Jesus and the Poetics of the Impossible

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I want to continue an inquiry started a few months ago and again take up what the New Testament calls the “Kingdom of God,” which is the very meaning and purpose of Jesus’ public life and ministry. God’s Kingdom provides a perfect way to concretize or embody the what we mean by the “Logos made flesh”, where the name of God is incarnated, gets flesh and bones, blood and sinew - but Jesus’ Kingdom is nothing like what you would expect if you were expecting a Kingdom in the royal sense, full of the paraphernalia of purple and power and princely potentates.

 

For Jesus' announces a Kingdom which signifies the unruliness of the rule of God, a kind of divine madness which runs rough shod over the settled ways and rules of this-world... so that the discourse of the Kingdom rightly understood is governed not by a “logic” which has to do with names and entities, but by what I will call a "poetics", which has to do with events – something that actually happens.

 

To say that the coming of the Kingdom is an event, is to say that it is an out-coming, a bursting out of something we did not see coming, something unforeseen, singular, irregular, even a bit odd... or alternatively the in-coming of something “wholly other,” a weird intrusion from an unheard of dimension that breaks into our familiar world with something completely amazing, completely unexpected, which breaks up our horizons of expectations. Otherwise, nothing is happening, nothing much, nothing new; creation is grinding to a stop, and the “yes” is losing the strength to repeat itself, to come again; life loses its salt...   

 

So what follows is a brief insight into the teachings of Jesus and what he means by the Kingdom of God.  That is, we can identify the original ‘voice-print’ and authentic power of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom of God by simply showing that the same paradoxical structure, what is also called a dynamic pattern of “bi-polar reversals”, is clearly evidenced in the narrative center of some his most memorable parables.

(Only 5 of 30 parables are included here and Bible references have been left out)

 

 

 The Prodigal Son

 

 

While the younger rebellious son appears to be an outsider in self-imposed exile from the Father’s home, he is really an insider the homecoming feast, just the older dutiful son – who appears to be an insider in loyalty to his father’s home, is really an outsider in self-imposed exile in refusing to partake of the homecoming feast

 

The insider is out, and the outsider is in

 

 

 

The Unjust Judge

 

 The fearless judge in his annoying refusal to grant justice becomes the reluctant victim of the widows’ persistent demands, just as the persistent pleas of a widowed victim, is really the fearless stance of one who annoyingly refuses to back down.

 

The strong is made weak, and the weak is made strong

 

 

 

Vineyard Laborers

 

The apparent worthiness and hard work those who worked longest becomes the source of envy and a sense of injustice, while apparent unworthiness and laziness of those who stood around idle all day is an occasion of the landowner’s unconditional favor.

 

The first are last and the last are first

 

 

 

Pharisee and Tax Collector

 

What appears to be an expression of ones righteousness is really sin, while what appears to be a confession of ones sin is really an  of righteousness.

 

The saved are lost and the lost are saved

 

 

 

Friend at Midnight

 

The refusal of a friend is really the acceptance of a stranger, just as the rudeness of the same stranger at the door is really the faithfulness of a friend.

 

 

The friend is a stranger, and the stranger is a friend

 

 

 

 At least 30 of the 33 parables recorded in the Gospels have this same deep structure of paradoxical reversals...

 

 

So while St. Paul counseled the early Christian communities not to conform to the world, if under the pressure to conform to the world of the philosophers, I were forced to cough up the “logic” of the Kingdom of God, then I would have to insist from the start that this is a divine logic that is outright madness from the point of view of the “world,”, a logos that is a folly (moria) (I Cor. 1: 18).  

 

From the point of view of logic, for logic is the light of this-world, the “Kingdom of God” is impossible.  But, to be quite precise, we must insist that it is not simply impossible– it is not a simple logical contradiction, like “p and not-p” which would be a little boring, but something unforeseeable that shatters our horizons of expectation, which is quite exciting.1 That is, the Kingdom of God is a way of calling for the possibility of the impossible, where the impossible is the event that shatters the horizons of the possible.  So in the place of a “logic” of the impossible I will instead to speak here of a “poetics”.

 

A poetics is an evocative discourse that describes the symbolic space that obtains in the Kingdom and articulates the event of what actually transpires there within, while logic describes the normative rules that govern real or possible entities, entities which can or do instantiate its propositions. 

 

A poetics addresses and articulates the unconditional call of God, while logic regulates the forces of this world.  So in a poetics of the impossible we mean to pose the possibility of something life-transforming, not to report how an omnipotent being intervenes upon nature’s regularities to bend them to its infinite will.  But in the logic of impossibility, the impossible is simply something that cannot be, whereas in Jesus’ poetics of the impossible we are hailing an event that is all too real because it breaks open the business as usual world of that constitutes our ordinary everyday horizons of meaning.

 

Jesus’ poetics gives voice to the properly symbolic discourse of the Kingdom, while logic enunciates the literal discourse of the world.  As a symbolic discourse, then, a poetics is a certain constellation strategies, stories and metaphors, a style and a tone, as well as a grammar and a vocabulary, all of which are aimed at gaining some ground and making a point.  We might say that Jesus’ poetics is a discourse with a heart, supplying the heart of a heartless world.  Unlike logic it is a discourse with pathos, with a passion and a desire, with an imaginative sweep and a flare, touched by a bit of madness, hence more of an a-logic or even a patho-logic, one that is, however, not sick but healing and liberating. 

 

A poetics of the impossible describes the dynamics of a desire beyond reason and beyond what is reasonably possible, a desire to know what we cannot know, or to love what we dare not love, like a beggar in love with a princess, whose desire is not extinguished by the impossible but fired by it.  For our hearts are burning with a desire to go where we cannot go, to the impossible, praying and weeping for what eye has not seen nor ear heard, hoping against hope, as Paul said. 

 

 

Vis-à-vis logic, the rule of this Kingdom poetics is “foolishness,” which means it has a taste for the para-logical, a love for the elusive lines of the parabolic and the hype of the hyperbolic.  That is why the text of the New Testament is rife with parables and paradoxes, and why you could even write a history of people who were fools for the Kingdom of God.7 Rather than a clumsy heavy handed logic that is all thumbs in these matters, we require just such a poetics if we are to negotiate the subtle pianissimos and fortes of the music that is played in the Kingdom.  This poetics does not play an Aristotelian tune; it takes its measure not from moderation and calculation, not from equilibrium and balance, but from excess and the recess, from the hyperbolic and the elliptical.  Hence the paradoxes that punctuate this poetics are parabolical, and its parables are hyperbolic (when they are not elliptical), and its evaluations are reversals.  That explains why its system of accounting, its logos, is so odd.  The way things are counted in the “Kingdom” confounds the calculations of the “world,” for there is more rejoicing over the return of one sheep that was lost than over the ninety-nine that are safe...

 

We can only keep pace with what is going on in the Kingdom by staying with the twists of its parables and riding out the turns of its paradoxes.  The paradoxes usually take the form of reversals: the last shall be first, the insiders are out, sinners are preferred, the stranger is the neighbor, enemies are to be loved, and, as a general rule, a generally unruly rule, the impossible is possible.  

 

But this love of poetic diction does not spring from a wanton fondness for poetic license or from a taste for rhetorical impishness or from authors with no head for logic.  On the contrary, it is a discourse with a deadly serious and rigorous concern to give voice to the call that contradicts the world, as serious as Jesus himself, who evidently had a taste for this kind of sharp and paradoxical discourse, and as serious as First Corinthians, which turns on these overturning turns of phrase.  And it has a prophetic concern to confound and interdict the hardness of heart of the world, to shame its cold-hearted logic and to put its heartless economics on notice, which is as serious as Amos.  When, as we have seen, Paul says that God sides with the foolish and weak things of the world, the nothings and nobodies, in order to reduce to nothing the things that boast of being and presence, which means the powers that be, that pretend to be and have ousia, (essence) he was trying to shock the world with the impossible way things are done in the Kingdom.  For the Kingdom comes to loosen the grip of the world, to dislodge the rule of “what is” (being), to release the event that the world would prevent.

               

In the New Testament, the “world” and the “Kingdom” are antagonists because the logic of the world is a calculus, an economy, a heartless system of accounting or of balanced payments, where scores are always being settled.  In the logic of the world, nothing is for free and nobody gets off scot free.  By the same token, in the logic of the world, everything is for sale, everything has a price, and nothing is sacred.  The world will stop at nothing to get even, to settle or even a score; the world is pomp and power and ruthless reckoning.  In the world, offenders are made to pay for their offense and every investor expects a return.  Every equation must be balanced, with blood or money or prison time.  In the world, everybody has a lawyer.  So the logic of the world and the poetics of the Kingdom do not describe two different places, like New York and Paris, or Athens and Jerusalem, or this world and the other one behind the clouds, except poetically, differentiating two different orders of signification that contend with each other in the only existing world we know; not two different “wheres” but two different “hows,” whose differences must be negotiated in the one and only world we know.

               

A poetics of the Kingdom is a discourse of contradiction and interdiction, a grammar of how one “calls for” (prophetein) the rule of God, how it is proclaimed (kerygma), how one calls for things to happen in God’s way, not the world’s, remembering all the time the paradoxical character of this “rule,” where the reign of God settles upon the brow of the powerless.  

 

The discourse of the Kingdom flies up in the world’s face, which is a costly business, for the world keeps strict accounts and knows how to make its opponents pay.  If someone comes into the world and calls the world to account for itself, the world will receive him not (John 1:10-11), which usually means it will cost him dearly, maybe everything, which is not a good investment.  That is why the discourse of the Kingdom takes such a contrarian form, why it is so unyielding, so full of poetic perversity.  The Kingdom comes to contradict the world and contest the world’s ways, and it always looks like foolishness to the world’s good sense, moving as it does between logic and passion, truth and justice, concepts and desire, strategies and prayers, astute points and mad stories, for it can never be merely or simply the one or the other.  The whole idea of a paradoxical strategy is not to break these tensions but to settle into and deploy them, negotiating the distance between them.  The whole idea is to create a disturbance, to insinuate a dangerous “perhaps,” to speak out in the name of justice, in the name of God, in the name of an event, of something, I know not what, to raise hell, holy hell, or to raise the roof, a sacred roof, which is what happens if you call for the coming of the Kingdom, if you pray and weep for the coming of justice, right out in public.  The Kingdom comes to put the world in question, to put it on the spot, to put it into question.  May thy Kingdom come...

 

Reference: Caputo, J. D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Indiana Press 2007, see esp. Ch. 5

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