The Scandal of Particularity
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In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard observes, “That Christ’s incarnation occurred improbably, ridiculously, at such-and-such a time, into such-and-such a place, is referred to—with great sincerity even among believers—as “the scandal of particularity.” Well, the “scandal of particularity” is the only world that I, in particular, know. What use has eternity for light? We’re all up to our necks in this particular scandal.” The Monty Python film, Life of Brian, makes the same wry point about particularity by noting that the crucifixion took place on Good Friday at Golgotha “around tea time.”
Most of us assume that that which is most universal is most true.
From general principles, we can apply the truth to individual cases. The particular here below is but an instantiation of an overarching truth established above and beyond the specific. For example, God is Absolute Good, we reason and then find that prior principle of goodness embodied in the person of Jesus. It’s precisely because we assume, by default, that truth works top down, from the universal to the specific, that, ever since God heard the cries of a particular people in captivity and shortly thereafter promised to them that they and they alone would be his chosen people, the world has responded to Israel’s profession of faith with persecution and charges of elementariness. The pagan world met the glad and audacious tidings of the gospel with the very same ridicule. As Dillard notes, theologians call the principle that goes against the grain of our natural reasoning, moving from the concrete to the universal, “the scandal of particularity.”
The medieval theologian Duns Scotus attempted to lend the scandal of particularity some philosophical legitimacy, asserting that God only created particulars and individuals, a quality he named “thisness” (haecceity). Thisness grounds truth in the concrete and the specific. You can’t really love universals, Scotus argued. It’s hard to love concepts, forces, or ideas. Ideology, it turns out, is just the ego wrapping itself around such abstractions. Nevertheless, even the philosophical cosmetic surgery worked by the “Subtle Doctor” can’t erase the offense of the incarnation.
You don’t get more specific or more salacious than the claim that the Maker of Heaven and Earth, Goodness Itself, the unseen, underlying Principle that makes even 1+1 = 2, took up residence in the womb of a particular Jewish girl named Mary in a certain place called Nazareth in a specific region named Galilee.
God then lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly. Even worse, this God has elected not only a particular people out of all the world, he has elected to make himself known to the world not through a means available to all but through the witness and proclamation of an imperfect few.
The scandal of particularity is the challenge every (honest or self-aware) preacher faces when preparing a sermon for Christmas Eve, “And the Word became [this] flesh and took up residence among [them].” The scandal of particularity is served up, front and center at the table, as obvious and unavoidable as the bread and the wine, “When we turned away, and our love failed, your love remained steadfast. You delivered us from captivity, made covenant to be our sovereign God, and spoke to us through your prophets…” The we in the Great Thanksgiving refer to us only secondarily. It refers primarily to the particular people called the Jews. Whenever a believer or inquisitor wonders how it is that he or she can be incorporated into God’s saving work if that salvific work comes by way of Christ’s own unique body, they are grappling with the scandal of particularity.
As a preacher, I’ve been working with, apologizing for, or generally avoiding the scandal of particularity for two plus decades. It’s always easier, after all, to treat Jesus as the exemplification of a principle we knew or believed before we met Jesus— what better way to avoid picking up a cross and following him.
All this time I thought I understood the scandal of the scandal of particularity—How odd of God to choose the Jews?
How dare God aim at saving all by starting only with some?
How can the infinite become finite?
Yesterday I visited Capernaum, and I realized just how much of the particulars of the scandal had passed me.
Capernaum is on the Sea of Galilee, a short walk from where Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount— that we even know these particulars with certainty is chilling. According to the Gospels, Jesus makes Capernaum his base of operations after his initial sermon in his hometown of Nazareth meets with something worse than, “That was interesting, pastor.” They drive Jesus from the synagogue and attempt to throw him off the cliff. So Jesus escapes by a hair and moves on to Capernaum. In Methodism we call this “itinerancy.” Outside of the Passion, most of the stories you associate with Jesus take place in Capernaum.
Jesus teaching in the synagogue: Capernaum.
Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law in her home: Capernaum.
Jesus healing the Centurion’s daughter: Capernaum.
Jesus healing the woman with the issue of blood: Capernaum.
Jesus healing the poor bastard whose friends lowered him through the insulation of the roof: Capernaum.
Jesus healing the man with the whithered hand: Capernaum.
The leper at the steps: Capernaum.
The whole “fishers of men” bit: Capernaum.
The charcoal fire by which the Risen Jesus reenacts the scene of Peter’s denial and forgives him thrice: Capernaum.
As someone who works with these texts for a living, I of course knew the setting these stories all share. It wasn’t until I was standing in Capernaum yesterday, however, staring down into the actual remains of Peter’s inheritance, that I realized how incredibly proximate every part of Capernaum was to every other part and how close Capernaum itself was to every other part of Jesus’s pre-Jerusalem ministry. When Jesus departs to go to the “other side” into Gentile territory, for example, he travels no more than a distance I could swim. The “town” of Capernaum occupies a square footage not much bigger than the real estate owned by my local church. The Gospels report that after teaching in the synagogue, Jesus went to the home of Peter’s old lady. I didn’t realize until this week that that trip probably took Jesus fifteen seconds. Likewise, Peter’s mother-in-law probably could’ve smelled the leper begging on the steps of the synagogue so close was her home to the Father’s house. The roof a cripple’s friends dug to get to Jesus is no further from the disciples’s fishing dock than first base is to third.
What the maps in the back of your Bible can’t convey, what the Jesus movies sure as shit don’t make clear, is that the bulk of Jesus’s ministry takes place in a space smaller than a planned community in the suburbs.
Thus, the scandal of particularity is even more scandalous, the canvas of God’s saving work is even smaller than Mary’s womb. Jesus preached and enacted the Kingdom among people who knew him and whom he knew. The cramped dimensions of Capernaum are such that there’s no way Jesus did not recognize the man with the withered hand or know the name of the man lowered threw the dry wall on a stretcher.
Even more scandalous—
When these folks reject Jesus, as they all ultimately do, they’re not rejecting a type of Kingdom preacher, a general instantiation of messiah, the latest iteration of a universal God principle.
They’re rejecting Jesus.
They’re abandoning the guy who lives fourteen feet over there. They’re turning away from the one whom they knew and who knew them. The scandal of particularity— I’ve learned only by virtue of being here— applies not simply to the way in which God took particular flesh but the way in which flesh rejected the particular God with whom they’d taken up residence.
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