianity--we can expect our fixation on sin and guilt to be revealed to us as a psychological indulgence, as a playing-about in the face of our true responsibilities, a playing-about for which we ought to be ashamed.  We all are to know this, that our sins and guilt can be (or we can plead for them to be) forgiven, but our shame will abide.  Our shame is ours forever.

We go about our lives as our urges and our conceits bid us, for that riding-upon and being ridden by our states as elements of Creation are what we know from moment to moment.  If our true selves--or, rather, those contracted loci of truth-seeking that we would like to present to God as ourselves--concentrate themselves for any fleeting moments, they (that is, we) would do well to concentrate upon our shame.  We will say "Hills, cover us" either to hide us in our shame, or to hide us too late from God's wrath.