Saturday, October 16, 2004
(3:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Love and History
I don't understand what love is. Sometimes I wonder if I've ever actually loved anyone. I've said the words before, when the situation demanded it, and I'm sure I meant something by it. I've said it too soon before, then been silenced by my actions or my sense of narcissistic woundedness -- made to wonder if the phrase "I love you" has anything more than an internal function for me, a way of putting my house in order.I've listened to countless Christian songs -- just last night, driving down from Chicago, Monica put in an old "Jesus music" CD that she loved from her childhood, and I couldn't listen after a certain point. I couldn't understand how a "relationship" with a non-present being could work in the way it worked in those songs. The way they talk about it has always sounded to me like the relationship between a man and a woman, as crassly parodied in the South Park episode where Cartman starts a Christian band. There is a certain justification -- marriage imagery plays a significant role in both the Old and New Testament. In our time, marriage as an institution is continually breaking down while establishing ever-greater hegemony -- "relationships" are all, to some degree, marriage in miniature, a broken parody of marriage, just as serial marriage becomes a broken parody of marriage. We could ask whether this has ever not been the case, whether marriage has ever functioned as it was supposed to -- or whether its breakdown is the point, the point that makes it such an irresistable image for the scriptural writers.
Although a relationship with God may be conceived as a "connection to eternity" or some other such obscurantism, in scripture it is always a specific, historically mediated relationship. Even in Romans, that great "theological treatise" of the New Testament, the argument is based on a particular history -- the gospel has its sense precisely in a world divided into Jew and Gentile, for example. The history in question is always a broken history, and if we take the Christian option, that history culminates in the story of Jesus Christ. For the writers of the New Testament, history was over when Jesus died on the cross; the end of history comes in the middle. Christ "made peace through the blood of his cross," by "becoming sin for us" -- and what does it mean that he was "made sin"? Did some kind of metaphysical transaction take place in which God shifted sin from the account of humanity to the account of Jesus? Was the crucifixion an accounting trick, a way of massaging the numbers? Or does Jesus rather become sin by embodying the human rejection of God? Is Jesus God in any sense other than being rejected by all of humanity -- the people of promise together with the indifferent "nations," the elites together with the faceless mob?
Jesus "became sin" by bringing to its climax the human rejection of God. One could think of it in terms of the sacrifice of Isaac -- what if, at the very moment when Jesus was definitively rejected, placed beyond the pale of humanity and handed over to the most shameful punishment yet devised, God had intervened, this time offering up humanity itself as the replacement lamb? This is a point that people don't seem to understand: God would have been within his rights to destroy the world once Jesus was rejected. Jesus could have gone on living -- we can put it parallel to the situation of Moses in the case of the Golden Calf, where God offers to destroy Israel and start a new people from Moses. He does not do so, however. He submits to death, and he endorses this story by raising Jesus of Nazareth, by endorsing Jesus of Nazareth as the embodiment of human rejection of God -- and the new people he founds on Jesus Christ is exactly the same broken world that has rejected him. Adam and Christ are empirically identical, but the relationship is new because God has died -- for his sins.
Why did God let it get to such a point where justice was impossible to practice? How could he let it get so bad? Why did the law (whether of Moses or of Rome) fail so miserably to produce justice or even moderately restrain injustice? In the end, whose fault is it that sensible people sensibly condemned Jesus of Nazareth to death as a threat to everything that made human life even moderately bearable? How could we ever forgive God for the tedious procession of violence and death that we call human history? We couldn't. No one could possibly forgive God in good conscience -- and if God is this insane preacher with his impossible ethic, then we'll simply have to do without God. By raising Jesus from the dead, God says yes to that concrete, empirical humanity who rejected him on the basis of particular, justified grievances -- God says yes not only to the personal history of Jesus, but to the totality of human history that led up to him and that will stem from him.
We call that "love." The Bible does, at least. "For God so loved the world..." -- not just the abstract idea of the world, but the actual history that had actually played out -- not the stereotypical love of a woman for what the man "could be," the love of potential that has never yet been achieved, but love of this world, this world in which Tiberius Caesar declared a census over the entire Roman world, in which a particular city-state had achieved dominance of the entire known world, in which a particular strange ethnic group had a particular relationship with God mediated through specific kings and temple buildings and wars and exiles -- this particular world in which George W. Bush is president of the United States, which has itself extended its dominance over most of the globe, in which 30,000 children die of hunger every day (particular, specific children with specific parents and brothers and sisters and friends and maybe even pets, who have perhaps learned to count or to recite the alphabet in their particular language or perhaps not), in which journalists and aid workers with specific histories are beheaded, in which certainly a great deal of good occurs, but in which the balance is by far on the side of evil, specific goods and specific evils that perhaps could have been otherwise (especially if watched over by an omnipotent God!) but weren't, that happened in this one particular way to produce the mass grave that we call the planet earth -- history, not biological necessity, producing this mass grave, even if it could have been the case that every person died of "old age," specific wrongs, specific sins of omission or comission, specific decisions to deprive others or to build up a reserve at others' expense, specific people whom you can look in the face, whom you perhaps do, and to whom you say, "Too fucking bad!" We can and do say that all the time. I do, every time I walk down the street or sit at home. Too. Fucking. Bad. You need my help? Well, I've got my own problems. You don't have any money? Well, I've got barely enough. You're suffering? Well, I've suffered too. Different sufferings, perhaps lesser sufferings -- certainly never anything like starving to death, but suffering nonetheless, in this world full to overflowing with suffering, with people crying out, where even the people with "everything" are crying out, every second of every day. This is the world God so loved, this one and no other, the only game in town.
This world rejects God, and rightly so. And God admits his failing by finally, at long last, exercising his power over death -- perhaps too late. One could ask where was Abel's resurrection, where was Samuel's, or Moses's, or where was that starving child's resurrection, the resurrection of that leper who was never able to experience the simple joys we all expect? Why this particular guy, here and now? Why choose him? Because history had to end somewhere. Living in this body of death, the only possible hope is finally for it to be over with, and in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ -- for the New Testament authors, if not for us -- it is over, at long last, perhaps a little too late, "in the fullness of time."
Is that convincing at all? We might want to ask ourselves that question. Is that love? Does love always come when it seems to be too late to change anything, when things are too far gone and the problems are no longer fixable? Is love the tacit agreement between the two partners that finally, everything can be put out on the table, every grievance, every sin of omission or comission, every intractable problem -- and somehow, impossibly, it will all be okay, the relationship will endure, will even be renewed? Is love the decision that nevertheless, it will not finally be over with?
Who could make such a decision? Who could endure it?