on Forgiveness

In chapter eight of John’s gospel there is told a tale often considered a tender, an almost romantic tale, of forgiveness and pardon. It is the story of a woman accused of adultery. She had been caught in flagrante delicto. Her accusers bring her to Jesus and ask what is to be done. To this point the narrative reads as two simple acts: being caught, being brought to Jesus. This is, however, an abbreviation of a complex series of acts and undisclosed intentions.

First, there is the adulterous act. One may question why someone engages in such behaviour. Is there some unresolved flaw in the individual psyche? Is there some unresolved flaw in the marriage? Marriage is not a solitary action, neither is adultery. Where is her co-conspirator in this betrayal?

Second, there is the being caught in flagrante delicto. One would tend to think the most likely party to make such a discovery is one of the offended spouses. Where is he or she? One may well understand the horror of betrayal and the concomitant anger, but the publication of this betrayal demands, under the existing law of this time and place, the death of the offender. We, saturated in the ethos of the modern West, need to take a step back and ponder the absolute gravity and immediacy of that attainder. Was this a trap set by an angry spouse? The Law required there be two witnesses, neither of whom could be the spouse. Who are they? How did they chance upon this act? Why did they interrupt the act to investigate? How did they know this was an adulterous coupling? There is at play here something more than the captious familiarity of parlous parochialism bred of proximity in a less than urbane culture.

Third, the publication having been made, and the evidence being patent, the penalty is a given. Yet, the scribes and Pharisees, learned men, the seemingly would-be dicasts of the situation, come to Jesus to consult him. Do they really consider him to be so naïf that he knows neither the Law nor their aspirations to entrap him in some decree to toss the Law? Is this a trap for both the woman and Jesus? Are they both pawns of the over-zealous and self-righteous questing to prove themselves, perhaps to rid themselves of two people they find offensive?

The scribes and Pharisees were stringently devoted to upholding the Law. Their faith, the faith Jesus shares, claims it is written in stone by the very finger of God. It is absolute and un-amendable. Jesus hears them out, then he crouches to the ground and begins to write in the dirt. That is his response to them. They persist and ask their question a second time. Jesus turns to them and tells them: staring with the man among you who is without sin, go, stone her. He crouches back down in silence and makes marks in the dust of the earth. Without explanation one by one they all leave.

Scholars have spent a good deal of time in speculation about what Jesus was doing. English translations of the story often say Jesus “wrote”, but the Greek verb thusly translated can denote something more akin to “making lines”. Some have speculated that Jesus was writing the sins of the woman’s accusers, but were this the case, why would they have stayed on to press their question a second time?  Some have rather convincingly argued that he was writing from Exodus the prohibition against embrangling oneself in charges founded in maliciousness, and thereby revealing his awareness of a hidden agenda. From another perspective—and John is fond of telling stories that can be read on several levels–I think we may see in Jesus’ scribbling something akin to child’s play. Given also the Johannine fondness for contrast and irony, Jesus’ marks in the dirt might well be taken as the antipode of Judaism’s stone tablets. The Johannine community is always differentiating the freedom of Christ from the institutionalism of Judaism. Jesus here speaks no word against God’s Law; he, the Child of God, merely does that which God does, he makes his marks upon the earth, not upon the enduring persistence of stone, but upon the fugacious transience of dust.

When only the accused and the Child of God remain, he asks her: who accuses you? She replies: no one. Where are her accusers? Where is her husband? Where stands her conscience? Jesus accepts her position, and confirms it saying: neither do I. He tells her to go. Go where? Home? To husband? To family? To a neighbourhood buzzing with gossip? To the glare of the righteous and pious? Go? Jesus tells her: get on with your life and do this no more! To do this no more is here the easier task. How does one—in this woman’s world–recover from the ordeal of shame, scorn, condemnation, broken marriage? Some might well think stoning would have been the more kind resolution. What is the life of this morally disenfranchised woman going to be like in the society of her time and place, a society wherein women are possessions, divorce is common, and adultery, like blasphemy, can be fatal? Jesus frees her to a greater punishment than bludgeoning; he frees her to live with the consequences of her act.

This is not a happy ending for anyone involved. The scheming Pharisees get to see their plot dissipate in Jesus’ passivity. The cuckold husband is left to his own devises and a devastated marriage. And the church to whom this tale is preached is left to face the radical terrors of the limitations of both situational ethics and retributive justice.

This passage is not found in many of the earliest copies of the Gospel according to John. Some have opined that it is a misplaced piece of Lucan material, others argue it belongs to the traditions of the Johannine community, and so has a proper, if not ancient-most place, in John’s work. It is small wonder the tale is not in all ancient editions. It would not have sat well with the early church’s strict moral disciplines. In any age it sets an ominous stage for dealing with the real world. Is it viable in human society to claim, as Jesus has it, that the honour of enforcing the divine law belongs first and foremost to the one who is blameless before God? Is it fine to say no one judges you, go, and leave it at that? Who cleans up the upheaval this causes? We still today do not have proper answers. We still today cannot resolve the problem of helping them that offend against the social contract to amend their ways. We, with all our resources of training and conditioning, still are able as a society to offer little in the way of rehabilitative justice, and fall back upon punitive justice to accomplish, to hopefully accomplish, restoration, reformation, and reintegration. God may, with a sweep of his hand, allow all is forgiven. Such is something astonishing more complex for us as individuals and as societies. We are all strings-attached and baggage. We do not enjoy the freedom of being the creative God. More so than those scriptural passages wherein the extremes of moral excellence are enjoined upon us, passages we may take as upholding an ideal, this passage is an affront to humankind’s sense of law and justice, and to the church’s need to relate to the “real” world.

The Pharisees wanted to trick Jesus. The husband wanted revenge. The woman wanted something neither her own self nor her marriage could give her. Jesus serves it all back to them each and all, and to us, in a manner more challenging, more demanding, more painful than any consequence of following the Law could ever have provided. No, this is not a happy tale. It was not then. It is not now. Our sin may be forgiven by God, but—as our act–it is something woven into the very fabric of who and what and where we are, and its resolution must be lived out in the who and what and where we are. Sin has consequences. What it has not is eternality. Redemption never comes without a cross.

May we, through the mercy of one to another, bear the crosses of our sins more easily than they deserve.

 

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on Heaven

I recently received a complaint that preachers talk about heaven but never discuss what one does in heaven. Succinctly put: one does nothing. One “IS” in heaven, one does not “DO” things in heaven. Before I attempt an elucidation of that, I shall note that a great many questions about items such as god, soul, heaven, hell—the ultimate classifications of meaningfulness on a cosmic, personal, and moral level—are confusing and confused because religious imagery gets mixed up with and in philosophical imagery and terminology.  We find ourselves akin to a baker trying to produce a delectably delicate cake when the only ingredients provided are steak and turnips. To decoct some essence of understanding from this imbroglio, I shall in the autumn of this year begin a series, approximately twenty-seven articles, following the main currents of Western philosophy regarding these topics.

The question of what one does in heaven is a spurious inquiry for a simple reason. We exist in time and space, and time and space are also the basic-most ways in which we reference everything in, around, and about ourselves. We cannot imagine anything without some sense of extension. Something is here, or there, or over there. Likewise, we cannot imagine anything as not extended in some time sequence. It is now, or it was then, or it will be. But these referencing devices of time and space are, by very definition, the antipodes of the spiritual and eternal. The non-material, the spiritual has no extension. It is not something that can be spoken of as here or there. It is extension-less. So too is eternity. It is not a time, or a sequence of times. It is something outside of time, an absolute singularity of moment. There is no past, present or future in God or in heaven; God IS. Indeed, that is, philosophically and theologically, the essence of God–Pure Being, or better put, Pure “Be”, since the suffix –ing itself carries a sense of endurance, a sense of a sustained temporality, a resonation of  “now”. Technically, we may not say heaven is here or there, or now or then, or that God is here or there, because when we use “here”, “there”, “now”, “then” in such referencing, we are speaking either figuratively or confusedly. There is, by definition, no extension—temporal or spacial—in God, in heaven, in anything essentially spiritual or non-material. Realistically, we can say no more than (we believe) God IS, heaven IS.

I am cognizant of the fact that I am seemingly being repetitious, but philosophy often needs to circle the object of its consideration to demark where it is not, what it is not, the object of consideration being in itself an invisibility. We live in space, we live in a time sequence, our consciousness constantly rippling over moments, and organizing things. We, therefore, have no language to express anything otherwise. When we try to speak about things spiritual or non-material we have no recourse to some mode of expression other than one fundamentally encoded in space-time experience. Heaven becomes a “place”, God “does this, then that”, etc. But we must ceaselessly remember that we are using our language analogically, figuratively, imaginatively, and not technically, or scientifically. This is often a difficult mind-set to maintain when one enters the aeolian sphere of religious discussion; we are so very inclined to forget we are in the linguistic realm of “it is as if”.

We speak of heaven and God figuratively because we have no other way of so doing. We think of the event of creation as in the past, and final judgement as in the future. We think of being in heaven as having some very long duration and sequence of events. We think thusly because from the temporal side, our side of the issue, such are the only tangible terms of reference we possess. From the other side, the spiritual side, the God-side, the first fiat of creation to the day of last judgement to the compass of our celestial bliss are but one singular moment; God and heaven but one singular joyous “AH!”, one singular fulgurant embrace Christians name Love. That one would be disposed to speak, as do the scriptures, mystics and saints, of singing, dancing, feasting, adoring, worshipping, etc. about such BE-ing, about such embrace, is not incomprehensible, but such speaking is simply something poetical, a devise used to portray that which is beyond portrayal, Pure IS.

Even traditional talk of the trinity as an endless intermeshing of its aspects transcendent, immanent, dynamic (Father, Son, Spirit), its perichoresis, is a linguistic fiction. God is ONE, space-less, timeless, a pure with-in-ness, a pure and absolute un-extended now or, if you would, I-now. The complex simplicity (or the simple complexity) of that idea causes time-space beings to render the expression of this intense oneness, this concentrated communicity of transcendent, immanent, and dynamic in terms of endurance, movement, and internal relationships. All this terminology of integral divine relationships, movement, and action in this holy and undivided trinity may seem to us most profound, but it is in reality merely a spacio-temporal enunciation by and for our less than subtle conscious comprehension of the ONE. (Churches of East and West could have avoided centuries of antagonism and animadversion had ecclesiastical clerisy been more inclined to embrace each other’s sincerity rather than reject each other’s vocabulary, each claiming to have the more true perspective and both treating as an object that which both claim to be the most supernal and supreme Subject! Had fervidly religious but less then well-educated monks roaming the Middle East been more mindful to simply live charitably and not preach that which they were not adequately prepared to preach, perhaps another cult of monotheism would never have arisen. It is a lesson rarely taken; too often do they of good intention think they ought and can speak for the Truth, when they, and all others–heaven included, would be better served were they to humbly acknowledge their gifts, and simply live out their faith in kind acts, and  in silence regarding matters catechetical. Acts do preach more assuredly than words. There is not complete but, nevertheless, much merit in the church’s ancient practice of confining the teaching of the tenets of faith to only certain officers of the church. To which I shall add the caveat that, despite the charm of the idea of vox populi, vox Dei, popular fascinations too often lead leaders where faith has neither grounds nor reason to venture.)

“In” heaven, which is not other than being “in God”, one is in a singular moment of embrace, of ecstasy, of literally being outside of one’s being, of the organism reaching its eruption into its purist, most rarefied form, its wholly-being-with-and-in its source and end as its source and end. One does not read the great mystics’ recounting of the experience of sacred ecstasy without realizing they are describing something which is orgasmic on a scale simultaneously cosmic and personal, although, for most of them, confessedly virgins or celibates, such an explicitness of statement is excluded from their vocabulary.

For us the greatest truths are ever wrapped in the humblest fictions of time, space, faltering words, and inadequate ideas. Our sacred texts begin with an acknowledgment of this, our inability to envision the divine and eternal beyond the confines of our worldly experience, for they tell the tale that one inauspicious yet angelic tinged night the Eternal One became manifest as a child, wrapped in swaddling, and set into a bed of straw wherein cattle were wont to feed. Let no theologian, no philosopher, no preacher—no matter how insightful or profound his words or ideas regarding God and his heaven—ever feel pride before so stark a depiction, so gracious a kenosis, so sublime an abnegation.

Therefore, in adoring worship, where all words fail, humbly and hopefully we offer straw, and with angels, archangels, and all the choirs in heaven we make bold to add our song: Holy, Holy, Wholly ONE, as it was in the beginning, so is it now, and shall be evermore. Amen.

 

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on The Apocalyptic Book of Revelation

The final entry in the Christian scriptures, The Book of Revelation, is written in a style known as apocalyptic, hence, the alternate name, The Apocalypse, literally, the “un-covering”. This literary form was in vogue for several centuries before Jesus and continued to have some cachet in early Christian times. Continue reading

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on God within, an eclaircissement for believers

I am informed that as a result of my last publication some have taken to their prayer desks with carcanets of ice to pray for me, the pantheist! Arise and desist. The rumour is false. To them that had such concern, allow me to advise a visit to my earlier publications on this site: on Faith—2, on Faith—3, and on Masks posted on 12, 13, and 26 February 2012 respectively. Note as well, a half paragraph with pastoral intent cannot embrace the whole of a complex dogma.

God is within not exhaustively, but really. The divine in its Transcendence is ever beyond the reach of man, the divine in its Dynamic exists always one breath before the human, and the divine in its Immanence is at the heart of man summoning ever to manifest the divine, and therein and thereby to truly worship and adore. It is in arising to this summons that one becomes fully self, an “I”, a saint, an expositor of God. It is in eschewing this summons that one becomes something lesser, a “me”, a sinner, a detractor of God. In traditional terminology, we know the Father (the transcendent) only through the Son (the immanent) and we know the Son in the Spirit (the dynamic); only by acting upon the divine Spirit’s evocation do we realize, actualize the incarnate Son and glimpse the eternal Father.

In the last century, Karl Barth restored the primacy of the doctrine of the trinity to Western Christian theology. The trinity is the definitive dynamic unicity, the ceaselessly intertwining singularity, the divine perichoresis of traditional terminology. Within this animate and eternal dialogue, communion, and concinnity of transcending, dynamic, and immanent is nestled the wonder, the rapture, the mystery of creation’s why. Herein resides the proper most basis and home of creation and sanctification, being and holiness. It is the tri-unicity of the divine that makes comprehensible and real all that is. It is this dynamic solidity that grounds all movement, physical and spiritual. It is this divine movement that concretizes all being.

In emphasising the practice of acting upon the incarnational aspect of divine presence and grace I am not playing at pantheism, neither am I cathecting a mere ideal, resuscitating Ludwig Feuerbach, or revisiting Henry James. I am simply echoing the divine fiat that calls forth the Christ abeyant within to arise and shine for the wellbeing and welfare of all.

There is a Shaker tune, “Lord of the Dance”, that has in recent times gained some prominence. While some may find it novel, it references images of the divine found in religions more ancient than even our own ancestor in faith.  Thus, I give to my reader this request: in this season of holydays and holidays, amid the brumal bustle, pause in silence,  reflect upon that ceaseless “dancing in circles”, the perichoresis of the divine trinity. Contemplate the supernal rhythms and rhymes, look upon this God who is the dance that causes the music to play, who sets the spheres to the making of their music and the angels to their songs. The locus of the divine never exists with-in, with-out, above, or beyond in isolation, in traditional terminology: God is always one holy undivided trinity. We, in our finite dimensionality of body and soul, can never at once observe that breadth of being, that complexity of dance, and thus, we must, as commanded, ever “sing a new song”, ever find anew the faithful tune.

 

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“Unto us a child is born”

I recently received a letter form an old friend in which she reminisced about my parents. Reminiscences, like the sound of the word itself, ripple, and so that night as I prepared to sleep I had my own remembrances of things past. Continue reading

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on Christmas–2, a defense of my earlier missive

I am aware our ancient ancestors readily accepted that the supernal transcendent could and did immerse itself, incarnate itself, in the world, from the plenitude of forms Zeus acquired in pursuit of beauties, to Alexander, Caesar, and Jesus of Nazareth. All of these divine manifestations in the flesh bespeak of an encounter with extraordinary and realigning power in some form; only the last impacts decisively the spiritual vision of humanity. Continue reading

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on Christmas

Christmas is about new life, and it is a sacred remembrance of family as the nucleus of new life. How often have I heard some too dogmatized cleric stand in a pulpit and prattle on about how Christmas is about this special child, this special birth, and by that intended act of reverence slam shut the door in the face of the multitude that has come to the church this day for their annual visitation. Continue reading

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