Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

This vision puts aside some very disturbing interpretations of the Crucifixion that have had the effect of transforming an act of infinite mercy and grace into a piece of pure vindictiveness. Realist or positivist readings and the concessions made to them have much aggravated this effect. The wider the difference between Christ and God is taken to be, the more inevitably this invidious understanding will follow. The trouble here, and trouble of every kind, conceptually speaking, comes from the fact that Jesus was indeed a man, flesh and blood, living in mortal time. As a man he was as vulnerable as we all are.

If he was a carpenter, we may imagine that his hands were calloused and sinewed with the long practice of difficult skills, and that they would have shown the marks of injury long before his Crucifixion. Perhaps Calvin was right, that his appearance was much marred by poverty and hardship. This would have been true of generic humankind at any time in history. So also for the Son of Man, perhaps. Reluctance to accept this view of him can only arise from the difficulty of relinquishing our biases against those who have no comeliness that we should look at them, who are held in no estimation. Yet if God did become a human being, then it seems reasonable to suppose that the word “human” must be understood in the largest sense. Our ancient habit of celebrating the glory of God has tended to obscure the fact that, in the Incarnation, it was not glory he chose, except as it is inherent in all humanity. This again raises the question: What is man? Jesus’ role, according to the ancient hymn, is not only humble relative to his divine nature, but humble among men, death on a cross being the great fact and proof. To put the matter another way, in what human form can the divine be wholly present without violating the conditions of human existence? A very ordinary life, it would seem. Isn’t this carpenter the son of Joseph? Jesus’ humanity is indeed the stone of stumbling. If he is truly man and truly God, he is the profoundest praise of humankind the cosmos could utter — in the very fact that he could and would walk among us, feeling the heat of the day, and — bearing the suffering for our oldest crime — be rejected and killed by us, as the unvalued were and are. This is another meaning of the prayer “They know not what they do.”

On the other hand, if the irrefutable truth (irrefutable in terms of the testimony of the Gospels) that Jesus of Nazareth was a man is modified, as it often is, to mean that Jesus of Nazareth was only a man, then the chasm between God and humankind opens in the minds of the faithful despite the Incarnation and all that followed, and the great gesture is refused. The pagans of Mark’s time and ours might understandably reject the Gospel out of hand, given Jesus’ hunger and thirst, sorrow, suffering, death, and all the rest that meant he was one of us. The knife edge, belief and disbelief ready to be rationalized in exactly the same terms, is very much a subject of the Synoptics, although we have the Epistles to assure us that it was not their innovation. What would tip the balance toward accepting the truth of the Gospel? What would make the Incarnation with all it implies credible, even necessary? Reverence toward humankind. The hardest question Jesus puts to us is really whether we believe in Man.

Son of Adam, Son of God. How is this to be understood?

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” This is the bare, forked animal, unaccommodated man, the one creature that must find, contrive, create the minimal circumstances of existence, unhelped by instinct or by adaptation. This is humankind as anomalous presence on earth, singularly vulnerable to deprivation. Calvin remarks, charmingly, “It is strange that Christ should say, that he had not a foot of earth on which he could lay his head, while there were many godly and benevolent persons, who would willingly receive him into their houses.” He says Jesus is simply warning the scribe that he could not expect more than “a precarious subsistence.”

This is no doubt true, and it is also consistent with the idea that the saying is proverbial, therefore not precisely suited to Jesus’ situation. It does suit the situation of those who hunger and thirst and are naked and sick and in prison — many of us actually and all of us potentially — those with whom Jesus specifically identifies the Son of Man in the parable of the great judgment. Let us say, tentatively, that for Matthew the phrase is defined in this proverb.

Yet we are told twice in Matthew and once in Mark that human faith could move a mountain. These are sayings of Jesus, and who am I to venture the word “hyperbole”? A general regime of forgiveness, like the reign of love imagined by Chrysostom, could have unforeseen benefits, more epochal than the moving of mountains. It might revoke, or have precluded, the infernal possibilities we have created for ourselves, which would be a momentous transformation of our circumstance. There seem to be assurances here of a great unrealized power in humankind, not power of a Promethean sort but one aligned with the spirit of God, in faith and in forgiveness. Our sacred dignity and our extreme vulnerability are the basis of a profound ethical obligation to weigh our actions in the scales of grace, not by our corrupted notions of justice and retribution. This is consistent with the return of the Son of Man as apocalyptic judge in Matthew 25, a parable that brilliantly unifies the ordinary with the prophetic meaning of the phrase. I consider it consistent also with an intended transformation of humanity’s conception of itself, an intent to persuade us to believe in our ontological worthiness to be in relationship with God.

“Grace” is a word without synonyms, a concept without paraphrase. It might seem to have distinct meanings, aesthetic and theological, but these are aspects of one thing — an alleviation, whether of guilt, of self-interest, or of limitation. I have chosen the word “alleviation” with some care. It means the lifting or easing of a burdensome weight. I suppose the moon, when it raises the tide, can be said to alleviate the imponderably burdensome mass of the sea. This is an uncanny phenomenon certainly. I have begun to think of reality, strange and arbitrary as it is, as a kind of parable. Primordial water mantled a young planet — this is true though particulars are lacking. The sun that had made the planet was younger than the water it shone on — also true. In its new light the seas could slide and slap and shine. All very well. Then somehow — again no particulars — a moon appeared, cool and demure but with pull enough to countervail gravity and lift the sea above the constraints of its own vastnesses.

Like most parables this one might as well be called a metaphor. It is meant to suggest the feeling all of us have who try something difficult and find that, for a moment or two perhaps, we succeed beyond our aspirations. The character on the page speaks in her own voice, goes her own way. The paintbrush takes life in the painter’s hand, the violin plays itself. There is no honest answer to the inevitable questions: Where did that idea come from? How did you get that effect? Again, particulars are lacking. We have no language to describe the sense of a second order of reality that comes with these assertions of higher insights and will override even very settled intentions, when we are fortunate.

It might seem pedantic to allude to the classics, or simply arbitrary, though the old convention of invoking the muses is relevant here. The ancient Greek poet Pindar has come down to us only in the many odes he wrote to celebrate victories in athletic competitions, notably the Olympic games. His poems are themselves amazing achievements, so the scholars say, and are therefore basically untranslatable beyond crude approximation. Their subject is always the intervention of the divine in lifting an athlete beyond merely human strength or skill, an experience the poet could claim for himself, mutatis mutandis. Pindar says, “One born to prowess / May be whetted and stirred / To win huge glory / If a god be his helper.” This is another way of describing the kind of experience I am attempting to evoke, which is no doubt encountered across the range of human skill and effort. Our own athletes may deserve a more respectful hearing when they, like Pindar, attribute a magnificent throw or catch to a moment of divine favor. This second order of reality, the feeling that one’s own capacities are somehow transcended in one’s own person, seems to find no expression among us in terms that can be understood as descriptive rather than as merely pietistic. We have YouTube to measure the nation’s pleasure in a spectacular athletic instant or two. In Pindar’s ode, great acts of prowess exalted and sanctified experience on one particular ancient evening “lit / By the lovely light of the fair-faced moon.” And they might well do as much for us, since they can only mean that we are more than we are.