Reading 2nd vol. now of John Meier's magnum opus on the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew. It seems to me he shows great acumen, care, discernment & humility in his way of research and interpretation. He carefully separates out the evidence for what we can know about Jesus in the strictly factual, historical sense, from any speculations about what it might mean in a religious or theological dimension.
This work seems so valuable in a number of ways. For one thing, it sends a very clear and powerful message to "Gentile" Christians - which they need to hear again and again - that the roots of their faith lie in Judaism. The first Christians were Jews : the religious and political controversies between various sects and groups in Palestine, in the time of John the Baptist and Jesus, became gradually re-shaped, over decades and centuries, into a religious divide separating Christianity and Judaism, Gentiles and Jews. Some of the original polemics, which find their traces in the New Testament, were transformed by some streams of Christianity into a condemnation of Jews and Judaism in toto.
Obviously a huge, profound historical subject, and a very ancient stumbling-block for relations between the two faiths. I can't do it justice here, today : merely wish to emphasize the value of Meier's study, which might be (probably has been) very useful and stimulating for inter-faith dialogue.
Another basic strength of A Marginal Jew, it seems to me, is that it presents a challenge to fundamentalist thinking on all sides. Every culture re-shapes and interprets its defining texts to suit its own values and priorities : no human society is exempt from the limited vision which results from ignorance, chauvinism, parochialism, nationalism, etc. etc. But historical work like Meier's has its analogue in scientific objectivity : the aim is disinterested pursuit of truth, wherever it may lead. This is a kind of light which needs to be shed into the dark corners of Biblical literalism and narrow fundamentalism, which cut and tailor the Biblical texts to suit their own mythologies of value.
But alongside all this, what is my reading of Meier doing for me? How is my own thinking affected? I transport Meier's evidence & historical interpretation into my own "theological" thought-world : that is, what seems to be my constant contemplation of this mystery of Father, Son, & Holy Ghost - "one substance in three Persons" (in the Orthodox, and Catholic, formula). This riddle feels like an infinitely-rich & generative matrix... a conceptual "mandala", or an overarching framework for the vast & particular dimensions of reality.
I envision this pre-existent Logos - that is, some ineffable order of divine Being & consciousness somehow preceding the physical reality of time, space & matter- which flowers in our planetary time (history) as a revelation of Personhood : the divine become human. I see this (Incarnation) as a manifestation, a presentation of a kind of sacred theater : the drama of the loving self-sacrifice of Jesus, in a spiritual victory over death. I see this strange work fulfilled in the "procession of the Holy Spirit" - the Holy Ghost as God in 3rd Person, suffusing the church as a whole and each of its members - the "body of Christ" - with the same spirit, the spirit of Jesus, in surprising, charismatic, distinctive, revelatory signs, and "personal" ways.
I see this work of divine love going on both secretly and openly through the unfolding of earthly history, in order to save the world through a shared recognition of God's own nature : for when we finally realize we are "at home" in a universe created and maintained by supernatural Love, we will go home, like the Prodigal Son of the parable, to the great, the real, the profound, the planetary Thanksgiving....
Showing posts with label Jesus1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus1. Show all posts
11.16.2012
Jesus Thoughts (18) : fragment of anti-matter
I started this series with a response to the work of John Meier, A Marginal Jew - his 4-vol. investigation of what we know about "the historical Jesus." Reading, play-acting, daydreaming about history have been part of my life since childhood. My parents bought for my brothers & me all those Random House and American Heritage series of history & biography for young readers, & I loved them all. In 7th grade I wrote the script for a school pageant based on George Washington's (Christmas) crossing of the Delaware (in which I played, conveniently, the "narrator").
As a teenager, fiction & poetry pushed aside somewhat this early interest, but it never really went away. After all, literature and history are inseparable...
In the early 1970s I went through a pretty extreme set of moral/psychological experiences, which amounted to a kind of spiritual awakening, and also led, gradually & partially, back to my roots, in a family of mainstream 60's midwestern Episcopalians.
Part of my writerly evolution, through the 70s and early 80s, led to an encounter with the Cantos of Ezra Pound & the "long poem" (epic?) modes of W.C. Williams, Olson, Crane, Zukofsky, & David Jones. At the same time, I was soaking up exotic lyric radiations from Osip Mandelstam & other Russians (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, et al.), along with Celan, Montale, many others. I was responding to these poets while struggling to find my own way - it was difficult for me to achieve a manner & tone which felt right (we are talking about a 20-year struggle).
To oversimplify : it seems the example of Mandelstam helped me integrate my spiritual point of view with a path back into poetry & art; while at the same time, the model of the epic, the "long poem", offered models of how to integrate history - factuality, time, concrete world events - into poetry : melding together my original focus on both literature & history.
I apologize for the long-winded back story. But it leads to a question about the place of the poet - the poet's "office". When I started exploring American stream long poems, I came up against a roadblock. On one hand, my "re-conversion" experience - including reading the Bible, & many related works - had given me a changed sense of history. Now, for me, world history was ultimately challenged by, pivoted upon, the life & message of the historical Jesus. World-time is crossed with a deeper dimension. On the other hand, American poetry was divided between the stream represented by Pound - American, modern, and in many ways anti-Christian, and the stream represented by Eliot, who promoted a worldview rooted in European culture and a medieval, authoritarian mode of Christianity : anti-democratic, and thus in many ways anti-American.
Of course to pivot everything on Pound & Eliot is a distortion of 20th-cent. poetry : but I think it can be said that any approach to the American long poem "containing history" cannot avoid these two. And, considering my background as I've sketched it here, a simultaneous attraction-repulsion may be understandable. They stood in my path.
Then I discovered a kind of mediating affinity between the harmonic, imagistic mode (& the American, democratic affirmations, contra both Eliot & Pound) of Hart Crane, on the one hand, and Mandelstam. So Crane's Bridge offered a concrete bridge in my efforts to synthesize all this poetic "information." & gradually - over about 25 years, through about 8 different book-length "long poems" - I worked into my own, less derivative expression.
The basic mystery of "divine intervention" in history (to put it baldly) : the key questions of being & reality, the riddle of truth, remain.... like a well or plumbline in the midst of time. Now I think the Welsh poet David Jones - with a very different style, & in a different way - may have been on a parallel track. There is a Poundian Cantos-effect emanating from Jones's long poems : yet his underlying vision is closer to my own : that is, we see the personhood of Jesus as spiritual crux, irreducible crossroad, unavoidable. Like Mandelstam's epithet for poetry : "The poem is a stone fallen from heaven / No one will judge it."
So now for me poetry is like air from the future... wine of the Jubilee. That wine of which the Son of Man will not partake until He comes into his Kingdom. The Kingdom of God, & of children, & Humankind... which reigns through the Word like Hart Crane's Christ-Dionysius. ("I am the vine, & ye are the branches...") Or in many of the deep dark cryptic poems of Celan ("He was washing the world...").
But what I say or do in poetry is of no interest to the American scene. From top to bottom, from New York to San Francisco, I do not matter to them. I'm basically invisible, a sort of anti-matter. Not to be taken seriously. A type of internal exile, in a literary gulag which operates by some other set of interests & values. I don't say this lightly, or with anger, either : it's probably a good thing. Silence & solitude leave room for independent work. Meanwhile, they just don't see me, or hear me. Maybe someday they will. A few years ago I tried to put some of these issues relating to Pound & Eliot within a "Dantesque" frame, as figures in Purgatory, on board a ship. Whitman and Edwin Honig make cameo appearances, too.
As a teenager, fiction & poetry pushed aside somewhat this early interest, but it never really went away. After all, literature and history are inseparable...
In the early 1970s I went through a pretty extreme set of moral/psychological experiences, which amounted to a kind of spiritual awakening, and also led, gradually & partially, back to my roots, in a family of mainstream 60's midwestern Episcopalians.
Part of my writerly evolution, through the 70s and early 80s, led to an encounter with the Cantos of Ezra Pound & the "long poem" (epic?) modes of W.C. Williams, Olson, Crane, Zukofsky, & David Jones. At the same time, I was soaking up exotic lyric radiations from Osip Mandelstam & other Russians (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, et al.), along with Celan, Montale, many others. I was responding to these poets while struggling to find my own way - it was difficult for me to achieve a manner & tone which felt right (we are talking about a 20-year struggle).
To oversimplify : it seems the example of Mandelstam helped me integrate my spiritual point of view with a path back into poetry & art; while at the same time, the model of the epic, the "long poem", offered models of how to integrate history - factuality, time, concrete world events - into poetry : melding together my original focus on both literature & history.
I apologize for the long-winded back story. But it leads to a question about the place of the poet - the poet's "office". When I started exploring American stream long poems, I came up against a roadblock. On one hand, my "re-conversion" experience - including reading the Bible, & many related works - had given me a changed sense of history. Now, for me, world history was ultimately challenged by, pivoted upon, the life & message of the historical Jesus. World-time is crossed with a deeper dimension. On the other hand, American poetry was divided between the stream represented by Pound - American, modern, and in many ways anti-Christian, and the stream represented by Eliot, who promoted a worldview rooted in European culture and a medieval, authoritarian mode of Christianity : anti-democratic, and thus in many ways anti-American.
Of course to pivot everything on Pound & Eliot is a distortion of 20th-cent. poetry : but I think it can be said that any approach to the American long poem "containing history" cannot avoid these two. And, considering my background as I've sketched it here, a simultaneous attraction-repulsion may be understandable. They stood in my path.
Then I discovered a kind of mediating affinity between the harmonic, imagistic mode (& the American, democratic affirmations, contra both Eliot & Pound) of Hart Crane, on the one hand, and Mandelstam. So Crane's Bridge offered a concrete bridge in my efforts to synthesize all this poetic "information." & gradually - over about 25 years, through about 8 different book-length "long poems" - I worked into my own, less derivative expression.
The basic mystery of "divine intervention" in history (to put it baldly) : the key questions of being & reality, the riddle of truth, remain.... like a well or plumbline in the midst of time. Now I think the Welsh poet David Jones - with a very different style, & in a different way - may have been on a parallel track. There is a Poundian Cantos-effect emanating from Jones's long poems : yet his underlying vision is closer to my own : that is, we see the personhood of Jesus as spiritual crux, irreducible crossroad, unavoidable. Like Mandelstam's epithet for poetry : "The poem is a stone fallen from heaven / No one will judge it."
So now for me poetry is like air from the future... wine of the Jubilee. That wine of which the Son of Man will not partake until He comes into his Kingdom. The Kingdom of God, & of children, & Humankind... which reigns through the Word like Hart Crane's Christ-Dionysius. ("I am the vine, & ye are the branches...") Or in many of the deep dark cryptic poems of Celan ("He was washing the world...").
But what I say or do in poetry is of no interest to the American scene. From top to bottom, from New York to San Francisco, I do not matter to them. I'm basically invisible, a sort of anti-matter. Not to be taken seriously. A type of internal exile, in a literary gulag which operates by some other set of interests & values. I don't say this lightly, or with anger, either : it's probably a good thing. Silence & solitude leave room for independent work. Meanwhile, they just don't see me, or hear me. Maybe someday they will. A few years ago I tried to put some of these issues relating to Pound & Eliot within a "Dantesque" frame, as figures in Purgatory, on board a ship. Whitman and Edwin Honig make cameo appearances, too.
A FRAGMENT FROM PURGATORY – so we moved along the bank upstream, and where the river bent in a broken circle to the left, beheld a busy municipium: welter of gleaming glass and flickering steel resembling vast shuttlings of water bugs (chaotic, breaking apart the smooth still surface into myriad coarse shags of garish noise). Then my eyes shifted to the river itself, and picked out a brig there – hermaphrodite, trim, she drifted with peculiar motion, perpendicular to the flow. At prow and stern were lofted pennants (princely St. George at the fore, and aft, a black-green, jumbled image fusing, it seemed, some fasces with a star). Upon the poop, a gaunt man in a rage stood, yapping imprecations toward the bow, whereat a lank chap, dignified with age, responded languidly (voice diffident and low). Apparently, they each commanded wheels, and piloted the ship as if to go both ways at once – causing the luckless keels’ erratic laterality (crosscurrent, at cross purposes). I turned to him, whom eagle’s perspicacity once lifted to the firmament on high. Stern and melancholy then he gazing, spoke. “Throughout the Occident once reigned supreme in poetry, these men – their tandem sway the ultimate authority. In talent matchless, their forceful mien bore down all before them. Yet, perdie, an overweening awe for ordered rule (drawn, I blush to say, from De Monarchia!) caused them to miss that inlet whence the whole sweet cataract of liberty descends; and so you see them, netted in such moil of turbid aimlessness.” “And yet,” contends me – “if there be contempt for duty, honor, justice, loyalty – neither high lands nor low – no fear of that sublimity called holy – what remains, but feud and die? What path leads out of universal enmity – that peevish self-engorged impiety which desolates the vernal countryside with fattened castles – that blighted antipathy to common good, which makes the cities bleed?” My dear guide, pensive, murmured then: “Remember this (your elder teacher’s screed of long ago): Freedom builds within, or breaks your bones.” And on that note I glanced upriver – glimpsed the leonine white crown, the heavy shoulders, the stout birch staff, the hiking boots – the veteran’s cap, askew – the slouching, musing gait – pioneering through cane reeds, alone –
11.13.2012
Jesus Thoughts (14) : on Resurrection
News that a famous American poet, Jack Gilbert, passed away on Nov. 11th. A solitary figure, who avoided the limelight, working away on his spare, very free, very moving poems. He was 87, afflicted with Alzheimer's (as Edwin Honig had been). But his Collected Poems had just come out, from a major publishing house. Poetry is all about time & timing. Now the mourning & celebration sounds are coming from the literary world, & his poems shine brighter than before. (To tell the truth I've never been very aware of him, or familiar with his work; but I picked up this new volume from the library shelf today, and am realizing I missed a lot there.)
A person dies, but leaves a ghostly trace in the work they have done. In the case of art, music, poetry, sometimes it bursts into flame repeatedly long after they are gone.
I'm thinking about Jesus, and recalling a certain idea about the Resurrection that struck me a few months ago. But I'll get to that in a minute. I'm thinking about the impact Jesus had on those around him : this figure of brilliant charismatic gifts - his magnetism & affection, his healing powers, his teachings, his eloquence, his prophetic utterance. The electricity that must have surrounded him like a buzzing power field. And especially his radical, uncompromising claim : to be the expected Messiah : that claim which brought him inexorably into conflict with the established authorities in Jerusalem (and Rome) : which brought him to crucifixion on Golgotha ("the place of a skull").
The Resurrection is a deep-shaded mystery. But I think we can hypothesize that, whatever "really happened", the way of life which Jesus's friends & followers began after his death amounted to the most serious form of commitment to mourn & remember him. It may sound heretical or out-of-bounds to compare their response to other cults of martyrdom and mourning (say, for beloved poets, or the martyr-figures or deceased spiritual leaders of other religions) - but I think it's fair to say there are at least some resemblances. Christianity is in a certain sense the largest, most powerful association of mourning & remembrance the world has ever seen. Christianity is much more than that : but I want to sketch this scene out as a kind of background to keep in mind. This religion still registers the visceral shock & grief which Jesus's followers felt, when this incomparably vital, earth-shaking, life-changing presence in their midst was suddenly, violently thrown down.
The Resurrection is a deep well. I like to think about Mary Magdalen as she is sometimes called, the "first apostle" - since according to the Gospels, she was the first to spread the news that Jesus's tomb was empty - that angels had told her to seek him in Galilee. (The mysterious Gospel of John has a slightly different version : Mary meets the resurrected Jesus in the garden beside the tomb, & at first mistakes him for "the gardener". I can't get away from the notion that this lovely, slightly comic scene - straight out of Shakespeare's late romances - has some kind of underlying symbolic meaning. The gardener - as Adam? Maybe.)
The message of the early Church is that the resurrected Jesus appeared to them several times; ascended to the Father in heaven; and sent the Holy Ghost : to be within & amongst them all, binding them together as the reborn body of Christ on earth, until he comes again. I'm convinced of the essential truth of this message, even though the whole process remains a great & alluring enigma, & even though I believe that as regards the Bible, things "literal" must be taken with a grain of salt. We must "judge for ourselves what is right," as Jesus says to the Pharisees.
But it occurred to me a few months ago that one could think about the meaning of the Resurrection in the following way. I'm not saying this is orthodox, or even acceptable; maybe it's not even true. But it's an imaginative approach. The thought occurred to me that the process of Jesus' death, Resurrection, & sending of the Spirit could be conceptualized as follows : simply, that Jesus died, yes - & is resurrected in us. This is the ultimate, over-arching power of the Holy Ghost working in us : this is the power that God grants - that "glorious freedom of the children of God" to which St. Paul attests. To be the Resurrection in our own place & time on earth : to be Christ, here, now - as manifested in our own distinct personhood, our own fate & vocation.
This, I admit, does not jibe perfectly with the doctrine of the Church : that we are waiting for the 2nd coming of Christ - that nothing is fully accomplished until that "end-time" takes place. But I think, on the other hand, this perspective might possibly give us a glimpse of what it might mean to live in constant gratitude for the simple fact of existence, of being alive. (This "gratitude-for-existence" is something which Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and the Acmeist poets, expressed as a basic principle.) If, having been "born again", we are the resurrection of Jesus - then suddenly "all things are made new" : we have a task to re-present Christ, here, now. & maybe this would be understood to "fit" the orthodox doctrine after all, in some sense : if we re-examine the pattern of death-resurrection-ascension-glorification, then each of us is at the stage of resurrection - the pre-ascension stage, which still awaits the ultimate "end" of history, the "end of the age".
Somehow I like this notion, anyway, if only perhaps in a poetic sense. The early Church mourned the living Jesus, who had died, who was gone; we were all, as Paul wrote, "baptized into his death". Yet at the same time, in the power of the Holy Ghost, we also live out the resurrection : in the most particular local distinct personal & global & contemporary sense of the word (here & now).
There is an saying of that terse, cryptic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus - something like "living each other's death, dying each other's life" (how does it go?) - which encapsulates the unusual schema for resurrection I am sketching here.
A person dies, but leaves a ghostly trace in the work they have done. In the case of art, music, poetry, sometimes it bursts into flame repeatedly long after they are gone.
I'm thinking about Jesus, and recalling a certain idea about the Resurrection that struck me a few months ago. But I'll get to that in a minute. I'm thinking about the impact Jesus had on those around him : this figure of brilliant charismatic gifts - his magnetism & affection, his healing powers, his teachings, his eloquence, his prophetic utterance. The electricity that must have surrounded him like a buzzing power field. And especially his radical, uncompromising claim : to be the expected Messiah : that claim which brought him inexorably into conflict with the established authorities in Jerusalem (and Rome) : which brought him to crucifixion on Golgotha ("the place of a skull").
The Resurrection is a deep-shaded mystery. But I think we can hypothesize that, whatever "really happened", the way of life which Jesus's friends & followers began after his death amounted to the most serious form of commitment to mourn & remember him. It may sound heretical or out-of-bounds to compare their response to other cults of martyrdom and mourning (say, for beloved poets, or the martyr-figures or deceased spiritual leaders of other religions) - but I think it's fair to say there are at least some resemblances. Christianity is in a certain sense the largest, most powerful association of mourning & remembrance the world has ever seen. Christianity is much more than that : but I want to sketch this scene out as a kind of background to keep in mind. This religion still registers the visceral shock & grief which Jesus's followers felt, when this incomparably vital, earth-shaking, life-changing presence in their midst was suddenly, violently thrown down.
The Resurrection is a deep well. I like to think about Mary Magdalen as she is sometimes called, the "first apostle" - since according to the Gospels, she was the first to spread the news that Jesus's tomb was empty - that angels had told her to seek him in Galilee. (The mysterious Gospel of John has a slightly different version : Mary meets the resurrected Jesus in the garden beside the tomb, & at first mistakes him for "the gardener". I can't get away from the notion that this lovely, slightly comic scene - straight out of Shakespeare's late romances - has some kind of underlying symbolic meaning. The gardener - as Adam? Maybe.)
The message of the early Church is that the resurrected Jesus appeared to them several times; ascended to the Father in heaven; and sent the Holy Ghost : to be within & amongst them all, binding them together as the reborn body of Christ on earth, until he comes again. I'm convinced of the essential truth of this message, even though the whole process remains a great & alluring enigma, & even though I believe that as regards the Bible, things "literal" must be taken with a grain of salt. We must "judge for ourselves what is right," as Jesus says to the Pharisees.
But it occurred to me a few months ago that one could think about the meaning of the Resurrection in the following way. I'm not saying this is orthodox, or even acceptable; maybe it's not even true. But it's an imaginative approach. The thought occurred to me that the process of Jesus' death, Resurrection, & sending of the Spirit could be conceptualized as follows : simply, that Jesus died, yes - & is resurrected in us. This is the ultimate, over-arching power of the Holy Ghost working in us : this is the power that God grants - that "glorious freedom of the children of God" to which St. Paul attests. To be the Resurrection in our own place & time on earth : to be Christ, here, now - as manifested in our own distinct personhood, our own fate & vocation.
This, I admit, does not jibe perfectly with the doctrine of the Church : that we are waiting for the 2nd coming of Christ - that nothing is fully accomplished until that "end-time" takes place. But I think, on the other hand, this perspective might possibly give us a glimpse of what it might mean to live in constant gratitude for the simple fact of existence, of being alive. (This "gratitude-for-existence" is something which Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and the Acmeist poets, expressed as a basic principle.) If, having been "born again", we are the resurrection of Jesus - then suddenly "all things are made new" : we have a task to re-present Christ, here, now. & maybe this would be understood to "fit" the orthodox doctrine after all, in some sense : if we re-examine the pattern of death-resurrection-ascension-glorification, then each of us is at the stage of resurrection - the pre-ascension stage, which still awaits the ultimate "end" of history, the "end of the age".
Somehow I like this notion, anyway, if only perhaps in a poetic sense. The early Church mourned the living Jesus, who had died, who was gone; we were all, as Paul wrote, "baptized into his death". Yet at the same time, in the power of the Holy Ghost, we also live out the resurrection : in the most particular local distinct personal & global & contemporary sense of the word (here & now).
There is an saying of that terse, cryptic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus - something like "living each other's death, dying each other's life" (how does it go?) - which encapsulates the unusual schema for resurrection I am sketching here.
11.08.2012
Jesus Thoughts (11) : on a Bruegel day
Fleeting short thoughts this morning, at work. Glancing out the library window, at a Bruegelish autumn scene : snow on the rooftops, the Unitarian steeple. Low clouds roving up from the south (Narragansett Bay); a few flickers of gold leaf flaking off the maple trees; huddled shrouded monkish people walking by, leaning into the wind.
The recurrent, obscure & pleasant fantasy-sensation of drifting into the seamless continuum of a Bruegel landscape. Or is it a sense of heavy stones dusted with snow in the Middle Ages. Or is it a sense of a time-warp, an anachronism, a synchronicity. Or is it just an imaginary (willfully imagined) feeling of stillness : of Time slowing down, the wheel coming to a halt.
Forgive me for my self-indulgence here; maybe I'm just an old monkish librarian. Thinking this morning of one of Jesus' parables of the kingdom of heaven (& I've probably got it slightly wrong, you'd better look it up). Here's my rough paraphrase :
The Kingdom of God is as when a rich householder throws a wedding feast. He invites all his friends, all the rich & powerful & intelligent, the priests, the scribes, the lords; but nobody shows up. So angrily he throw open the doors and invites everybody in : sinners, criminals, the sick, the homeless, the poor. & they flock inside, happily celebrate with their host. But one young man shows up without a wedding outfit : the servants of the householder confront him : "What? No wedding suit?" & toss him out. & so it will be for each & all, when the Eternal comes upon you.
"When the Eternal comes." What does this mean?
To repeat : I think Jesus believed he was the Messiah, the Son of the Most High - & understood what it meant, its implications. One of those consequences was that "in his name" - in his name - salvation, healing & blessings were coming into the world. What was "his name"? Among other things, it was the sign of his individual personhood. Through the action of God coming into the world as an actual person, the form of the individual human life, the life of the person, is blessed, is made holy. As it's been put in another way : Man as the original Adamic "image of God" is cleaned, polished and restored through the "name" (the personhood) of Jesus.
Once he began his "public" career, Jesus lived his life as a sacrificial priest, making a sacrifice of his life : & in doing so, every such public act became symbolic, a dramatic sign. The life he lived became framed within the aegis of its end : he was moving toward his own death, he was moving into the dimension of eternity.
And there must be an "eternal" dimension to every person's life. The Bible, the "Word", sets up a kind of light-reflective mirror. On the one hand, we see the outward, "objective" traces of the historical record, the chronicle of the radiating vibrations from Jesus' actual life on earth. On the other hand, in the mirror of the word, we sense the inward meaning of the Gospel message as it impinges on own personal consciousness (within our "subjectivity"). A curious doubleness, a complementarity of inner & outer weaves itself together in this "mirror" Logos.
I'm looking out the window, at the wintry Bruegel-world. Sensing strange oneness, underlying time & distance : like these dark red-gold leaves, flying, floating & clustering everywhere, pervasive, omnipresent - under a worn old lamb-statue, leaning out from a cathedral door. "When the Eternal comes..." (will I have my wedding coat?).
The recurrent, obscure & pleasant fantasy-sensation of drifting into the seamless continuum of a Bruegel landscape. Or is it a sense of heavy stones dusted with snow in the Middle Ages. Or is it a sense of a time-warp, an anachronism, a synchronicity. Or is it just an imaginary (willfully imagined) feeling of stillness : of Time slowing down, the wheel coming to a halt.
Forgive me for my self-indulgence here; maybe I'm just an old monkish librarian. Thinking this morning of one of Jesus' parables of the kingdom of heaven (& I've probably got it slightly wrong, you'd better look it up). Here's my rough paraphrase :
The Kingdom of God is as when a rich householder throws a wedding feast. He invites all his friends, all the rich & powerful & intelligent, the priests, the scribes, the lords; but nobody shows up. So angrily he throw open the doors and invites everybody in : sinners, criminals, the sick, the homeless, the poor. & they flock inside, happily celebrate with their host. But one young man shows up without a wedding outfit : the servants of the householder confront him : "What? No wedding suit?" & toss him out. & so it will be for each & all, when the Eternal comes upon you.
"When the Eternal comes." What does this mean?
To repeat : I think Jesus believed he was the Messiah, the Son of the Most High - & understood what it meant, its implications. One of those consequences was that "in his name" - in his name - salvation, healing & blessings were coming into the world. What was "his name"? Among other things, it was the sign of his individual personhood. Through the action of God coming into the world as an actual person, the form of the individual human life, the life of the person, is blessed, is made holy. As it's been put in another way : Man as the original Adamic "image of God" is cleaned, polished and restored through the "name" (the personhood) of Jesus.
Once he began his "public" career, Jesus lived his life as a sacrificial priest, making a sacrifice of his life : & in doing so, every such public act became symbolic, a dramatic sign. The life he lived became framed within the aegis of its end : he was moving toward his own death, he was moving into the dimension of eternity.
And there must be an "eternal" dimension to every person's life. The Bible, the "Word", sets up a kind of light-reflective mirror. On the one hand, we see the outward, "objective" traces of the historical record, the chronicle of the radiating vibrations from Jesus' actual life on earth. On the other hand, in the mirror of the word, we sense the inward meaning of the Gospel message as it impinges on own personal consciousness (within our "subjectivity"). A curious doubleness, a complementarity of inner & outer weaves itself together in this "mirror" Logos.
I'm looking out the window, at the wintry Bruegel-world. Sensing strange oneness, underlying time & distance : like these dark red-gold leaves, flying, floating & clustering everywhere, pervasive, omnipresent - under a worn old lamb-statue, leaning out from a cathedral door. "When the Eternal comes..." (will I have my wedding coat?).
11.05.2012
Jesus Thoughts (8) : repentance & belief
Will continue as I can with this line of conjectures, come confusion, rain or shine. Gentle blog readers might want to start with #1 of these Thoughts - otherwise the drifts might be too high, the cloud banks too dark. They will be dark enough anyway...
Have been thinking out loud here about the spiritual claims Jesus makes : that he is the Messiah, that with him the gate and the way to God's presence, the kingdom of God, is opened : which is a personal presence. Which means that the ultimate ground of the cosmos is in some way, somehow, personal - beyond our sharpest consciousness & comprehension of what that might mean (in the abstract, anyway : we might experience it, however, in some kind of unknown spiritual trance or rapture). In the depths.
But Jesus does more than simply make a claim for his status, for who he is. His message, his mission, is to invite people to join him there. The NT repeatedly summarizes the announcement he made as he wandered around Galilee and Judea : "Repent and believe in the Gospel (the good news)."
These two go together : repent and believe. Why? Well, for one thing, the spiritual pigeon-code, the message, he is delivering, is so earth-shaking, so transformative - such a shock to our ordinary earthbound perceptions and way of thinking, that we have to repent - to turn, to make an inward moral change - in order to receive it. it's simultaneously a moral and intellectual change which is demanded here.
If we accept the message, we are no longer grounded in common sense or material calculations : we are suddenly participating in some kind of previously-unknown spiritual community. We are grounded in a relationship with the creator of the universe : as the NT puts it (I paraphrase from memory), "he gave men the power to become children of God." Children of God. It's an assertion which requires an almost incomprehensible revolution of consciousness.
And it has a moral component. If God is the pure power of infinite Love and Wisdom - the "whole Good" in a Platonic sense, or the goodness of the whole - then we are called upon to refashion our lives in response to this invitation to infinite love & joy. We're asked to re-evaluate the partial goods we pursue on earth, in the context of an acknowledgement of a new spiritual dimension : the life of our eternal soul. Inner and outer correspond to and influence each other, as in the saying "Give, and you shall receive." What we acknowledge and do with respect to loving our neighbors as ourselves, will have repercussions on our inward state of mind and soul - every day, in every situation. It really is an invitation to be "born again" into a new way of life, rooted in a spiritual dimension which we have until now shunted to the sidelines (a low priority).
It's an invitation, not a command. I hold firmly with the notion that Jesus's message was never intended to condemn the world, but to liberate our minds - from an enslavement to anything less than eternal life. God the father in Jesus's words, is a God of infinite love, mercy and forgiveness. The renewal of repentance and belief which Jesus outlines is a challenge for every person - not an easy path. We all have our burdens of inward & outward trouble, suffering and shame - our selfishness, our complacency, our moral obtuseness, our unkindness, our stupidity & rage, our fears, our despair. "For unless you turn and become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God." - this is a saying both easy and hard. But listen to this : "Come unto me, you who are burdened and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.' My burden is.... light.
Have been thinking out loud here about the spiritual claims Jesus makes : that he is the Messiah, that with him the gate and the way to God's presence, the kingdom of God, is opened : which is a personal presence. Which means that the ultimate ground of the cosmos is in some way, somehow, personal - beyond our sharpest consciousness & comprehension of what that might mean (in the abstract, anyway : we might experience it, however, in some kind of unknown spiritual trance or rapture). In the depths.
But Jesus does more than simply make a claim for his status, for who he is. His message, his mission, is to invite people to join him there. The NT repeatedly summarizes the announcement he made as he wandered around Galilee and Judea : "Repent and believe in the Gospel (the good news)."
These two go together : repent and believe. Why? Well, for one thing, the spiritual pigeon-code, the message, he is delivering, is so earth-shaking, so transformative - such a shock to our ordinary earthbound perceptions and way of thinking, that we have to repent - to turn, to make an inward moral change - in order to receive it. it's simultaneously a moral and intellectual change which is demanded here.
If we accept the message, we are no longer grounded in common sense or material calculations : we are suddenly participating in some kind of previously-unknown spiritual community. We are grounded in a relationship with the creator of the universe : as the NT puts it (I paraphrase from memory), "he gave men the power to become children of God." Children of God. It's an assertion which requires an almost incomprehensible revolution of consciousness.
And it has a moral component. If God is the pure power of infinite Love and Wisdom - the "whole Good" in a Platonic sense, or the goodness of the whole - then we are called upon to refashion our lives in response to this invitation to infinite love & joy. We're asked to re-evaluate the partial goods we pursue on earth, in the context of an acknowledgement of a new spiritual dimension : the life of our eternal soul. Inner and outer correspond to and influence each other, as in the saying "Give, and you shall receive." What we acknowledge and do with respect to loving our neighbors as ourselves, will have repercussions on our inward state of mind and soul - every day, in every situation. It really is an invitation to be "born again" into a new way of life, rooted in a spiritual dimension which we have until now shunted to the sidelines (a low priority).
It's an invitation, not a command. I hold firmly with the notion that Jesus's message was never intended to condemn the world, but to liberate our minds - from an enslavement to anything less than eternal life. God the father in Jesus's words, is a God of infinite love, mercy and forgiveness. The renewal of repentance and belief which Jesus outlines is a challenge for every person - not an easy path. We all have our burdens of inward & outward trouble, suffering and shame - our selfishness, our complacency, our moral obtuseness, our unkindness, our stupidity & rage, our fears, our despair. "For unless you turn and become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God." - this is a saying both easy and hard. But listen to this : "Come unto me, you who are burdened and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.' My burden is.... light.
11.03.2012
Jesus Thoughts (7) : in the beginning....
Improvisation is part of this thread; I'm not always completely sure of what I'm going to say. This is just a journal, Henry's Logos-log : I have to seize the day, free time is scarce... so when the moment is opportune, then here I am. Maybe this diary will accumulate gradually into something of value.
Someday I'll try to write in more detail about the crisis, back in 1972-3, which entirely reshaped, re-oriented me. I've posted scattered things here & elsewhere about it (including an essay in the 1994 anthology for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea), but much more could be written. Someday. For now, let's just say that - to paraphrase Simone Weil - when I was about 19 years old, I had come to the end of my "natural" self - I reached an inner limit, my merely personal spiritual resources were exhausted, burnt out. I was sinking under the weight of my own natural gravity - I was in need of supernatural grace. & grace arrived, in the nick of time.
Faith itself is a spiritual gift. Without it, the mystery of truth is too deep for any one person. I know exactly how meaningless these phrases sound to someone who doesn't think they believe in God. I've been there. I'm still there. But my convictions are firmer now than they were three, five, ten, fifteen years ago. When convictions and principles are weak, then the short day's distractions, mistakes, temptations are strong. Yet, as Roger Williams well knew, and proclaimed from his rustic rooftop - you can't force belief or conviction of any kind, on anyone. An imposed conviction is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms - a mode of intellectual tyranny.
No doubt I could be dwelling in utter delusion; yet I feel confident instead. I feel my vision of things as they are is growing more clear. Not wise myself (& never have been) - still, I sense my perception becoming aligned with a truth that is inherent in reality.
I say these things because, to repeat, I understand how extremely difficult it can be to attain a rational basis for a spiritual truth. I spent many years in the mid-1970s as a kind of wandering seeker, a dreamer - mostly in a kind of meditative trance (while hitchhiking around out West, or doing odd jobs in New York City or Minneapolis, or traveling to London with musical ambitions) : reading, reading, thinking, pondering... trying to grasp 1) what had happened to me, and 2) how to imagine - realistically - a "personal" divine Being.
Many writers & thinkers fall back on mystical paradoxes when confronted with these issues. I can't disagree with them : I agree (reservedly) with Nicolas Cusanus, that there is a fundamental distinction between the finite and the infinite, the human and the divine - a logical distinction, in other words - which is, nevertheless somehow bridged and transcended in the Incarnation (the union of finite and infinite, of divine and human). But mystical paradox can result in a sort of explanatory cul-de-sac. It's poetry, not prose.
So today, here, I am going to sidestep in my discourse, make a flanking maneuver. I'm simply going to assent to the irrational bridging of that distinction (as the diagonal bridges a square with an irrational number). I'm going to take it, for the moment, on faith. And I'm going to turn (return) to a schematic mapping of what seem to be some implications of such a (cosmological, ontological) logos-design.
To do that, let's go back and reiterate, in a new figuration, the main plot of the Bible. We recall the "hexaemeral" cosmology of the opening chapters of Genesis. The story is metaphorical, analogical - we were never meant to take it literally. When Genesis states that God created the universe in 7 days, what the author is doing is aligning the cosmic, seasonal order of solar time with a theological explanation of that order. It's convenient : it's "fitting" - it fits, since the 365 days of the solar year and the 12 months of the lunar cycle divide into 52 weeks of 7 days. The story that the world was made in 7 days is a kind of hymn of praise disguised as a prose narration : it allows a people, a tribe, a community, to align itself with the cosmic order on a human level - on an ordinary, daily (weekly) basis.
All the seasonal festivals of ancient peoples are simply elaborations of this fundamental cultural orientation. This is what is called piety : the structuring of human works and days on an attitude of trust and supplication offered toward the logos, the divine order, of the universe. The dome, the house, the temple - fundamental, global phenomena representing what Osip Mandelstam (in a literary analogy) termed an attitude of "domestic hellenism" - a radiant push-back against harsh existence with "teleological warmth" : confidence in humanity's ultimate place, a being-at-home on earth, a dwelling.
Of course, we are no longer ancients : we are modern. In the context of 19th-21st century history & science, the voices conceptualizing a remote, impersonal cosmos, subject to randomness, chance, violence, and the finality of death, have grown strong. For many, the notion of a cosmic Spirit, a somehow "personal" God, simply outrages our own rationality. It's a shock to the mind.
Yet the mind itself is the key. One meaning of Logos is "ratio". The poet, the seer, deals not so much in analysis, but with analogy (leading to synthesis). An analogy is a kind of ratio. The fundamental ratio that structures belief in God was narrated at the climax of the creation story at the opening of Genesis : when "God made man, in his own image and likeness". This too is a literary fiction : it was never meant to be taken literally. But it symbolizes a ratio inherent in nature, in the entire cosmos. Here is the analogy : just as the mind of Man (male & female) senses, interprets, & orders life on this planet, so the ineffable mind of God orders the cosmos which emerged from nothing. Body is to mind as Man is to God : and the "Son of Man" is the verbal sign given to the summary, the totality, of that physical manifestation, that embodiment of the logos, the ratio. "God is Spirit," declares Jesus, "and those who worship him do so in spirit and truth." In this spirit, then - in this light - it's possible to recognize the signs of the "Son of Man" as omnipresent and pervasive throughout the natural world.
Suddenly we understand we are participating, mostly without being aware of it, in a planetary and cosmic mystery play : as St. Paul wrote, we are all dying to this "body of death", all at once - & all rising too : into that "third heaven" (the intellectual heaven, above the 1st heaven of the sky and the 2nd heaven of the stars). Into the dimension of the eternal, "uncreated" Logos. There the spirit of God is the living "person of persons" - that is, a personal being more personal than our own deepest experience and consciousness of personhood (as we have known it, imperfectly, in our own lives).
These are the strange metaphysical mysteries I've come to accept, after much hard experience, seeking & searching. I know exactly how drastically they overturn the modern "rational" worldview. But this is the way home; this is the fireplace in the kitchen of "domestic hellenism."
Someday I'll try to write in more detail about the crisis, back in 1972-3, which entirely reshaped, re-oriented me. I've posted scattered things here & elsewhere about it (including an essay in the 1994 anthology for Edwin Honig, A Glass of Green Tea), but much more could be written. Someday. For now, let's just say that - to paraphrase Simone Weil - when I was about 19 years old, I had come to the end of my "natural" self - I reached an inner limit, my merely personal spiritual resources were exhausted, burnt out. I was sinking under the weight of my own natural gravity - I was in need of supernatural grace. & grace arrived, in the nick of time.
Faith itself is a spiritual gift. Without it, the mystery of truth is too deep for any one person. I know exactly how meaningless these phrases sound to someone who doesn't think they believe in God. I've been there. I'm still there. But my convictions are firmer now than they were three, five, ten, fifteen years ago. When convictions and principles are weak, then the short day's distractions, mistakes, temptations are strong. Yet, as Roger Williams well knew, and proclaimed from his rustic rooftop - you can't force belief or conviction of any kind, on anyone. An imposed conviction is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms - a mode of intellectual tyranny.
No doubt I could be dwelling in utter delusion; yet I feel confident instead. I feel my vision of things as they are is growing more clear. Not wise myself (& never have been) - still, I sense my perception becoming aligned with a truth that is inherent in reality.
I say these things because, to repeat, I understand how extremely difficult it can be to attain a rational basis for a spiritual truth. I spent many years in the mid-1970s as a kind of wandering seeker, a dreamer - mostly in a kind of meditative trance (while hitchhiking around out West, or doing odd jobs in New York City or Minneapolis, or traveling to London with musical ambitions) : reading, reading, thinking, pondering... trying to grasp 1) what had happened to me, and 2) how to imagine - realistically - a "personal" divine Being.
Many writers & thinkers fall back on mystical paradoxes when confronted with these issues. I can't disagree with them : I agree (reservedly) with Nicolas Cusanus, that there is a fundamental distinction between the finite and the infinite, the human and the divine - a logical distinction, in other words - which is, nevertheless somehow bridged and transcended in the Incarnation (the union of finite and infinite, of divine and human). But mystical paradox can result in a sort of explanatory cul-de-sac. It's poetry, not prose.
So today, here, I am going to sidestep in my discourse, make a flanking maneuver. I'm simply going to assent to the irrational bridging of that distinction (as the diagonal bridges a square with an irrational number). I'm going to take it, for the moment, on faith. And I'm going to turn (return) to a schematic mapping of what seem to be some implications of such a (cosmological, ontological) logos-design.
To do that, let's go back and reiterate, in a new figuration, the main plot of the Bible. We recall the "hexaemeral" cosmology of the opening chapters of Genesis. The story is metaphorical, analogical - we were never meant to take it literally. When Genesis states that God created the universe in 7 days, what the author is doing is aligning the cosmic, seasonal order of solar time with a theological explanation of that order. It's convenient : it's "fitting" - it fits, since the 365 days of the solar year and the 12 months of the lunar cycle divide into 52 weeks of 7 days. The story that the world was made in 7 days is a kind of hymn of praise disguised as a prose narration : it allows a people, a tribe, a community, to align itself with the cosmic order on a human level - on an ordinary, daily (weekly) basis.
All the seasonal festivals of ancient peoples are simply elaborations of this fundamental cultural orientation. This is what is called piety : the structuring of human works and days on an attitude of trust and supplication offered toward the logos, the divine order, of the universe. The dome, the house, the temple - fundamental, global phenomena representing what Osip Mandelstam (in a literary analogy) termed an attitude of "domestic hellenism" - a radiant push-back against harsh existence with "teleological warmth" : confidence in humanity's ultimate place, a being-at-home on earth, a dwelling.
Of course, we are no longer ancients : we are modern. In the context of 19th-21st century history & science, the voices conceptualizing a remote, impersonal cosmos, subject to randomness, chance, violence, and the finality of death, have grown strong. For many, the notion of a cosmic Spirit, a somehow "personal" God, simply outrages our own rationality. It's a shock to the mind.
Yet the mind itself is the key. One meaning of Logos is "ratio". The poet, the seer, deals not so much in analysis, but with analogy (leading to synthesis). An analogy is a kind of ratio. The fundamental ratio that structures belief in God was narrated at the climax of the creation story at the opening of Genesis : when "God made man, in his own image and likeness". This too is a literary fiction : it was never meant to be taken literally. But it symbolizes a ratio inherent in nature, in the entire cosmos. Here is the analogy : just as the mind of Man (male & female) senses, interprets, & orders life on this planet, so the ineffable mind of God orders the cosmos which emerged from nothing. Body is to mind as Man is to God : and the "Son of Man" is the verbal sign given to the summary, the totality, of that physical manifestation, that embodiment of the logos, the ratio. "God is Spirit," declares Jesus, "and those who worship him do so in spirit and truth." In this spirit, then - in this light - it's possible to recognize the signs of the "Son of Man" as omnipresent and pervasive throughout the natural world.
Suddenly we understand we are participating, mostly without being aware of it, in a planetary and cosmic mystery play : as St. Paul wrote, we are all dying to this "body of death", all at once - & all rising too : into that "third heaven" (the intellectual heaven, above the 1st heaven of the sky and the 2nd heaven of the stars). Into the dimension of the eternal, "uncreated" Logos. There the spirit of God is the living "person of persons" - that is, a personal being more personal than our own deepest experience and consciousness of personhood (as we have known it, imperfectly, in our own lives).
These are the strange metaphysical mysteries I've come to accept, after much hard experience, seeking & searching. I know exactly how drastically they overturn the modern "rational" worldview. But this is the way home; this is the fireplace in the kitchen of "domestic hellenism."
11.02.2012
Jesus Thoughts (5) : fields of Messiah
Context is everything. The framework, the field of the message-in-embryo nurtures its meaning, forms the protective husk of the traveling pigeon-signal. Thus when we think & talk about Jesus we have to envision the wider field, the landscape, the ground upon which the Messiah-figure stands.
We could start with the meaning of "Messiah" itself. The root of the messianic phenomenon lies in the character & nature of Yahweh, the High God, the only God, as presented in Hebrew monotheism, the beliefs and practices of Judaism. Two characteristics, it seems to me, distinguish Yahweh from other ancient mythologies of the divine. First, is the monotheistic concentration of all power and benevolence in the one God, a creator-God, apart from whom nothing exists at all. Second, is the active, personal character of Yahweh : as narrated in the Bible, God intervenes in history in a way that can be chronicled. Yahweh is a saving God, coming to rescue the poor and oppressed, raining down judgement on the wicked - in this life, in this world.
This narrative depiction of Yahweh, as an actor in history as well as all-powerful Creator, lays the foundation for the prophetic expectation and reception of a Messiah : one who comes to fulfill all the promises of justice and salvation made by God to Israel (and through Israel, to the world).
And this is the context, I believe, in which we have to build a mental sketch (merely a conjectural hypothesis!) of Jesus's self-understanding : how he himself comprehended his vocation, his mission in life. He believed himself to be the Messiah : the one called upon to fulfill the messianic expectations of the people of Israel. From this original position flows the application of all of his spiritual, intellectual, charismatic and rhetorical gifts, and the expression of decisive moral choices, as he faced up to the consequences of his vocation.
Let's think about this for a moment in a yet wider context. The Jewish "fulfillment of Scripture" in the embodiment - the personhood - of a Messiah shows imperfect parallels with the rhetorical denouements found in other philosophical & religious cultures. Buddhism was embodied by the Buddha. Platonic philosophy culminated (theoretically, as befits Plato) in a "philosopher king" who would implement, in the real world of history, the ethical paradigms of Platonism. Aristotle, Plato's pupil, inculcated a living ruler - Alexander the Great, no less - with the precepts of his own philosophy. What I'm looking at here is what might be (in my admittedly very sketchy and unsystematic review) a general tendency : the expressions of religious world order tend to become personified, embodied, expressed in action by representative figures (ie. the prophet Daniel's messianic "Son of Man").
With this in mind - this sense of Jesus shaping his mission as a messianic fulfillment - perhaps we can appreciate his message itself in greater depth. His message, to put it simply, is that he is opening the door to God. God as the universal, ever-living fulness of an overwhelming love, wisdom & mercy : as the eternal cosmic Mind of creative lovingkindness, out of which all creatures have emerged. Thus, in this vision, we are re-shaped, "reborn", as "children" of this God - children, with Jesus, of his divine "Father". & so we begin to share a new life in this new, divine-human nature. Moreover, Jesus aims to create a community in which "we shall all be one." Through the recognition of our common "creaturehood" - offspring of a divine Mind - we begin to live together according to the precepts of such an understanding - the original Logos, what "was from the beginning."
The message is challenging, radical & strange. It is also rooted in ancient worldviews & conceptions which we sometimes fail to grasp today. But it is "possible, possible"... when we go back to the original comprehension or insight : that is, when we ask ourselves, "why is there something at all, rather than nothing?" When we consider : "What if human consciousness and action, as we know it on this planet, represent a ratio, an analogy, a proportion - ie., a Logos - with a universal Consciousness from which reality proceeds (is given)?"
We could start with the meaning of "Messiah" itself. The root of the messianic phenomenon lies in the character & nature of Yahweh, the High God, the only God, as presented in Hebrew monotheism, the beliefs and practices of Judaism. Two characteristics, it seems to me, distinguish Yahweh from other ancient mythologies of the divine. First, is the monotheistic concentration of all power and benevolence in the one God, a creator-God, apart from whom nothing exists at all. Second, is the active, personal character of Yahweh : as narrated in the Bible, God intervenes in history in a way that can be chronicled. Yahweh is a saving God, coming to rescue the poor and oppressed, raining down judgement on the wicked - in this life, in this world.
This narrative depiction of Yahweh, as an actor in history as well as all-powerful Creator, lays the foundation for the prophetic expectation and reception of a Messiah : one who comes to fulfill all the promises of justice and salvation made by God to Israel (and through Israel, to the world).
And this is the context, I believe, in which we have to build a mental sketch (merely a conjectural hypothesis!) of Jesus's self-understanding : how he himself comprehended his vocation, his mission in life. He believed himself to be the Messiah : the one called upon to fulfill the messianic expectations of the people of Israel. From this original position flows the application of all of his spiritual, intellectual, charismatic and rhetorical gifts, and the expression of decisive moral choices, as he faced up to the consequences of his vocation.
Let's think about this for a moment in a yet wider context. The Jewish "fulfillment of Scripture" in the embodiment - the personhood - of a Messiah shows imperfect parallels with the rhetorical denouements found in other philosophical & religious cultures. Buddhism was embodied by the Buddha. Platonic philosophy culminated (theoretically, as befits Plato) in a "philosopher king" who would implement, in the real world of history, the ethical paradigms of Platonism. Aristotle, Plato's pupil, inculcated a living ruler - Alexander the Great, no less - with the precepts of his own philosophy. What I'm looking at here is what might be (in my admittedly very sketchy and unsystematic review) a general tendency : the expressions of religious world order tend to become personified, embodied, expressed in action by representative figures (ie. the prophet Daniel's messianic "Son of Man").
With this in mind - this sense of Jesus shaping his mission as a messianic fulfillment - perhaps we can appreciate his message itself in greater depth. His message, to put it simply, is that he is opening the door to God. God as the universal, ever-living fulness of an overwhelming love, wisdom & mercy : as the eternal cosmic Mind of creative lovingkindness, out of which all creatures have emerged. Thus, in this vision, we are re-shaped, "reborn", as "children" of this God - children, with Jesus, of his divine "Father". & so we begin to share a new life in this new, divine-human nature. Moreover, Jesus aims to create a community in which "we shall all be one." Through the recognition of our common "creaturehood" - offspring of a divine Mind - we begin to live together according to the precepts of such an understanding - the original Logos, what "was from the beginning."
The message is challenging, radical & strange. It is also rooted in ancient worldviews & conceptions which we sometimes fail to grasp today. But it is "possible, possible"... when we go back to the original comprehension or insight : that is, when we ask ourselves, "why is there something at all, rather than nothing?" When we consider : "What if human consciousness and action, as we know it on this planet, represent a ratio, an analogy, a proportion - ie., a Logos - with a universal Consciousness from which reality proceeds (is given)?"
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