Alien

Of the many ancient Christian texts that did not make it into the scriptural canon, the Gospel of Thomas is the most famous, for we had the name but not the actual text for centuries before it was rediscovered after the Second World War. Sharing the name of the apostle, but otherwise completely unrelated, is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a document that has more in common with the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew in that it is written after the split between the early Christians and proto-Rabbinic Judaism, so casts Jesus as antagonistic to Jews, never mind that he was one. Like the birth narrative of Matthew, the Infancy Gospel is a fiction and an argument, trying to position Jesus in the Hebrew religious trajectory while also projecting developing understandings of Jesus back onto his boyhood. So you get this:

When this child Jesus was five years old, he was playing at the ford in the stream. He made pools of the rushing water and made it immediately pure; he ordered this by word alone. He made soft clay and modeled twelve sparrows from it. It was the Sabbath when he did this. There were many other children playing with him.

A certain Jew saw what Jesus did while playing on the Sabbath; he immediately went and announced to his father Joseph, “See, your child is at the stream, and has taken clay and modeled twelve birds; he has profaned the Sabbath.”

Joseph came to the place, and seeing what Jesus did he cried out, “Why do you do on the Sabbath what it is not lawful to do?” Jesus clapped his hands and cried to the sparrows, “Be gone.” And the sparrows flew away chirping.

So far, so good, right? But just wait…

The son of Annas the scribe was standing there with Joseph. He took a branch of a willow and scattered the water which Jesus had arranged.

Jesus saw what he did and became angry and said to him, “You unrighteous, impious ignoramus, what did the pools and the water do to harm you? Behold, you shall whither as a tree, and you shall not bear leaves nor root nor fruit.”

And immediately that child was all withered. Jesus left and went to the house of Joseph. The parents of the withered one bore him away, bemoaning his lost youth. They led him to Joseph and reproached him, “What kind of child do you have who does such things?”

Now, that’s a story we might not tell in Sunday School. And it gets worse.

The good news is that the fantasy stories about the childhood of Jesus, like the flight to Egypt, are historically doubtful. That latter tale, murderous Herod the Great, the slaughter of the innocents, also lacks secondary evidence, and requires us to adjust the timeline, as Herod died four years before the Common Era, while we have traditionally placed the birth of Jesus at three years before the turning of the age. But adjusting the dates and acknowledging that the authors of Matthew are trying to show that Jesus is the new Moses, it is at least possible that Herod ordered the execution of the infant boys of Bethlehem, for it was a small village, and the death toll was likely less than twenty, not even worth mentioning given the other massacres and genocides of the age.

Yet, for all of our doubts about the historicity of these stories, both the childhood fictions and the flight to Egypt, both still contain truths.

Both wrestle with the subject of otherness, of strangeness, of being an alien. Matthew makes Mary, Joseph and their toddler foreign residents in Egypt for a time, strangers in a strange land. This story reminds the readers that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, carries with it a religious trajectory of justice for the oppressed, places Jesus in the context of that thousand year narrative, just as those who followed Jesus were the oddballs, the outsiders, strangers. The infancy narratives speculate about what it must have been like for Jesus to be both a human child and the creative force of the divine at the same time. They follow a traditional Christian trajectory that makes Jesus both profoundly human and profoundly other. Jesus was, on one level, alien to both those around him and even to his own self, being of two natures.

Feeling other, alien, to ourselves and to our lives, is remarkably human. In an extreme form, it becomes a psychiatric condition of people at war with their own bodies, patients who engage in self-harm and self-mutilation. But each of us has, at times, felt like a stranger, wondered how we ended up in this body, this family, this job. Feeling strange and off, even after decades in relationship. And we are other. These messy, finite bodies, sacks of chemicals and energy, house something that is so much more than chemicals and energy, something infinite and complex and always, always changing. We don’t even really know ourselves from one moment to the next and yet we strive to communicate that self to others through these imperfect instruments. And something in us yearns for that infinite self to be know. We crave it. Know me. See me. It is, like art, aiming at the impossible, for that thing, that true self, is a divine gift and beyond our knowing.

And so, we are never truly known, even by those who love us the most, and we constantly try to be known. And then, there are those portions of our life where we try not to be known, where we are afraid that if people really know us, they will see what we really are and reject us, proclaiming to the world that we are alien, strange, defective. The yin and yang of our unknowable self, this desire to be known completely and the fear that we will be known completely.

I experience this tension in my professional life as a minister. To feel called by God is a fearful thing, for you are either a psychopath who believes they are worthy of the call, or you are constantly aware that you are not worthy, that you have no business calling others to righteousness when you are yourself a sinner. Some seek authenticity and familiarity with clergy, while others place them on a pedestal. And I want to be known, for my gifts and for my faults. Those who would have the minister as other, as alien who walks among us but is not one of us, are hurt and infuriated when they see that I am just like you, and almost always sever the relationship.

The most recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, addressed this same issue when it considers the recent fad in the corporate world for authenticity. Bracketing the question of whether you can be an effective leader if you are fully known, the issue goes on to point out that those who try to be “true to self” often are less capable of growth in new roles than those who are chameleons, capable of changing appearance and growing into a new setting.

Know me… I’m scared you will know me… this tension in every single human interaction, in our stream of consciousness, in moments of love and intimacy and in our worst insecurities. In our families and our friendships, our workplace and our community. If there were a solution to this ill-fit of infinite soul to finite materiality, it would have been discovered centuries ago. And while every religions promises the answer, it does not seem to me that any, including our, provides it while we are still in these bodies.

What we are left with is spiritual bubble-gum and shoe-strings, as we MacGyver our way through life patching together our boat of self, the fleet of friendships and relationships that are our context. And the sticky stuff of that knowing the unknowable happens through our enacted rituals of belonging. We perform acts which declare that we belong together and accept one another. We place our hand over our heart and enact a ritual of American-ness. We gather at the holiday table and enact a ritual of family-ness. We come to a table with a loaf of challah and a chalice of Welch’s and we enact a ritual of covenant-ness. Duct tape and spit and a little baling wire, and we make as best we can with what we have, imperfect unknowable selves gathered, poking at the edge of divine mystery, trying to belong and be known. It is what we have. These rituals are good. We are aliens in this place, aliens in our bodies, aliens to one another, just as Mary and Joseph, as boy Jesus, as Jesus on the Cross, were fickle and strange and alien, unknown and unknowable. We enact rituals to carry us for this time, breaking bread and declaring our love of a God we barely know, confident that God longs to know us. That God knows us. That the loving knowing of our Creator is forever.

I long for you to know me, and you will never ever know me, for I don’t even know all I am. And you, who want to be known, you are more than that finite body can hold, more than all the languages of humankind can every describe.

But in this moment, as we come together and make ritual, for awhile, we no longer feel alien. May it always be so.