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The phone chirps. Yes, the house phone. Yes, we still have one. Yes, it's because it's easier to keep than to try to renegotiate our cable and internet package. And yes, it's Axel, one of the three actual people, meaning not robots, scammers, doctor's offices, or the red cross, that use the number.
I didn't really and the weariness in Axel's voice was not a draw, but I was curious about the circumstances. "What has riled him up?" I asked.
"You won't believe this . . ." He paused for effect: "The Council of Chalcedon."*
"I do believe it," thinking, It is Nils. "But explain."
"Why don't you come to lunch? Let him explain."
"Because I don't want to come to lunch," I thought but didn't say. I don't want to un-rile anyone. "No, but prepare me," I did say.
"I don't know if I can," Axel said. "Something, something, something leading to something about how the church is stuck in the weeds of Chalcedon, even if it doesn't know it. Trying to reconcile fully God and fully man, when God is omnipotent and man is too feeble to walk to the grocery store, where God is omniscient and man gets lost on his way home. But if Jesus of Nazareth is God's revelation of God's self, then he is no longer defined by power and knowing. He acknowledges in his death that he is weak - men can capture him, beat him, and hang on a tree until he dies. He demonstrates, when he teaches in parables, for example, that wisdom has nothing to do with knowing but with realizing that life in the world is a confusing thing in a perplexing place. And if he comes out on the other side, if he is raised from the dead, he demonstrates that love and hope and healing are the essence of God, not power and not knowing.
"This is still Nils," Axel says: "The Definition [of Chalcedon] has no interest in Jesus of Nazareth; there is no sense in it that here in him, Jesus, is the revelation of God. The council is, like Paul, completely disinterested in his ministry. But where Paul at least wonders about what his death and revelation might signify, Chalcedon is only interested in his birth or becoming, how he could come to be both God and man at the same damn time in the same damn being. No one at Chalcedon is asking, "What is God trying to say to us here?" Instead, the Council wants to say to God. It wants to explain how it must have been if the son of man was also the Son of God, truly God and truly man, 'one person in two natures, divine and human, which cannot be confused, changed, separated, or divided,' or whatever it says. It's theology without kerygma.** It's proposition without story. All I'm saying here is all Nils. "And the ghost of the writer of Mark's gospel was there, at Chalcedon, also according to Nils, screaming but unheard, 'You shits. You stupid shits. You stupid pharisaical shits!'
"So?" Axel asks.
"Do I want to go to lunch?" I answer. "No, I don't think I do. Can't you let him be riled up?"
"I suppose so. I mean, how can I stop him? But we're still having lunch."
"Cancel," I say.
"He's my brother."
"Cain-cel," I didn't say, because I didn't think of it at the time, only later. And I was glad of that. It was a stupid pun. Whatever we like to think, wit is almost never wisdom. It's seldom kind. Mostly, it isn't even funny.
01.18.24
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* The briefest of histories, a slightly longer (but not too long) explanation, and "the definition."
** The word means "teaching the story of salvation." Interestingly, if I click it with my spellchecker, it gives "merrymaker."
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