Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Serm: The least likely F

According to an old logic joke, for any predicate, F,  there is a least likely thing to have the property, a thing such that , if it should have the property than EVERYTHING has the property.  The theorem that this vivid misreading is a simple conversion of Tautology, "if P then P", the most trivial of logical laws.  One could build a whole logical system using a term for the the least likely F (and another for the most likely one -- what is an F if anything is-- with the same sort of history) and doing away with quantifiers (and their messy rules). Vut  notation needed to compensate would be messy indeed. 

"Least likely" makes me think of Jesus, the least likely Messiah.  Everything about him is wrong: his parentage is open to question, and even if you accept his apparent parents they are the lowest of the low -- not landowner or even tenant farmers but landless laborers.  Nor is he from the big city or a famous town, but from a shanty village thrown up house laborers for the overlords' rebuilding of a rebel city near by.  And his triumph was a disaster, him dead and his followers scattered and dispirited.  And yet, we can now say that this was the fullness of God on Earth.

We can take this "least likely" and rebuild theology upon it, for Christianity is all about the least likely and the fullness of the presence of God: the last are first, the oppressed are blessed and free, the fish food and bad wines are the Body and the Blood.  And the conclusion is that, consequently, ALL are first, all are blessed and free, everything is the Body and the Blood.  And whatsoever we do to the least is done to the Greatest.