The Three Temptations of the Christ

 

I ponder whether Jordan Peterson is doing any good with his seminars on the Bible. I do not find him a clear thinker. An excerpt I happened to catch online recently seemed to me pretty weak. A view of faith and the tradition from the outside, and uncomprehending.

That may be the point. That may be what is needed for the greater public: an everyman to represent the audience, poking and prodding at this odd book and raising questions. What the heck is this all about? It may be a gateway for some.

Or it may be disastrous: an attempt to fit the Bible within Peterson’s false world view of clinical psychology.

The excerpt I heard was on the three temptations of Jesus in the desert, described to us by Matthew and Luke.

What struck me foremost was the Peterson panel’s need to discount the Devil’s clear statement in the gospels: “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.” The panel’s reaction sounded to me like denial. They refused to acknowledge that Satan is in charge of this world. They did not like to hear that. Peterson absurdly claimed that Satan was really offering Jesus rulership in Hell, even though the text says plainly “the kingdoms of this world.” Rulership is good, to Peterson, so long as you don’t accept Satan first. Hierarchy. Lobsters. Order. 

From this we see that Peterson himself craves power.

Which is probably why most people go into psychology. It is a perfect profession for bullies.

The panel was also puzzled that Jesus didn’t turn the rocks into bread. Why not? After all, bread is good, right? 

They didn’t seem to grasp the significance of a fast, and of honouring the commitment to fast. I think their confusion was why anyone would ever fast in the first place.

For the record, the proper understanding of the three temptations is simple, if you are familiar with Christian ethics. They are the three temptations we all face: the world, the flesh, and the devil.

 In offering the rulership of all the kingdoms of the world, “their authority and their glory,” Satan was offering the world.

In tempting Jesus to turn stones into bread and break his fast, Satan was offering physical pleasures: the flesh. We always think of sex here, no doubt, but food is also a pleasure of the flesh.

In tempting Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple and have angels rescue him, Satan was offering “the Devil.” The Devil is Lucifer; the essence of Lucifer is pride, self-will. To declare yourself God.

Throwing himself from the top of the temple and having angels catch him would after all, be the ultimate publicity stunt, issuing orders to God and showing God obeys him. “Putting God to the test.” Putting himself above God.

A more contemporary and secular description of the three temptations would be money, power, and fame. Money = the flesh; power = the world; fame = the Devil. They are about the same thing, the same temptations. They are the things that pull us off the rails. Are we missing any?

Now about the claim that the Devil is in control of the kingdoms of this world, and gets to choose their rulers: Those who become rulers are almost necessarily those who lust for power. Set up any system you like for choosing rulers, and this almost must remain true. It follows that the Devil is the ruler of this world: the temptation of power over others, which is always Satanic. 

This is no doubt why the emperor Constantine refused baptism until his deathbed. He understood that rulership was incompatible with true Christian virtue. It should be no surprise, if we continually find that our rulers and prominent politicians behave badly in their private lives. Good Christians are highly unlikely to find themselves in such positions.

The one possible partial exception is monarchies. Monarchies in effect select the ruler randomly, not because they want to rule. So monarchs may not be particularly power hungry.  This is why monarchies are a more benevolent form of government than dictatorships, even if the powers exercised are the same. But even within effective monarchies there are usually palace intrigues, power struggles, and needs to be ruthless to remain in power. Pity Lady Jane Grey.

A word as well on fasting, so incomprehensible to the psychological mindset. Fasting is of value in itself because, contrary to Freud, animal urges are not here to be satisfied; they are here to be disciplined. We are not animals. Otherwise there is no point to our existence. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by following the commandments of God. 

Psychology is so far from religion that I doubt the two can be reconciled. Making Jordan Peterson a false prophet.

To Those in Peril on the Sea

 On that day, as evening drew on, Jesus said to his disciples:
“Let us cross to the other side.”
Leaving the crowd, they took Jesus with them in the boat just as he was.
And other boats were with him.
A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat,
so that it was already filling up.
Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion.
They woke him and said to him,
“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
He woke up,
rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet!  Be still!”
The wind ceased and there was great calm.
Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified?
Do you not yet have faith?”
They were filled with great awe and said to one another,
“Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?”

This, the gospel reading at today’s mass, strikes me as uncannily resembling the traditional image of Vishnu asleep on the cosmic ocean. The universe we know is a dream he is having. Once every kalpa, every aeon, he awakens from the dream, and the universe ceases to be. Then after a time he goes back to sleep, and a new cosmos begins. The turbulent waters on which he sleeps are the stream of time, with its changes. 

Is the Bible story a borrowing from Hindu mythology? Possibly; or possibly the other way around.

Or perhaps this is evidence for Jung’s theory of the archetypes. Jung traced certain motifs and images, like this one, across world mythology, including cultures with little or no contact with each other, and then again in the dreams of his patients. He posited these represented structures in the mind, which he called archetypes. Ultimately, for the materialist Jung, these ended up expressing structures in the brain. Evolution has deposited them there somehow.

Jung’s disciple Marie-Louise Von Franz specialized in Jungian interpretations of fairy tales. Someone once challenged her with the question, “How do you know your archetypal psychology and development of the ego through individuation is the real story being expressed obliquely through these stories, and not just one more fairy tale like these others?”

Her answer was unsatisfactory: “It is the fairytale I believe.”

Are we left with no way to choose among fairy tales? Do we just arbitrarily decide to place our faith in Vishnu, or Jesus, or Jung, or Mother Goose?

Suppose, instead, that there is a God. This is not a stretch; it the fundamental premise of the text. As a philosophical proposition, monotheism has been proven seven ways to Sunday.

If there is a God, the repetition of this motif in unrelated texts is a proof of the reliability of those texts. God must have dropped it in there.

God must have created us for some purpose. He would have programmed us with a built-in user’s manual or operating system. He would have embedded in our psyches certain images, concepts and narratives expressing his plans. This, the sleeping God waking to calm time and change, can be assumed to be one of them.

God is God; he can do what he wants. He can implant the images in our consciousnesses, and then act them out in history to demonstrate that he is with us, and to clarify their full meaning. 

We are not to be troubled by the madness all around us. We are not to suppose that God is not in charge. Keep calm and carry on. Soon he will wake—or we will—and all will be as it should be.

The Wedding Feast

 

And Jesus answering, spoke again in parables to them, saying:

2 The kingdom of heaven is likened to a king, who made a marriage for his son.
3 And he sent his servants, to call them that were invited to the marriage; and they would not come.
4 Again he sent other servants, saying: Tell them that were invited, Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my calves and fatlings are killed, and all things are ready: come ye to the marriage.
5 But they neglected, and went their own ways, one to his farm, and another to his merchandise.
6 And the rest laid hands on his servants, and having treated them contumeliously, put them to death.
7 But when the king had heard of it, he was angry, and sending his armies, he destroyed those murderers, and burnt their city.
8 Then he saith to his servants: The marriage indeed is ready; but they that were invited were not worthy.
9 Go ye therefore into the highways; and as many as you shall find, call to the marriage.
10 And his servants going forth into the ways, gathered together all that they found, both bad and good: and the marriage was filled with guests.
11 And the king went in to see the guests: and he saw there a man who had not on a wedding garment.
12 And he saith to him: Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? But he was silent.
13 Then the king said to the waiters: Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
14 For many are called, but few are chosen.

This was the reading at last Sunday mass.

Whatever else it might reveal, it puts to bed the notion of many, including Bishop Barron, that there might be nobody in hell, that we can at least hope that everyone gets to heaven. Rather, “few are chosen.” 

The first and most obvious puzzle: why would all the respectable people, the upstanding citizens, not want to come to the king’s feast? Why would they treat the servants who delivered the invitation badly, even put them to death? 

This is the anomalous detail always needed in a parable or allegory to tell us we are not talking literally. For a literal marriage feast, this would make no sense. But if this refers to the persecution of the prophets, it fits with the marriage feast really being the kingdom of God. The prophets call us to God’s kingdom, and they are inevitably persecuted for it. Just like Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, those in authority in this world are fundamentally opposed to anyone speaking truth directly, because it upsets the status quo, or risks upsetting the status quo, and so threatens their status. They are the status quo.

Of course, their attitude is illogical. They are refusing a feast, and ensuring their destruction. But evil is always illogical.

The second puzzle: according to the parable, “both bad and good” enter heaven. Can that be right?

But that is why we have part two of the parable, with the man not wearing a wedding garment being cast out. There is a second weeding out. Only at this point are people “chosen,” as opposed to choosing themselves whether to come. And not just this one man is rejected; “few are chosen.”

The first triage is genuinely seeking truth—these are the people who are summoned from the highways, and who answer the call. They are the honest seekers; those who refuse the call are those who do not want to hear the truth. But once hearing the truth, once in God’s presence, the obligation to do God’s will is apparent. This is the second triage: are you prepared to dress, and act, accordingly? And so at this point one can still be rejected, and many are.

Why a marriage feast? Who is getting married? 

You are.

Each individual soul is getting married to God. It is a two-step process, the engagement and then the full commitment. 

Today's Gospel

 

The mote and the beam.

Luke 6:41-45

41 Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?

42 How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye.

43 “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.

44 For every tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not pick figs from thornbushes, nor do they gather grapes from brambles.

45 A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”

Today’s gospel reading, from Luke, illuminates familiar passages in Matthew,

First, we have the passage best known in Matthew for the often quoted phrase “judge not, lest ye be judged.”

But here only the words that follow appear: about removing the beam from your own eye before removing the splinter from your brother’s.

This makes it clear that the command is not to judge as such. That was not the message, but rather not to judge others by a harsher standard than you judge yourself—it is against hypocrisy, not against making moral judgements, including of others’ actions.

“Judge not, lest ye be judged” is a phrase conveniently ripped out of context by the wicked to protect themselves from criticism.

The reference to the tree and its fruit—“by their fruits ye shall know them”—here is clarified; it refers not to moral deeds, but to speech. 

What counts as evil speech? 

Not necessarily evil counsel, for that would not be easily evident. Not lies, for the same reason. Not things that are intentionally evil—the tree does not deliberate over its fruit, and this coming from the heart implies something the evil person cannot hide with any cunning.

I suggest that “evil speech” means ugly speech; that this is an aesthetic judgement. It is speech that “tastes” bad, as a fruit can taste bad or look ugly. Someone who can speak beautifully is a good person; someone who cannot is a bad person.

And for “speech” here, read the arts broadly. “The arts” was not a concept available to Jesus or his listeners in the New Testament. But, as among Arabs today, the essential art among the ancient Jews was the art of fine speech.

Carpool Karaoke with the Devil at the Wheel

 

In the New Testament, Jesus casts out demons from a boy who seems to be epileptic. Matthew 17:14-18.

When they returned to the crowds again a man came and knelt in front of Jesus. “Lord, do have pity on my son,” he said, “for he is a lunatic and is in a terrible state. He is always falling into the fire or into the water. I did bring him to your disciples but they couldn’t cure him.”

“You really are an unbelieving and difficult people,” Jesus returned. “How long must I be with you, and how long must I put up with you? Bring him here to me!”

Then Jesus reprimanded the evil spirit and it went out of the boy, who was cured from that moment.

Lucian of Samosata, a pagan Greek exorcist, dealt with similar cases.

“Everyone knows how time after time he has found a man thrown down on the ground in a lunatic fit, foaming at the mouth and rolling his eyes; and how he has got him on to his feet again and sent him away in his right mind.”

This is sometimes pointed to as evidence that the ancients simply misunderstood mental illness; there is really no such thing as demonic possession. We know, after all, that epilepsy is caused by physical damage to the brain.

But this does not explain how they seem to have believed they could cure it.

The long-distance diagnosis of epilepsy may after all be wrong. Falling down, rolling eyes, foaming at the mouth, jumping into the fire or the water—this also sounds like a child’s tantrum, magnified and taken to an extreme.

The thought is inspired by some recent TikTok clips of leftist women reacting to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. They are throwing tantrums. And one of them, the woman with the short dark hair, the fourth in this compilation—you have a look.

What is a tantrum? It is when a person is completely under the control of some desire, some want, some urge. Not some emotion: that looks quite different. Someone overcome with sorrow, for example, will go entirely quiet. Someone overcome with fear will hide. Someone overcome with love will hug. This is desire, not emotion, a primal hunger, a violent assertion of self-will. But then again, it is more complicated than that: the desire seems to take over the will; the women in the video are no longer in control of themselves. Rather than self-willed, they may even be self-destructive: “I wish I had been aborted.” They might throw themselves into a fire, or break their own toys.

The easiest way to make sense of it is to understand this thing, this desire, as an independent will; which is to say, a possessing demon. It thinks and acts independently of the will, and controls it.

Hitler, they say, used to throw such fits. As is immortalized in a million memes. 

We commonly nowadays call such possessed people “narcissists.” This is fairly apt. Narcissus himself, in the legend, was possessed by just such a demon, a lust towards himself, which was self-destructive. But he is perhaps more instance than ideal paradigm. We have been prejudiced in his direction as a vestige of Freud’s pseudo-biological fixation on sex as prime motive.

Possessed might be a better term. Such people might be possessed by any or all of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, wrath, lust, envy, acedia, gluttony, avarice. All of whom are traditionally, and properly, understood as demons.

For two thousand years or so, Christianity has been here to keep such demons at bay. In the East, Buddhism has done the same work, beginning with the Noble Truth that such desires are the root of all suffering. All major religions no doubt do this work.

Now we have turned away from religion, and the demons run wild in the streets.

Last Sunday's Gospel: The Kingdom of Heaven

Parable of the treasure in the field. Possibly Rembrandt.

The gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass was a string of short parables describing the Kingdom of Heaven. An essential subject, yet, as usual with parables, it is hard to make out what is really being said. 

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a merchant seeking fine pearls, who having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Parable of the pearl. Mironov.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some fish of every kind, which, when it was filled, fishermen drew up on the beach. They sat down and gathered the good into containers, but the bad they threw away. So it will be in the end of the world. The angels will come and separate the wicked from among the righteous, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus said to them, “Have you understood all these things?”

They answered him, “Yes, Lord.”

This seems intentionally funny. Really? Was that all so understandable to you?

He said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been made a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a householder, who brings out of his treasure new and old things.”

Matthew 13: 44-52, WEB

Therefore? How does this statement follow from what has come before? Why are we even talking about scribes?

Now let’s back up. Start with the treasure in the field. An obvious contradiction here. Why, having discovered the treasure, doesn’t the man just take it? Why rebury it, then buy the field?

And the pearl. Is it obvious that a merchant is better off having sold his entire inventory for one pearl? Is there any reason to suppose he would get a bigger profit out of it than out of another pearl, simply because it is more expensive?

For that matter, who fishes with a dragnet from the beach? How do you drag a net from a stationary position on the beach?

These seem to be a series of riddles. Let’s try to solve them.

The field that must be bought in order to yield its treasure must have an inexhaustible yield. The pearl that is more profitable than all other pearls combined must have an inexhaustible value. The sea that yields abundant fish even standing and casting at the shoreline must be inexhaustible.

And the scribe?

The scribe, that is, the writer, genuinely does, in his regular profession, have an inexhaustible resource. He draws on imagination and memory: “new and old things.” There is no end to the treasures the mind can produce.

Jesus suggests the situation of the scribe sums up the other examples. That is, the kingdom of heaven is most justly comparable to—or is—the memory and the imagination. These are our experience of the spiritual world.

Accordingly, the association of the prior examples seems dreamlike, an association if image motifs, rather than making some rational point: a treasure in a field, then a treasure from the sea, then good and bad things emerging from the sea, then good and bad people burning in a furnace.

Together, it sounds like the imagination, like a reverie.

One implication, since this is so, is that every scribe, every writer, every artist, is a disciple of the kingdom of heaven. It is essentially a spiritual office.

One might mistakenly thing this statement weak: that the Kingdom of Heaven is “only imaginary”; “made up”; “a fiction.” Jesus denies this by his reference to the burning of souls by the angels. This world of the imagination is, he says, more consequential, more meaningful, than the world we only sense with our vegetative senses. It is where the truth is revealed, and the real values of all things.

We ignore or trivialize it at our ultimate peril.

Now, perhaps, we see it only at a distance, and indistinctly, as through a glass darkly. But one day we will see it face to face.

Salvation by Suffering

“I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world.
They belonged to you, and you gave them to me,
and they have kept your word.
Now they know that everything you gave me is from you,
because the words you gave to me I have given to them,
and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you,
and they have believed that you sent me.
I pray for them.
I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me”

There is a common misconception that Jesus came to save all men. Church thinkers as prominent as von Balthasar and Bishop Barron want to believe all men will be saved. The consecration at the English mass actually used to say that Jesus came “for all,” a mistranslation of the previous Latin. This is of course what everyone wants to believe. It is reassuring.

But in this Sunday’s reading, Jesus plainly says otherwise. He came for a certain subset of mankind, who belong to the Father.

And this is the consistent message of the gospel. For example, at the very outset of the gospel, when some of the Pharisees come to the Jordan to be baptized, John rejects them, saying

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”

They were refused as unsuitable for salvation. They were refused Christian initiation.

So on what basis are some saved?

The passage implies good works: “they have kept your word.” Yet it also says this group belonged to God before any such justification by works. Score one for the Lutherans?

The passage indeed implies faith: “they have believed that you sent me.” Yet it also says that they belonged to God before any such justification by faith. So much for the Lutherans. Score one for the Calvinists? Some are simply predestined to be saved, regardless of any justification?

Perhaps, at least based on this passage.

But perhaps there is a further clue in the phrase “out of the world.” Those selected by the Father, those for whom Jesus came, are those who are in some sense separated from or alienated from the world.

And this tallies with Jesus’s own clear enumeration of those who are his people: in the Beatitudes.

The people whom Jesus came to save are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the peacemakers, the merciful, the pure-hearted, the persecuted. Such people do not fit in this world, and suffer in it.

And the rest, Jesus almost as much as says, can go to hell.

The Original Locked Room Mystery

A Protestant friend recently argued with me against the doctrine of transubstantiation on these grounds: that Jesus, after the resurrection, proved he was not a spirit by having Thomas put his hands in the marks of the nails. It is in this Sunday’s gospel reading:

Jesus came, although the doors were locked,
and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”

A brief summary of the doctrine of transubstantiation is perhaps needed here: the Catholic Church holds that, at consecration, the bread and wine for communion actually transforms into the body and blood of Christ. They retain all the physical qualities of bread and wine, the “accidents.” But the substance has changed.

My Protestant friend is arguing that Jesus was here using the accidents to prove that he was in fact there in body, not just a hallucination. If God himself considers such visual and tactile evidence proof, it follows that anything that looks, smells and tastes like bread and wine, is actually bread and wine. No transubstantiation.

A clever argument; but it has things cleverly reversed.

In the gospel, Jesus is not showing the wounds in his hands and side to prove he has a physical body. To prove he were not a hallucination, touching him anywhere would have sufficed. But so would the simple fact that many disciples were seeing him at the same time. Touching his wounds proved something else. These wounds, after all, were fatal. He is proving he really did die. Yet he is here. He is proving that he has been able to overcome the characteristics, the accidents, of a physical body.

This body has also just passed through a wall into a locked room. The essence of the physical is that it occupies a discrete point in space; this body does not.

Later, when disciples encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus, they do not recognize him. His body apparently lacks all the accidents that would identify it as him.

If Jesus’s resurrected body is capable of such things, it is surely as capable of appearing as bread or wine.

Jesus Met the Woman at the Well: Take 2

“Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his children and his livestock?”

The story of the Samaritan woman at the well, last Sunday’s reading, looks like another parable of the need to overcome the natural idolatry of parents or ancestors. This is especially true if we come from a dysfunctional family; it is always true in any case.

For two wells, two waters, and two authorities, are contrasted: the physical well, and the spiritual well of the Logos; the physical water and the spiritual, or “living,” water of the Gospel; Jesus and ancestral custom, personified as Jacob, the eponymous ancestor of Israel.

And the answer is obvious: Jesus is the higher authority.

“So the woman left her water pot, went away into the city.”

She discarded the water of her ancestors. This is an either-or choice. “He who does not despise his father for my sake is not worthy of me.” “Family values” are not a part of Christianity, but radically apart from Christianity.

The point is signed and underlined by her being a Samaritan. The Samaritans and the Jews had irreconcilable differences regarding the proper place of temple worship; as the story reminds us. Both cannot be right. And Jesus unambiguously tells her her ancestors were wrong.

“You worship that which you don’t know. We worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews.”

So she faces the eternal human dilemma: accept the unconsidered assumptions inherited from your father, who at best was no more than a man, or fight through for truth.

It is here perhaps that it becomes significant that she is apparently an outcast in her own community: coming at the unseasonable hour to get her daily water, to avoid encountering others. It is naturally enough those kicked to the bottom of the social totem pole who will find it easiest to see the shared delusions. They obviously have less to lose. See the Beatitudes on this. Children are also more apt to see, having not yet been so thoroughly indoctrinated. “For such is the Kingdom of God.”

I had noted previously that the woman must have been socially rejected because she was living in adultery. I was wrong. By the rules of ancient Israel, concubinage was respectable; consider Abraham’s concubine Hagar, the mother of Ishmael.

She was more likely to have been rejected for having five husbands. A surprising fact; so surprising that it proves Jesus was not just using intuition or playing probabilities, but had true supernatural knowledge. There are two possibilities: either the husbands divorced her, socially branding as a terrible wife; or they died, suggesting she was a jinx. Or a poisoner. Either would explain her social isolation. And either would amount to a profound experience of rejection.

I think we can also infer that she must necessarily also have been extremely attractive and/or accomplished, to have had five or six suitors despite this.

When the woman asks Jesus for the living water, why does he respond, “go, call your husband?” Why need her husband be involved?

Precisely because this is a social problem, a sin of the fathers visited upon the fourth generation. It would not be enough for her to see the truth, so long as she is committed, through marriage, to that corrupted social order. Unless she is, like Peter, to abandon spouse and family, they too must be brought along.

The woman responds that she has no husband. Jesus agrees that this is true, and reveals that he knows her entire marital history.

But if he knows her entire marital history, and knows this to be true, why did he tell her to bring her husband?

The point is that she both has and does not have a husband, depending on how you look at it, surely. The reference might be to concubinage, in which case Jesus might be accused of having spoken with less than perfect accuracy on the first occasion. This is not a plausible inference, however, since he is omniscient, and immediately demonstrates this. It seems more likely that the woman actually did have a husband, and was lying.

Why would she lie?

Oh gentle reader, you are innocent in the ways of romance. This woman has just met a handsome stranger at a well. Meeting at a well is the usual first act of a Biblical romance—Jacob himself, whose well this is, met his wife at it. This appears to be a woman with a reputation for playing the field, as it were, and who is apparently naturally highly attractive. Admitting she is married might kill the fun.

If so, she actually has had six husbands, counting the present one, and Jesus would amount to the projected seventh—a magical number for the Bible.

So when Jesus says her present husband is not really her husband, he is making a more general point, about family ties.

We all both do and do not have earthly fathers; for our true father, Jesus reminds us elsewhere, is always and only our father who is in heaven. We all both do and do not have husbands; for our true husband is always Jesus, the Seventh, the Sabbath spouse. Earthly spouses are, in the end, transitory and arbitrary, like well water. Any five or six might do.

We must not elevate family ties to divine status; and this is the usual temptation.

“So when the Samaritans came to him, they begged him to stay with them. He stayed there two days. Many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, ‘Now we believe, not because of your speaking; for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.’”

This fulfills Jesus’s requirement that the Samaritan woman bring her husband. She brought the entire community, and they had to be converted as a group.

Today's Reading

The woman comes to the well at noon.

This is unusual. The usual routine would be to go to the village well first thing in the morning, before the heat of the day, and get the water for your household’s daily needs.

The woman has instead waited until noon, making her labour more difficult, in the dry, hot climate, presumably in order to avoid meeting others. She is a social outcast.

And we know why; she is living with a man adulterously.

Jesus reveals her sins to her. As a result, she is able to access the true living water.

The story models the sacrament of confession.

The First Temptation of Christ

Tissot: Jesus ministered to by angels.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was hungry afterward. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” 

But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of God’s mouth.’” 

Then the devil took him into the holy city. He set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,
‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and,‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you don’t dash your foot against a stone.’” 

Jesus said to him, “Again, it is written, ‘You shall not test the Lord, your God.’” 

Again, the devil took him to an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. He said to him, “I will give you all of these things, if you will fall down and worship me.” 

Then Jesus said to him, “Get behind me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and you shall serve him only.’” 

Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and served him.

The reading for the first Sunday of Lent is Jesus’s temptation in the desert, as told in the Book of Matthew.

This is the rite of passage found for males in most cultures at adolescence: Jesus’s Bar Mitzvah. North American Indians would go out to the woods alone and fast until they met their spirit animal. Xenophon tells of Herakles, as a young man, going off into the wilderness and encountering two women, Virtue and Vice.

The idea is that this spirit quest sets one’s life direction. What is your life going to be all about? It happens at about adolescence because this is when we reach the age of reason, and become fully independent moral agents, responsible for our own decisions.

One might think this unnecessary in Jesus’s case: his life course was pretty much already set. But, being fully human, he too must go through such a moment. He too must be genuinely tempted. At the same time, the temptations he encounters represent those encountered by every man.

The most interesting of the three is the second one: to throw himself down from the roof of the temple.

One can understand the temptation to bread; he has been fasting for forty days. One can understand wanting the kingdoms of the earth. But what does he get by jumping off a high building?

The obvious.

What does anyone get by jumping off a high building?

Not, by being borne up by angels, to reveal publicly that he is someone special and God is with him—because the quoted promise that God will save us from striking our heel against a stone is extended to all.

The angels referred to would be bearing him up to Abraham’s bosom.

Now let’s look at the three temptations. What are these three paths open to us at adolescence, as the guiding principles of our life?

If it is to turn the stones to bread, we have decided that life is all about satisfying basic urges: about enjoying food when we are hungry, and drink, and sex. Or drugs, and rock and roll. Maybe also sports and exercise and healthy foods; these are still a matter of satisfying the body. Many do take this path; the path, even if sometimes more upmarket, of Falstaff, of Pumbaa, of Baloo the Bear. It is not coincidental that the last two are animals.

The second temptation is to despair of this life and to snuffing it. Perhaps in hopes of a better hereafter—hence the reference to the temple. A lot of kids do. A lot of kids, even if they do not actually commit suicide, become deliberately self-destructive. If the first temptation is to hippiehood, this is the punk wave, with safety pins and razor blade jewelry. With playing chicken out on the local highway, or with anorexia. If we think here mostly of teenagers, not adults, it is because those who choose this path tend not to live to adulthood.

The third temptation is to live for what the world knows as “success.” Career, social status, power, and so forth.

This, it seems, is the worst of the temptations, for this requires explicitly worshiping Satan.

But all of these are presented as barren, dead ends. The proper path, the good fourth way, as Jesus advises, is to worship God, and to serve him only.

Pete Buttigieg's Christmas

The Flight into Egypt

Pete Buttigieg has gotten a lot of criticism for his Christmas tweet:

“Today I join millions around the world in celebrating the arrival of divinity on earth, who came into this world not in riches but in poverty, not as a citizen but as a refugee. No matter where or how we celebrate, merry Christmas.”

Others quickly pointed out that there is no indication in the Gospel that Jesus’s birth family was either rich or poor. And Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem not as refugees, but to register for a census.

And why can’t he use the name “Jesus”?

It seemed to me initially obvious that Buttigieg was way off; I am surprised to see that some have also defended his tweet.

Peter Wever at The Week, for example, responds “it's hard to see how a carpenter from an otherwise insignificant village in Galilee would be well-off.”

I suppose that depends on what counts for you as “well-off.” A carpenter from a small town in America today can do well enough. He’s just not going to make the Fortune 500.

But it seems to me the bottom line is that, if it were somehow significant to the narrative that Jesus was either rich or poor, that fact would have been noted in the Gospels.

Jack Jenkins responds that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were indeed refugees at a later point, the flight into Egypt.

JMJ do seem to fit the meaning of “refugee” in informal usage during the flight into Egypt; but not the legal definition. Because they did not leave their home country—Judea, Galilee, and Egypt were all provinces of the Roman Empire. It would be like fleeing from Georgia to Ohio. As many blacks did during “Jim Crow” days.

This does not look to me like a plausible interpretation of what Buttigieg wrote, however. He was speaking of how Jesus came into this world, not of subsequent events.

So it seems to me there are two possibilities here: either Buttigieg does not have a very clear idea of the New Testament; or he is distorting it to suit a political agenda.

Either way, it does not mark him as a serious Christian.

This would not matter, except that he has made his Christianity a central feature of his campaign, arguing that he can win Christian votes away from the right.

A tweet like this seems to make this less likely, by showing how superficial his avowed Christianity actually is.

There may be a constituency, on the other hand, of those who are not themselves serious Christians, but who would still like to be reassured that their political beliefs do not run counter to it. This, after all, is presumably why we hear ahistorical assertions that, say, Jesus was black, or a communist, or a political revolutionary.

Zacchaeus Out of His Tree

Zacchaeus called down from the Sycamore tree.

He entered and was passing through Jericho. There was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, and couldn't because of the crowd, because he was short. He ran on ahead, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was to pass that way.

When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and saw him, and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for today I must stay at your house."

He hurried, came down, and received him joyfully.

When they saw it, they all murmured, saying, "He has gone in to lodge with a man who is a sinner."

Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, "Behold, Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor. If I have wrongfully exacted anything of anyone, I restore four times as much."

Jesus said to him, "Today, salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost."

--Luke 19:1-10

Zacchaeus is not a real person. The story of Zacchaeus is a parable. The image of little Zacchaeus climbing a tree is too obviously comic for real life.

Zacchaeus means “pure.” It is not really a name. His small stature makes him seem childlike. He climbs trees, as a child would. And as a self-conscious wealthy man would not. For it is publicly undignified, and likely to expose him to general scorn.

So this is a parable of innocence.

Zacchaeus is egotistic in an innocent way, just as a child is. His initial avarice is innocent, unreflective. Who does not spontaneously want to own nice things? Nice things are nice.

Jesus singles him out from the crowd. Just as Jesus elsewhere says, one must become like a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Innocence is the key.

But only the key. Jesus opens the door, when he tells Zacchaeus to come down from the tree.

This act of immediate obedience is the test. It equates to repentance. “Get off your high horse.”

Because Zacchaeus does this, wholeheartedly, Jesus comes and dwells with him.

It is surely significant that all this is said to have happened in Jericho: the city that was the entrance to the Promised Land. With such repentance, the walls come tumbling down.

The good man, in sum, is not the man who does not sin. The good man is the man who repents when sin is pointed out. The bad man resists and denies. The difference is the difference between sin and settled vice.

Compare today’s first reading, from the Book of Wisdom: “Yet you are merciful to all, because you are almighty, you overlook people's sins, so that they can repent.” God’s own forgiveness is absolute, but conditional on repentance.

We all sin. We all have avaricious urges. A fundamentally good person, faced with their own wrongdoing, repents and seeks to make amends. A bad person demands “forgiveness” without repentance. That is the difference.

The critical moment in the Garden of Eden was not when Adam and Eve ate the apple. It was when they hid in the bushes, and tried to shift blame.

Gospel

Forwarded out of the ether from friend Eugene Campbell, who says it brought tears to his eyes and he just had to share it.

Gospel music is the heart and soul of America. It is that African spontaneity that makes US culture different from European culture.

Not incidentally, this is where rock and roll comes from. At base, rock and roll is secularized gospel music. If you don't believe me, look up a video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Actuslly, never mind. Let me do it for you.

Rock and Roll is Sacred Music

St. Johnny Rotten.

Look up “Christian rock” on YouTube, as I just did, and you will get a glimpse of an old controversy: is rock and roll the Devil's music? A large number of Christians have always believed this—that something about rock and roll makes it intrinsically immoral. In fact, a huge number of rock and roll musicians have thought so themselves. Keith Richards once said in an interview he usually wrote “Luciferian” songs; Neil Young has called rock “God and the Devil shaking hands.” Jerry Lee Lewis has said “I know I am playing for the Devil.”

This seems to me absurd. Why should the Devil get all the good songs?

Is rock beautiful? Does it “strike a chord” in you, as it does in me? Then, by definition, it is from God, not the Devil. Here's why: God is the perfect being. This means he is the perfection of being, reality, or truth. It also necessarily means that he is the perfection of moral good—evil cannot be an aspect of perfection, for it is a flaw. It also follows that he is the perfection of beauty. Ugliness cannot be an aspect of perfection, for it too is a flaw.

From this it follows that the more beautiful a thing is, the more it approaches God. We understand this instinctively, I think, when we experience beauty in nature. Our perception of beauty comes with a sense of awe; it is felt as a communing with the divine intelligence. So too in art. Ergo, as rock is beautiful, rock is divine. (Note too that beauty is not the same as mere prettiness. Real beauty requires the sublime.)

Music, indeed, of all the arts, is most completely justified by beauty alone, because as music it can convey no other message, no didactic content, no "redeeming social importance." This makes it the most sacred of the arts--as in the "music of the spheres." There is a reason that angels are traditionally pictured strumming harps.

Ergo, rock music is intrinsically good, not evil; a thing of God, not the Devil.

Add to that the actual origins of rock. Rock began in Gospel music. This genesis is commonly obscured, largely I think because of the pre-conceived notion that rock is anti-religious in some way. It is commonly claimed that rock began instead as the mogrel child of county and western plus rhythm and blues. But just listen to some of the performances of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. You cannot deny that she was singing and playing rock already in the 1940s. But she was not classed as rock and roll—she was the most popular Gospel singer of her day.

http://youtu.be/JeaBNAXfHfQ

And the first Doo-Wop hit was a flat-out Christian religious song, “Crying in the Chapel.”

http://youtu.be/Qe_tL7aVGE8

The strange emotional energy of rock began as the energy of a revivalist meeting; that characteristic snare beat began as the clapping of the congregation. Rock emerged from exactly the places where gospel was omnipresent, among people who were raised on gospel as their music. Jerry Lee Lewis attended Southwest Bible Institute. Little Richard started out singing in Pentecostal churches, and was eventually himself ordained a minister. Chuck Berry's dad was a Baptist deacon. Elvis Presley learned guitar from the family pastor.

In context, it becomes clear that rock and roll's reputation as “the Devil's music” makes sense only in a Gospel context—only on the assumption that music, or this music, ought to be reserved for sacred places and occasions. Rock was bad because it was the supposed profanation of a sacred musical form.

That still makes it more religious than--just about anything else.

News Flash: World Ends

Apocalypse in fresco: Macedonia

This Sunday's Gospel Reading:

Jesus said to his disciples:
"There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars,
and on earth nations will be in dismay,
perplexed by the roaring of the sea and the waves.
People will die of fright
in anticipation of what is coming upon the world,
for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
And then they will see the Son of Man
coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
But when these signs begin to happen,
stand erect and raise your heads
because your redemption is at hand.

"Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness
and the anxieties of daily life,
and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.
For that day will assault everyone
who lives on the face of the earth.
Be vigilant at all times
and pray that you have the strength
to escape the tribulations that are imminent
and to stand before the Son of Man."
- Luke 21: 25-36

French Romanesque Apocalypse.

As you probably know if you follow this blog, I think it is absurd to worry about the end of the world. What difference does it make? The issues are the same issues we face at individual death, and that is certain to happen in our lifetimes. Moreover, for each of us, subjectively, the End of the World is functionally coterminous with our individual death.

So looking for signs in the sun, the moon and the stars is a fool’s game. There are always signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars. Nations are always in dismay. We need to always be prepared, regardless of such signs—because we could die at any moment, quite regardless of what happens in the world at large.

And I believe this is in fact what Jesus is talking about. This is the only way it is literally true that these things “will assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth.”

The exercise of keeping in mind our own death, on the other hand, is a very wise one, one that has always had an important part in the Christian world view. The “Memento Mori” is a traditional genre of art.

A memento mori from the ruins of Pompeii

One of the things that struck me as most deranged, when I returned to Canada after seven years overseas, was how death seems to be a taboo subject. Everyone speaks and acts as if it is something abnormal, something which should never happen to them.

Memento mori on an English tombstone.

I suspect the current preoccupation with the end of the world is a result of this. Everyone thinks the world is about to end. There is this silly rumour that the ancient Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world for December 21 this year. And there are any number of fundamentalist Christian groups who announce the end every few years. Not to mention Catholics relying on Fatima’s Third Secret or the prophecies of St. Malachi. But more pernicious are the global warming crew, the population bomb throwers, the peak oil pundits, and the like.

Memento mori, Uffington Church, England.

It will happen when it happens, and in the meantime, it doesn’t make any difference to you or me.

Gospel Reflection: No One Knows the Hour

Danby, Apocalypse

Jesus said to his disciples:
"In those days after that tribulation
the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from the sky,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

"And then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in the clouds'
with great power and glory,
and then he will send out the angels
and gather his elect from the four winds,
from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.

"Learn a lesson from the fig tree.
When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves,
you know that summer is near.
In the same way, when you see these things happening,
know that he is near, at the gates.
Amen, I say to you,
this generation will not pass away
until all these things have taken place.
Heaven and earth will pass away,
but my words will not pass away.

"But of that day or hour, no one knows,
neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

--Mark 13: 24-32

There are several obvious problems with this passage.

Most notably, Jesus promises that these things—the end of time—will take place before “this generation” passes away. Obviously, the generation that first heard these words is now long dead.

He says that nobody knows the time of the end, including the Son; only the Father. Yet the Son is God from God, light from light, true God from true God, of one being with the Father—how can he not know, if the Father knows?

He describes the end of the world in terms that make no sense scientifically: the sun and moon might become darkened, by an eclipse, but the stars cannot fall from the sky.

And how can both heaven and earth pass away, yet his words continue?

And isn’t it a bit odd, a bit jarring, a bit off register, to describe the violent events of the end of the world in terms of the gradual budding of a fig tree in spring?

There is one simple answer to all of this. I hesitate to say it, because I have been talking so much about death here recently that I suppose I risk losing the few regular readers this blog has.

But I believe he is talking not about the End of the World in a cosmic sense, but individual death.

Or rather, the one is functionally the same as the other. Consider the nature of eternity. I say it is not an infinite forward progression of time. It is multidimensional time. Each moment in time is equidistant and immediately accessible from eternity. Accordingly, the instant one dies and enters eternity, one is indeed at the end of time. Therefore, “this generation will not pass away” is accurate, as is Jesus’s promise at the crucifixion to meet with the Good Thief that same evening in paradise, despite his upcoming three days harrowing Hell. “This generation will not pass away” thus refers, not only to the generation that first heard these words, but to every generation after it, including our present generation. Therefore, too, “heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

This also makes sense of the reference to spring, a recurring, natural event—individual death is, on the cosmic scale, a recurring, natural event. In part, Jesus is advising us not to fear it, any more than we fear spring’s coming.

And there is a reason why, although God the Father necessarily knows the time of our death, Jesus would not. If he knew when he was going to die, he would not fully share the human experience. His sacrifice on the cross would not then have been complete. Therefore, in order to be fully human as well as fully divine, his innate omniscience would have had to be veiled on this point. He could not have known in advance.

The stars, of course, will not literally fall from the sky. Jesus is describing a subjective experience near the point of death, not an objective, scientific event.

To be clear, there will be a literal end of the world. There has to be, logically and scientifically. But if you think about it, it is silly to concern ourselves with that. It’s a fool’s game. What difference does it make whether it comes in our generation or another, given that we are all going to die regardless, and the instant we do, we will have access to that time as well?

Accordingly, rightly, Jesus advises his followers not to concern themselves about it.

Nor should we.