Outlaw's Carnival

Rituals of Exit

Baptism is very often understood as a purification rite, by which a person may wash away their sins and enter membership with the righteous. I don’t wish to deny all such meaning and resonance. Different stories run together everywhere. Where this story waxes, however, the baptism of Jesus becomes something of a puzzle, or even a minor crisis of dogma. It is universally held among Christian traditions that Jesus is without sin. Why then does he need to be baptised? 

I have no interest here in defending or disproving the dogma at stake, but in any case, the issue is not an issue if Jesus’ baptism was an ritual of exit, rather than a purifying rite of entry.

I'm aware of the allure of trying to expunge a religious tradition of moral questions—of saying that baptism and messianism and such have nothing to do with addressing one’s moral failures. Everything is about the more exciting and less awkward matter of overthrowing the powers that be, and so on. Alas, the messianic texts are in fact full of moral questions. Every day I live is full of moral questions. No one likes a moraliser, but the questions follow me around anyway. The consequences of not attending to the questions follow me around even longer. There is no good image of a human world after law, apart from relationships good enough to trust. Those kinds of relationships are formed of moral questions, well held. Moral questions are relational questions and relational questions are everything.

That said, the introspective religious conscience of the West is a weighted thing through which faith institutions have kept the rabble in perpetual moral debt. It untethers moral questions from the weave of life and politics and power, and loads them upon the isolated soul. John’s wilderness cult was not about purification for individuals facing some vertical justice system. John's moral imagination was horizontal and creaturely. Horizontal goodfaith renders the violent injustices of justice systems meaningless. It moves beyond that domain. More still, it reveals law as the problem itself: a systemic reproduction of the very violence it exists to eradicate.

When Jesus stands in the river with John and is immersed, with the cool running water singing in his ears, he is not being purified in order to gain entry into the kingdom. He's not going down by the riverside to wash his sins away. He's undergoing a ritual of exit from the realm of subjection; of debts, masters, laws and rulers. He enacts an exit from ponerou—that is deliverance from the evil of miserable toil, as the familiar old prayer ends. He's enacting a ritual of uncitizenship, ending all obligations to all such powers. He's  setting his face toward some other realm without borders or laws; a realm of mutuality and good relationships. A realm of all things reconciled. A realm that is right there, present, hidden in plain sight. Under so much tangled wire fencing, the earth is just the earth.

There's no tale told of the Messiah figure’s adult life before he left his inherited position and became something else, as John had also done. It is only told that John's ritual was the gate through which he went to begin his outlaw days. As he emerges from the river in that wild place, he is drawn by God further outward to the desert. There he is without food or human company. It is said rather matter-of-factly that he lives there in the company of the animals and the angels, as though those two orders were accustomed to sharing worlds together. He encounters that mischievous imp who tries to lure him back to what he had left, with the primary fruits of civilisatation: a controlled source of food, dominion over land, and the social power of greatness and spectacle. 

The story breaks apart here. John is locked up. His followers continue his austere pattern of fasting and simplicity in the wild. The Messiah figure on the other hand returns from obscurity and cuts an altogether different path. Whereas John kept himself away from the settlements and cities after passing through the waters of uncitizenship, Jesus returns to the world as one who no longer belongs to its rule. He re-enters what he left as a resident outsider. He becomes a jarring presence of extreme alterity, within the norm. There he is, hos mé—“as not.”

John's happening was a threshold. Beyond it the Messiah figure becomes a happening of his own. His pattern is of another ilk. Where John is austere, Jesus is accused of being a drunkard, a frequentor of parties and an associate of the most impious sorts. He is an itinerant, wandering with a growing cohort of hangers-on. The image is carnivalesque. The party goes from town to town. There is story-telling. There is feasting in the fields. There are ecstatic experiences. There are marginalised bodies at the front. There is healing and howling. They fraternise with enemies. They go about making themselves guests of the most unlikely hosts. And they host the most unlikely differences around the table.

There is a sort of violence, for want of a better word, to this carnival. It remains, wilfully, in the midst of all that it has left behind, like someone who quits a job but stays in the building. It cuts some new path, performing another kind of life within the old realm of law and mastery and power. It wanders through all the fences as though there were nothing there. 

Here is a striking pattern for life in the broken middle. How to exit when there is no livable outside realm? How to exit and yet remain present for the love of everything? How to enact the authentic exodus, that yet remains present. The Open is not necessarily somewhere else. It is wherever it happens. Here, perhaps, is the dialogue between the Open and the Enclave; the point at which they are not really two different spaces at all. Over time the messianics found language for this peculiar form of life: to be in the world but not of it… to live as xenoi, as strangers… to be here and now in this present age of the powers, hos mé: “as not.” 

But the pattern is a puzzle in itself. There is only a certain amount of time one can spend living as an outsider on the inside. The clock ticks on the outlaw who freely inhabits public space. How brazenly other can one sustainably be in a locked down world?