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