The Giver & the gospel, part 2
As Jonas “receives” more and more memories
from the Giver,[1]
he begins to question the justice of the Elders’ decision (“back and back and
back”) to implement “sameness” in the community. It must be said – one of the reasons why
Jonas was selected to be the next Receiver was that he is endowed with the “Capacity
to see Beyond”, an ability that was signaled from his birth by his pale
eyes, which distinguish him from almost every other member of the
community, all of whom have dark eyes.
This “capacity” manifested itself, in Jonas’ case, by his ability to
perceive colour – a colour, as he would later discover, called “red”. During the Ceremony of Twelve, when he was
selected, Jonas had noticed that the Receiver-become-Giver also had pale eyes,
as does someone else in Jonas’ life.[2]
Jonas’ father is a Nurturer, responsible
for caring for “newchildren” until such time as they are assigned to a family
unit. Typically, any newchild that fails
to attain a certain weight within a prescribed period is “released”. One such child had endeared himself to Jonas’
father, and on his recommendation, had been granted a “grace period” to allow
the child to attain the required weight; the pale-eyed child is called Gabriel,
and he is brought home to share life with Jonas, his parents and his younger
sister Lily. As time goes by, Jonas
discovers that he is able to give memories to “Gabe”, as the Giver does with
him. Through his reception of memories,
Jonas has learned what it is “to love”; consequently, he comes to understand
that he loves Gabe dearly. When Jonas
learns, firstly (and to his horror), that “release” from the community means to
be killed (i.e. “euthanized”), and secondly, that Gabe is slated for release
due to his persistent failure to attain the community’s development standards,
Jonas decides that he has no choice but to devise a plan to contravene the
rules, kidnap Gabe and leave the community.
It is striking to see that for Jonas, it is almost instinctual that for
him to love someone means that he will do whatever it takes, no matter the
danger or the cost to himself, to protect his beloved. Things simply cannot continue as they
are; Gabe, who has the Capacity to see Beyond, represents the only desirable
future for the community. Gabriel
must live! Like Abram, Jonas
prepares to leave everything he knows behind and head off into the unknown.
Choose
your own ending: Jesus
Jesus inherited a two-millennia-long
tradition from his family and his wider community. In Jesus’ day, there were different groups
within Judaism, each enamored of a vision of what the kingdom of God would look
like and how it would become a reality (and what they could do to hasten its
arrival). The values of the Jewish
community had been codified by the Pharisees (one such group) into a system of
strict rules that ensured faithfulness to Yahweh and promised eventual deliverance
for the people (i.e. those who adopted their vision of the kingdom), if only
they could perfectly embody the justice of the Law and its associated ritual
purity. However, Jesus detected a “deeper
logic” to the tradition than that promulgated by the Pharisees. Jesus was convinced that the privatized piety
(hoping to result in a public Davidic regime) promoted by the doctors of the
Law was wrong-headed, and that the Law was truly honoured in the love of
God, neighbour…and enemy (cf. Mk. 12.28-31; Mt. 5.43-48)! This was a love that threw caution – including
the careful curating of one’s reputation – to the wind. Things had to change, but how could Jesus
effect such a radical healing of the people’s blindness (cf. Mk.
4.11-12; Is. 6.9-10)? Could they somehow
learn to see things his (i.e. God’s) way?[3]
With gradually mounting horror, accompanied
by ever more fiery rhetoric, Jesus came to understand that the people of God,
far from pleasing Yahweh with their diverse stratagems to usher in his kingdom,
actually had a sentence of death hanging over them. With keen prophetic insight, Jesus saw that
he was living in a time akin to that of Jeremiah, and that what the coming
years held for his people was not a renewal of the (conventionally understood)
Davidic dynasty, but rather a disaster beyond which there was scant hope of a
future for the covenant people of Yahweh.
As had been the case at the time of Jeremiah, Jesus perceived that the
all-encompassing “sin” of the people of God in his day consisted of an
idolatrous nationalism, which, when carried to its logical (and ideological)
conclusion, would inevitably result, not in the supremacy of the nation of
Israel, but rather in its complete and utter destruction.[4] When Jeremiah had encouraged his 6th-century
contemporaries to cooperate with the Babylonians, he had been branded a
traitor. What was Jesus to do? How to be faithful to his (heavenly) Father’s
covenant and call? How to accomplish his
messianic mission? What was to be
done? What were the demands of love?
Ever more horrified, Jesus came to what he
perceived to be the inexorable conclusion – he would have to embody both
the covenant-faithfulness of the God of Israel and that of Yahweh’s
(hard-hearted, stiff-necked) people. He
would have to “take responsibility for God”[5]
and for Israel both and therefore bind Yahweh and his people together
once-and-for-all. He would be the
one to do it. He would stand in the
place of the people of God and would be accused of both infidelity to Yahweh and
rebellion against Rome[6];
he would absorb the impending divine judgment.
He would stand in the place of Yahweh and be mocked as an impotent
imposter, a sad excuse for a king[7],
never mind a god. He would love his
neighbours/enemies to the utmost – he would be suspended between a faithful God
and an adulterous people and his act of sacrificial love would reconcile this
nation to the God she had always wrestled with and against whose covenantal
yoke she had incessantly bucked (cf. Gn. 32.28; Jer. 5.5). As Jeremiah had discouraged his
contemporaries from rebelling against Babylon (so as to prevent the destruction
of Jerusalem), so Jesus exhorted his oppressed countrymen to love the Romans,
and not to stage violent (and futile) insurrections against them. Jesus – who had undoubtedly grown up hearing
the book of Jeremiah read in the synagogue – knew all too well what the outcome
of a generalized revolt would be.[8]
[1] And therefore,
continues to experience more and more pain.
The community demonstrates “collective narcissism” in the sense that
they have decided to protect themselves against any and all forms of suffering. The community has solved “the problem of
pain”! And yet, there is no reference to
any “transcendent entity” to whom the citizens could express their gratitude
for their pain-free existence. And yet,
this idyllic life rests on the willingness of one individual to experience pain
on behalf of the entire community, viz. the Receiver of Memory. The Receiver lives in relative isolation and
must bear the burden, not only of physical/psychological pain, but also that of
being unable to share the knowledge of the past – and the resulting wisdom –
that they have acquired at so great a cost.
The Receiver is doomed to live “alone” (with their family unit) among
the other members of the community, all the while without benefiting from
opportunities to express any of that which they are experiencing, unless called
upon by the Council of Elders to do so.
[2] There is also a young
girl in the community with the same pale eyes.
[3] Indeed,
as W. Brueggemann points out, “the faith that Israel transmits in [Scripture]
…is about a memory that is transformed, criticized, and extended each
time it is told. It is a tradition in
which there are no objective controls but only the perception and passion,
imagination and discipline, of those who care for the memory. It is a memory of gifts and surprises, of
discontinuities and incongruities…Story offers nothing that is absolutely
certain, either by historical certification or by universal affirmation. It lives, rather, by the scandal of
concreteness, by the freedom of imagination, and by the passion
of hearing. It is concrete in
telling about real people in a specific time and place who engaged in
irreversible events. It is freely imaginative. The story can be told in more than one
way. It has more than one meaning,
depending on the way it is told and the way it is heard. The hearing must be done with passion…stories
are…open-ended…They have a career and can follow the promise…And when the story
is finished, both the teller and the listener are faced with possibilities,
with the freedom that the promise may take more than one form of fulfillment”: Brueggemann,
Walter, Genesis, Atlanta: John Knox, 1982, pp. 4-5.
[4] This
section is based on the reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” found in Wright,
N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. Wright interprets Jesus as standing firmly
within the Jewish prophetic tradition and understands Jesus to have
intentionally undertaken an eschatological mission (i.e. a kingdom-mission) in
favour of the people of God (i.e. Israel).
[5] Cf. Rowan Williams, Tokens
of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief, Louisville: WJK, 2007, pp.
20-26.
[6] “Jesus
embraced the death his people were dying”: Brueggemann, Walter, The
Prophetic Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018 [1978], pp. 94-95.
[7] Cf.
the anti-imperial Jewish slogan, “No king but God!” Little did the Jewish would-be rebels know of
the way that their God would choose to be crowned and enthroned… The way of
truth, the way of God, is always the way of the cross. The one who
would speak for God must share the fate of God, who was always rejected,
mocked, humiliated and ultimately, destroyed by those who claimed to belong to
God (cf. Heschel, Abraham, The Prophets, New York: Harper Perennial,
2001 [1962], p. 31). As the culmination of the tortured history of
Yahweh and Israel, the cross of Jesus does not come as a surprise, but that
takes nothing away from the horror of what Jesus – what Yahweh – was willing to
undergo to demonstrate his solidarity with his beloved and hopelessly obdurate
people. In Mk. 13, Jesus had announced the destruction of the Temple
and the city of Jerusalem within one generation. He was the last in
a long line of messengers (cf. Mk. 12.1-12; Jer. 7.25) to be rebuffed (and
worse!) by the people of God. Time was up (again)! What
more could Yahweh do? Well, quite a bit actually. Yahweh
is a faithful God; he will not abandon his people without being abandoned along
with her. Yahweh had bound himself to this people, and since they
have rejected the things that make for peace, he would share their
doom. The love of Yahweh on display on Golgotha is a beautiful and
terrible sight, perceived only by him who had been responsible to oversee the
murder of the Son of God (Mk. 15.39). Like Jeremiah, whose
laments/complaints had been met with divine silence, so Jesus cried out in
dereliction at having been abandoned by Yahweh (Mk. 15.34), only to realize
that “God was no longer separate from him” (cf. Williams, Rowan, Meeting God
in Mark, Louisville: WJK, 2014, p. 56).
[8] The, perhaps
inevitable, (first) Jewish War began in AD 66; after initial successes by the
rebels against the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, the legions of Syria regrouped
and undertook a systematic, brutal repression of the rebellion, beginning in
Galilee and moving southwards towards the capital. After a lengthy and horrific siege, Jerusalem
fell in the year 70, the city and the (second) temple were destroyed (as Jesus
had predicted) and the population enslaved, while the general who had led the
Judean campaign – Vespasian – now sat enthroned as emperor of Rome.
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