…and now for something completely different!
“…and now for something completely different!”1
Super Over Abundance
In the Monty Python film “The Meaning of Life” a morbidly overweight man enters an elegant restaurant and orders dinner. His solicitous waiter facilitates his request for “the lot,” by serving it in a bucket. After gorging himself, his waiter implores him to finish his meal with “one thin mint.” The result: the man explodes.
Superabundance
Jesus tells a parable in the gospel of Luke. He says, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins, be spilled, and the skins destroyed. But new wine must be put into new wineskins” (Lk 5: 37-38). In the gospel of John, Jesus and his disciples attend a wedding. During the festivities, the steward discovers that all the wine has been served. Jesus is notified and instructs the steward to fill with water “six stone jars…each holding twenty or thirty gallons” and then to draw from them and take it to the chief steward. The result is that the chief steward discovers that the water has been changed into wine, and it is the best wine yet served. The steward’s amazed response is “…everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests has become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now” (Jn 2:1-10).
These parables are completely different from Monty Python’s story of exploding overindulgence. But why does it matter that “something completely different” is possible? In this consumptive addictive culture can we still hope that something else, something completely different, will help to make sense of it all? Whether it is our Good (i.e. Plato) or God, will it keep us from exploding from overindulgent overconsumption?
We know what will happen when actor John Cleese makes the announcement of the advent of "something completely different." It is usually something unexpected, weirdly humorous, and painfully absurd. But by how much is this absurd? We can be sure that the super abundant possibilities of the absurd far exceed the permutations of the normal. In the imaginations of Monty Python, the absurdly bitter end is only the beginning of a massively transgressive energy. The transgressive-absurd will break the deadly logic of the socially secure that serve the privileged class. So, in the end, things explode and then happily begin anew with a grin.
There is a form of hope hidden in humor that ferments in the superabundance of the absurd. There is “more to this world than is dreamt in (our sober) philosophies.”2 So, anything can be lampooned, be it wine or waiters. But there is a super abundance beyond the almost everything of the absurd; there are greater possibilities of "something completely different." Beyond the nonsense within and around the so so, serious are possibilities that put us in our place and also are a promise of redemption. But why consider the superabundance of the possibilities of redemption? We need to regain our sense of the super abundance of the holy/human to see evidence of outrageous mercy, a mercy that offers us re-creative possibilities in the theo-illogic of the scriptures.
The promise of the scriptures is an illogic of super abundance that forms the possibility of abundant life. This is possibility beyond the cutting edge of the absurd. This is what we need in a world that lives beyond the fringe of sense in self-justifying nonsense. So, today, now, we need “something completely different.” But first we need to understand our own absurdities.
It is strange to find ourselves at the end the most secular age in history to discover that the inevitable, irreversible demise of religion is the advent of "the spiritual." It is logically odd to pass through all the modern disciplines of non-belief and discover that our secular directors are deeply and mysteriously "spiritual." This, however, is not all bad news. The advent of spirituality is promising for those who never had faith or liberating for those who have suffered under a rigid regime of authorized beliefs. Of course, there are difficulties with some faith traditions that modernism has taught us to abandon while postmodernism has taught us to “spiritualize.” But we need not put new wine into old wine skins. Though there are potential difficulties for both the new and the (still useful) old, we need both new wine and new wine skins and old wine and old wine skins. So, is there something more, something completely different than what is authorized by our secular/postmodern philosophies?
One possibility is that the scriptures and their faith communities are the balance between old and new, offering meaning beyond the modern absurd and the postmodern “spiritual.” Is it possible that the strange new world of the bible that appears absurd in the simple geometrics of the modern and so relativistic and spiritual in the postmodern perspective, are in fact beautifully secure on more fluid scriptural foundations?
This is the wager that Paul Ricoeur has made in his writings on biblical hermeneutics.3 In his studies of the hermeneutics of biblical language, Ricoeur concluded that a general theory of how we interpret the world should honor the particularities of scriptural language. For Ricoeur, the particularities of scriptural logics are the foundations of general hermeneutics. But given the general validity of the postmodern perspective that any foundation may be the result of brutal history of some totalitarian chemistry, what kind of foundation is a scriptural foundation?
For Ricoeur, a scriptural foundation is based on many different literary forms, among which are: narratives, laws, wisdom, prophecy, psalms, poetry, sayings, parables, and sermons. In essence, the bible is one thing in two parts, but it is also composed of many different literary forms. But why restate the commonplace? The fact is that the commonplace often has uncommon and startling implications. One is that different literary forms shape the faith of the interpreter in different ways. We are, so to speak, what we read, but though we are people of the One Book, we are not just one version. Christians can affirm Paul (Rm: 5:1) and assert that they are justified by faith. But Christians can also affirm that the faith of Israel and the Church(es) takes on many distinct structures: different gospel narratives, the role of law, the presence of poetry, the wit of wisdom, the insight of the parables, and the dynamics of preaching.
So, as with many literary forms there are many kinds of faith. This is an application of the particularities of biblical hermeneutics to our understanding of scriptural understanding. But there is a second implication of Ricoeur’s theory of biblical interpretation: the interaction of different literary forms dramatically increases the possibilities of faith. When these different forms interact, they constitute multiple possibilities for the faith of interpreters and their communities. For Ricoeur, the multiple forms of biblical language and the multiple possibilities that they constitute for faith are a scriptural example of “the excess of gift” that so exceeds our expectations that we no longer need to count the debts that we believe we are owed.4 The strange new world of the bible5 is so wondrously strange because it offers us many ways beyond self-centered despair or overfed absurdity. The new wine is really new, and its actualized potentials are incalculable.
If all this is clear, then we may have some understanding of the “superabundance” of the scriptures. But we still may not get the point. Superabundance is something that needs to be experienced as “something completely different,” when really different, is almost beyond imagining. So, how different is this difference? Are there practical, experiential, ways to experience-understand how the bible takes us beyond all our normal secular positions and postmodern philosophies? Is there a way to understand the fluid foundations of the bible that provide substance to the vague transcendences of the postmodern?
Ricoeur makes a radical observation on these questions. For Ricoeur, the best friend of the philosopher, is the exegete. Given his preference for the particular, this means that if our ideologies are to get the kind of help they need to get beyond or over themselves and find some variety in the simplifications of the modern and some solidity in the relativities of the postmodern, then their best friend is the close reader-interpreter of scripture. Of course, multiple literary interactions and the varying relations of different communities of interpretation will develop new interpretations over time. But we can explore these possibilities, right now, through an exegesis of the kaleidoscopic lens of two texts of superabundance.
The Wedding/Wine
There are old wineskins for old wine and new for new. The first is fresh and exciting. The other is deep and mysterious. But Jesus is not limited to wine skins. The new, the old, the fresh, the textured, and the full-bodied will flow from deep, unfathomable reserves that will fill and overflow each and every empty cup. There will be no end to its abundance. It is superabundant.
Notes
1. Monty Python, “Now For Something Completely Different,” Columbia Pictures Industries, 1971.
2. Shakespeare, William, “Hamlet.”
3. Ricoeur, Paul, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, (Fortress Press, 1980). Figuring the Sacred, (Fortress Press, 1996).
4. Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting, (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
5. Barth, Karl, The Word of God and the Word of Man, (Peter Smith, 1958).
