“In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the “Kingdom of God” are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the “world,” resulting in what I call a “sacred anarchy.” Consider but a sampling of its more saliant features. In the Kingdom, the last are first and first are last, a strategically perverted system of privileging, so that the advantage is given not to beautiful Athenian bodies that house a love of wisdom, but to lepers, deaf mutes, the blind, epileptics, and the paralyzed. The favor of the Kingdom falls not on men of practical wisdom, of arete, of experts in phronesis, but on tax collectors and prostitutes, who enjoy preferential treatment over the upright and well behaved. In addition, in the Kingdom the way to be arrayed with all the glory of God is to neither sow nor reap but to behave like the lilies of the field. If you try to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose it you will be saved. In the Kingdom one should hate one’s father and mother but love one’s enemies, and if a man strikes you you should offer him the other cheek. There, if you are rich, you have a very fine needle indeed to thread to get into the Kingdom. If you would want to become rich with the treasures offered by this Kingdom, you should sell all that you have and give it to the poor. Moreover, you should give to the poor not only what you can afford but even what you need for yourself. If one of your sheep is lost, then you should not worry about endangering the other ninety-nine but go out and search for the lost one, which is an unaccountably odd way to count. If you host a party–even a wedding for one of your children–you should go out into the streets and welcome in the passers by. There bodies pass easily through solid walls, rise from the dead, traverse the surface of water without sinking, glow with a blinding whiteness, and pass instantly from one state, like water, into another, like wine. Cripples are made straight, lepers are cured, and the dead rise from the grave. All these bodily metamorphoses are in turn figures of a personal transformation best described as metanoia, which might be retranslated from “repentance” to “being of a new mind and heart,” being tuned and attuned to the new being that comes of belonging to the Kingdom.”
|| john d. caputo, “spectral hermeneutics” in after the death of god
