AS FAR AS I CAN SEE

As we advance in years, we have a tendency to focus on the mistakes we made when we were younger, the wrong choices, the opportunities missed, the lack of caution that resulted in catastrophe, the temptations to which we offered no resistance, and so on. There is certainly place in maturity for such reflections, and for the regret that makes them poignant, that sometimes even makes them sorrowful.

But it is very important, as we grow in knowledge and discernment (Philippians 1: 9), that we do not lose hold of our affection and respect for the innocence that occasioned most of those mistakes, even though the thing itself, the innocence, may be lost to us, recoverable now only through an act of grace. Where that innocence lacked wisdom, it overflowed in courage and buoyancy and passionate hope, and these are precious and fragile attributes of spirit, qualities to love and pray for.

When Jesus, from the Cross, handed over His mother to the care of His beloved disciple, He was handing over what had been precious in the old dispensation along with its shortcomings to the guardianship of the new, His church. As members of His church, we must never lose our affection for the old testament, whatever errors its qualities may have occasioned.

And this is the lesson for each one of us as well, as we grow old in knowledge and discernment.

When the Son of God emptied Himself and took the form of a servant (Philippians 2:7), He limited himself to the knowledge and the language and the cultural framework of an individual in a certain time and place, first century Galilee. That has many implications, but one is that the concept of a ‘covenant’ between God and the Jewish nation was the vehicle available to Jesus to communicate His revelation of God’s character in its aspect of seeking something from His creation.

In the Jewish tradition, the covenant relationship is between God and the nation of Israel. But of course, nations cannot agree to or enter into contractual relations—only individuals can do that. So throughout the Old Testament, we find the basic covenant being enacted or renewed between God and some individual: Noah, Abram, David, etc. This in turn requires accepting some individual as effectively representing the rest of the people of the nation, in such a way that what is agreed to by that individual is binding on the other individuals represented.

In the Jewish tradition, therefore, every Jew, simply by virtue of being a Jew, was obligated to fulfill the terms of the covenant with God. The terms of that agreement, from the Jewish side, were obedience to God’s expressed will. In the early period of Covenant history, this was thought of largely in terms of ritual observance, with the prophetic period shifting the emphasis towards moral behavior. But the central truth never changed, that the whole nation – meaning every Jew – was duly obligated.

Understanding his own work in that sense, Jesus sought the responsibility of representing the Jewish nation as Messiah, the perfected Jew, sinless under the (properly interpreted) Law. But more than that, much more than that, Jesus Christ sought the responsibility, as Son of Man, of representing all of humanity, every single individual, of living the life of the perfect human being, sinless in never deviating from perfect Love.

This is the ‘eternal covenant’ between God the Father and God the Son referred to in Hebrews 13:20, that the Son of God might become representative of all humanity by entering into humanity, and leading the perfect human life, culminating in perfect human death.

The perfect life and death of Jesus was the achievement of that mission, his resurrection and glorification the proof of God’s accepting its success. At death, Jesus became representative of every individual, and the terms that God the Son agreed to with God the Father became binding on every human being.

But what were those terms? What are the terms of the new covenant?

Under the Jewish covenants, the terms were always reward of one kind of another on one side – God’s – for obedience of one kind or another on the part of every Jew.

In the covenant between the Father and the Son, the covenant sealed by the life and death of the incarnate Son, the reward on the Father’s side is forgiveness, and the qualification for the reward on the human side is the same: forgiveness.

This can be put in another way – though it still uses Galilean concepts – by saying that Jesus enabled reconciliation with God for everyone.

Under the Jewish covenants, such reconciliation was possible only in response to perfect obedience to the Law, and such perfect obedience was humanly impossible. That’s what Paul is lamenting throughout Chapter 7 of Romans.

Under the Eternal Covenant, the covenant sealed in Jesus’s blood, any and all are offered that reconciliation, and it does not require any action on their part. It only requires forgiveness, that is, absorbing the harm done to oneself without retaliation, without publicity, without rancor.

As we have noted on other occasions, forgiveness is the key to everything else. Both in parable and in direct discourse, Jesus makes the point again and again. Unless you forgive others, your Father will not forgive you.

Is that unfair? In a way, yes. Every Jew became obligated to obey the ceremonial law simply by virtue of being born a Jew. Every American becomes obligated to obey the laws of the United States by virtue of being born of American parents.

So also, every human being is obligated to forgive. This is what for most people makes Christianity hard, hard to accept and hard to live out. The difficulty of it lies at the heart of the reality that “Our God is a consuming fire”(Hebrews 12:19). In the fullness of time, our God will refine out of us every element that makes it hard to forgive.

But remember. This is only one way – the Galilean way – of inquiring after God.

As Lewis Mumford and others have pointed out, the invention of the clock wrought the greatest change in human perspective of which we have record. It led to organizing reality according to its reference to an artificial sort of grid, one divided into unique and completely equal segments, and this in turn led to a way of viewing reality as consisting of things – events and people alike – as things that once were not, and then were for a countable quantity of these segments, and then were not again for all subsequent segments.

This is so irresistible a principle of organization that we can’t even imagine another, and yet it was not always so. Before the clock, the human significance of things – events and people – organized our reality rather than placement on an artificial grid. Thus for example the lives of our grandparents – though they be in the grave – could still be part of our own reality, not metaphorically but literally.

I suspect that heaven’s principle for organizing reality is much more like this older way than the mechanistic modern way. The reason why theological phrases like “heaven/God is timeless” or ‘heaven/God/the atonement exists outside of time” seem to us so empty of imaginative meaning, stating facts we cannot actually comprehend, however blithely we mouth them, is that we are creatures of clock-time. For us, time simply is the grid. Christ’s atoning act “took (past tense) place” in a certain “number” of segments on the grid, and does not even exist in “subsequent” segments of the grid (except in memory, causal aftereffects, etc, all of which occupy their own segments of the same grid).

In both Matthew and Mark, after guaranteeing His disciples recompense for the privations they are currently experiencing in following Him, Jesus qualifies what he has just said by adding: “But many that are first will be last, and the last first.” I believe He is here speaking of heaven-time – reality organized by significance – rather than clock-time, and what He is saying is that the order of significance there will be very surprising to those who have not begun preparing for it here-and-now.

And this, as far as I can see, is what underlies the meaning of many other gnomic Biblical claims such as “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever,” “He was in the beginning with God,” “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight,” as well as many other things Christ Himself said.

In heaven’s true reality, there ‘was’ never, nor ‘is’ there now, nor could there ‘ever be’, a ‘time’ in which Christ’s atonement was not of infinite significance, is not there in its entirety.

When Jesus spoke of the first being last and the last first, he was, as ever, teaching us something about the relationship between God and each individual. Without speaking now about what that lesson is, it should certainly be noted that sayings like this have often been used in the political arena to give ‘Christian/moral’ cover to attempts to eradicate all qualitative differences among individuals.

Differences in intelligence that are obvious from an early age, once thought to require differences in tutorship to accommodate the elevation in capacity and potential, are now largely seen as threats to the self-esteem of those not so gifted, and therefore to be harnessed and stunted. The result is the elevation of harnessed and stunted pursuits like ‘computer engineering’ to the acme of the intellectual life.

And not by coincidence, those sorts of intellectuals are the most useful to the powers that be.

A similar oppression these days awaits those with native artistic ability. Instead of being channeled into disciplined instruction to allow that talent to climb eventually onto the shoulders of those who have labored similarly before, and then reach for new beauty in the yet higher realms, the nascent artists of our age are directed towards self-expression of selves that are still infantile in awareness and experience. The result is a ‘high’ art that speaks to nothing beyond subjectivity, sometimes coupled with puerile ‘philosophy’, or ‘democratic’ art by potentially serious artists absorbed into any of the ponderous and gluttonous entertainment combines, machines that inhale vast amounts of mediocre artistic abilities and spew out bulky products of shaped and bundled blandness, like hay tasty to cattle but to no one else. Thus Hollywood, Broadway, the Best Seller lists.

And not by coincidence, those sorts of artists are the most useful to the powers that be.

Of all the varieties of social arrangement, democracy offers the most opportunities for finding and encouraging exceptional individuals, and yet also the greatest danger of extinguishing them, sadly often under the banner of Christian egalitarianism.

You cannot reason your way from the world to a morally just and loving God. The world is through and through unjust and fundamentally tragic. Of course the world contains beauty and innocent pleasure and kindness in abundance, but they are flyspecks on the scale compared to its weight of brutality and grief and catastrophe and evil of endless variety. If clearheaded reason were our only guide to a final assessment, we must necessarily arrive at either madness or despair.

And neither does revelation change the reality of the world, although much of what people call ‘religion’ claims it does. The things that are horrors when there is no God remain horrors when there is. The grief of a mother over her dying child is indelible. It is a permanent element of reality. It is not lessened if the mother and child are reunited in some afterlife; it is simply succeeded by a new reality. Pain, sorrow and tragedy are real and, once real, eternal.

The essence of faith, the relationship God asks of us, is not the belief that God will somehow make things right. Wrong is never made right. The essence of the relationship God asks of us is summed up by Job: Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. Though the world really is unjust and tragic, not just seemingly so, though no amount of apologetic will ever reduce its evil by the slightest weight, though all our attempts to defend God are really attempts to defend our own convictions, while God remains unfathomable, though every avenue of rational rescue is eliminated and I am utterly exhausted of hope…and then…and then…at the end of all justification…even though He slay me….

In Christian ministry, death is often imaged as a passageway leading from this world to the next, or a bridge uniting modes of existence, or a gateway through which we step out of the mortal and into the eternal. These are all perfectly appropriate images, but it is important to emphasize the continuity they represent, rather than the transformation.

What passes over the bridge is what is essential to who we are. What emerges on the yonder side of the gate is recognizably the same personality as the one who entered from the earthly side. Far from transforming us into saints or angels, death doesn’t even improve us. Death is transportation, not medicine. Who we are here and now is what we will be there and then: what is changed is the nature of the world in which we find ourselves.

But what a change that will be!

When God first refused Israel entry into the Promised Land and sent the nation back into the wilderness, it wasn’t to gain time in order to accommodate the Promised Land to them: it was to cultivate a new Israel, an Israel that could flourish in what the Promised Land had to offer.

As we approach Heaven, most of us have much more in common with the first Israel than with the second.

The various groupings in which individuals find themselves or into which individuals can place themselves are all abstractions of one sort or another. Nations, tribes, clubs, marriages, even families are nothing, spiritually speaking, over and above the individuals who comprise them, and the attitudes of those individuals. The reason this is important to note is because God only has relationship with actual, individual human beings. God does not have relationship with any ‘nation’—what would that even mean? ‘Nations’ do not suffer in wars, only human beings suffer. When nations are attacked, when marriages fail, when clubs dissolve, no ‘nation’ trembles in outrage, no ‘marriage’ suffers remorse, no ‘club’ wishes it could have found new energy somewhere.

God does not favor, reward, or punish ‘nations,’ or any of the other abstractions. Where two individuals are separately in healthy relationship with God, it may seem to an outsider to be a ‘blessed’ union. But it is simply – simply! – a harmonic union, harmonized in values, in goals, and in faith with each other and with spiritual reality. The blessedness of such a union lies in its freedom from strife, with each other and with God’s reality. And this is true of nations as well.

Satan does indeed mean temptation, but it is the temptation to regard malignancy as something outside of and influential upon human nature. Malignant, evil, demonic, monstrous…these and many others are just the names we use for different malformations of the natural human being. Dogs have it in their nature to be vicious or loving, humans much more so.

The temptations Jesus confronted in the wilderness are those that confront people by virtue of their imagination and sociability. We can imagine worlds in which others regard us more highly, in which the world yields to our tools, in which we shape our destiny…and that imagination in the context of sociability creates endless new channels into which our animal nature can pour. That’s why everyone, sinners and saints alike, except by the grace of God, becomes the King or Queen of an imaginary world and rules there, the way an author rules his characters, or a child his sand castle.

Jesus did not overcome those temptations. He died to them. That is the narrow way.

Did God engineer a setting to provide the perfect entry point for the Son to enter into the world? As far as I can see, the answer has to be that God did nothing of the kind. The wailing of the children of Sodom, the grief of Hagar and the depredations of her son’s sons, the deaths of Tamar’s husbands, the famine of Jacob’s people, the ferocity of the Pharaohs and their vainglorious architecture, the plagues that devastated without moral discrimination, the flood that engulfed a pursuing army and orphaned a multitude, the slaughter at the foot of Mount Sinai, the genocide of the Hittites and Amorites, the rivers of blood that flowed from David’s sword and the avaricious and cruel tyranny of his most famous son, the establishment of an industrialized slaughterhouse at the center of God’s worship, the merciless waves of bestial armies ravaging each other over centuries, the torture of the wise, the murder of the good, the unrelieved sorrow of countless mothers…these were all part of the peaceful Bethlehem setting. Did God stage manage all of that? The thought is unthinkable, at least by me.

It’s late spring as I write, and birdlings are hopping around the ground and making their first short flights as their observant parents stand guard. Only a few weeks back, the parents were busily constructing the nests that would cradle their young. The birds did certainly engineer the nests, but they did not engineer the trees. They just made use of the trees.

And this is true of nature in general. Even people only engineer the nest into which their children are born; they do not engineer the world.

God had to enter the world somewhere, at some time. And just because it was God’s entrance, that place and time became the most important place and the most important time. But it is a profound mistake to think that we should therefore seek to comprehend God by the categories of that place and that time.

To represent the death of Jesus as a sacrificial atonement is perhaps the most egregious example of where that mistake can lead.

Here are a pair of images of Jesus…

…kneeling alone on a beach in the early morning, fanning a small pile of kindling into flame. Earlier, alone, he had caught a few fish, and now he’s preparing the fire to cook them. He looks out over the still-misted waters of the lake, and hears the faint sound of men out in a boat. The sun lifts above the horizon of the surrounding hills, and its first rays strike his eyes. He looks down. The sun’s afterimage dances on the inside of his eyelids. He opens his eyes, and sees the small fish lying on a piece of wood. The sound of the men on the lake, though still faint, is getting louder, and the mist is disappearing under the sun’s heat. He removes his sandals, picks up the fish and carries them a few steps into the water. Using his bare fingers he prises the fish open and cleans out their innards, then rinses them clean in the water. The blood laps against his ankles…

…reclining on the dirt floor against a cushion made of shredding reeds. He is among a sizable group that includes a few of his students, some tanners and fishmongers who reek in distinctive ways, various fishermen and tradespeople. All of these are sitting cross-legged on the floor. A handful of tax collectors also have mats to lean against. The tax collectors are noticeably cleaner than the others, because they have special robes for going out.  One of them owns this house. Street urchins are slinking ferret-like against the walls, waiting to pounce on stray bits of food. The house-owner’s concubine has prepared the food, a large pot of boiled barley with dog meat added for the special occasion. The pot sits on wooden slats in the middle of the party. Jesus and the tax collectors have bowls that she fills for them; all the others crawl to the pot and use their fingers to stuff their mouths. What falls to the floor gets snatched up instantly by the feral children.

The privileged guests also have small clay bowls for their wine. A few of the prostitutes from the house down the street have joined the party, and they are carrying wine flasks around the crowd, pouring out for those honored to have their own bowls. The others drink straight from the flasks as they are brought around, the wine often spilling down their necks and dying their robes red. As the night goes on, a guest occasionally goes out with one of the women, and when the couple returns, they bring a full flask with them.

The party is raucous, the story-telling vivid and earthy. The home-owner, inflated with the honor of hosting a traveling rabbi yet enlivened far beyond propriety by the wine, raises a hypothetical point of doctrine in a loud voice: Are all dogs kosher to eat, or only Jewish dogs!

A tremor runs through the hilarity; the students, even though drunk, glance at one another, then over at their teacher.

But Jesus is rocking with laughter, holding his sides. His own face is red. “Don’t you realize,” he cries out, “that whatever goes into a man ends up in the crapper! And a crapper’s ritually clean!” (Matthew 15:17)

The party-goers roar. The students slap each other on the back and signal for more wine. The prostitutes are happy to oblige.

And the teacher’s eyes are peaceful with perfect satisfaction.

These are images of the invisible God.