On Chuang Tsu's Butterfly and the Gospel of Matthew

Michelangelo's little doodle in plaster on the Sistine Chapel end wall.

Today's gospel is another funny one. Jesus is speaking about the end times, “the coming of the Son of Man.” He tells us it is urgent that we stay awake. Why?

“For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.

Be sure of this: if the master of the house

had known the hour of night when the thief was coming,

he would have stayed awake

and not let his house be broken into.

So too, you also must be prepared,

for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”

So, let's get this straight: the Second Coming of Jesus and the End of Time will be like nothing so much as --- a thief robbing your house.

Hope you weren't drinking anything.

This seems calculated to be the least appropriate analogy possible. Do I need to ring through all the changes on the contradictions here?

Jesus is the rightful lord and owner of everything; how is he a thief—and we the master?

He is supposed to descend from the Heavens “in glory”; how is this like sneaking in the night?

The master, in the parable, can stay awake for the thief if and only if he is aware of the hour at which the thief is coming; yet we do not know the day or hour. How then is the comparison useful?

Not last and not least, the analogy is in the past tense. (I don't read Biblical Greek, but I checked multiple translations.) Why so, since the analogy is supposed to be to something in the future—indeed, the ultimate future event? Any good writer, for clarity, would make this match, surely—unless he were trying to kid us.

Comedy has been defined, formally, as “the reversal of expectations.” This is comedy plain. It portrays the Second Coming itself as the ultimate reversal of expectations, the ultimate deus ex machina. The whole thing is a gag. Whatever we expect the Second Coming to be, it will not be.

I think what is most obviously meant by all this is a point we seem to have seen in the gospel before: the Second Coming is not a future event. This is necessarily true, as we have noted, for philosophical reasons: eternity is not an infinite progression of time, but a state outside of time. It is therefore equidistant from all moments, not a point following in sequence immediately after the last moment.

That immediately makes sense out of putting the analogy in the past tense. So does saying it is all “As it was in the days of Noah”--this almost more than implies, it almost states plainly that the essence of the Second Coming is already in the past, and has been with us since the day of Noah.

Tintoretto: The elect rise at the end of time. Your results may vary.

This also makes it necessarily true that we do not, cannot, “know the hour” at which Jesus will come. We cannot know, because it is not a future event. So long as we think if it as a future event, we are going to be wrong.

It also makes sense of Jesus's exhortation to “Stay awake!” On any obvious interpretation, indeed, this advice is meaningless. First, we do not know the hour—so how can we be sure of being awake at the hour? If it is all deus ex machina, how is being awake at that moment going to make a difference?

But if it is all always and eternally happening, Jesus's advice makes perfect sense. He is saying, in the present tense, “Wake up!” Wake up, that is, and you can see right now the Son of Man descending in clouds of glory.

Really? We can? Where?

Let's examine the other clues Jesus gives.

First, it is something or someone who appears to us, from our present perspective, more like a “thief in the night.”

Second, there's the striking image of people suddenly disappearing from daily life:

So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man.

Two men will be out in the field;

one will be taken, and one will be left.

Two women will be grinding at the mill;

one will be taken, and one will be left.

Has this sort of thing ever happened to you?

Death? That it is describing death is an obvious possibility; but it seems a but hyperbolic, a bit melodramatic, to describe death as a part of everyday life. That doesn't quite seem to pass the test. Nor is death, for most of us, all that sudden.

But what about sleep?

It indeed comes mostly in the night. While pleasant, it certainly does take us away from our daily work, in the fields or at the mill, and in doing so can easily be seen as a thief of our livelihood. It is certainly indeed a part of daily life. A person “disappears” from the field when he falls asleep.

Sleep as a metaphor for death? No—I summon Occam the Barber. Why not sleep as sleep? We can dream, can't we? Or, in an even more common and sudden circumstance, any of us can “disappear” from the surrounding scene when we slip into a daydream—as we commonly do, or ought, in prayer.

And by the way, one might interject here another puzzle: the end of time is supposed to involve the descent of heaven to earth, right? The merger of heaven with earth; no more separation of the two. So where in the passage is the person being left behind staying, and where is the person “taken” taken? Yes, I know the theory of the “Rapture,” but that sounds a lot too complicated to me. Occam again.

We perceive eternity, then, and the Kingdom of Heaven, when we dream or daydream. This sounds trivial, but perhaps only because we are inclined to see dreams as trivial. Dreams are surely not heaven itself—they are not, after all, uniformly and supremely joyful. They can even be quite hellish. But they may yet be an image of heaven, or of the afterlife—either a solid metaphor for it, or true heaven perceived now through a glass darkly, later face to face.

I think Occam would prefer we take the latter premise. When we engage our imaginations, then, as we do when we dream, daydream, or read a good novel, or watch a good play, or write one, we are not simply “making things up,” but imperfectly perceiving the real, existing, spiritual world, including Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell.

This world does, after all, have the interesting characteristic of being eternal. In our imaginations, time is completely fungible. We can be any age; we can revisit scenes from our distant youth, and they are right here now; we can imagine a completely realized future; we can walk and talk with the departed. We also seem to have a perfected body: we can, like the resurrected Jesus, walk through walls, rise in the air, or be in two places at one time.

Of course, this does not matter, because we know the world we imagine is not “real.” Right?

Do we really know this? How do we really know this? True, to some extent we seem to be able to actually influence events in the imaginary world—we can choose to imagine a large green peach, and it appears in the mind's eye. What of it—shouldn't such things be possible in heaven? After all, we also seem able to manipulate the physical world to a certain extent.

Another obvious argument for the imaginary world not being real is that there are no mutual dreams. If we stand beside someone in the field, and discuss the physical field, it is clear that we are both perceiving the same field. But if we sleep beside someone in the field, and discuss the dreams, it turns out we do not have the same dream.

Tissot: Two Women at a Mill. Choose one.

Or does it? Doesn't this all presuppose that the field is real and the dream not? After all, if you dream of being in a field with someone, and discuss the field with them in the dream, aren't the two perceptions likely indeed to correspond? But would this person in the dream be able to describe to you the room in which you are sleeping? Probably not.

Jesus may be making the same point. What that bit about one person disappearing, and one person staying, reminds me of, actually, is waking up from rather than slipping into a dream. It is waking from a reverie that is most likely to be that quick—it can be a jolt. At one moment you are dreaming you are working away in a field in the First Century AD, next to some companion, and in the next you are somewhere else entirely, in your own bed, in your own room, with its soft sheets and blue walls.

Except, of course, that what Jesus describes would be someone suddenly awakening from a dream as it would appear to the characters in the dream. Logically enough, when you wake up, and the people and the place in the dream disappear to you, to them it would appear instead as though you have disappeared, while the dream continues with them in it—if the dream world itself is real.

Jesus is saying, then, it rather seems, that the world of dreams is a real world--_the_ real world.

This seems to me to accord well with both the systematic inversions in the analogy and the repeated calls to wake up and to stay awake. They seem like arrows pointing in this direction. But the inversion is that it is the one left standing in the field who is truly awake, the character in the dream, while the one “taken” is falling asleep in eternity, since the perspective of eternity on these things is the opposite of our physical perspective.

If this seems difficult to understand, watch the film “Avatar.” It speaks truth in spite of itself.

So, in sum, on this reading of the gospel:

1. the world that we experience in dreams is real, and
2. it is the eternal world.

Put another way: “the kingdom of heaven is within.”

While what Jesus is saying is really fairly simple and plain, it is complicated by being close to the very opposite of the way we usually think of such things.

Mt. 24: 37-44

Jesus said to his disciples:

“As it was in the days of Noah,

so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.

In those days before the flood,

they were eating and drinking,

marrying and giving in marriage,

up to the day that Noah entered the ark.

They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.

So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man.

Two men will be out in the field;

one will be taken, and one will be left.

Two women will be grinding at the mill;

one will be taken, and one will be left.

Therefore, stay awake!

For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.

Be sure of this: if the master of the house

had known the hour of night when the thief was coming,

he would have stayed awake

and not let his house be broken into.

So too, you also must be prepared,

for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”