Thinking about Jesus: Report from a Work in Progress

This piece was originally published in the Cabrini Communicator.

When I started college, I ran into three kinds of people who talked to me about Jesus. One was David White, a Quaker with strong interests in Asian philosophy. He had done serious work on Indian systems of thought and mental discipline. He seemed to have a broad understanding of  what human life was about, what to do next, how to be unobviously good – rooted in old and converging traditions from three continents. His comment about Jesus: “Whatever he is, he is not a philosopher.”

A second influence came from a couple of competent New Testament scholars, who taught me what it is to be careful in interpreting a text. They made it clear that the New Testament scholarship enterprise was one honking beautiful thing, in which the research tools were well developed, the questions refined and processed by lots of very good minds. It seemed to me unlikely that I would, very soon, be able to make any contribution to this enterprise, and it seemed likely that a lifework would result in a footnote to a footnote somewhere.

The third influence came from some folks I might never have met, except that they seemed to be the only people around not mostly into sex, drugs, and rock and roll – none of which I was ready for, my freshman year at Macalester. This was the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical group that put weight on a personal relationship with Jesus initiated in a moment of conversion, fueled by feelings derived heavily from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Their message was that an intimate understanding of Jesus was: (1) what I needed; (2) all I needed; and (3) pretty easy to get, if I just wanted it enough.

This was the Protestant counterpart to what I had run into from Catholicism in my youth: the idea that there was some well understood way to salvation enshrined in the Vatican, passed out through mysterious spiritual and educational conduits to priests and nuns, and available in limited quantities to the spiritually dense people in the pews, who will do fine, the way pets do fine, if they were obedient, keep themselves clean, remember their place, and take in as much water as their little water glasses can hold.

These messages all converged to say: “Whatever you do, don’t think about Jesus.” The evangelicals said that the whole truth was simple, and not to be found by thinking. My home-town Catholics said the whole truth was complicated, secured in the monopoly pockets of semi-Martians, in the various holy orders. The historians said it was complicated, and that, to the extent it could be covered, they had it covered. And my old friend David White said that, whatever was there, it wasn’t interesting in the way philosophers were interesting – not a line of thought to be retraced.

The Catholic liberals I met later didn’t dispute the consensus. They understood Jesus as a mid-point in a line of anti-oppression prophets culminating in Karl Marx: the point is not to understand the world but to change it.  Jesus’ message is simple, has to be simple, as a foundation for simple people’s action against oppression.

Recently, I have had a chance to think a few hours a day, and I find myself wanting to think about Jesus, even though, for these various reasons, I’m not supposed to. It started out with noticing something. Dominic Crossan and his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar have emphasized that, with the sayings and stories of Jesus, there is usually good reason to believe that the moral was added later, that the oldest bit is a story or observation without much commentary. Looking over the list of these stripped down sayings and stories, I was struck with their similarity to remarks of early philosophers from whom we also have fragments and stories, without significant context. In particular, his stuff reminded me a lot of  Heraclitus, of Marcus Aurelius, and of the collection of paradoxes that constitutes the skeptical manuals of Sextus Empiricus.

Heraclitus is best known for a couple of sayings: ‘You can’t step in the same river twice,’ and ‘The upward and the downward way are one.’ These sayings are typically philosophical, so it is perhaps useful to look closely at them. The first says that something which we generally take as simple and uncontroversial is in fact plausibly seen as multiple and complex: as KFAI is a different station every hour, the Mississippi is a different river every second. New stuff comes in; old stuff goes out. What we call a thing is really a flow, a movement, an action. (Heracleitus thought about candle flames the same way.) Obviously, once one has grasped this fact, the questions press in: ‘How much other stuff that we think of as one is really also many?,’ and ‘Does it make some important difference if we start noticing the manyness in onenesses?’

The other remark goes in the opposite direction. Anybody who has ever pedaled a bike up to the youth hostel at the top of the hill in the evening, then glided down in the morning, can testify that the upward and the downward way are as different as any two things in human experience. Yet, we know, it’s the same road, the same stones, exactly. Two things that we take to be different can be reasonably seen as the same. Again, this presses the questions, ‘What else is like this?’ and ‘Does this singleness in doubleness matter?’

Philosophers love this kind of thing. They collect paradoxes and double-meanings and mistakes the way bug collectors collect bugs. For philosophers, this is a really intense and fairly autonomous interest. It doesn’t necessarily have to go anyplace or mean anything. More practical people want to know: what use is this? Can I make it part of my speech to my kids about why not to do drugs or to the sales team about approaching difficult clients, or can I incorporate it into a letter to the editor on the deceptive slowness of climate change? Where’s the sermon? Where’s the pep talk? Where’s the point? But philosophers find puzzles to be fun and revealing for their own sake, and they are slow to make messages out of them. They want to understand, or at least appreciate, human beings’ relationship to the world, what happens when people try to know the world or name the world, the exact ways that reality keeps slipping out of our grasp.

Some of what Jesus says fits Heracleitus’ models. The seeds all go to the same place; the seeds go to very different places.  The old woman gave the temple much less than the rich man gave; both gave huge amounts. Other sayings challenge  the common sense reading of a situation. The place next to the host is the best place at the banquet, is the worst place at the banquet (depending on what happens next). It is smart to build new barns after a good harvest; it is stupid to waste time building new barns, whatever the harvest.  One can bring most of the sayings of Jesus into some family of paradox and puzzle, casting them as some kind of warning that one’s initial way of thinking is not the only way of thinking, that human and natural reality resist our categories, play games with our intuitions, will not stay still.

Of course, in the editorial context of the gospels, all of these sayings get a moral point, and those points are generally what anyone sane would call: good advice. But how do we understand their earliest context? Do we really want to understand Jesus as the sort of person who was always moralizing, always admonishing, always on some kind of personal quest for justice? He might have been that way. We know good people who are that way. But it is also imaginable that lots of the stories we read as moral parables might have been originally introduced this way: “Isn’t it strange that…?” or “I just noticed that…” or “Doesn’t it bother anybody that…?” Maybe the philosophy comes first, and the heart follows.

We know that mathematical and philosophic prodigies (essentially, people obsessed with understanding relationships and structures) spring up in the strangest places, sometimes make enormous progress very early in their lives. Jesus might have been one of those.

Such a reading would not upend theology. It would shift our understanding of certain sayings and stories, interacting with every other line of thought we have available about the gospels.

I want to continue trying to work out this idea of Jesus as philosopher. I think it might have something to it. It matters to me because I am a philosopher, and it would be helpful to me to have that as a point of contact with Jesus. The more important point is that any of our experiences of ways of being human is relevant to our reading of sacred texts. People are complicated, and understanding any person is a matter of seeing many layers interacting. It is a life-long pursuit.

We can’t let ourselves get sucked into the idea that the story has to be simple, because we need answers, now, immediately, about everything important. To that, the universe says, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

On Reading the Parables of Jesus

A Progress Report: On Reading the Parables of Jesus

If I were picking up the Bible and reading around in the summer parables - the prodigal son, the unjust steward, the good Samaritan, the wedding feast, the narrow gate – I would likely make some connections to my life and then think about them for a while, take it away to my den like found bones. So, for example, I read about the farmer who hatches a plan to secure his future by building new barns for a large harvest. He is surprised when he dies before the barns are finished. Reading that, I say: ‘Yes, I am always looking ahead, making plans on the assumption of extra life. Clearly, if I knew I was going to die soon, lots of that activity would seem pointless, and I would do other things: visit my friends, spend time with my dog.’ The story of the farmer who builds new barns reminds me of a way of thinking that is very familiar to me, the grab for security and safety. It makes me look at my own first impulse in a critical way. (I might go home and pet the dog.)

Reading the gospels in Word Team is different from reading them by myself. The Word Team gets so many meanings out of the text. We go around in a circle, giving our first responses; usually, every person has something different. This information about how the story will be heard is very useful for preaching; one gets a feel for the possible mindsets of this audience. One’s question as a preacher is: how do I say something helpful to people who begin with all these interpretations, making all these connections to issues in their lives?

Stepping back from the process, remembering how it goes, week after week, I want to ask, “So, what is the real point of any particular story?” The story may provoke various thoughts, even obviously helpful and new thoughts, but are they anywhere near to what Jesus had in mind?

In some moods, I dismiss this question. The parables provoke thought. Thought is good. End of story.

But wouldn’t it be a shame if I missed the point?

So I think about what limits can be put on readings, how to winnow down the mass of possible ways of thinking. One might look at the moral as stated in the passage. Usually, after Jesus tells a story, he goes on to explain it to the disciples, or he draws the moral from it. This stuff is often taken by scholars to be later than the parable itself – an attempt by editors to apply the tradition they have received to the needs of a particular community. (The work of the Jesus Seminar is very important in separating the layers of additions from the basic texts.) This commentary is not trivial material. It articulates one community’s experience, a point that some community has found valuable. It is at least a starting point for understanding the text. But any explicit moral is usually just one more interpretation - not authoritative advice on how to read the story.

One might try to use historical scholarship to limit meanings. One knows that the First Century was different from the Twenty First Century, that thoughts are available to us now that would have been just impossible then, and also that the First Century had family structures, economic realities, community relationships assumed as background that we would find very strange. So, one has some hope that one can eliminate readings that rest on realities of our time and search out readings that would have been natural in Jesus’ time.

This is important work. It has limits. History at a distance of two thousand years can identify, from sketchy evidence, general patterns of life. We know, however, that such an account, in our own time, would miss many variations on themes and exceptions to rules.  Historians in the future may know what laws were on the books but not necessarily how they were applied or enforced. They may get pictures of the ideal family, the normative career, the People Magazine version of success, but not necessarily a sense of the compromises and resignations and creative adaptations that intelligent people made to those ideals and norms and versions. If one becomes conscious of what an historian even two hundred years from now would miss about our own lives and time, the texture that doesn’t get captured in documents and pronouncements, one gets a sense of the limits of historical context reading as a guide to scriptural interpretation.

This general worry about history is complicated by the fact that Jesus lived at a cultural crossroads, at a time of social change. We might be inclined to think of his teachings as arising in a sleepy village, from the experiences of a simple carpenter, but the sleepy village is a mile away from a large, energetic Roman city, Sepphoris, with huge building projects that might well have lured craftsmen from the whole region. In such a city, one might encounter an astonishing range of teachings and life experiences – including Greek philosophic teachings.

Then there is the problem of genius. Ask a music historian what kind of music a composer born in 1756 might have produced, and the historian will be able to say a lot with certainty, based on what such a person would have heard, what lines of development were emerging, what sorts of patronage were available in the late 18^th Century. But the historian could not predict Mozart, could not predict what a mind fixed constantly on music from early childhood might come up with. So, if we think of Jesus as a person obsessed with certain relationships and problems from very early on, working something out steadily over time, we have to admit that the things he could have come up with may not be well explained by his context.

Is theology relevant? Some people in the early church understood Jesus to be a cosmic principle, equal to God, the sole mediator between humanity and God. Does the question, “What would a person with that status say?” give us any help in reading the gospels? I can’t see how it could. If Jesus was very different from other human beings, as a god among mortals is different, that just eliminates any possible platform for interpretation. We can’t say how a mind like that might think. So my working hypothesis is that, if this grand picture of the ultimate significance of Jesus has truth to it, whatever Jesus became arose out of an understandable human experience. It is not impossible that the meaning of a life might be larger than the person living it can understand. But, so far as I can see, if one attributes god-like consciousness to the author of the parables, one simply gives up on the project of discovering what they meant. Any “good” reading is as likely as any other. One might be forced to come to this conclusion, at the end of the day, but it is a shame to give up too early on the idea that these stories might teach us something radically new, if we pay the right kind of attention.

How do we proceed?

One way I begin is to look for a minimal content to the stories, a set of ideas that come up over and over and that might be the basic insight, out of which various applications arise. I want to ask: what did Jesus tend to notice and think about? He tells a lot of stories, for example, that show how different perspectives change one’s way of seeing. A coin in the box of ten is just one tenth of one’s wealth. But a lost coin becomes an obsession. One thinks about it to the exclusion of everything else. Building a new barn seems like a great idea when one is healthy and looking forward to many years of prosperity. If one learns one is going to die very soon, it suddenly seems like a totally crazy project. The steward who is fired from his job comes to view business practices that would have seemed bizarre to him the day before the firing as just the right way to secure his future. If one pauses to consider what this structure means before rushing on to the next, moral thought, one is left with a general attitude toward life: whatever you value or pursue or take to be obvious, there’s likely a perspective from which that is not valuable, not a good project, obviously false.  One can imagine Jesus observing rigid commitments and noticing that they can be dissolved by a simple shift in perspective.

I suspect that, whatever moral or social-critical direction Jesus’ teaching eventually takes, it begins its life as a cluster of mental habits and approaches, a way of seeing through things.

Here is another possible member of this cluster. Think about that story of the feast where someone sees a place next to the host and runs to grab it. That is a natural move. One wants honor. One goes for the best place. But the natural move, the first thing that occurs to a person, risks disgrace, in certain very likely circumstances: the host is saving that place for a distinguished friend. One can add the moral point: don’t be concerned about honor, practice humility, stuff like that. But, again, if one pauses just before the moral point, there is a general habit of mind evident here: be suspicious of the direct approach, of your first impulse, of what comes naturally. Again, one can imagine Jesus watching people go astray in that way and gathering stories.

Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral economist, talks about two systems of judgment, one very fast and tending to simplify choices, the other much slower but also likelier to get it right. He shows with some very elegant experiments that people are often ruled by a set of decision standards that they would never endorse if they really looked at them. We are animals who once had to make some decisions very quickly, and we carry with us intuitive mechanisms that often don’t serve us very well. So, perhaps like Jesus, Kahneman recommends a habit of mind that tries to get some distance from first impressions and first impulses.

I think about the recommendation that one choose the narrow gate. When one is coming back from the State Fair, after the grandstand show, one is inclined to take the freeway home. One imagines all those lanes, no stoplights, a direct route. One might then pause a minute and reflect that tens of thousands of people are having that same thought and heading in the same direction, and choose instead to take the back road. (See A Beautiful Mind for an economic version of this idea.)

My project over the last couple of years has been to identify a way of thinking and seeing underlying different stories and sayings in the gospels. It seems to me likely that whatever moral and social revolution the gospels contain is somehow founded on a new way of seeing, one that breaks the hold of established conventions and assumptions.

I have been influenced in the last few years by the hopeful story Norman Doidge tells in his books, The Brain that Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing, both introductions to the science of neuroplasticity - the idea that basic ways of processing experience can be rewired by conscious effort, and that there is a clear direction toward health and human connection that provides a rationale for such rewiring efforts. These books, which remind me of the New Testament in their spirit, raise an important question for me: did Jesus discover a new kind of mind, and was his fundamental teaching – at some point in his career - a recommendation of that mind?

One of our Easter readings, Ezekiel 36, puts these words in the mouth of a very frustrated God, a God at his wit’s end: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” Every year, this reading alarms me. I think of bio-engineering, and of all the projects dictators have undertaken to remake their people into the right sort. Mao and his cultural revolution come to mind.  And yet reform has to be something more than new beliefs, a new enthusiasm. People who are still the old person just keep making their old mistakes in new ways. (The picture of Peter in the gospels makes that point over and over.) Is it possible that Jesus, at some stage in his career, is offering people a set of exercises to build a new mind, out of which new relations and a new society might emerge?

That’s what I’m working on. More later.