JESUS AND HISTORY

1. This morning we want to look at Chapter 12 of Gogarten, "Jesus and History." Jesus had only one task in history, to enable man to make a new decision. For him history was changing both the world and man through calling for new decisions. He went about the job of making history by speaking to only two audiences.

2. The first audience was the establishment, the scribes and Pharisees. Listen to the thrust of his address to them:

'Alas, alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites that you are! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in men's faces; you do not enter yourselves, and when others are entering, you stop them.

'Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You travel over sea and land to win one convert; and when you have won him you make him twice as fit for­hell as you are yourselves.

'Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin; but you have overlooked the weightier demands of the law, justice, mercy, and good faith. It is these you should have practiced, without neglecting the others. Blind guides' You strain off a midge, yet gulp down a camel!

'Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

'Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites'

'You snakes, you vipers' brood, how can you escape being condemned to hell?

(Matthew 23)

Throughout the gospels he does everything in his power to explode their image of what it means to be a human being.

9. But he also had another audience, the outcasts. Listen to what he says here to that audience :

'How blest are those who know their need of God;

the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.

How blest are the sorrowful,

they shall find consolation.

How blest are those of a gentle spirit,

they shall have the earth for their possession.

How blest are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail; they shall be satisfied.

How bleat are those who show mercy; mercy shall be shown to them.

How blest are those whose hearts are pure; they shall see God.

How blest are the peacemakers;

God shall call them his sons.

How blest are those who have suffered persecution for the cause of right; the~kingdom of Heaven is theirs.

How blest are you when you suffer insults and persecution' Matthew6.

How blest are you, how blest are you, how blest are you; you poor, you outcasts! No moralism here!

4. Jesus has only these two audiences in the New Testament - The scribes and Pharisees are those he calls hypocrites. The poor, the outcasts, those who are left out of society, he calls blest.

5. It is easy for us to lose the offense of the address that Jesus makes upon the scribes and Pharisees by thinking that they are somehow wicked, immoral men. No. They are the establishment. They are the bankers, the lawyers, the councilmen, the pastors, the bishops, the leadership of civilization of his time. They are good men, indeed they preserve the structures of civilization. You would not have societies save they were here, you would not have any kind of order save they had decided to do their jobs. These are the ones without whom you do not have civilization.

6. But they are also the ones who have a picture of the world that is established, As Gogarten talks about it, they have a picture of the world that "embraces all of reality." The scribes and Pharisees have a picture of the world as eternal.'' It is self-contained, self-sustaining, unchangeable. And so Jesus' tactic for them, is to walk in front of them and shout into their faces, "Doom! Doom! Doom!" This job is to set human thought free from domination by fixed images and established piety. Jesus' method is to smash their world view, to demand of them that they abandon their security, abandon their picture of reality. Until then, his only word to them is, "Repent!"

7. Jesus takes the stuff of the first century morality, the stuff of the first century justice, and their picture of what is humanly authentic, then shoves that to the absurd, to the ridiculous, shoves it against life as it is, exposing the ridiculousness of the fixed picture of the world. For instance on the Sabbath day he does that which defies the current structures of society, and then­points out to the scribes and Pharisees whatever authority they think they have is not adequate. He shoves them back on their own authorities, Moses or David, and says, "Didn't Moses speak of me, and didn't David take food from the Temple and eat it when he was hungry." Time after time he moves into their value structures and detonates their picture of reality by pronouncing a doom that rocks their entire theology and their piety. Alas, for you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

8. Then there is the other audience, of Jesus' preaching, the poor, the disenfranchised.

These are the ones the scribes and pharisees could not go across the street to help because they were outcast from the structures of society. Jesus' word to them is a promise, the word of possibility, the "how blest are you," pronouncing to those that in the midst of their self depreciation, and their own rejection by society their's is a blest life, their life will be honored by life itself. To them he presents a word of possibility, at every moment.

9. We have to see finally that Jesus is not out to wipe out or to prop up either of these groups. Rather his proclamation, his word to them is that neither of them have even the slightest possibility to live save they make a new decision , save they decided to live as the outcast or to live as those who would rather have life wrapped up. You can see from the diagram on the first page that in the pressure chamber, in the synapse between the demand to repent and the promise of the kingdom, a decision is called for. It is the decision to embrace both the demand and the promise that thrusts one into the kingdom of God. Gogarten says that these two; the call for repentance and the promise of the kingdom are "interdependent.'' They are the "No" and the "Yes" which when heard free a person to make a new decision. Jesus demands that all men, both groups, step out of their pictures of the world. Either those who are the establishment or those who see themselves to be the dis­establishment must step out into the uncertainty required by a new decision. For Jesus the man who decides to live in the uncertainty of the future, in the midst of the actual ambiguity that life is, then has the possibility to make an authentic response to life. Jesus tells the story of the Samaritan who made a direct response to the demands placed upon him in a living event. That decision of the Samaritan enabled Jesus to say that this is what it means to be a neighbor, an example of an authentic life. For Gogarten there is no possibility of turning away from "this world," save you move into the world of uncertainty, make the leap into the unknown, respond to a new situation which then gives you permission to make a new life decision and forge out history in a brand new way. It is in that decision, to live in the uncertainty of the present, that you see the living out of the creative word of god."

10. According to Gogarten, Jesus' God is the God who promises himself to the man who steps into that gap which is to recover destiny which is to live by the will of God. When you step into that uncertainty and respond to the situation that has been given to you with radical openness, God is acting in you, the kingdom of God actually happens in this world, and you embody the radical expenditure of the man of faith.

11. Gogarten goes on to talk about the kingdom of God in more detail. In this chapter he says that the man who hears the promise of the kingdom and repents of his dependence upon some fixed world is the one who perceives God's free dominion over the world, who perceives the way that life is. The one who steps beyond the present world experiences the kingdom and participates in the activity of God in history which is to BE history. He uses the metaphors of giving one's life with the uncertainty of receiving anything, which then is the occasion for the receiving. Or, the losing of one's life is in fact the very decision that allows one to find out what life is really all about. The decision to die to one's own world view , one '.~ own grasp of reality, to walk into the situation that impacts us in this world with radical openness ­`s to receive life back authentically. According to Gogarten, living in the other world calls for a radical change of thinking, a change of mind, and that change happens in the gap between the demand for repentance ­­ the No that is said to your fixed universe ­­ and the promise of the kingdom ­­ the Yes, that is said to your life as one who is given permission to step into the unknown. Thereby the responsible man emerges responding to God, to the impingement of radical possibility, accepting permission at that very moment to be responsible for the world. Living in the other world is perceiving the free dominion of God over the world. It's in perceiving that you have radical permission to engage your life at this moment on behalf of that world. And so Jesus proceeded throughout society from a group of Pharisees, to a group of outcasts, proclaiming the word of repentance, and calling for belief in the kingdom of God that is at hand.

12. It's helpful to note Gogarten's re-articulation of Jesus' authentication in this chapter. Jesus is the one who has complete lack of restraint and, at the same time, he has complete commitment in the present. He is free to say whatever is necessary to bust a human being open to a new decision. But the key to his power, his authority, is this world. His word is only authenticated in the decision that is called for by another human being. There is no new picture of the world that Jesus lifts up for you to hold on to. There is no authority to which he appeals to justify his claim upon you. It's like the man by the pool, he walks up and says, "Do you want to get healed?" He doesn't say where he came from, doesn't say what authority he has, he just says, "Do you want to get well?" Then he makes that absurd claim on man, ''Get up!" That's all, "Get up!" Again no authentication, just the raw decision that is called for on the part of the man by the pool. Or the same with the scribes and the Pharisees. Each time he just smashes their idols and then cells for them to render up their grasp of life and to move out to engage in a brand new way with the Sabbath or with the tax collectors and sinners. They were called to repent of their morality, of their piety, to give up their self­contained, self­sustained world, and begin to respond authentically to the situation they had been given. They were called, to create in that situation authentic humanness. Gogarten says that Jesus has no special vocation, no more valid law to which he can appeal, no special permission from God, and that he has no authentication from anything that anyone would see as valid in this present world. Indeed Jesus comes from another world. He points to the kingdom of God that is nothing apart from this world, but is the happening that happens when one leaps into the breach between giving up his world view and making an authentic response. Deciding to respond afresh to the historical goingonness is what he means by recreated history or the kingdom of God that happens in history.

13. Gogarten also talks about Jesus having to make the same decision that he claims is the concept of his preaching. What is proclaimed in Jesus' own teaching comes about for him personally as wel'. There is no difference between what Jesus demands of other men than that which he lives out of in his own life. For Gogarten, the authentication of Jesus' preaching is that he himself lives in the midst of the same dynamic, the same radical No, radical Yes, and the decision made in the ambiguity. As any other man is called he lives by the will of God, lives in the kingdom of God ­­ the other world. In the midst of his proclaiming the kingdom God is at hand, he himself is the kingdom, he himself makes that same decision to be that kingdom in history, to be authentic history as he moves day by day throughout his own ministry, his own life.

14. I find it helpful to stand back and drop this dynamic of repentance, promise and decision into some particular life situations. I guess I would point to the three particular stances toward life that have shown up all across history. Indeed I struggle with these stances and their dimensions everyday. I would point to them as the cynic, the romantic and the stoic.

15. The cynic in me shows up saying that, "structures take care of themselves," that there is something kind of eternal about structures. It shows up in the decision to wall by the bits of broken egg shells or chunks of toast on the floor or a pile of cereal some kid has flipped there, assuming that the structures will take care of the mess. That is the story that I tell myself to avoid having to face the fact that structures are my decision to engage myself in the care of my colleagues. Structures are nothing eternal or something that cut there going on and on. My cynicism is by refusing to be the structures that history requires at that moment. Rather I stand there as one who doesn't give a hoot for the immediate situation because I have more important things to do. Thereby I avoid the impingement of the demand to care for my colleagues at that moment.

16. Another example is the situation that arises time and again in teaching clergy in PLC's. A galaxy pastor told about where he finally became clear that the Local Church Experiment was the one experiment that was required at this point in history for himself as a local pastor. He pointed to a conversation that he had during the December Training School here last year, when he found himself asking the familiar question, "How is it that the local church is the hope of the world, the only way to go?" The by now classical response came, "Well what are your alternatives: the Boy Scout Club, the Rotary Club, the League of Women Voters? What is the vehicle that will freight the new humanness across the globe?" In that bit of drama he was slammed up against his own cynicism about the local church, about the structures that had borne him into history. He finally had to make a new decision that it was the local church finally that was the gift to the 20th century and that he ­­ a local­pastor had been sent into history for this very moment.

17. The second place this where this frozenness shows up is a form of phariseeism, that of romanticism. It's like when I tell myself the local Church office is an impossible situation: we have to see that the whole local church experiment comes off. We now have 30 ga1axies in North America in being and 16 more coming into being that is 144 local churches. Now how can anybody expect four guys holed up in that little office to enable such an experiment and still to do long range research? Especially when 1 come to the ecclesiola research Tuesday night, PSU weekends and the need to write research procedures hour after hour. I keep telling myself, "That's impossible! I can't do that. Well, look at someone else like the NSV group, they have all kinds of time." It wasn't until the other day that one of my colleagues reviewed for me the story of Charlie Brown and Lucy, where Lucy says, "Charlie Brown, do you see those stars out there? Do you see this world around you? Do you have any other world than the one you've get ? Well, then LIVE IN IT! And so it was that I had my romanticism broken about equity or that I can't do research and somehow keep this Local Church Experiment going. CRACK went my romantic illusion that you have to have only a certain amount of demand on you, otherwise it is unfair.

18. The third kind of frozenness I find myself struggling with is stoicism, or blind obedience. I don't know if you have been to any Ecclesiola meetings lately but on Tuesday or Wednesday nights where we are doing fairly raw research and edge brooding I look into the eyes of my colleagues around the table and I see just a kind of blank stare, just a kind of fuzzy look in the eye. I don't know what is going on, but I mean it's almost 1ike zombies out there. What I finally began to see is that they think this outfit is somehow to teach courses or do something that you know how to do. But what we have decided to do is to be that ridiculous outfit that is about reformulating civilization through massive contextual re­education. We're out to create the new structure, the new images. We are, right now in our Tuesday research, Wednesday night . .... research, Thursday night ecclesiola, about the job of creating the future;. Nobody is going to create the future save you decide. You think that the prior will tell us what to do? He doesn't know what he's doing out there anymore than you do. It's not until you decide to take responsibility for the whole research that there is any kind of possibility for the research to come off. The way that I finally got that said to myself is that when I sit there with that blank stare in my eyes then I have decided to condemn this order to Hell. The only thing that we have in this order is the decision to do the impossible, the decision to win. And what it means to decide to win is to pick up that research and create the research net, the research structures, the methods by which we can get hold of the next 1000 years. It is to get the style forged out,­and get the web of consciousness that will permit mankind as a 20th century global village to make it into the next century with authentic human structures and images that will permit civilization to be human.

19. I would submit to you that there is only one word that is proclaimed to us as we sit there with our cynicism, romanticism, and stoicism. That word is, "REPENT "! It's over. You just get clear you've decided not to be the order, not to be the People of God, when you sit there with those stances. You've not decided to expand your self­image, your picture of reality. You've not decided to take into yourself the fact that what it means to be the Church is to throw your images out, to smash your idols, and to throw a brand new net of consciousness across reality, to begin to rebuild, day after day, again and again, an adequate picture of reality, an adequate grasp after humanness, an adequate set of metaphors and images.

20. One of the places I find myself just staggered by the stoicism is where people, myself included, start playing around with new religious mode language. Sometimes we are playing a new kind of sophisticated, pietistic game with life where we mouth those new religious mode categories. We forget those NRM charts are simply a screen through which we can look at reality, and not reality itself. Those charts are rather tools to shove you into life, into the mystery, to jar you lose, to drop you once again into the abyss, to make you step over the abyss and begin to create metaphors afresh that get said what it means to live before life as it is. They shove us to encounter life afresh, to do the radical deed, to be the self­conscious human being, to know the final mystery to the deeps of our lives and to the depth of unconsciousness itself. Thereby we can stand with roots that go a thousand miles into the memory and consciousness of human beings. And always coming out of those roots are fresh images and pictures which help to get said again and again, at new levels of intensity, what it means to be human. To smash those idols of the religious mode charts is required. They're not the new consciousness, their job is to explode old images and to allow a fresh grasp after life each day.

21. Gogarten points out that Jesus is always out to throw you into the unknown, into the uncertain. He calls you to make a brand new decision to give up your picture of the world, to grasp tine' given situation that is yours, and to forge out a new authentic response that will allow human beings to live in the world that they have been given.

22. Let me close by putting on this diagram what I think are the clues that Gogarten gives in this chapter on the style of the trans­establishment,

It is those who live by the will of God, that allow God to act in them and be themselves the kingdom of God in history. The first clue is that the trans­establishment style is that of the one who gives up certainty. He lives with no certainty about his sense of reality or his sense of what is right. He has no authentic piety except to live before the demand to create afresh the piety in our time, Secondly, he sees that he is always called to make a change of mind, to give up his life not knowing what that means except to render it up, to lose it. He has the promise of new life but no security. There is no new law implicit in the trans­establishment's style.. You aren't out cast over life with a new kind of stability based on morality or piety. Rather the trans­establishment responds to the life events that one is slammed up against in his daily existence. The style is that of standing before life as it pulsates and deciding what is the authentic response the true deed.. Also it is the style of allowing God to act in me. It is allowing change to happen both in my world: view and in my self-image and style through the decision finally to engage my life in behalf of the world. I respond to the world as I respond to God.

Donald Cramer