As Cathy said during the meeting, it’s a very hard thing to translate a piece of Spanish poetry into English. How much more challenging is it to start an entirely fresh language based in an entirely new principle of meaning, and carry the old language across to that!
This is what Jesus did. The gospels are littered with evidence of his word-spinning, his signal-giving, his soul-searing mind-bending significance-shifting. How could the Pharisees possibly ask him for a sign when they were surrounded by so many? They could not have been paying attention at all. Or, rather, because the source code for the language he was evolving was so utterly foreign to their own program, they were blind to all the signals he produced.
John’s gospel in particular is thick with signs, and awareness of their pivotal function.
“In the beginning was the word…” This has been read within an eternal framework, talking about the eternal Word of God made flesh in the person of Jesus. But to read it in purely a high doctrinal light takes away so much of its dynamism. We can also read it as: In the beginning was word, communication, sign, and this is with God and is God! And the beginning is absolute beginning, now, with this word/sign....
We remember where we came in on this last time. Human signs are manufactured items, all of them. The very first, original sign is the sound wrung from the awed lips of our distant ancestors when they became collective murderers of the first human victim. That noise signified the first abstract meaning— one not directly connected to a physical stimulus. Rather it signified the total complex of feelings (rage, violence, fear, peace) generated by terrible crisis of imitative desire and its wondrous resolution by the killing of the single victim. It was a sound of and for the sacred, the transcendent realm of meaning beyond direct satisfaction of needs. It also generated the name of a god representing the deceased victim, but who was not remembered as a victim, rather an all-powerful being responsible for both all the terror and all the peace. Then, from this first sound and its power of meaning all other words and significations got their start, like cells multiplying out from an original life form. Because once proto-humans “got” the trick of “sound + meaning” it would be almost automatic to imitate the same basic formula for every other experience in the actual world. (Remember how imitative the brain is: it can surely also imitate itself.)
And so again, if Jesus enters into the role of the primary victim but does so with infinite forgiveness and peace—which then becomes the meaning of the event rather than the anger and violence of the persecutors—then the words and signs spilling out from this event, the “good news”, is the beginning. It is an absolute beginning of human meaning, relationship, culture. And the beginning is even more primal than the ancestral beginning of human language and culture, because it undermines the “older” beginning with absolute life now, absolute giving now. Therefore, “In the beginning was the word….”
We also remember that the binary system of language came from the origins of culture (“all the terror / all the peace”), but in this astonishing new beginning there is only affirmation, only “yes”. We said, therefore, “Jesus took the ‘no’ out of life!” It was objected that “no” is still very important, e.g. “no to torture” or “no to slavery”. We then discussed how these vital “no’s” were part of a wider “yes”, and that a theology of no, protest or resistance against injustice, is still a necessary witness and ministry. The key thing is not to be infected by the violence against which we are protesting, to have the purity of heart to always affirm everyone, and the world too, even as we’re saying “no” to the systemic violence in it.
But back to signs. Here, for example, is a piece of bread. “This is my body for you…” Oh boy, the audacity and genius of this sign! We’re not talking about some strange ontological miracle whereby this “really, really” is Jesus’ body even though it still looks like bread (transubstantiation). Neither are we talking some peculiar “spiritual” reality coming from a different, spooky, non-material world. Nor are we talking about a depressing plain memorial, some empty theatre of the one atoning sacrifice of Christ. Rather, this is a sign, as sign, that subverts every other sign! It invokes Jesus’ intervention at the very root of our sign system and holds itself up as primordial, reconstituting sign. “Do this in memory (as a concrete sign) of me! Everything for us humans is sign and I want you to recall again and again that I have changed the very roots of our signs, out of violence into love: and this particular “sign” springs that truth up into our hearts and world, over and over.” The eucharist is the sign of the reinvention of signs by Jesus.
But, if this is the case, if Jesus is this radical intervention in our sign system, evidence surely has to show up also in the vast array of signs around us. There has to be a profound disturbance in our semiotic universe. Last week we looked at evidence from the Middle Ages. How about in our own time when we are surrounded by an ever expanding galaxy of signs? The argument of Virtually Christian is that, yes, indeed, there is evidence, and it shows up powerfully in contempoary movies and songs. There is the presence of what the book call “the photon of compassion”. This particular metaphor was chosen because a “photon” in physical terms is the elementary particle of light, but it is also a wave (like a wave in water). In other words it is a dual reality, both an observable “thing” and a relationship. The effect of Christ is both an identifiable reality at the heart of our sign world and yet a relationship that can only be properly appreciated in relationship.
Next week we will look at a number of examples of the photon of Christ but we ended this session with one highly telling example, the Disney cartoon, Wall E. This movie tells the story of a small, grubby robot left alone on earth to clean up the huge mess of a trash-covered planet. Meanwhile all the humans have taken off into space, literally cruising around the heavens and reduced to endlessly-entertained, obese parodies of human beings. The only one with any real humanity is the little robot, Wall E of the title. And we know in fact that Wall E is the new Adam because he falls in love with another robot called Eva and together they re-inspire humanity to return to earth and behave as real humans! Wall E is killed in the process and resurrected by Eva for good measure. In other words this is the story of the compassionate Christ but told without one mention of religion and more effective for that. Watching the movie the divine/human photon of compassion falls luminously from the screen into our hearts. And it does so because of the original refiguring of our sign system by Jesus.
This is what Jesus did. The gospels are littered with evidence of his word-spinning, his signal-giving, his soul-searing mind-bending significance-shifting. How could the Pharisees possibly ask him for a sign when they were surrounded by so many? They could not have been paying attention at all. Or, rather, because the source code for the language he was evolving was so utterly foreign to their own program, they were blind to all the signals he produced.
John’s gospel in particular is thick with signs, and awareness of their pivotal function.
“In the beginning was the word…” This has been read within an eternal framework, talking about the eternal Word of God made flesh in the person of Jesus. But to read it in purely a high doctrinal light takes away so much of its dynamism. We can also read it as: In the beginning was word, communication, sign, and this is with God and is God! And the beginning is absolute beginning, now, with this word/sign....
We remember where we came in on this last time. Human signs are manufactured items, all of them. The very first, original sign is the sound wrung from the awed lips of our distant ancestors when they became collective murderers of the first human victim. That noise signified the first abstract meaning— one not directly connected to a physical stimulus. Rather it signified the total complex of feelings (rage, violence, fear, peace) generated by terrible crisis of imitative desire and its wondrous resolution by the killing of the single victim. It was a sound of and for the sacred, the transcendent realm of meaning beyond direct satisfaction of needs. It also generated the name of a god representing the deceased victim, but who was not remembered as a victim, rather an all-powerful being responsible for both all the terror and all the peace. Then, from this first sound and its power of meaning all other words and significations got their start, like cells multiplying out from an original life form. Because once proto-humans “got” the trick of “sound + meaning” it would be almost automatic to imitate the same basic formula for every other experience in the actual world. (Remember how imitative the brain is: it can surely also imitate itself.)
And so again, if Jesus enters into the role of the primary victim but does so with infinite forgiveness and peace—which then becomes the meaning of the event rather than the anger and violence of the persecutors—then the words and signs spilling out from this event, the “good news”, is the beginning. It is an absolute beginning of human meaning, relationship, culture. And the beginning is even more primal than the ancestral beginning of human language and culture, because it undermines the “older” beginning with absolute life now, absolute giving now. Therefore, “In the beginning was the word….”
We also remember that the binary system of language came from the origins of culture (“all the terror / all the peace”), but in this astonishing new beginning there is only affirmation, only “yes”. We said, therefore, “Jesus took the ‘no’ out of life!” It was objected that “no” is still very important, e.g. “no to torture” or “no to slavery”. We then discussed how these vital “no’s” were part of a wider “yes”, and that a theology of no, protest or resistance against injustice, is still a necessary witness and ministry. The key thing is not to be infected by the violence against which we are protesting, to have the purity of heart to always affirm everyone, and the world too, even as we’re saying “no” to the systemic violence in it.
But back to signs. Here, for example, is a piece of bread. “This is my body for you…” Oh boy, the audacity and genius of this sign! We’re not talking about some strange ontological miracle whereby this “really, really” is Jesus’ body even though it still looks like bread (transubstantiation). Neither are we talking some peculiar “spiritual” reality coming from a different, spooky, non-material world. Nor are we talking about a depressing plain memorial, some empty theatre of the one atoning sacrifice of Christ. Rather, this is a sign, as sign, that subverts every other sign! It invokes Jesus’ intervention at the very root of our sign system and holds itself up as primordial, reconstituting sign. “Do this in memory (as a concrete sign) of me! Everything for us humans is sign and I want you to recall again and again that I have changed the very roots of our signs, out of violence into love: and this particular “sign” springs that truth up into our hearts and world, over and over.” The eucharist is the sign of the reinvention of signs by Jesus.
But, if this is the case, if Jesus is this radical intervention in our sign system, evidence surely has to show up also in the vast array of signs around us. There has to be a profound disturbance in our semiotic universe. Last week we looked at evidence from the Middle Ages. How about in our own time when we are surrounded by an ever expanding galaxy of signs? The argument of Virtually Christian is that, yes, indeed, there is evidence, and it shows up powerfully in contempoary movies and songs. There is the presence of what the book call “the photon of compassion”. This particular metaphor was chosen because a “photon” in physical terms is the elementary particle of light, but it is also a wave (like a wave in water). In other words it is a dual reality, both an observable “thing” and a relationship. The effect of Christ is both an identifiable reality at the heart of our sign world and yet a relationship that can only be properly appreciated in relationship.
Next week we will look at a number of examples of the photon of Christ but we ended this session with one highly telling example, the Disney cartoon, Wall E. This movie tells the story of a small, grubby robot left alone on earth to clean up the huge mess of a trash-covered planet. Meanwhile all the humans have taken off into space, literally cruising around the heavens and reduced to endlessly-entertained, obese parodies of human beings. The only one with any real humanity is the little robot, Wall E of the title. And we know in fact that Wall E is the new Adam because he falls in love with another robot called Eva and together they re-inspire humanity to return to earth and behave as real humans! Wall E is killed in the process and resurrected by Eva for good measure. In other words this is the story of the compassionate Christ but told without one mention of religion and more effective for that. Watching the movie the divine/human photon of compassion falls luminously from the screen into our hearts. And it does so because of the original refiguring of our sign system by Jesus.
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