2024-04-24 A Meditation on Simulacrum

“3 Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, 2 to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people. 3 For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. 4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. 8 The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people. 9 But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. 10 As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, 11 knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.” (Tit 3:1-11 ESV)

With similar language but different intent the churched world spies quite wildly differing gospels. One’s gospel depends, it seems, on some soothing or non-confrontational melody of words, words not green behind the ears, words that know, words wise to the average pewsitter’s comfort zone.

Words that challenge, and words that arouse, are puzzled over, are closer to the Bible, but are few and rare; where spied they are persecuted, the messenger is killed, the stitch in time to save nine, comes from a few souls, a paltry cohort, a daring militia.

The commandos of this gospel are a bit foolish or unwittingly dull to higher fashions of crime, to higher group-think and communal weaknesses of that old enemy the flesh. These soldiers are, not uptight, plaintive and Believing: they and we believe all Man is under condemnation, a Fall has occurred, the race may be only to a few speedy souls who spy the waters stirred up, or the race may be to what is more gently assumed, a good “half” or “two-thirds” saved.

But no, no one stops to ask if this “sheep and goats” mentality is heard. No one stops to ask if we understand, that salvation is to be sought out with fear and trembling. No one recognizes the myriad flaw zones, entire geographic regions, for one perceived slight or failure to stand up in the hour of trial and need, cut off unknowingly from the news reports, dealt a different media and ISP, living in an alternate Cloud. So we fear the Living Lord.

Therefore the Christian is almost skeptical of any dichotomy of good and evil as writ in stone: each of us can go through the pressure-cooker, wherein our very existence is made out as illegal, where we are reminded moment-by-moment of our sinful state, and this state only increases when we are under the accusation. The Christian lives instead in a radical, not radical as in Marxist nor radical as in Peacenik nor radical as in Social Justice Warrior, but radical as in a vivified, incarnate reality called Cross. The Cross that informs and molds all efforts, all entreaties unto goodness, that says “there but for the grace of God go I”.

The Cross that invites a strange easier burden and lighter yoke, to the one belligerent and confrontational, “my crew” is the leading third eye, the insightful modernist variant on perhaps the fisherman or carpenter or, dare we say, the Magi. The war games, testing the waters, who submits to whom? Use it to learn something of our present “civil” war. Use it to ask if one’s basic training included a reasoned mindset, a platform of equity, a locus of generous judgments. Use your contretemps to bark now rather than slyly to slither into a tomorrow debt, a later day of confrontation, a harder or “too big to fail” compromise. We are never “too big to fail”; God’s peace and His prosperity is richer than any losses we might have accumulated. And if we say, it is deserved thus to have lost, then it is undeserved thus to have Gained. To have Won. To have seen that the enemy is ephemeral: any person literal or with a name, with a presence bodily and available in the community, is someone we cherish, regardless of inward-turning temptations to declare war. Anyone “real” is a friend; the enemy hides and spooks in the untouchable realms of hidden attack and seeping and sucking attack on the communal wealth. The enemy dispels the moment it is found out, a law firm or church that never existed, after all. And this friend: the mathematical understanding, true to the mind too of an engineer or mechanic or architect, understands: where the spirit is what we walk by, the flesh will attack; where we turn outward, our backs against each other’s backs, we are presently rewarded with that hated state called war, but grateful to have found War rather than a simulacra coexistent with abuse and the suckling leech.