Genesis says we’re “Made in [God’s] image and likeness.” And again, John 3:11 says “We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” We are expressions of the logos, which means being committed to decay. We have the dualistic mindset that comes from having settled for “being like God” over and against being with him. But we have immortal longings, and are meant, on this side of the grave, for singleness of heart, body and mind.
Salvation is acceptance. It is a stepping into paradox, inhabiting a traditional Catholic “Both/And” structure, and feeling the illogical pull of both sides. St. John knows his audience is of a different mind, knows that judgment is a biproduct of a dualistic “either/or” perspective and “feeling condemned” is how it reacts to contrasting views. He knows that egoic death is necessary to correct the dualistic perspectives. In a 2010 interview, a questioner asked the Dalai Lama if he felt his time on earth was a success. He replied “All human life is some part failure and some part achievement.” Some people ask me “If I liked the monastery.” I tell them “the monastic life is life. There are parts I liked, and parts I didn’t.” Dualism makes us forget to hold the sides of a paradox in tension. St. John knows his audience.
Jesus’ incarnation is an opportunity to wake up. For St. John, the only “condemnation” is remaining in the Ego’s dualistic perspective. For Buddhists, this is the state of “Samsara.” Jesus hints at this when, in Matthew 5, he says anyone who calls his brother a fool is liable to, and some translations say already in, hell. “Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” Condemnation, in the end, is wholly optional.
I’ll admit that this last statement fits, for me, like shoes with pebbles in them. In part it’s because I hear “belief” from the spiritualized dualistic perspective of too many modern christians. “Belief” in that case, is the intellectual acceptance of the fact that someone wholly other than me (Jesus) is the Son of God. The problem is, I buy that proposition, but the unitive perspective I’m drawn towards has more to reveal.
What I’m getting at, and what I’ll spend the rest of this post spouting about, is this: Jesus incarnation is an opportunity to wake up. So is yours and so is mine. Jesus “saves” and he’s “the son of God” but the fact is, so are you and so am I.
Let’s unpack this by means of a short primer on the link between acceptance and expectations.
All of the Gospels deal, to some extent, with the “worldliness” of God’s plan, exemplified in the Mosaic covenant. You will prosper in the desert, says that iteration of the agreement, if you keep these laws. If you don’t follow them, bad things will happen. Whole Jewish generations grew up thinking that those to whom bad had happened were divinely disobedient.
When Israel was governed by the judges, and certainly by the time of the various exiles, a messiah was sent to lead the people back to God’s law, but restoration of worldly prosperity was the primary upshot of that movement, and it was easy to lose the forest for the trees.
So particularly in Mark’s gospel, and to a lesser extent in all the Gospels, Roman occupied Judea was home to a very specific set of Messianic ideals. At the most, a messiah was supposed to expel the Romans from Judea. We hear echoes of this in Luke’s gospel as well, when, en route to Emmaus, the disciples tell the unrecognizable Christ that they were downcast because “[they] had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” They’re still being periodically jarred out of that perspective in Acts, when they ask Jesus “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
Jesus’ messianic ideal comes from the suffering servant paradigm of Isaiah. In that model, one who suffers for the people heals and expiates the sin of the people. “upon him was the punishment,” Isaiah says, “that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” The judges model gets caught up in healing symptoms. Isaiah’s model heals the illness itself.
Not only during, but after Christ’s life, the fact that Jesus doesn’t fit the Judges’ messianic paradigms accounts for a good bit of unbelief. The problem grew worse when he began appearing as a stranger. Jesus disappointed, at that point, both in physical resemblance to his earthly self and in his role as the messiah. In the post resurrection appearances, Christ trains the apostles to discard what most often gets in the way of belief: expectations.
In short, the post-resurrection Jesus was unrecognizable: the apostles expectations about his appearance were based on knowing him during his lifetime, just as our expectations would be based on 2 millennia of Christian art. When he didn’t meet those expectations, when reason couldn’t bring about recognition, realization had to kick in.
At Emmaus, Jesus appears as a stranger, walks and talks with his disciples, and presumably says a few things about the “suffering servant messianic model.” I wasn’t privy to their conversation, but it seems to make sense that Jesus would take the opportunity to retool his disciples’ expectations. It flows quite naturally into a moment when Christ the Stranger breaks the bread, and (aha!) his disciples recognize him.
Mary Magdeline assumes the gardener at the empty tomb is a stranger till (aha) he says her name. By the time Peter is thrice asked “do you love me” we’re told “none of the disciples dared to ask him ‘who are you’ because they knew it was the Lord.” His disciples are portrayed as needing less and less prompting to make that leap. The Aha moments, once bestowed by a Transcendent source, become a mental maneuver the Apostles have been trained to do.
Shifting expectations prepare the way for realization, the aha moments show us that it’s expectation that gets in the way. Without the conflict between reality and expectation, we’d more easily see the person right in front of us as Christ. By the time Jesus ascends into heaven, their paradigm is fully adjusted. They are trained to recognizing the stranger as Christ, by adjusting and ultimately delete, expectations.
When John says “those who do not believe are condemned already,” he’s not talking about someone else’s ability to tell me I’m going to hell. He’s talking about how miserable the dualistic mindset is. When he says “those who believe in him are not condemned” he’s talking about the way “acceptance of paradox and discarding expectations” yield greater serenity.
To me, these are the mere “earthly things,” the understanding of which Jesus takes as a given. Expectations block acceptance in predictable ways. I don’t know what the “heavenly things” Jesus had to teach were. I reckon we’ll get there, though, following paradox-expanded hearts. When we look in the mirror of heaven, perhaps our own image will be all we see. Maybe, such “true visions” of ourselves were Jesus’ goal all along. Everyone is the messiah. May we, one day, not need reminding.
No comments:
Post a Comment