The Giver and the gospel, part 1
I
suggest that Lois Lowry’s novel The Giver[1] offers
a striking parallel to the Gospel-story[2]
in that it presents us with an individual who is faced with an intolerable
situation in the midst of their society, a situation which they feel compelled
to change, but which they can change only by becoming the “enemy” of their
society’s self-serving ideology. Indeed,
both the protagonist of The Giver and that of the Gospels must “betray”
their people in order to give them the hope of a future. In both cases, this betrayal is, in reality, a
courageous act of self-sacrificial love, a love that is unreciprocated due to
the inability of the members of their community to perceive
either the gravity of their situation or what it actually means to love – or,
for that matter, the hitherto undiscovered depths of human (and divine)
reality. This comparison of the two
protagonists helps us to understand Jesus as someone who had to make the choice
to embrace a – what he believed to be God-given – vocation to save his people
from their sins (cf. Mt. 1.21).
Jonas
is selected
As Lowry begins her story, Jonas[3] - a young
member of a (benignly sinister[4])
totalitarian society which has succeeded in eliminating suffering from their
strictly-regulated community – is “selected” as the next “Receiver of Memory”. In this dystopic “worker’s paradise”, all
motivation and rewards for competition have been done away with – to begin
with, all 12-year-olds are assigned a life-long profession by the “Council of
Elders”, whose decisions are based on an analysis of the character,
proclivities and talents of each child during their first twelve years of life.
This literally “colour-blind” society has
been engineered in such a way as to eliminate all sources of possible conflict,
namely, all differences and (perceived) inequalities; this state of “sameness” encompasses
all aspects of the community’s life, from clothing to climate. This pain-free community has managed to keep
even the memory of suffering at bay, by tasking the Receiver with the
responsibility to remember – and therefore, vicariously experience – the
history of the world. The Receiver is
consulted by the Elders only when they face a new dilemma (a rare occurrence)
and find themselves in need of the Receiver’s hard-won wisdom. As Jonas soon discovers, there was a time, “back
and back and back”, when life was experienced differently, and the Receiver is
the only member of the community who has any access to the experiences of all
the generations of humanity who lived prior to the advent of “sameness”. Everyone else exists in a timeless state in
which no one can recall a time when anything was any different, and no one can
imagine why (or how) things would ever change.
This futuristic community has an
experience of time that is reminiscent of that of most societies in the Ancient
Near East. Abram’s departure from
“Babylonian” civilization (cf. Gn. 11.31—12.3) – where time was understood to
be eternally cyclical, to chart a course into the unknown, all the while
conceiving of time in a linear manner – was a revolution.[5] Babylonia, like all other ancient cultures,
not only had a cyclical view of time, but also reasoned in circles – this is
the way things are because this is the way the gods ordained them to be because
things have always been this way because, obviously, this is how the gods
ordained them… When Abram left his “community”, he made it possible for the
future to be different, he broke out of the
eternal-imperial-ideological-vision-of-life-sanctioned-by-the-gods and opened
up his family to new possibilities. As
Jonas will come to discover, his community’s experience of time is the result
of the decision taken long ago by the Council of Elders to establish
“sameness”. As we will see, Jonas will
be faced with a choice similar to that of Abram.
The fragile “peace” of Jonas’ community is
maintained through social conventions which include a tight control of how
language is used,[6]
as well as the almost total absence of (intense or unpleasant) emotion
(including libido), due to the regular administration of “medication”. Anyone who is no longer useful to the
community – whether they be sickly infants, the elderly or uncooperative
citizens[7]
– is “released” to “elsewhere”. Also,
under certain circumstances, citizens may request release. Through meticulous social engineering, the
community has seemingly “created” a world in which “death will be no
more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more”[8]. This is the story of how Jonas, now
apprenticed to the current Receiver, discovers what his assigned “vocation”
entails, beginning with him absorbing the “received wisdom” of the Giver[9]
and learning what the community will expect of him once he is fully trained.[10]
Jesus
is selected
The story of Jonas’ society resembles the
story of Jesus and his community, i.e. the Jews of second-temple
Palestine. Far from being a simple
(never mind intentional) retelling of the Gospel-story, The Giver, I
suggest, helps us understand the Gospel “from Jesus’ perspective”, i.e. how he
understood his role vis-à-vis the people of God and how his understanding of
his messianic vocation was informed by his imaginative interpretation of the
Scriptures.[11] Indeed, the Evangelists tell the story of
Jesus as (a replay of) the story of Israel. Moses and David, along with all the
other biblical characters, were part of the family that God had promised to
give to Abram, the nation that would be the agent of God’s purposes in the
world. Mark’s book is the “Gospel” that Yahweh has finally kept
the promises he made to his people throughout the two millennia which
had passed since the call of Abram. Mark
begins his Gospel by quoting the prophet Isaiah (40.3) who had described “a
voice crying out in the wilderness” and then introduces us to John the
Baptizer who appears “in the wilderness” (1.3-4; cf.
1.12-13). Any Jewish reader would immediately associate John’s
activity with that of Moses. Referring to “the wilderness” evokes a whole
series of events: Yahweh’s great act of liberation when he freed his people
from slavery to a pagan empire, his covenant with Israel, and the giving of the
Law at Mt. Sinai (cf. Ex. 19.1-6). Mark
describes John as “baptizing” people in the Jordan
River (1.5). After their 40-year journey across the desert, the
Israelites arrived at the banks of the Jordan, the final obstacle between them
and their promised home. So, by plunging people in the Jordan “in the
wilderness”, John was evoking the entire history of the people of God from the
time of the Exodus until his own day. Mark, for his part, is placing
the story of Jesus within the overarching story of Israel, i.e. the story of
Yahweh and his people.
This is the moment when Jesus is
“selected” as Israel’s Messiah, i.e. as the guardian and “actualizer” of his
community’s destiny. When John baptizes
Jesus, a divine voice acclaims Jesus as “my Son” (Mk. 1.9-11). This is another scriptural quotation (Ps. 2.7)
and evokes God’s promises to David of an eternal royal dynasty (cf. 2 Sam.
7.1-14) as well as the understanding that the “one anointed to be king” was
Yahweh’s “son”. Following his selection,
Jesus spends 40 days (of course) alone in the desert (cf. Mt. 4.1-11), during
which time he must decide how he will make Israel’s dream of a new world become
a reality (i.e. how he will establish the “kingdom of God”: Mk. 1.12-15). Jesus must decide how he will wield his royal
authority. There were several options
available – should he acquiesce to the traditional expectations of the Messiah
and seek to overwhelm Israel’s enemies, thereby protecting the ancestral
traditions so as to safeguard the integrity and purity of the people of God
(i.e. adopt a policy of “Israel first”)?
Or should he re-examine his community’s story and imagine an ending that
no one had yet considered? The facts
were plain – every time the people of God had attempted to regain their long-lost
freedom from empire through violence or political machinations, the story had always
ended the same way[12],
i.e. with the imperial foe defeating and/or dominating them. How to break the cycle? How to establish a kingdom of shalom?
[1] Boston & New York:
Clarion Books, 1993.
[2] Of course, the story is
(perhaps, primarily?) a commentary on our present cultural reality, its use of
technology and the pervasive “immanence” of secularism (and one of its possible
outcomes), but for the purposes of this assignment, I draw parallels between it
and the story of Jesus. Then again, as
will be hinted at in this analysis, The Giver evokes universal and
“trans-historical” aspects of human nature.
One “mythic” story that The Giver reminds me of is the Tower of
Babel. Indeed, The Giver is a
very Jewish story as are, so it happens, the NT Gospels!
[3] An Anglicisation of the
Greek form of “Jonah”; cf. KJV of Mt. 12.39-41 (when Jesus refers to the “sign
of Jonas”).
[4] Cf. Hannah Arendt’s
“the banality of evil”.
[5] Cf. Cahill, Thomas, The
Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads changed the way Everyone Thinks
and Feels, New York: Doubleday, 1998, pp. 53-90.
[6] “In a positivistic
society, language is conventionally understood simply as descriptive of what
is. When language only describes what
is, it inevitably becomes conservative.
It tends to become ideological, giving permanence to the way things
presently are. But language…can be
evocative and creative, calling into being things that do not exist. Such language is the way of promise and
hope. And because such speech calls into
existence things that do not exist, it is dangerous and subversive speech. It stands characteristically over against
things as they are”: Brueggemann, Walter, Genesis, Atlanta: John Knox,
1982, p. 102.
[7] There is a
“three-strikes-and-you’re-out” policy.
[8] Rev. 21.4; as we will
see, the community has not eliminated death, but has rather taken complete
control of who dies when and how. “For
the Old Testament authors, existence beyond the grave can be secured
only…through the memory of the clan or tribe…”: Harrisville, Roy A. Fracture:
The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers,
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006, p. 19. In
Jonas’ community, the memory of those who have been “released” is not
preserved, and this, in the interest of avoiding prolonged grief; rather, a
child lost to a tragic accident can be “replaced” by another child who bears
the same name. In the community, an
individual qua individual only “exists” while they are playing the role
the community has assigned them. There
are ceremonies to celebrate the release of the elderly, which resemble
retirement parties more than anything else; they are “funerals without
grief”. Perhaps this is Lowry’s way of
critiquing the trend to hold “Celebrations of Life” instead of traditional
rituals associated with the mourning/burial of the dead. Then again, what “celebrations of life” and
“celebrations of release” have in common is a lack of any religious interpretation
of the “passing” of the deceased. Cf. W.
Brueggemann’s remarks: “The prophetic tasks of the church are to tell the truth
in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial,
and express hope in a society that lives in despair”: https://eerdword.com/three-urgent-prophetic-tasks-walter-brueggemann-on-reality-grief-hope/ (accessed December 15,
2024).
[9] Once the Receiver is
assigned an apprentice, they become “the Giver” (of memories).
[10] Blake’s
“Jerusalem is a work of prophetic imagination, and as such it dares to
peer over the event-horizon, it takes us further than we have actually
travelled. Looking around at our society
now, in the midst of an ecological crisis brought on by our polluting
industries and gross consumerism, in the midst of a mental health crisis
brought on by our cold, alienating philosophies, and a way of life that amounts
to institutionalised anomie, in the midst of a moral crisis that sees us exploiting
one another economically, sexually, and in almost every other way, we seem
still to be in that part of the prophecy in which ‘the cruel works of many
wheels’ grind on, in which the ‘cogs tyrannic move each other by compulsion’
not by love, in which our own spiritual lives are still ‘In the Dungeons of
Babylon, cut with flints’, ‘defacing our own lineaments with bitter blows’”:
Guite, Malcolm, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God,
Baltimore: Square Halo Books, 2021, p. 104; cf. Jesse Zink refers to our current
global reality as one of “polycrisis”, a term first coined in the 1970s: Faithful,
Creative, Hopeful: Fifteen Theses for Christians in a Crisis-Shaped World,
New York: Church Publishing, 2024, pp. viii-ix.
[11] In case there was any
doubt, this does not mean that Jesus walked around with his Bible, ticking off
prophecies one-by-one as he fulfilled them… I believe The Giver can help
us acquire a deeper appreciation for the (compelling) humanity of Jesus, as
someone who had to imaginatively interpret his tradition and risk everything in
order to act upon his radical (re)interpretation. Indeed, it seems to me that it was precisely
his (courageous) imagination that enabled Jesus to both accept his God-given
mission as Messiah and to carry it out in the way that he did. Also, an aspect of Jesus’ death that is not
often factored into Christian “theories of the atonement” is the irreducibly political
nature of the cross; indeed, I would say that Jesus’ death was the result of a
calculated (what we would call) political stratagem on his part. Of course, there was absolutely no difference
between “religion, theology” and “politics” in the ancient world; they were of
a piece, constitutive of a seamless ideological-social order. How could we have missed the ad nauseum
references, in the Hebrew Bible, to the kingdom of God as being, not “heaven,
eternity” but rather Yahweh’s answer to pagan empire? Cf. e.g. Daniel chapters 2 & 7.
[12] Judas the Galilean had
led a revolt against Rome while Jesus was a teenager, leading to the
destruction of the city of Sepphoris, situated on the shore of the Lake of
Gennesaret, not far from the village of Nazareth: cf. Ac. 5.36-37. The Maccabees (the family of Judas Maccabeus,
i.e. “the hammer”), who had risen up and defeated the Seleucids in the 2nd
century B.C. were widely regarded as heroes of zealous “faith under fire” at
the time of Jesus. Internal squabbles in
the Hasmonean dynasty, which had been founded in the wake of the Maccabean
victory, had led to the annexation of Judea by Rome in the year 63. The everlasting kingdom of justice and peace
promised by, e.g. Daniel, never seemed to arrive…
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