Turning The Tables

I thought Jesus might not have been all that angry when he did it, so I thought I might give it a try.

I’ve done this particular sort of inside-out thinking about God before— with the story of the king giving a wedding feast and no-one came, so he sent his servants out to get anybody they found on the street to come, and so the feast was full. But then the king saw a guest without a wedding robe, told him how disrespectful he was being, and had his servants bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness. I assigned the role of the robe-less guest to God. That makes us the king in the story, who goes out looking for people to invite to his party, and when God shows up dressed in nothing but the plain truth, we think we’ve been insulted, and tell God, “Get out of my house!”.

Last Sunday, the gospel text was about the baptism of fire and the ministry of division. If I try imagining the same inversion on this text, I get a picture of us dividing God up, three against two and two against three. If God is in us, and we are in God, and God is the medium within which we live and move and have our being, without which we cannot find our Way, then that means that every single bible story can be read this way.

It reminds me of the Jungian method of dream interpretation, in which the analytical dreamer is to imagine that every element in the dream represents some aspect of themselves. The whole dream-scape is a map of some territory, or perhaps some wilderness, within the dreamer’s innermost being.

It can be most helpful to read the bible in this way. It often gives some scriptural story a liminal and evocative quality that has the power to change our understanding in irrevocable ways.

So, what sort of inversion does last Sunday’s gospel invite us to imagine? If God is always within and without, then a doubled vision is required. We have no problem with the usual imagining of Jesus bringing a baptism to us, or speaking a truth that sets us one against the other. That way of seeing it has gotten itself cemented into history. But what about God being the one who is baptized in fire by us, and whose unity we tear into pieces—each in opposition to the other? That is an image with which we are not at all familiar! It turns out to be oddly orthodox, though— God as the innocent victim of our fear and hatred; God as the reverse-Engineer of sin.

It’s so not about us, and it is so much about God! Except, God is in Us and We are in God. Why does that make so much sense, and at the same time make absolutely no sense at all?

There is a tiny, dirty, flyspecked windowpane that it’s so easy to walk right past without even seeing it. Through that window, for just a fraction of a second, we can see God’s backside passing by. We can just barely get a glimpse of how it works— how God somehow imploded sin by deliberately becoming the Great Un-victim. This is how the cosmic aspect of Brer Rabbit convinced us to throw God in the Briar Patch. This is how God shatters into a thousand shards of grief and hopelessness and simultaneously reappears whole, laughing, at the very edge of our ability to comprehend. This is how God does the impossible— The One who cannot Die, dies— and thereby Death itself is rendered both false and foolish. This is why I love the phrase, “Trampling down death by death.” This is why Zen carries so many bouncing echoes of the Truth. This is why the Great Way of the old Taoists appears under our feet, and disappears as soon as we try to see around the next bend. This is why Tolkien’s poetry makes me cry.

So, what good does it do, to wrench our brains around like this? I wish that I could express it better, but all I can say about it is that it seems to open gaps in our consciousness for the wind of the Spirit to blow through— chinks in the walls of our complacency; rips in the fabric of our assumptions— and these breaches of our defenses give us glimpses of something we didn’t expect. In that moment we take a surprised breath and what we inhale is the grace and glory of God. Words are utterly inadequate in the moment of that breath, but still we feel compelled to try and say what it is that happened to us.

A quote from Christian Winan’s “That Bright Abyss” comes to mind, and will not leave— so I will leave it for you.

“To fling yourself into failure; to soar into the sadness by which you’ve lived; to die with neither defiance nor submission, but in some higher fusion of the two; to walk lost at the last into the arms of emptiness, crying the miracles of God.”