|
|
3. So I want to try to get articulated that question or indicate to you where my own struggle is with that question. But first, I will read a brief episode out of the life of Jesus:
When he arrived on the other side (which is the Gadarenes' country) he was met by two devilpossessed men who came out from among the tombs. They were so violent that nobodydared use that road.
"What have you got to do with us, Jesus, you Son of God?" they screamed at him. "Have you come to torture us before the proper time?"
It happened that in the distance there was a large herd of pigs feeding. So the devils implored him, `'If you throw us out, throw us into the herd of pigs"'
"Then go!" said Jesus to them.
And the devils came out of them and went into the herd of pigs. Then quite suddenly the whole herd rushed madly down a steep cliff into the lake and were drowned. (Matthew 8:2832)
4. That going to the other side is the best indication that I know of in the gospels of what it meant for a man to stand in the Jesus place.
5. But what is the life question that we are dealing with? I am going to deal with this under four major categories: first, the life question that is being struggled with when you raise the question of Jesus; second, what is the Christ or the Christian gospel; third, deal with Gogarten and my overt critique of Gogarten; and fourth, briefly try to state what the imperative is upon us as we deal with this question.
6. First under the life question I have four questions. The first three questions are preparatory questions or questions that I have to ask myself as I get ready to answer what is the life question that we are struggling with.
7. The first preparatory question is that question that I began with, "What does Jesus have to do with me? What does Jesus the man, Jesus of Nazareth, the man of the first century have to do with me?'' It's not a question of trying to substantiate my faith, it has nothing to do with trying to substantiate my faith. It is simply, on the other side of having decided to be a man of spirit, what does he have to do with me? Why go around with looking at the gospels or articulating any Christian theology that has to do with the Man Jesus?
8. I would begin to answer that question by simply saying "'When you talk about God you are always talking about yourself The reverse i5 also true. When you have said who you are, you have said who your God is. That is the only place where it even begins to make sense for me to look to understand who Jesus really was. When I face this question, I'm trying to deal with who it is that I'm responding to when I respond to God. The Church has struggled with this back through the past history of the Church. Everybody who has ever tried to talk about Jesus really turns around and is describing himself. For example, if they want to be a loving person, they describe Jesus as a loving person. If they want to be an offensive person, they describe him as an offensive person, and so on. They are turning around and describing themselves. You can't avoid it. When you are talking about Jesus you are talking about who your God is. There is no way to avoid that because Jesus in our memory has to do with our relationship to final reality.
9. The church has basically had two stances toward Jesus. One is that Jesus is the adopted son of God. That has been the mainstream of Christian response because it seems that that is the only way in which you can articulate to yourself first of all the fact that this has to do with man, that it has nothing to do with anything else than man. It has to do with being human, and therefore you begin with the humanness of Jesus.
10. Now then people have fallen off completely on the side of the humanness of Jesus, then there have been others who have come back on the other side and said, "No 5 Jesus was a transformed God. He was the transformed God. He was not man, he was simply God having transformed himself into man, and going about living." These were the Antiochian schools and the Alexandrian schools respectively in their particular times.
11. "What does Jesus have to do with me" has some thing to do with where you have decided to place the emphasis of your life. Have you decided to place the emphasis of your life upon the humanness that is the human way of living, or have you decided to place your life upon the understanding that there is some immediate grasp of final reality, namely God. You can see the trap that that latter position can get you into, for you cannot even begin to describe God until you start talking about man.
12. So the way the Church has answered this question has basically been, "What Jesus has to do with me is, Jesus is the man. Jesus, the man, is God on earth." Now that holds the paradox and keeps us within the framework of that understanding that I'm not dealing with how I substantiate or guarantee my faith. I'm just dealing with what I am up against when I'm dealing with Jesus. I'm dealing with God on earth, or I'm dealing with the final reality and the way life basically is.
13. The second preparatory question that I have to ask is, "What does Jesus have to do with the man of my time?" Or what does he have to do with the secular man? Why does he have to bother with even looking at this whole understanding of Jesus? I think this is where our primary struggle has been with Gogarten: Why in the world do we fool around with this, why don't we just articulate the gospel as it is? We have a 20th century gospel, we have a 20th century understanding the papers are there. You can use the traditional language and ground it in their lives if that's helpful. Or if you don't have to use the traditional language then you don't have to, you can still ground within them the understanding of life as it is. I see that this struggle is basically with unfaith, but that's the way my response is.
14. But the man on the street' the man of our times, is asking that same question. He is asking a question to which our study is dealing or we need not deal with this study. He articulates something like' "What can I rely upon?" It goes back to a very basic understanding of faith. Faith is to rely upon something, and everyman relies upon some reality that is his God. Therefore, this is his question and this is why we can deal with it, and why secular man today can deal with it.
15. The answer you finally have to give secular man is something like "there is no place you can rely upon, there is no thing that you can finally rely upon." But we can go on to respond "There is, however, on the other side, a neverthe-less way of living life, still in the midst of there being no place to live your life, with no thing finally that you can rely upon to live your life."
16. That part is not quite so difficult to get over. The rub with secular man comes when you get to the next point. That is he has to say, "Yes, there is no place I can live my life, but I can live my life." And then he must say, "And that is the Word about life." And there is where the rub comes, because secular man is the kind of man who has been brainwashed with relativism for so long that he can intellectually see that Word "there is no place that you can live your life, but you car, live your life." However, he can take that and turn it into one other word among many other words that are in the midst of history.
17. So the question is how does he get that anchored, how does he get it grounded so that he sees that that is the Word and holds himself before that. I don't think that there is any other way except the naming of the name, "Jesus the Christ is my Lord." And that is offensive to me, to you, to anyone who dares to look at it. I'm not saying he has to say that, I'm saying he has to come to terms with where the place is in history that the Word is. I don't want to say where it came into being, because I'm not talking about something back in the first century. I'm talking about just the way history is: that there is that scandal of particularity that this word and that place is there, and no place else. Now the naming of the name therefore is where the real struggle is with that question. I don't think I have that to the bottom as yet, but I'm trying to get there.
18. The third preparatory question I have to ask is "What does Jesus have to do with every man?" In a way that is the same question, but it's another question in the sense that people are asking around the globe, "Why do I have to change my life? So there is a way of living, so there is the Word in terms of your articulationof that in the midst of history. But finally, why do I have to change my life, I have a wayof living.
19. There are many men, secular and otherwise, who have that kind of understanding but when I come against that the hardest is when I have to deal with the Buddhist, or with the Muslim, with any man of another historical religion. But finally you come down to see that as you have looked at the whole sweep of the whole human race and tried to get clarity upon what it is that we have to say to theshore human race you usually come up with responses like "Well, what you're saying is, let's just be human. Let's just be human beings, in the way Little Big Man said it." This understanding is a part of the mood of our day, "Let's just be human."
20. But the problem is you never se`` a human. That is, you never saw man, you've only seen men. You see the pluricity of men across the globe, and the pluricity of understandings of what it means to live. And certainly there have been authentic ways of living that have not selfconsciously dealt with Jesus. Most probably by now have heard something about Jesus (you don't have that kind of battle to fight.), but you do have to have a battle to fight with people who have not selfconsciously dealt with the scandal of particularity that is there.
21. The last question is something like, "What does it look like when a man be's his being?" That is not good English but that is theonly way I know how to say it. "l1hat does it look like when a man is being his being, or being who he is?" What is that "otherworld living" that is lived in the midst of life? He can answer that question in many kinds of particular ways, but finally you answer it by saying how you found it. The way I've found it is, that when someone says to me, "David, be who you are," I first of all have to come to terms with the fact that I am not a person who knows who he is. I will never know who I am. And I insist you never tell me who I am, because you cannot tell me who I am. In fact, if you try to, I'll end up tomorrow doing the opposite of that you said that I am.
22. Therefore, "Who am I?" is a life question. If it isn't a life question then let's take that out of the Question of God lecture. It is a basic life question because you cannot define who you are _ because you live in illusions. And no one else can tell you who you are because you are utter mystery . Therefore there is a deep life question when someone says, "Be who you are." So the way I find it is, is that I'm always showing up in illusions, I'm always showing up thinking that there is a way out. I think that's all illusion is, one way or another of finding a way out. I think that's all illusion is, one way or another of finding a way out of being who you are. I have to struggle with that over and over again. I have to be broken into from outside of me. That breaking into from outside may come for you, but it won't be you, because I know enough about who you are. No, what comes into you is that intrusion that we have talked about as the Christ event, which is finally not synonymous with the particular.
23. This is an interesting place to look at the question of Jesus because it' that particular that you mean by Jesus. Finally, it is whatever particular, the stumping of your toe, the bumping of your head on the cradle, wherever it is in life that you come to, there's the place where you're really talking about Jesus. When you're broken into from outside, and are left utterly without support, then it is that you can deal with the question of faith or of relying upon God who is God.
24. But now I have to deal, before I can deal with Gogarten, with what do I mean by the Christian gospel, or why has it been particularly articulated? Here I would use the Mark articulation of the gospel as it came out of the mouth of Jesus. It begins with, "The time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe this Good News." The kind of summary of the Christian gospel has come to mean the most to me in trying to deal with this question of how does the man look when he be's his being. And, of course' you know that my question is, "How in the world can I be my being?"
25. But finally, it's the man of faith who's asking this question and so the real question is, "How can all men be their being?" I mean it comes to us first of all in terms of ourselves. But finally, as the men of faith, we're thrown out beyond to ask it in terms of all men. Or how can we keep ourselves standing before the mystery of life *hat is the mystery of life and not before some little reduced understanding, even those reduced understandings that are the articulation of Jesus the Christ is our Lord. it's obvious, when you read Gogarten that that's what he's dealing with. He's not dealing with people who have some little idol, he is dealing with men who have a religious idol. That is, they are men who worship God, the Pharisees and the scribes. Therefore, if you don't find the finger turning around out of that book and pointing at you as the Pharisee and the Scribe, you don't really struggle when you are deeding with Gogarten. But certainly in this Chapter 10 that I'm responding to, you find the finger pointing at you several times.
26. It begins with, "The kingdom of God is at hand." That is, it's there. Whatever this being your being is, or this living in the other world, it is not that which you have to wait for until tomorrow. This deals with my experience of authenticity and hypocrisy. Maybe the problem arises simply because of my brainwashing that I'm always going to be living tomorrow. Tomorrow will be the time when I can live, and therefore I never live. Well, this just cuts across that immediately. "The time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and be baptized.)'
27. And so the first thins I respond to that with is something like, 'Now how i5 the world does he know that?' When somebody walks in to you and says the time has come for you to live your life, I respond, 'Well how do you know it's the time? I want to wait.)
28. The response I get from Jesus is not too easy to get ahold of, but he seems to be saying that how I know the time has come and the kingdom of God is at hand is "I'm in it. I'm in the kingdom of God." I mean he had to decide as Gogarten says, to choose the kingdom of God or he could never say, "the time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand." Or he even seems to be asserting, and this is the boldness of that Jesus figure, 'I'm it. I am the kingdom of God. It's not something I go around living in sometime and sometime I'm not In it. I am just it, period. And you have to come to terms with that.) Or, finally, I guess he says something more like, it'll came upon me. It happened to me. I got grabbed by it. God has chosen me from the foundation of the earth." And so it's something that just pops on you.
29. But if you ask him directly, he doesn't respond in any of those three ways. He simply says, "Come and see, come and see." So finally then you're left with the decision of whether you wilt live in the kingdom of God or not.
30. I guess the first part, 'the time has come, is saying to me that man can be man. He doesn't have to wait for circumstances or anything else, he can be man. And therefore, I do not have to wait to live my life.
30. I guess the first part "the kingdom of God is at hand," says to me, real living is at hand to you. That is, the kingdom of God is where God reigns. kind so where is it that God is in charge? It's certainly the place where I'm not in charge. I might be ordained but you'll notice you have never in all the annals of history ever had anyone so brash as to ordain himself, even the Jesus figure. Maybe Charlemagne did, when he made himself the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. But that's probably the only exception in all of history, if it is such an exception. It is the kingdom of God that is present to our lives at all times which simply says that there is no thing that lives, only God lives. That is, only God is in charge, only God reigns. The mystery that finally rules the universe rules over our lives. Thereforeho thing is life, rather all is life and there's where my problem is. There's where I have the difficulty of living in the kingdom of God. That is9 I'm always picking this part of life, or that part of life. I pick this value or that pleasure. That Saint John of the Cross in his Dark Night is getting at us, isn't he? That book is dealing even with those pleasures of the sense and pleasures of the spirit. And I cannot even live my life there because I've not embraced the fact that all of life is good and that I can participate in it. So I go around most of the time refusing to live the life that has been given to me, or I refuse real living. But the kingdom of God is at hand, so there is no excuse for not living our lives.
32. And then the part9 '9re~pent.ii Of course, you could simply translate that for secular man into 'change your life." Change your life, there's no other way. It7s not some kind of imperative upon you to change your moral existence. It's simply change your life. It's an indicative statement about your life, I must change, period. There is no way of getting around the fact that every human being faces that kind of an encounter, that he must change. And iesus9 to come back to that question, is simply the demonstration of that requirement upon your life. It's not a moral imperative to go about doing something else different than you're doing, it's simply saying, like the Hebrew repentance, turn around.) Turn around, you've been refusing the real living all your life. Every day you wake up you're refusing real living. Turn around, and live your life as it is.
33. The old phrase of 'change of heart' gets hold of it too because, as Gogarten has pointed out to us already and underscored many times, it's a change of attitude (attitude is a bad word because it connotes emotional feeling). But attitude, in the architectural sense, speaks to me. These beans up here have an attitude towards one another that's not very emotional. And it is that change of attitude towards God and toward man that finally the repentance is about. How would you change your attitude toward the mystery that is the mystery of life. You've been running away from him all your life. Turn around and have that changed attitude to God, responsibility to God. And have a changed attitude toward man. My attitude toward man is usually, "What can I get out of him? How can it benefit me with the relationship that I have in this situation.?' You can see how this get hold of the religious ones, can't you, because even the religious ones are trying to use men to do something for themselves. Pastoral counseling, I guess, is the end of the road of that trying to use people to get your own significance out of life. Or if ,we think that we have to use one another in some way to try to make it, to demonstrate that we're good priors, we have at that moment fallen into the trap of the Pharisee. We've fallen into the trap of being the religious who reduce life down to some interior feeling that we can have, or some benefit that we can qet. But like St. John of the Cross, you get benefits in the midst of aridity. And they sure don't come to you in the first instance as something you earned or do by your particular deed in life.
34. Then the last part, 'believe this good news," is to live that life that we have turned around in. Or, when we decide to turn toward God and be responsible for men and not to them, then we can live that life. And so our question is usually something like, "Now are you sure all this is going to happen the way you say it will if I repent?" I'm standing there trying to decide whether I'm going to really turn around or not and asking." Are you sure I'll live now if I turn around, it looks like death is coming to me instead of living." I ask that, and the answer comes back something like, "Well, will you? Will you live?" And you're left with that.
35. You understand at that point it is that the poor are blessed. That is, the people who are least burdened down with layers of phoniness, with layers of falsities about life, are closest to the kingdom of God. But you'll notice, and Gogarten points this out, there's no guarantee that because you're poor in spirit, or in other ways, that you'll turn around or become one on the kingdom of God. There's no guarantee and nothing automatic in making yourself poor to enter the kingdom of God. I thought he was quite clear on that point.
36. But the second question is even more important because here I am a man of faith. Therefore I know that question is reduced. It is not the question at all. The real question is "Will men live? Will mankind live? If I repent, not if they repent, but if I repent, this will transform the world?" The New Testament answers something like, "That's the promise." And that, if you want security in life, if you want to be sure about anything, is the closest you are going to get to any kind of assurance. That7s the promise that you will be able to 11ve.
37. So the answer that comes when you ask "Will mankind live?'' is "Call them, call them." And therefore you have to decide at that point whether or not you are going to enter the kingdom of God. You can see why, from that perspective, you pronounce woe upon those who are striving for the Kingdom of God. There is no striving to enter the kingdom of God, it is simply, "Repent. Turn around and live the life that is before you." There is no surprise in the fact that you can at that point pronounce woe upon those who are striving for security because to get security, to be certain in any sense whatsoever is to turn away from living before the mystery of life, before which there is no security.
39. As I try to respond to Gogarten, I would stand entirely upon the pole that Jesus is finally not important. In fact, when you look and try to see how the New Testament itself articulates the authenticity of the Christ Word, it says he was asked, "Where is your authority?" And the response is something like." There are two witnesses' there is God and me and finally that'sall. In other words, this question is a means of trying to authenticate your faith, which is not the question when you are dealing with Jesus. You only grasp the importance of Jesus when you see that he is not important. Now after you have said that, then you say, "Yes, let's look again." Of course there is some importance in Jesus, which is what most of these men, including Gogarten are saying.
40. Second, on the positive side, Gogarten does a good job of getting hold of Jesus. It is excellent scholarship and he does an excellent job of articulating the kingdom of God. I mean I couldn't even struggle this way with the kingdom of God without what he has done. So something is going on within his struggle that is authentic. But finally his selfconscious question, the question he gets out overtly, is an irrelevant question. Underneath, yes, he's asking the right question.
41. In this chapter, Gogarten is good in terms of his articulating the two groups, the Pharisees and the sinners, there are only two kinds of people in the world, Pharisees and sinners. There are good people and people who aren't good, and the aren'tgood people are the ones who are the closest to the kingdom of God. I would also point to his articulation of the poor in which he asks: "Is it a metaphorism or is it a metaphor?" and answers that it is very clearly both. He says yes, it i. a metaphor, and yet it is talking about poor people, people who are actually impoverished, without goods in the world. When he answers it that way, then you know that finally Gogarten is a 20th century theologian who is not standing hefore some reduced understanding of Jesus.
42. Then thirdly Gogarten helped me shove to the ontological, and not the moral. He is clear that authority is the authenticity of Jesus. Or, as he puts it, "The proclamation is all that Jesus stands upon." Jesus doesn't stand upon this or that understanding of God. He simply spoke with authority and with his life, he spoke who he was, and he spoke the truth or he spoke the life as it is.
43. But ther1 the word hypocrisy comes up at this point and all you have to deal with in this chapter is that one term. I'll give you simply my literal translation of it. Hypocrisy is something like, "The state of being basically separated." Hypocrisy comes out translated from the Greek as playing a part in a play, but it is pointing to something far deeper than that. It's that you're in a state of being basically separated. Therefore repent! Or hypocrisy is always the problem of manthat he is trying to secure this existence in some way or another.
44. The last part of the critique is that Gogarten's way of articulating that the other world is there is helpful, except that he does not describe it. It's like he takes a lot of this understanding and gets you right up to the edge, but then doesn't ground it in any kind of way. But you sympathize with him how do you talk about the other world it's hidden. You have to be there to talk about it, and because it is the other world only those who are in the other world know that you are talking about the other world. And in that sense it is always hidden. But finally the "other world" is only the transformed "this world," it's only a transformed world that we all live in. It! s the world where God really rules, it is the kingdom of God . Therefore out only response is the acknowledgment of it.
45. The imperative upon us as the Order is, first of all, that we must know Jesus, who is our ground, the center, the contentless Christ. And he is that particular man, that is man himself. He is man, or the Adam.
46. A second imperative, is that we must find out what it means to "live this place," (the spatial metaphor for understanding the word). I would simply refer to the prostration before Jesus which becomes rod.
47. And then we must listen to the sayings. We have been working with the sayings and for me learning to listen to them is a deep imperative upon us.
48. We must also see the doings. There are four of them for me:
1) The walk, we've got to learn to see the walk that was in Jesus. I can simply paraphrase it with: ,'He went aside to pray, alone, on a hill." Thatis probably the most important do in the whole New Testament.
2) The miracle, and we are most familiar with those. For example, "Arise, take up your bed, walk, and go home." (There is a structure in that statement that is crucial.)
3) The sermon, and that's not the sayings themselves but the do of the sermons: "The crowds came, he went up the hill, he sat down, the disciples gathered, and he taught them."
4) The gesture1 and there are many of these, different
kinds I think. One that has addressed us all recently is: "Suffer
the little children to come to me, such is the kingdom."
David McCleskey