In the early 17th century, Miguel de Cervantes
wrote a narrative about a hidalgo, a low level noble, Alonso Quijano. Alonso was
a veracious consumer of chivalric novels, so much so that his fantasy life began
to distort his mind, from which he ended up falling into madness. Alonso came
to believe he was in fact a knight, a nobleman higher up the social ladder from
his lowly hidalgo station. Of course, we know his fantasied alter ego as Don
Quixote, that slayer of windmills and seeker of knightly adventures. Guiding
the Don was the paragon of knightly virtue, Amadis de Gaul, the perfect model
of knightly disposition. Amadis’s storied legend shaped the purposes, values,
and attitudes of Quixote, so much so that even physical objects in the visual
space around Quixote were transmogrified, taking on meaning through the lens of
Amadis’s modelled perspective. A simple washbowl becomes a knight’s helmet. Amadis’s
narrative influence on the mind and affections of Quixote, while entertaining, were
also the cause of Alonso’s madness. Alonso had lost touch with reality, with
how the world actually was. Rather, as he gave his mind and will over to his hero,
his model, Alonso became a character – a caricature – of knightly manners and disposition.
For all intents and purposes, Amadis de Gaul led Alonso Quijano on the path to
madness because of Alonso’s desire to become one with a world he found more
meaningful than the one he found in his mundane day-to-day existence. The world
of chivalry and knightly adventures formed an ontic force and attraction greater
than what the ‘real’ world could offer Alonso.
In the gospel narrative, the shocking, for us, request of
James and John, to call down fire from heaven, found its legitimacy in the Old
Testament prophetic model, Elijah. Elijah had bravely faced opposition from the
priests of Baal, who threated to draw Israelites away from the worship of
Yahweh, a sin of which there is no greater in the Old Testament. In this epic
battle of religious wills, Elijah, in his triumph over the priests of Baal,
calls upon Yahweh to send down fire to consume the offerings offered by both
religious sides. And low and behold, God answers Elijah’s request in the affirmative,
and thus commenced a Baalic embarrassing BarBQ. Hurray for our side and our
powerful, vengeful deity who smites our enemies. Adding insult to injury,
Elijah has the priests of Baal slaughtered, in the name and honor of Yahweh,
who is pleased with this massacre. We sing our hallelujahs as our Don Quixote
of Israel successfully topples this idolatrous windmill.
As Elijah is a biblical hero, it is only fitting that two
first century Jews find in him their Amadis de Gaul, their paragon of righteous
zealotry, their guide in confronting and dispensing with the enemy of God and
tribe. However, Jesus seems to have missed this lesson in synagogue kindergarten
class. In fact, he seems to down right revolt against this acclamation of heroic
status brought about by Elijah’s violent act, an act lauded in its defense of exclusive
Yahwistic worship. Could Jesus’s rebuke of such modelling inform us as to a
paradigm shift in divine imaging?
While it is a dangerous thing to make critical remarks
about long held religious convictions, especially when it comes to scripture, I
feel compelled to tread where angels fear to go. But let it be noted, Jesus
seems to be giving me permission by his implicit teaching, found in a seemingly
simple rebuke. Could it be possible that those who formed the many narratives
and traditions of the Hebrew people, weaved into these narratives ideological
constructs formed from cultural attitudes and dispositions towards ‘others’
that would be legitimized and justified through unconscious projections upon
the divine, thus divinizing these varied and all too human constructs of
violence and revenge? Could the various accounts of God’s violent responses to
human behavior, especially behaviors transgressing deeply held and revered
religious cultural frameworks, have been Feurbachian projections of human
violence? I dare say, probably. Well, actually, uh, yes. And Jesus was not
having any of it. In this simple rebuke, Jesus turned the religious imagination
of his disciples on its head. A long held and revered model had been casually
sidelined by Jesus in his refusal to entertain a very traditional response to a
perceived enemy of God’s chosen.
Our models, those we chose to inform and form our images of
the world and the divine – how we both see and respond to our social encounters
and experiences – shape our phenomenological hermeneutics, our interpretations
of what is true, valuable, and meaningful. Even characters in the Bible play
such a role for many Christians. And yet, in some cases, missing the all too
human construction of God images found in various texts of scripture can
actually lead us to misunderstand and misrepresent the God of Jesus Christ. And
sometimes Jesus’s words will come to us in rebuke for our misunderstandings and
dispositions. As the gospel of Matthew instructs us, ‘you have one instructor
(model), the Messiah’ (Matthew 23:10). Even our interpretation of the Old
Testament must be through the lens of our true divine model, Jesus Christ. Any
other ultimate model will more than likely lead to madness, which in turn will
lead to our condemning others, scapegoating others who we might wish to call
down fire upon.
