Sunday, August 8, 2021

I will raise you up & other existential difficulties

Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51

There are few trickier questions in the realm of philosophical metaphysics than identity. This is certainly true of so-called "personal identity." One of the best Christian approaches to identity remains Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas' Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. As all intelligent approaches to the metaphysical issue of identity recognize, one person is no person. In other words, in a vacuum, in an imagined individual universe, there is no identity.

Worthwhile theological/philosophical takes on identity also realize that every identity in some way contains its own negation. In short, to borrow a much-used phrase: something is what it is and not something else. While this may appear to rebut my assertion, it does not. Its not being something else is an important component in making something what it is. In the present cultural moment of "advanced" Western societies, we are struggling mightily with identity, especially when it comes to sex and gender. As a result, many people, especially many young people, experience crises of identity.

Don't worry, this post is not an attempt to untangle the Gordian knot of sex and gender. When attempted there seem to be two basic approaches, both of which often strike me as ideological. First, some continue to insist on the strict binary view: there is male and female. Ideologized takes on this binary insist that traditional gender roles "naturally" arise from sexual differences. Second, those who seek to make sexual identity entirely plastic and who see no connection whatsoever between traditional gender roles and biological sex also seem to miss the mark. Yes, I realize that the phrase "biological sex" is problematic because there is a lot more to biology than meets the eye, chemistry to give just one example.

My point in starting my reflection on this week's readings by bringing into relief the complicated nature of personal identity by way of gender identity is just to show that it is a complicated affair with many different cultural, scientific, personal, and social components. Among the cultural and social components is theology. Not only but also Christian theology. I guess I should mention here something that should not be controversial but, due to ideology, it is. Namely, that the New Testament, our uniquely Christian scriptures, are at best ambivalent about marriage, procreation, and sexuality in general.

At least when it comes to its fundamental aspects (i.e., what it makes it what it is and not something else), Christian orthodoxy is no less complicated. In its Christian mode, orthodoxy consists of a series of paradoxes, that is, seeming contradictions: three and one, human and divine, virgin and mother, to stick with the most basic dogmas. The key to Christian orthodoxy, therefore, is holding seemingly disparate things in tension. It was G.K. Chesterton who observed, "A heresy is a fragment of the truth that is exaggerated at the expense of the rest of the truth."

The fundamental theological issue at stake in today's Gospel from the sixth chapter of Saint John's Gospel is what later came to be known as the hypostatic union. The hypostatic union refers to the uniting of two natures- divine and human- in the one person of Jesus Christ. This goes to the core of who Jesus Christ is. Today's Gospel brings this to the fore when those listening to Jesus's audacious claims say, in effect: "Hey, wait a minute! How can you say that you came down from heaven when your parents are Joseph and Mary? We know who you are. Yet you claim to be God?"

The audaciousness of Jesus's claim is mostly lost on us because, for us, they are old hat. Part of how you read the Gospels well is by putting yourself in the place of those who are hearing Jesus for the first time. This requires knowing something about their milieu. It is also important to recognize that in reading any of the canonical Gospels you are not reading something that was written in "real time."

John's Gospel is arguably the most literary of the Gospels and probably written the latest. Nonetheless, the inspired author wants to convey the startling effect of Jesus saying "I am God." It seems clear that, even in John's Gospel, it is not intuitively obvious to the casual observer that Jesus is the Son of God (True God from True God) in the flesh. Hence, these people are understandably incredulous about his claims not just to be "the bread of life," the food that makes those who eat it immortal, but God in the flesh! All this before getting to his giving them his flesh to eat and his blood to drink, which would be front and center next Sunday if we were not celebrating the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I don't mind sharing (again) that the recent death of my friend Kyle has really knocked me off balance. Grief carries a gravity all its own. One question the loss of someone near and dear to me prompts is one I am sure is not unique to me: Is clinging to a belief in life beyond death, so-called "life eternal," just way getting through the night? When I am being honest, part of my grief is having to confront my own mortality. When I factor in my own mortality, this night remains a sleepless one! As John Donne observed in Meditation XVII of his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions:
And perchance I may thinke my selfe so much better than I am, as that they who are about mee, and see my state, may have caused it [the Church bell] totoll for mee, and I know not that




Who is this man, this Jesus from far-off Nazareth who speaks to us mainly through ancient texts preserved and handed on? Jesus himself states that to recognize him as the one sent by the Father, the one who came down from heaven, the bread of life who will raise us up on the last day requires something of a miracle. What else can he mean when he tells them, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him..."?

We easily lose sight of our oft-professed belief that faith is a gift from God. I don't know about you, but I have to believe faith is a gift God desires to give to everyone. But not being in the business of coercion or manipulation, God is content to offer the gift and let it be received, ignored (for now perhaps), or rejected. In an article some time ago for Church Times, Anglican bishop David Wilbourne recalled an interview playwright Dennis Potter gave to Melvyn Bragg when Potter was close to death. In Wilbourne's words, Bragg sought to dismiss "faith as nothing but a bandage around the wound." “No,” replied Potter, "it is the wound; faith is the wound.” Sooner or later love wounds us all, even if the wound is not inflicted until my loved one dies.

I also have to believe that God is merciful to those who, in good conscience, cannot receive the gift. You see, to be raised on the last day, as nice as that sounds, is not a demonstrable belief. While the desire to live forever seems to be a very strong human desire expressed well by Woody Allen, who once quipped, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. Living forever is at best a hope but often only a wish. How a wish becomes hope is through experience. In this regard, experience means being inflicted with a wound: no cross, no resurrection.

I am currently reading Catholic theologian David Tracy's book Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time: Selected Essays, Volume 1. In his essay "The Ultimate Invisible: The Infinite," he captures well what I am trying to express:
Moreover, our beloved dead, whose fates no one really knows, are painfully invisible to us now. Indeed, the dead possess a unique form of invisibility: the dead are presently absent and absently present. When Dante first experiences the underworld and sees so many dead persons he once knew well in life, he exclaims, 'I did not know that death had undone so many.' We all know the feeling (pg 36)
Wishing is not bad. Wishes can be the seeds of genuine hope when planted in reality and watered by experience. Holy communion, in this metaphor, can perhaps be thought of as fertilizer that nourishes hope.

It makes little sense to mention orthodoxy without mentioning orthopraxis. All the orthopraxis we need can be found in our short reading from the deutero-Pauline Letter to the Ephesians:
And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.

So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma
Don't live this way to attain a reward. Your own efforts merit you nothing anyway. Another fundamental paradox of Christianity, I believe, was identified by Martin Luther and captured by him in the Latin phrase simul iustus et peccator. Translated, this means something like I am at the same time justified (by Christ) and a sinner.

Because I am justified, I am free. As Paul writes to the Christians of ancient Galatia, it is for freedom that Christ set you free (Galatians 5:1). Hence, you are free to live in the manner indicated by the inspired author of Ephesians because it is the kind of person (hopefully) you want to be and as a contribution to the kind of society in which you long to live. Isn't it hard to believe that the small mustard seed produces such a large plant?

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