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Archive for the category “parables”

18 Sep 2011

RS8: Timeless Courage and Kindness

A: Last Thursday (Sept. 15, 2011) my 87 year old dad had surgery at a publicly funded hospital in the Greater Toronto Area. It was a planned surgery — a knee replacement — but it was still a big deal for us. You worry when an 87 year old is having major surgery! Anyway, my mom and I got to sit for several hours in the surgical waiting room and watch all the people going about their day at this major teaching hospital.

As you’d expect there were people of all ages and all ethnicities. Different faces, different voices. But all focused on a common issue — the care and healing of sick people. I think my favourite moment came when a group of new student nurses went past with a supervisor. Ten or twelve young women, all different ethnicities, but all sporting long, shiny hair tied back in a ponytail. Black hair, blond hair, brown hair. United by fashion, I guess you could say.

Anyway, it was a positive environment. A real environment. Very grounded in our lives as human beings, human beings who need each other’s help. Coming so soon after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it seemed like the right sort of answer to the question of why we suffer as human beings here on Planet Earth. We can’t stop change. But we can bring healing to those who are in pain in the aftermath of change.

J: Most days there’s more healing in the pinkie finger of a publicly funded hospital than in the entire body of orthodox Western Christianity.

A: The staff we met at the hospital were upbeat and positive about my dad’s procedure. They were starting with the assumption that if they did a good job on the surgery and he did a good job on the physio and follow up care, his quality of life would probably improve. I liked the fact that self-pity wasn’t encouraged or condoned. They expected my dad to be a full participant in the process of healing.

J: It’s an interesting scientific fact that people’s attitude toward their health and recovery plays a major role in the trajectory of their healing. In particular, anger and self-pity interfere with the healing process because these choices prompt the body to sustain high levels of stress hormones. Stress hormones such as cortisol can damage crucial areas of the brain. In other words, if you choose to hang onto your anger and self-pity, you can damage your own brain.

A: Canadian physician Gabor Mate has written a very readable book on the connection between stress and health — especially how too much stress is linked to illness. (Gabor Mate, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (Toronto: Vintage Canada-Random House, 2003)).

J: Though fans of Richard Dawkin’s “selfish gene” won’t like what I’m about to say here, there is intentionality on God’s part in the design of DNA on Planet Earth.* All human beings share the same basic DNA, so all human beings are affected by the problem of brain damage caused by stress hormones and other neurophysiological imbalances. As researchers are grudgingly beginning to recognize, the human brain — and thus the wider human community — works a lot better when people make the choice to love and heal and forgive and learn from past mistakes. The human brain also works better when men and women, boys and girls, pool their respective talents as part of a team of different-but-equal individuals. No person is an island.

No matter what pond you happen to be living in, we all look to the same God for love, forgiveness, healing, and guidance. Photo credit JAT 2017

A: Especially not religious leaders.

J: God doesn’t single out certain individuals to be “chosen” priests or ministers or religious leaders. Those who claim to be chosen by God must answer to their communities for the choices they make. They must answer for their claims that God would want to blow up certain buildings or that God would want to take revenge on certain people. Why would God, who love all their children equally, be in the business of choosing one group over another? The inner heart knows God doesn’t play favourites. It cannot be any other way.

A: In the summer I stumbled across a wonderful article in the Toronto Star about a village in Pakistan where, for decades, hatred and violence between Muslims and Hindus had become the norm. (Rick Westhead, “A life-saving gift: How a Pakistani village plagued by sectarian attacks was transformed by one Hindu man’s blood donation to a dying Muslim woman,” Toronto Star, Saturday, July 30, 2011, p. A3). As reporter Rick Westhead describes, a difficult life in a desert environment was filled with fear because certain people had decided it was okay to beat and rape and even kill their neighbours on the other side of the religious divide. This all changed “in a moment” when a young Muslim mother desperately needed a blood transfusion and the only willing donor was a Hindu man. As word spread of the man’s offer, a group of Muslim men, incensed that medical staff refused to provide separate facilities for Muslims and Hindus, led a charge on the medical clinic to try to kill the blood donor. The doctor intervened. He told the attackers the Muslim woman would die without the transfusion. The leader of the Muslim attackers suddenly had an epiphany. He saw how generous the Hindu donor was. He suddenly felt remorse for his own hatred, and the next day he apologized to the donor: “‘I don’t know what came over me,’ Latif says. ‘I remember thinking that here we were refusing to even shake hands with the Hindus and he was willing to give us his blood. It was a marvelous thing he did. It was the turning point of my life.'”

Today the village is a place transformed by kindness and empathy and mutual assistance — all because of the bravery and compassion of one Hindu man and one Muslim man who were willing to let go of a longstanding “tradition” of hatred. Plus the doctor who stepped in the middle and said what needed to be said.

This reminds me a lot of you when you were healing the poor and the excluded in the towns of Galilee.

J: This is the great truth about God’s children. No matter who you are or what your religion or what the colour of your skin, you’re a child of God. You’re capable of astonishing feats of compassion and courage. It’s who you really are. When you look at your neighbour, whether Muslim or Christian or Jewish or another religion, you need to look at them through God’s eyes. You need to see them as your brothers and sisters, as your family-of-the-soul. Because this is the way God looks at all people — as individuals who are equal but different.

A: I’d like to remind readers of the My Fellow American interfaith initiative that can be visited at http://myfellowamerican.us. When I was watching the 2-minute video yesterday, with its clips of ordinary Americans who happen to be Muslim, I kept thinking of the waiting room at the hospital. I kept thinking of all the people who were there because they share the same human capacity to care. We’re all the same when we’re trying to heal and trying to help others.

J: Two thousand years ago I wrote the parable of the Good Samaritan to talk about this timeless issue. I was once the man who was beaten up by the side of the road (quite literally), and through the kindness of strangers I discovered to my shock that people can actually choose to be the loving and forgiving children God knows us to be. I would never have found my faith and my trust in God without the help of these kind, humble strangers. The people who helped me weren’t famous. They had no status. They had no wealth of the earthly kind. But they had that most mysterious of treasures — the heavenly heart.

A: It’s extraordinary how one act of great kindness and courage can change the world, isn’t it?

* This statement isn’t meant to lend support to Creationists or the Book of Genesis. Far from it. Scientific evidence about the age of the universe and the age of Planet Earth must take precedence over “revealed” teachings from sacred texts.

For more thoughts on the My Fellow American project, please see http://jesusredux.blogspot.com/2011/07/my-fellow-american-interfaith.html

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Posted in Divine Love, healing, Jesus' original writings, Jesus' teachings, Mother and Father God, parables, Realspiritik, Soul, theodicy and tagged Kingdom teachings, science & faith | Leave a Comment

05 Jul 2011

JR55: Healing: The Easy Way and the Hard Way

A: Apart from the Kingdom sayings and the puzzling Son of Man sayings, you also left behind some curious sayings about protecting the master’s house and making it strong against thievery or attack — especially attack from within. Thomas 21b and Luke 12:37-48 and Mark 3:20-27 all use this theme. The passage in Luke is especially confusing. Luke 12:37-38 is a makarism: “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.”

Now, I know you had nothing nice to say about the custom of slave-owning. So the passage in Luke (12:37-48) must be a parable, an analogy for something else, even though the Oxford NRSV calls these verses a collection of “sayings on watchfulness and faithfulness” rather than a parable.

“Therefore I say: If a householder knows a thief is coming, he will keep watch and not let him break into his house (of his kingdom) and steal his goods. You must keep watch against the world, preparing yourselves with power so that thieves will not find any way to come upon you” (Gospel of Thomas 21b and 21c, translated by Stevan Davies). Photo credit JAT 2013.

J (grinning): Oh, yes. It’s a parable. One I wrote myself.

A: Ah. And I see that this parable references “the Son of Man” in verse 40: “You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Many commentators have assumed this verse is a reference to an apocalyptic prophecy you made. They assume “the Son of Man” is an actual person — you — who will be coming back on a future day to bring about the prophesied day of judgment. Is this what you meant? Because Matthew 24:36-51 certainly makes it sound as if this is what you meant.

J: Matthew, as we’ve discussed earlier, was no friend of mine and no friend to my teachings. Matthew was like a gardener who sees another’s man field and hates the way the plants are arranged. So he sneaks in with a shovel at night and digs up the other man’s plants and takes them to a new field and replants them in an entirely new garden composition and adds some new plants of his own, then steps back and loudly proclaims he’s done great honour to the other man. Meanwhile, the other man’s garden is a potholed ruin.

A: Always with the parables. You just don’t quit!

J: It’s who I am.

A: Okay. So what were you getting at? Why were you so fond of the image of the master’s house that needs to be protected? Who was “the master”? Was it God?

J: Nope. The master in the parable of the responsible slave (Luke 12:37-48) is the soul of any human being who’s walking around on Planet Earth. Any human being at all.

A: Say what?

J: Although today’s commentators assume I was an idiot who spouted apocalyptic prophecy and hadn’t a drop of common sense in me, I actually had a “method to my madness.” The sayings I left behind all speak to a few internally consistent, common sense teachings about the soul. I said a small number of things a great many times. The things I said all relate to each other in a logical, coherent, heart-based way. If I spoke again and again about the psychological reality of the Kingdom (wholeness and maturity of the self), and the importance of respecting “boundaries of the self” and “boundaries of the other,” and the potential of human beings — all human beings — to seek healing and redemption through the power of forgiveness, then there’s only one person this “master” can be. The master is the self. The master is the core self, the soul that each person is. The true self. This parable is a metaphor about the human brain. It’s an attempt to explain in layman’s terms what’s going on inside a person’s head, and why there’s no such thing as demon possession. It’s an attempt to explain why the path of redemption seems so harsh at times.

A: “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay down his head and rest.” (Thomas 86)

J: Yes. Foxes know who they are and where their “home” is. Birds know who they are and how to build a home for themselves and their children. Human beings, of all God’s creatures on Planet Earth, are the least likely to know who they are and how to build a “home” for their highest potential. For a human being, this home is their brain — their biological brain and central nervous system. This home has to be painstakingly built over many years. Nothing so simple as building a bird’s nest, no sir! The “insides” of a person have to be carefully built to match the “outsides.” This is the holistic path to maturity for all human beings.

A: This goes back to what you were saying a few days ago about Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas (Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas). One thing I love about your teachings on wholeness — on Whole Brain Thinking — is the fairness of it. These teachings apply to all people in all places in all cultures. It’s radically egalitarian. Everyone gets the same basic toolkit for building a garden of peace. But each person’s garden will look different because each soul is different. I just love that part!

J: Yes, but before they can get to the point of being able to admire each other’s gardens — instead of envying and destroying each other’s gardens — they have to get through the healing stage. This is the stage where most people quit, where they run away from the difficulties and challenges of building an inner “home” — a field full of good soil — inside their own heads. This is the stage most people don’t even know IS a stage.

A: The Church has done precious little to help us understand this — even today, when we have so much knowledge about the human brain and its hard-wiring for empathy and change.

J: Two thousand years ago, I certainly had no knowledge of neuroanatomy or neurophysiology or neurotransmitters or the like. But I was a keen observer of human nature, and I was scientifically minded. More to the point, I was a mystic. I had unflinching faith in God’s goodness because of my mystical practice, and I knew there had to be something better than “demon possession” to account for frightening behaviour. So I looked to a scientific model. It wasn’t that hard, really. You work through empirical observation and rudimentary statistical analysis. That’s how all science advanced for thousands of years until recently. You take careful notes, you try to stay objective, you look for patterns, you try to prove you didn’t simply invent the patterns because you wanted to see them. Objectivity is crucial, of course. If you’re determined to find an imaginary Cause X, you’ll find it because you want to. However, this isn’t science. This is narcissism.

A: So your lack of narcissism — or I suppose I should say your eventual lack of narcissism — made you more open to honest fact-finding about the human condition.

J: I was open to the idea that there could be scars on the inside of a person’s body as well as on the outside.

A: In James 1:8, you use the unusual Greek word “dipsychos,” which is usually translated in English as “double-minded.” What were you getting at here?

J: If you read the parts of the Letter of James that I wrote — James 1:2-27; 2:1-8a; and 3:1-18 — you can see me struggling to put into words the problem of understanding the human brain and all its competing “intents.” I used several different metaphors there to try to explain what a lack of inner wholeness results in. Which is tragedy. Pain, suffering, and tragedy.

A: You also express the idea in James 1:8 that “the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” This is a pretty tough statement, don’t you think?

J: Many will think so. They’ll assume I’m talking about divine judgment and divine retribution. But I’m not. I’m talking about the scientific reality of the soul-body nexus. I’m talking about the built-in set of checks and balances that exists within the human self to promote mature, loving choices.

I’m going to come at your question from a different direction. If there really is a God, and there really are good souls, and there really are souls who choose to incarnate in a temporary 3D body where they have to struggle to balance the needs of their souls and the needs of their biological bodies . . . would it make sense to you in this context that God would refuse to provide built-in roadmaps and compasses and warning signals and obvious feedback so you could safely navigate all the confusion? Does that make sense to you?

A: No.

J: It didn’t make sense to me, either. So in the parable of the responsible slave, the “house” of the master is — to use you as an example (sorry, hope you don’t mind) — is your entire head, including your skull. The “master” is your soul, and in particular the non-plastic parts of your brain that are controlled by the thoughts and feelings and actions of your soul. The “slaves” are the semi-autonomous regions of your brain that are supposed to be in charge of your physiological needs, but which all too often end up running the show — and doing a very poor job of it, I might add. If you were to let the “slaves” manage your choices, abuses would occur. Abuses of your self and abuses of others. Naturally, your core self — your soul — wouldn’t like this very much, and your core self would have something to say about it. This isn’t punishment “from above.” This is you standing up for your own core integrity! This is you trying to get yourself back in balance!

A: By first recognizing that there’s a problem. With your own choices.

J: Healing begins with insight. Before you can heal, you have to admit there’s a problem. Unfortunately, people can get their heads caught up in some pretty unhealthy thinking patterns. They can become so dysfunctional that they confuse the “slaves” with the “master.” They can’t hear their own inner voice, even though the inner voice never stops talking.

There’s always the easy way and the hard way. You can listen to your own inner voice, and begin to heal, in which case the journey won’t be as difficult.

A: You’ll get a “light beating” (Luke 12:48).

J: The majority of human beings, then and now, however, end up by default on the hard way.

A: So their bodies get a “severe beating” (Luke 12:47) from their own souls.

J: Well, it looks that way from the outside in the beginning.

A: People will say you’re blaming the victims of illness.

J: It’s not that simple. People get ill for a variety of reasons. But ONE of the reasons people get sick is because they opt to make certain very poor choices. This is simply a statement of fact. It’s not a judgment to say that a person who chooses to eat 5,000 calories per day and is morbidly obese (with all the attendant health problems of extreme obesity) bears SOME of the responsibility for his or her state of health.

A: When you put it that way, it seems pretty fair and reasonable. There are lots of intentional human choices that can lead to serious illness and disability. We often don’t want to change the choices we make until we really, really understand the consequences that are involved.

J: Observable consequences are part of each person’s built-in roadmap for living a life of wholeness in accordance with the wishes and needs of the soul. If your biological body is way out of balance, you need to listen to what your soul is saying. It’s only common sense.

Posted in boundary issues, brain-soul connection, Gospel of Thomas, healing, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Kingdom teachings, Letter of James, makarism, Matthew's and Luke's intent, parables, Son of Man, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

30 Jun 2011

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JR53: Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas

A: At the beginning of Stevan Davies’s translation of the Gospel of Thomas, there’s a Foreword written by Andrew Harvey. Harvey has this to say about the Gospel of Thomas: “If all the Gospel of Thomas did was relentlessly and sublimely champion the path to our transfiguration and point out its necessity, it would be one of the most important of all religious writings — but it does even more. In saying 22, the Gospel of Thomas gives us a brilliantly concise and precise ‘map’ of the various stages of transformation that have to be unfolded in the seeker for the ‘secret’ to be real in her being and active though [sic?] all her powers. Like saying 13, saying 22 has no precedent in the synoptic gospels and is, I believe, the single most important document of the spiritual life that Jesus has left us (pages xxi-xxii).”

Harvey then plunges into 5 pages of rapture on the ecstatic meaning of Saying 22. None of which I agree with, of course. And none of which you’re likely to agree with, either, if experience is any guide. But I thought maybe you and I could have a go at it.

J: By all means.

A: Okay. Here’s the translation of Saying 22 as Stevan Davies’s writes it:

“Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples: These infants taking milk are like those who enter the Kingdom. His disciples asked him: If we are infants will we enter the Kingdom? Jesus responded: When you make the two into one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the upper like the lower and the lower like the upper, and thus make the male and the female the same, so that the male isn’t male and the female isn’t female. When you make an eye to replace an eye, and a hand to replace a hand, and a foot to replace a foot, and an image to replace an image, then you will enter the Kingdom (page xxii and 25-27).”

Harvey’s interpretation of this saying speaks of an “alchemical fusion” and a “Sacred Androgyne” who “‘reigns’ over reality” with actual “powers that can alter natural law” because he or she has entered a transformative state of “mystical union,” where “the powers available to the human being willing to undertake the full rigor of the Jesus-transformation are limitless.”

I’m not making this up, though I wish I were.

Mustard Seeds by David Turner 2005. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

“The disciples said to Jesus: ‘Tell us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.’ He replied: ‘It is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all. However, when it falls into worked ground, it sends out a large stem, and it becomes a shelter for the birds of heaven'” (Gospel of Thomas 20). Mustard Seeds by David Turner 2005, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

J: And there I was, talking about a little ol’ mustard seed . . . . It’s a terrific example of the danger of using “wisdom sayings” as a teaching tool. People have a tendency to hear whatever they want to hear in a simple saying. Parables are much harder to distort. Eventually I caught on to the essential problem that’s created when you choose to speak indirectly to spare other people’s feelings. When you use poetry instead of blunt prose, it’s much easier for other people to twist your meaning intentionally. You can see the same understanding in the Gospel of Mark. Mark is blunt. He doesn’t waste time on cliches and “wisdom words.” He goes straight for the truth, and leaves no wiggle room for gnostic-type interpretations.

A: Harvey seems to have found a whole lot of wiggle room in Saying 22.

J: I must admit that Harvey’s “revelation” of the Sacred Androgyne makes me feel sick to my stomach.

A: Why?

J: Because it denies the very reality of male and female. It denies the reality that God the Father is male and God the Mother is female. It denies the reality that everything in Creation is built on the cherished differences between male and female. Being male isn’t better than being female. And being female isn’t better than being male. But they’re not the same. Neither are they yin-and-yang. They’re not two halves of the same coin. They’re not mirror images of each other. They’re not a fusion — they’re not a Oneness — like a bowl of pure water. God the Mother and God the Father are like a bowl of minestrone soup. You can see all the big chunks of differentness floating around in there, and that’s okay, because that’s what gives the mixture its taste, its wonder, its passion.

God the Mother and God the Father aren’t the same substance with opposite polarities. No way. They have individual temperaments and unique characteristics. In some ways, they’re quite alike. In other ways, they’re quite different from each other. Just as you’d expect in two fully functioning, mature beings. That’s why it’s a relationship. They work things out together so both of them are happy at the same time. It’s not that hard to imagine, really. They have a sacred marriage, a marriage in which they constantly strive to lift each other up, support each other, forge common goals together, build things together, and most importantly, raise a family together. They look out for each other. They laugh together. They’re intimately bound to each other in all ways. But they’re still a bowl of minestrone soup. With nary a Sacred Androgyne in sight.

A: Okay. So if you weren’t talking about “oneness” or “alchemical fusion” or the “Sacred Androgyne” in Saying 22, what were you talking about?

J: Well, I was talking about the mystery and wonder that can be found in a simple seed. I was talking — as I often was — about how to understand our relationship with God by simply looking at and listening to God’s ongoing voice in the world of nature.

A: Oh. Are we talking about tree-hugging?

J: You could put it that way.

A: David Suzuki would love you for saying that.

J: I was a nature mystic, to be sure. Endogenous mystics are nature mystics. They see the image of God — and more importantly the stories of God — in God’s own language, which is the world of Creation. The world outside the city gates has so much to say about balance and time and beginnings and endings! The world outside the city gates is a library. It’s literally a library that teaches souls about cycles and physics and interconnectedness and chemistry and complexity and order and chaos all wrapped up together in a tapestry of Divine Love.

A: What you’re saying seems like a pretty modern, liberal sort of understanding. Were you able to articulate it this way 2,000 years ago?

J: Not to be unkind to modern, liberal thinkers, but when was the last time a philosopher of science sat down with a mustard seed and reflected on the intrinsic meaning of it? When was the last time you heard what a humble fresh bean can teach you about the spiritual journey of all human beings?

A: I see your point. People in our society don’t usually take the time to sit down and “smell the roses.”

J: Geneticists and biologists and related researchers can print out all their research on the genome of a kidney bean, and can even modify this genetic code in a lab, but to a mystic the kidney bean holds more than pure science.

A: So we’ve switched from mustard seeds to kidney beans as a metaphor?

J: Kidney beans are bigger and easier to see without magnifying lenses, and a lot of people have begun their scientific inquiries by growing beans in a primary school classroom. So yes — let’s switch to beans.

A: I remember being fascinated by fresh beans and peas when I was young. If you split the bean with your thumbnail, and you didn’t damage it too much when you split it, you could see the tiny little stem and leaf inside at one end, just waiting to sprout. If you planted a whole, unsplit bean in a small glass-walled container, you could watch the whole process of growth — the bean splitting open on its own, roots starting to grow from one end, the stem and leaf popping up, the two halves of the bean gradually shrinking as their nutrients were converted into stem and root growth. Somehow the bean knew what to do. It just kept growing out of the simplest things — dirt, sunlight, water.

J: The bean is a lot like the human brain. If you plant it whole in fertile ground and provide the right nutrients, it grows into a thing of wholeness and balance and wonder and mystery. On the other hand, if you try to split it open, or extract the tiny stem hidden inside, or plant it on rocks instead of good soil, or fail to give it sunshine and water, it won’t thrive. It may not even root at all. You can’t force the bean to grow where it isn’t designed to grow. You can’t force it to grow once you’ve forcibly split it open. You can’t force it to grow on barren rock. The bean has to be whole when you plant it. The outside skin has to be intact. The different parts inside the skin have to be intact. The bean has different parts, but it needs all those different parts in order to be whole — in order to create something new. The bean isn’t a single substance. But it is holistic. It’s a self-contained mini-marvel that teaches through example about cycles and physics and interconnectedness and chemistry and complexity and order and chaos. It appears simple, but in fact it’s remarkably complex. Creation is like that — it appears simple, but in fact it’s remarkably complex.

A: Why, then, were you talking about “male and female” in Saying 22? Why did you seem to be talking about merging or fusion of male and female into an androgynous state? Or a Platonic state of mystical union?

J: It goes to the question of context. I was talking to people who, as a natural part of their intellectual framework, were always trying to put dualistic labels on everything in Creation. Everyday items were assigned labels of “good or evil,” “pure or impure,” “male or female,” “living or dead.” It had got to the point where a regular person might say, “I won’t use that cooking pan because it has female energy, and female energy isn’t pure.”

A: I’m not sure that kind of paranoid, dualistic, magical thinking has really died out, to be honest.

J: There are certainly peoples and cultures who still embrace this kind of magical thinking. You get all kinds of destructive either-or belief systems. You get people saying that right-handed people and right-handed objects are favoured by God, whereas left-handed people are cursed. It’s crazy talk. It’s not balanced. It’s not holistic. It’s not trusting of God’s goodness.

A: And you were left-handed.

J: Yep. My mother tried to beat it out of me, but I was a leftie till the day I died. When I was a child, I was taught to be ashamed of my left-handedness. Eventually I came to understand that I was who I was. The hand I used as an adult to hold my writing stylus was the same hand I’d been born with — my left hand. But on my journey of healing, redemption, and forgiveness, I came to view my hand quite differently than I had in my youth. Was it a “new hand”? No. Was it a new perception of my hand. Yes. Absolutely yes.

A: You stopped putting judgmental labels on your eyes and your hands and your feet and your understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God.

J: One of the first steps in knowing what it feels like to walk in the Kingdom of the Heavens is to consider yourself “a whole bean.”

A: Aren’t there kidney beans in minestrone soup? How did we get back to the minestrone soup metaphor?

J: A little mustard seed in the soup pan never hurts either.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dualism, Favourite Posts, gender and sexuality, Gnosticism, Gospel of Thomas, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Mother and Father God, Mother God, parables, Plato, relationship with God, unio mystica, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged Gospel of Thomas, Kingdom teachings

05 Jun 2011

JR47: "Knowledge" Versus "Truth"

A: Tell me how you would explain the difference between “knowledge” and “truth.” There seem to be a lot of different theories floating around.

J: Here’s one of the problems with relying too heavily on words. One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “truth.” One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “wisdom.” One person’s “knowledge” is another person’s “fact.” Words can be very messy, very sloppy. It’s important for individuals to be clear about their use of abstract words like these.

A: Okay. How do you, as a soul-in-angel-form and speaker of the English language, use the word “knowledge”?

J: I use the word “knowledge” to mean an accumulation of facts. Lots of raw facts. These facts may or may not be connected to each other. But there are lots of them. Lots of different facts that can be accessed from memory or from sources such as books or computers to answer specific questions of fact.

A: Like the question and answer pairs on Jeopardy.

J: Exactly. These question and answer pairs rely on logic and reason. But there’s usually little emotional content. And there’s no need for “insight” or “understanding” or “truth.” The facts speak for themselves. Of course, as human Jeopardy contenders recently discovered, a honkin’ big computer can access raw facts — “knowledge” — faster than most human brains can.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear(respect) the Lord, and turn away from evil. It will be a healing for your flesh and a refreshment for your body” (Proverbs 3:5-8). If you really want to heal your relationship with God, try humbly accepting you probably have a lot of old beliefs that are messing up the way your brain works. Certain beliefs about God can “freeze up” your neural networks and prevent your brain from being able to process Divine guidance. Without easy access to your Divine guidance, you’re limited to the ideas inside your own brain. And let’s face it, some of those ideas are probably pretty stupid (like Young Earth Creationism). The Truth about you and God (a wonderful Truth!) is already deep within you, but first you have to melt the ice that’s keeping you from feeling your Soul pathways. Photo credit JAT 2022.

J (Cont): Having said that, I want to make it clear that I’m not dissing the importance of “knowledge.” It’s important to be able to remember and access facts. Facts give information about things that are already known, already certain — things that are “a done deal.” Facts help ground the learning process. In fact, learning can’t take place at all in the absence of facts. This is true even in fields such as philosophy and theology. The universe isn’t reinventing itself every few seconds like some big relativistic, existential “symbol” in the sky (as some religious philosophers would have you believe). There are fixed facts, fixed historical realities that guide all choices made by God and God’s angels. The universe has a history — a factual history — that can’t be changed. The universe’s past has a measurable effect on its present. The past matters. And the past is fact — not fiction. The past can’t be altered. Time is linear. Even for God.

A: This will come as a great disappointment to fans of time travel stories. And to theologians who insist that All Time has been known to God since the very beginning. God’s foreknowledge of all that will happen in the future is the basis of Christian “predestination” — the doctrine that says God already knows ahead of time who will be saved in the End Times.

J: Another example of old lies begetting new lies, as you put it. The first lie, of course, was the lie that souls desperately need to be saved from hell and judgment and damnation. But souls don’t need to be saved. Why would God create billions of defective souls that need to be saved by . . . televangelists? Salvation-of-the-soul is a goofy idea from start to finish.

A: But a very profitable one.

J: It’s an interesting fact of neurophysiology that certain forms of serious psychological dysfunction in human beings are accompanied by damage to the parietal lobes of the brain — parts of the brain which are crucial to a person’s ability to relate to time and space. When the volume of the parietal lobes is reduced, and when the density of glial cells is diminished in the parietal-temporal regions, an individual will experience problems understanding boundaries (i.e. his or her location in space) and problems with empathy (i.e his or her location in both time and space — also called boundary issues). These are the individuals who can’t learn from their own mistakes, who can’t empathize with other people’s feelings, who constantly invade other people’s “time and space.”

A: The narcissists.

J: Yes. A narcissist is someone who’s become inwardly focussed to the point of selfishness and self-absorption because he or she has no “brain health” in the areas of time and space — no ability to accurately identify the factual boundaries that surround each soul. She literally can’t see where she ends and another person begins. She can’t see that she’s a separate entity — a separate consciousness — from her neighbour. The boundaries between her and her neighbour exist and are real and are factual. But she can’t see them. It’s all blurry to her. The boundaries exist, but she behaves as if they don’t exist. She behaves as if she and her neighbour “are all one,” as if the neighbour is merely an extension of her own core consciousness. The neighbour, of course, is expected to “behave” — to obey her needs and wishes without question and to reinforce her image of herself as a wonderful person. There’s a perfect analogy for this mindset in the realm of science fiction: Star Trek’s hive queen of the Borg.

A: See, I knew there was good reason for me to be watching the Space Channel.

J: The great thing about the way the Borg Queen character is written is her calm, serene, elevated disposition. She believes her own propaganda about making life better for all the individuals she incorporates into her collective. She goes around telling everyone “we’re all one, we’re all equal.” But what she actually means is, “I’m the only one who really exists, and all you drones are merely inferior beings who were put here to serve me” . . . which brings us to the question of “truth.”

A: The way you’ve just described the Borg Queen reminds me — none too pleasantly — of the modern apocalyptic prophet I spent too much time with a few years ago: Grace. She was always speaking “the truth” that “we’re all one, we’re all equal.” She had the same calm, serene detachment as the Borg Queen. It gave her such an air of believability — even wisdom. She seemed to have let go of all her worries about the past. Very appealing to somebody like me who was dogged by feelings of guilt and shame.

She seemed so believable — until you challenged her. When you challenged Grace’s superiority, her infallibility, it was like a switch went off in her brain. She switched instantly from calm, affable charm to vicious, vengeful violence. The smallest thing could set her off. I still remember the murderous look in her eye one day when I told her that she herself had caused an electrical short in a lighting fixture by twisting the fan/light combo while it was still attached on one side to the ceiling. I could see that she wanted to throw me down the stairs because I’d pointed out her obvious error. The mistake was entirely hers. But she didn’t want to hear about it. She couldn’t handle responsibility for her own mistakes.

J: Good example — though painful. Grace was a person with significant impairment of her biological brain function, as you know. She was able to process “knowledge” — facts — well enough to function in society. She could remember that gas needed to be put in the car, that food had to be bought and prepared. But as for “truth” . . . “truth” was beyond her capacity to grasp because of damage to her biological brain from early, unhealed, profound childhood abuse. Physical, emotional, sexual, and psychological abuse. As a result of the abuse, and the biological damage caused by it, Grace couldn’t read “intent.” She couldn’t understand or be honest about her own inner intent. Her intent was to prove to other people that she was better than they were. That’s the honest truth. The truth is that everything Grace did — all her choices — were shaped by her narcissistic intent. Her words about “oneness” and “equality” meant nothing because her actual intent said something different.

A: So you’re drawing a strong link between “intent” and “truth.”

J: Very much so. Facts by themselves are not “truth,” though “truth” is not “truth” without a foundation of facts. Truth — as I’m defining it — is an observation or insight about the way in which seemingly random facts are linked together by underlying strands of intent. The intent is like the subfloor of the factual foundation. The facts lie on top of the intent. The truth builds on both the intent and the facts. For something to be “true” in a philosophical way, it must objectively assess both a collection of facts AND the underlying intent underneath those facts.

A: Are you saying that a person’s “intent” and his/her “starting assumptions” are the same thing?

J (shaking his head): No. A person’s inner intent is more like his inner “purpose” or “goal.” Your intent speaks to the principle of time — where you were in the past, where you are now, and where you want to go. It’s more like conscious motivation. It’s the motivation that gets you out of bed in the morning and keeps you going, even when things aren’t going well.

A: So it’s teleology?

J: Again, no. Teleology implies there’s a finite, definable end goal or a purpose shaped by the Law of Cause and Effect. “Intent” is not as simple as teleological purpose. “Intent” goes to the very heart of consciousness — what it means to exist as a living consciousness who is separate from (though connected to) other living consciousnesses. Intent can be thought of as a cohesive set of interconnected choices — a series of small choices that, when put together, create one big “meta-choice.” That “meta-choice” is your intent. At a quantum level, “meta-choices” shape the way in which certain energies can and will flow.

A: Can you give us an analogy for that?

J: Sure. I’ll use an analogy I’ve used before — the sower of seeds.

A: I think I see where this is headed . . .

J: In the parable of the sower [Thomas 9; Mark 4], the person — the soul — is the sower of seeds. The seeds represent the person’s potential, the person’s ability to learn, grow, change, and create. But the sower doesn’t create out of thin air. He must plant the seeds — the seeds of potential — in the right place if he wants them to grow. His decision on where to sow the seeds is his intent — his “meta-choice.” The meta-choice is what determines which seeds can and will grow. The seeds don’t grow equally well in all intents. Where seeds fall on a “ground” or “subfloor” of rock, they fail to root and they produce no harvest. Where seeds fall on patches of thorny weeds, they don’t grow and they’re eaten by grubs and caterpillars. There’s nothing wrong with the seeds themselves. The problem lies in the choice of where to plant them. The problem lies with the intent.

A: So a narcissist’s true intent is like the choice to sow seeds on rocky ground or in thorny patches.

J: Or in a bed of fire, as the church likes to recommend.

Seeds don’t grow easily on this rocky ground. “Jesus said: Look, there was a man who came out to sow seed. He filled his hand with seed and threw it about. Some fell onto the road, and birds ate it. Some fell onto rocks and could not root and produced no grain. Some fell into patches of thorny weeds that kept it from growing, and grubs ate it. Some seed fell upon good soil and grew and produced good grain. It was 60 units per measure and 120 units per measure (Gospel of Thomas 9).” Photo credit JAT 2023.

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Posted in "4 S's", boundary issues, empathy, End Times, Gospel of Mark, insight, intent, Jesus Redux, meta-choice, monism, My Spiral Path, narcissism, parables, sense of time & timing, Truth and tagged brain-soul connection | Leave a Comment

29 May 2011

JR44: Mark’s Themes of Understanding and Strength

This is a research paper I wrote in 2009 for a course on New Testament exegesis. It explains in detail some of the major themes found in the Gospel of Mark. I used Wordperfect’s Greek language symbols to type key words that were relevant to the argument. A few of these Greek letters didn’t survive the “cut and paste process,” so I’ll have to substitute English typeface where necessary (mostly for the vowels “eta,” “iota,” “upsilon,” and “omega”). Sorry about that.

P.S. The paper pasted here is as I wrote it, including the endnotes, where I confess I don’t yet understand how the word “artos” (leavened bread, loaf) is being used by Mark. Since then (with Jesus’ help), I’ve figured it out.

“Now the disciples had forgotten to bring any bread; and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, ‘Watch out — beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.’ They said to one another, ‘It is because we have no bread.’ And becoming aware of it, Jesus said to them, ‘Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’ And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ And they said to him, ‘Seven.’ Then he said to them, ‘Do you not yet understand?'” (Mark 8:14-21). Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003.

RADICAL MESSIAH AND THE SHEMA: MARK’S THEMES OF
UNDERSTANDING AND STRENGTH

Graham Stanton, in his discussion about the Gospel of Mark, refers to “Mark’s genius as a story-teller” (41), and says, “perhaps Mark should be seen not so much as a block of toffee (form criticism) or as a string of pearls (redaction criticism), but as a piece of rope with interwoven strands” (41). Later in the chapter, he asks these questions: “Why was this gospel written? Many scholars have proposed quite specific historical or theological settings. But they are usually able to make reasonable sense of only one or two of the many interrelated strands which the evangelist develops” (57-58). One strand which I feel has been overlooked is Mark’s overt addition to the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9) in Chapter12:29 of the Gospel. So obvious would this change have been to a Jewish Christian audience in the early to mid-60’s CE that the question of Mark’s purpose must be raised. What was he signalling to his audience with this change? Why did he dare add to a well-known prayer that, according to the Jewish Study Bible, was being formally recited late in the Second Temple period (379)? It is the thesis of this paper that Mark did not accidentally alter the Shema through lack of knowledge, and that he did not accidentally link the Shema to the commandment in Leviticus 19:18 to love one’s neighbour as oneself (12:31). There was a purpose to his addition of the phrase “and with all your mind (διανοίας)” to the existing formulation of “you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart (καρδίας) and with all your soul (ψυχnς) and with all your might (iσχύος).” This supposition is supported by Mark’s repetition of the Shema in 12:32-33, altered yet again, this time without genitive cases, and with a changed emphasis to understanding (συνέσεως). Here the sympathetic – and sensible (νουνεχwς) – scribe is allowed by Mark to voice the two most important commandments: “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ – this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” The penny then drops for readers as Jesus says to the scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (present tense verb, 12:34). Mark has just presented a major clue to unravelling some of the strands of his gospel.

The altered Shema is part of a teaching chreia (12:28-34) that can be seen, it is argued here, as an early creedal statement, the climax and summary of Jesus’ teachings about what it means to be “not far from the kingdom of God” (12:34). It is difficult to understand Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom of God, says Mark in different ways throughout the Gospel. Even Jesus’ closest friends, the disciples, do not understand (4:10-13). The whole thing can be boiled down to two commandments (12:28-31), which sound easy at first, but are much more difficult to practice than the old system of “burnt offerings and sacrifices,” a system which requires Jews to show unswerving loyalty. (Loyalty, not private emotion, is the meaning of the verb aheb, “love,” as it applies to the Shema, according to the Jewish Study Bible (380) and Sakenfeld (376)). A big part of Jesus’ version of faith, according to Mark, is the requirement that disciples use their minds. Fideism is not acceptable. God’s faithful must question the specific ways in which religious teachings are being misused (e.g. 2:23-28; 3:1-6; 7:1-23; 12:38-40; 12:41-44), just as in the past Jews once questioned harmful religious and societal conventions (e.g. Exod. 20:2-6; 21:1 – 22:16; 22:20-12). (Mark thus shows Jesus to be following the “wilderness spirit” of the Sinai Covenant in the Torah (cf. Mark 1:3,4,12), as opposed to the Temple and hierarchy-based Zion Covenant presented in the Psalms and the Deuteronomistic History.[1]) God’s faithful must be willing to not only open their hearts and souls to God’s kingdom, but also their minds (διάνοια) – their innate capacity to think and understand in moral ways (Harder 125). Moral thinking and moral decision-making is a higher form of loving God than being obedient and loyal to the laws of the Zion Covenant.

This kind of “thinking faith,” directed towards loving God (e.g. 1:35-39; 15:25-32), loving others (eg. 9:33-37; 10:41-45), and loving themselves (e.g. 12:31)[2], will put them in opposition to others – family (e.g. 3:21; 3:31-35; 10:28-31), friends (e.g. 6:1-3; 14:66-72), Pharisees (e.g. 3:6, 12:13-17), scribes and chief priests (e.g. 2:6-9, 3:16-17; 11:18), and Gentiles (e.g. 5:14-17; 15:16-20) – who choose to follow honour-oriented traditions. Understanding is not an instantaneous gift from God, however (clearly evidenced in 8:14-21)[3]. Nor is understanding a gift conferred only on the disciples closest to Jesus (e.g. 5:33-34; 9:33-37; 10:17-22; 12:34; 14:6-9). Understanding is a long, difficult process which disciples must willingly participate in (e.g. 4:13; 4:33-34; 10:23-27; 13:9-13). It requires strength, a theme which Mark repeatedly intertwines with the requirement for understanding, as shall be shown. God’s faithful must commit their strength (iσχύς) to a process spread out over time and geography (hence Jesus’ travels back and forth across Galilee and adjacent territories) and also over boundaries of class and honour (hence Jesus’ willingness to heal and teach people from disadvantaged groups). It is a process open to all people, regardless of race, religion, gender, state of mental and/or physical health, wealth, or status. But it is a difficult process.

Mark – for all that he is trying to describe a “thinking faith” – seems very wary of directly invoking Hellenistic or Judeo-Hellenistic notions of philosophy, rational thought, or “wisdom” (σοφία). Σοφία is used 51 times in the New Testament, but only once in Mark (on the lips of the surprised synagogue attendees in 6:2). The adjective σοφός appears 22 times in the New Testament, but not once in Mark. Whatever claim Mark is making, it is not a claim for σοφία (wisdom, insight, intelligence, knowledge, divine knowledge). He prefers the cognates of the more “practical” verbs συνίημι (understand, comprehend, perceive, have insight into) and διαλογίζομαι (discuss, argue, consider, reason, wonder about, question). It is notable that, although he uses the adverb νουνεχwς once, and the verb νοέω a few times, he does not use the Greek word νοuς, a noun meaning perception, understanding, thoughts, or reason. Νοuς is attested since Linear B; it was used by Plato to mean “the highest of the three parts of the soul” (Harder 122), and still later used in the post-canonical, apocryphal era of Jewish literature in a sense associated with the will or deliberation (Harder 125). It is difficult to tell whether Mark avoids using νοuς because in Hebrew there is no direct equivalent for it, and the Septuagint rarely uses it (Harder 124) (compare to Paul, who uses it in Romans and 1 Corinthians); or whether Mark avoids using it because he has a general tendency to not include abstract “wisdom words” such as “peace,” “hope,” and “righteousness” words in his writing[4].

It is interesting to ponder Mark’s non-use of the “wisdom words” frequently attested in books of the Old Testament, as well as in the other Gospels, Acts, and the accepted letters of Paul. Certainly it can be argued that these words are malleable enough to serve any purpose (“Peace in our time!”). Perhaps, by not making abundant use of “wisdom words,” Mark hopes to make his readers think, to apply their minds in new ways to the difficult question of what it means to be close to the kingdom of God. (Mark himself lends this impression in 13:14, where he suddenly interjects with “let the reader understand (νοείτω).”) “Out with the poetry, in with the praxis,” seems to be his approach. He therefore intentionally avoids “telling us” at length what Jesus said, and insists on “showing us” what Jesus did – what Jesus’ actions and choices were, where he went, who he talked to, who he aided, and what he did despite his friends’ lack of courage, faith, and love. Mark’s Radical Messiah is a man of relatively few words who teaches by example, and is not interested in raising his own status. (Even the scribe in 12:28-34 is accorded great dignity by Jesus – and also by Mark.) Therefore, for Mark, the examples are what matter most. (By contrast, Matthew’s Jesus seems very fond of the sound of his own voice, and John’s Jesus has a case of the “I ams.”)

It is clear from a review of word usage articles that, by the first century CE, there was a blurring between Jewish and Hellenistic concepts of heart, mind, and soul, and this may explain why Mark felt he needed to add to the traditional phrasing of the Shema. In the Septuagint translation of the Shema, for instance, leb is rendered as καρδία; yet Holloday’s Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon shows 11 different meanings for leb: the physical heart organ; the seat of vitality; the seat of one’s feelings and impulses; mind, character, disposition, inclination, loyalty, concern; determination, courage, high morale; intention, purpose; mind, attention, consideration, understanding; the self; conscience; metaphorically the “interior” or “middle”; and finally the organizing power of living beings (nefesh – the word which is translated as ψυχή in the Septuagint’s version of the Shema ) (171-172). Harder points out that Septuagint translators rendered the Hebrew leb or lebab as νοuς only six times, as διάνοια 38 times, and as καρδία in most other instances (124). Sorg reports that the Septuagint occasionally translates leb as ψυχή (181). Meanwhile, ψυχή itself (used 101 times in the New Testament) encompasses a broad range of meanings: the whole person or creature; a person’s actual, physical life; the seat of the emotions; the inner life or personality of a person; the part of the person that lives on after death (Harder 682-686; Carrigan). Καρδία can be used literally to mean the physical heart, or it can be used metaphorically. In the New Testament, it is used in 148 passages with a variety of meanings: the seat of intellectual and spiritual life; the inner person or personality/ego; the seat of doubt and hardness; the mind or reason; will, desire, intention (Sorg 182-183). To state, as Cameron does, that “since Hebrew psychology lacked precise terminology, there is some overlapping in the use of nepesh, leb/lebab, and ruah” is something of an understatement. Perhaps Mark, aware of the confusion amongst Jews and Jewish Christians about the meanings of leb and καρδία, nefesh and ψυχή, decides to make certain that no one can dispute the necessity of “mind” and “understanding” (as distinct from Hellenistic wisdom!) by his explicitly including both διανοίας and συνέσεως in the crucial teaching chreia of 12:28-34.

Mark wants to talk about the Radical Messiah’s “thinking faith,” but at the same time he demonstrates a prudent fear of both Jewish and Roman authorities. He does not wish to be arrested for apostasy or political treason (he is writing during a time of heightened political-religious conflict, both within Judaism itself, and between Judaism and the Roman Empire). Therefore, while he shies away from “wisdom words,” he makes ample use of allegory. It is difficult, for instance, to see Mark’s repeated use of boat crossings on the “Sea” of Galilee as anything but a metaphor. It is a lake, after all, and not a very big one, at that – a fact that early Jewish Christian readers in the region would have known. Pheme Perkins points out that the Q Source has no sayings about fishing or grapes, and no stories about storms on the Sea of Galilee (94-95). Mark, however, introduces the Sea of Galilee, fishermen, and boats in his first chapter (1:16, 1:16-20, and 1:19-20 respectively). He is hinting at something. What does a boat do? we then must ask. A boat helps us cross the waters. What have bodies of water traditionally represented in Jewish thought? The forces of chaos that are overcome by the sovereign powers of God (Gen. 1:2 – 2:3). And how does one overcome the forces of chaos? In part, by using one’s strength – at which point it is very hard to overlook the similarity in sound between the word for “fish” (iχθύς) and the word for “strength” (iσχύς). (We know that Paul uses plays on words, so it is not unreasonable to conclude that Mark does the same.) Once this is observed, the two miraculous feedings of the crowd with bread and fish (6:34-44 and 8:1-9) become emblematic of the “strength” with which Jesus feeds the people [5,6] – the same strength that is spoken of in a positive light twice in 12:28-34, in a negative light in 14:37, in a perplexing light in 3:27 and 5:4, and in a contextual way in 15:46, where Joseph of Arimathea has the strength to roll a “very large rock” across the tomb by himself.

In the important verses of 8:14-21, Mark draws an overt link between the allegorical feedings – with their relationship to the theme of strength – and the issue of understanding. Here, while Jesus and the disciples are sitting yet again in their boat (8:14 – the final reference to boats in the Gospel of Mark), Jesus castigates the disciples harshly, in several different ways, because they do not yet understand (νοεiτε) or realize (συνίετε). This pericope is filled with Greek verbs related to the thinking faculties of people (thinking faculties which include input from the senses): the disciples “forgot” the bread (8:14); Jesus cautions them to “see” the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod (8:15); the disciples “reasoned” among themselves (8:16); Jesus “knows” their attempt at reasoning and asks them why they are still “reasoning” that way instead of “understanding” and “realizing” (8:17); have their “hearts” been hardened? Jesus asks (8:17); do they have “eyes” that don’t see, and “ears” that don’t hear? (8:18); do they not “remember”? (8:18); do they not yet understand? (8:21). Verses 14-21 of Chapter 8 can be seen to conclude and epitomize the first half of Mark’s Gospel, as some scholars have suggested (Perkins 131); however, reading the Gospel in this way does, as Perkins points out, present “as much of a challenge to the audience as the ending of the Gospel does” (131) because of its critical depiction of the disciples. The disciples, both male and female, lack understanding and strength. They have not applied “all their mind” and “all their strength” to loving God or their teacher, Jesus, and therefore – unlike the scribe of 12:28-34 and perhaps unlike Joseph of Arimathea – they have not been able to draw near to the kingdom of God. It is not enough to be loyal, according to Mark. It is not enough to be close to the Rabbi. The disciples will not be able to understand what the kingdom of God is like until they give themselves heart, soul, mind, and strength to the praxis of loving God and loving other people, the sort of praxis which Jesus models on every page of this complex gospel.

ENDNOTES

1. The two covenant thesis in the Jewish Bible is convincingly argued by W.M.

2. Not all scholars agree that 12:29 commands people to love themselves (Klassen 389).

3. Mark does not tell us how Jesus acquired his understanding. We know only that God has adopted Jesus as his son (1:11 and 9:7), and is well pleased with him.

4. In marked contrast to other New Testament authors such as Matthew, Luke in Luke/Acts, and Paul, Mark uses the words “peace” (only 3 times), “hope” (zero times), “love” (X 4), “joy” (X 1), “freedom” (X 0), “glory” (X 3), “just/righteous” (X 3) or “holy” (X 7). (Nelson’s Concordance)

5. I have not yet figured out how “artos” is being used in these passages.

6. In this context, the numerological references in the two miraculous feedings (e.g. 5,000 people, 12 baskets of leftovers, 7 loaves) can be read as being indicators to treat these passages allegorically (unlike the healing miracles, which Mark treats in a factual way).

WORKS CONSULTED

Berlin, Adele and Marc Zvi Brettler, Eds. The Jewish Study Bible: Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Cameron, W.J. “Soul.” New Bible Dictionary. 2nd Ed. Ed. J.D. Douglas. Leicester and Wheaton IL: Inter-varsity and Tyndale House, 1982. 1135.

Carrigan, Henry L. “Soul.” Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Ed. David Noel Freedman. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. 1245.

Coogan. Michael D., Ed. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, College Edition. 3rd Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Ellison, John W., Ed. Nelson’s Complete Concordance of the Revised Standard Version Bible. New York: Nelson & Sons, 1957.

Harder, Georg. “νοuς.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3. Rev. Ed. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 122-130.

Harder, Georg. “ψυχή.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3. Rev. Ed. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 676-689.

Goetzmann, Jurgen. “σύνεσις.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3. Rev. Ed. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 130-134.

Holloday, William L., Ed. A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988.

Klassen, William. “Love in the New Testament and Early Jewish Literature.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vol. 4. Ed. David Noel Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 381-396.

Morrison, Clinton. An Analytical Concordance to the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979.

Perkins, Pheme. Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007.

Sakenfeld, Katharine Door Sakenfeld. “Love in the Old Testament.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vol. 4. Ed. David Noel Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 375-381.

Schattenmann, Hans-Georg. “Iσχύς.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3. Rev. Ed. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 712-716.

Sorg, Theo. “καρδία.” The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 2. Ed. Colin Brown. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986. 180-184.

Stanton, Graham N. The Gospels and Jesus. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

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Posted in Bible, courage, Divine Love, faith, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, insight, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, Kingdom teachings, Mark vs Paul, miracles, parables, Soul and tagged Kingdom teachings, Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

03 Mar 2011

JR17: Interpreting Jesus’ Parables: Some Guidelines

A: Tell me about your parables. Why did you switch from short wisdom sayings to narrative parables as a method of teaching?

J: I switched because wisdom sayings are the easiest thing to pervert if you’re a leader. They’re a convenient source of mind control or brainwashing, if you will. A clever leader can always find a wisdom saying or a biblical law to back up his or her desired position. Such leaders know that regular people will feel guilty and ashamed if they believe they’ve broken an important moral law. Regular people back down quickly when they think they’ve broken moral codes, moral imperatives. That’s a good thing, by the way.

A: Explain who you mean by “regular people.”

J: Balanced individuals. Emotionally mature individuals. People who respect both themselves and the needs of the wider community. Compassionate people. People who reject libertarian values.

A: You once wrote some scathing comments about the Ten Commandments to show how even these supposedly unbreakable laws are interpreted differently by those who are in power and those who don’t have any power.

J: As many political revolutionaries over the centuries have pointed out.

A: And more recently, liberation theologians.

J: The problem with these short wisdom sayings is that they can be given any context that’s convenient. Interpreters of wisdom sayings can claim the sayings must be interpreted literally, if that suits their purpose. More commonly, interpreters claim the sayings are symbolic — filled with hidden esoteric meanings that only the most advanced religious initiates can fully understand. Needless to say, this leads to no end of abuse. If wisdom sayings can be moulded like putty to suit any need, then they have no meaning. There’s a reason that most major world religions are centred around only a few small books of sacred teachings plus vast libraries of commentary and interpretation that run into the thousands and millions of pages. Each new generation of theologians wants to prove how clever they are at “reinterpreting” or “revealing” the hidden message of the short sayings. It’s a cottage industry.

This rock sample on display at the Natural History Museum, London, UK is a perfect visual metaphor for the parables written and taught by Jesus. As you begin to study the parables, you’ll likely see them as a whole and durable stepping stone that combines traditional teachings such as moral obedience with new strands of thought such as forgiveness. Eventually, if you persist in your efforts to know God, the older themes of purity, piety, and perfection wash away and leave only the enduring networks of love, healing, and forgiveness in your heart. When Jesus’ parables start to “pop” like this for you, you know you’ve found the pathway of your own soul. Photo credit JAT 2024.

A: I noticed a while back that if you try to read the whole book of Sirach at one time (the apocryphal book of Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach in the Oxford NRSV Bible) your head feels as if it’s going to explode.

J: That particular scroll was quite popular in Judea and Galilee at the time I was teaching.

A: The author of Sirach just goes on and on and on with endless lists of pithy little wisdom sayings. “Don’t do this.” “Don’t do that.” It’s impossible. Impossible to live up to. They ought to call this book “An Instruction Manual on How to Feel Guilty For Daring to Breathe.”

J: Yes. My mother was fond of quoting from it.

A: I can see how it would appeal to parents trying to govern their children with a firm moral hand. There’s something for every occasion.

J: Yes. Every time you got caught doing something wrong, you could count on getting a lecture, a beating, depending on the severity of the crime, and righteous repetitions of Sirach’s easy-to-remember moral laws.

A: They do stick in one’s head, don’t they? Sort of like “earworms” — those catchy but annoying songs we so often can’t get out of our heads.

J: One of my mother’s favourite moral imperatives was the importance of polite speech. The NRSV translates this favourite of hers as “Pleasant speech multiplies friends, and a gracious tongue multiplies courtesies (Sirach 6:5).” All my life I could hear her voice reciting that phrase whenever people around me started to get rude.

A: I think we all have memories of our parents’ favourite quotations. One of my father’s favourite sayings is, “When all else fails, read the instructions.” I think of this every time I get stuck on a task that would have been a lot easier if I’d read the directions before I started.

J: The problem with a book like Sirach — and it wasn’t the only book in my time to drone on and on about righteousness and obedience — is that it provides no guidance whatsoever, no practical advice at all on how to hear the inner wisdom of your own heart and soul. It’s a “top-down” list of laws, not a “bottom-up” search for meaning, life, purpose, and love. A computer could be programmed to follow all these laws, and would follow them successfully where they don’t contradict each other (as they often do.) But that’s not life. That’s not love. And it’s sure not divine wisdom. It’s just . . . obedience. Blind obedience. There’s no need to draw on your deepest reserves of courage and faith and devotion if all you’re doing is blindly following the laws. And there’s no need for forgiveness. There’s no room in there anywhere for insight. Insight — what writers in the past have called divine wisdom — is a complex blending, a complex interaction of positive emotions plus clear, logical thought plus mature, respectful behaviour. It’s holistic understanding. It’s something more than facts, more than knowledge. Insight is deeply intuitive while at the same time deeply objective. Insight is that hard-to-describe “aha!” moment when understanding suddenly “clicks.” Insight helps you feel more grounded, more connected to reality and to life, not less connected. Insight is the opposite of dissociation.

A: So you were trying to teach people how to find insight, not obedience.

J: Yes. And you can’t teach what insight is by reciting long lists of wisdom sayings. Insight involves the emotions of courage, trust, gratitude, and devotion, so if you’re going to give people practical tools for finding their own talent for insight, you have to speak to those emotions within them. You can’t just speak to the logical mind of the student. You have to speak to the whole of the student’s core self. You have to give them the opportunity to practise hearing. Really hearing. Hearing with their whole being, not just with their logical minds. You have to make them sweat a bit as they struggle to hear the meaning inside their own hearts. If they’re reading or listening to a parable using only the logic circuitry of their brains, they won’t understand the message of the parable. The message isn’t hidden. Nor is it intended to be hidden. But it is intended to make students stretch, to work their “heart” muscles as well as their “intellectual” muscles. It’s intended to encourage them to look at a difficult question from more than one angle. It’s intended to encourage honesty. A parable is meant to be painful, it’s intended to hurt. It doesn’t gloss over the painful truth. It highlights the painful truth, and asks the student to struggle with love and forgiveness despite the pain. That’s what a parable is meant to do.

A: It’s interesting that a person who’s dissociated from his or her core emotions will read your parables in very concrete, literal ways. They won’t get the emotional subtext at all.

J: That’s because they’re using their logic circuitry in unbalanced ways. They look at the “facts.” For them, it’s all they can see or hear. They assume that because there are facts and logic in the parables, the parables can be fully understood in purely logical terms. But they can’t. People get very angry, very hostile, when you tell them they’re being superficial in their reading of the parables. If they can’t feel loving emotions themselves, they want to deny that such emotions exist. They don’t want to admit to themselves or to anybody else that they’re mentally, emotionally, and spiritually imbalanced.

A: They don’t want to admit that they can’t love — that they don’t understand what love is.

J: Yes. And they’ll do everything in their power to avoid facing the issue.

A: Is their inability to love related in any way to their souls? Do they have defective souls that somehow missed out on the whole “love” thing when God was creating their souls?

J: No. Definitely not. Each and every soul in all of Creation knows how to love and forgive. Human beings can blame their upbringing and their own choices — combined in many cases with biological dysfunction in the central nervous system — for their inability to love as adults. People who’ve chosen to be dissociated from their loving emotions shouldn’t be proud of this choice.

A: Usually they have some pretty powerful excuses for their refusal to accept and heal their core emotions.

J: Nobody said it would be easy. That’s a point I tried to make again and again — the healing journey isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.

A: This morning I was rummaging through the Gospel of Thomas, and felt drawn to two parables on pages 68 and 69 of Stevan Davies’s book. When I read these two parables — sayings 63 and 64a in the Gospel of Thomas — I hear you talking about the excuses people make to avoid dealing with the pain of their emotions. I hear you talking about the fact that it’s easier for a “successful” person — a person obedient to logic and the law — than for an impoverished person out on the street to make excuses about sitting down at the table with God in a full relationship of love and trust. I hear you talking about the choices people make. The one thing I do not hear is the explanation that Stevan Davies offers for Saying 64a: “The point of the parable,” says Davies, “may be to hold up the host as an example of one who has failed to think things through (page 71).” To my way of thinking, Davies’s interpretation is logical, but way too literal, way too concrete. He doesn’t get this parable at all.

“Jesus said: Once there was a rich man who had lots of money, and he said, ‘I will invest my money so that I can sow, reap, plant, and fill up my silos with crops so that I won`t lack anything.’ So he thought, but that night he died. He who has ears, let him hear (Gospel of Thomas 63).” “Jesus said: A man entertained guests. When dinner was ready he sent a servant to invite his guests. The servant went to the first one and said, ‘My master invites you,’ but he replied, ‘I have to collect money from some merchants, and they are due to arrive this evening. Therefore I have to do business with them, and I must be excused from the dinner.’ The servant went to another said, ‘My master invites you,’ but he said, ‘I have just bought a house, and I have to spend a day there, so I cannot come. I must be excused.’ He went to the next and said, ‘My master invites you.’ This one replied, ‘My friend is about to be married, and I must organize the dinner. I can`t come. I must be excused.’ Again he went and said to another, ‘My master invites you.’ He replied, ‘I have just bought a village, and I have to go collect the rent. I can’t come and must be excused.’ The servant reported back to his master, ‘those whom you invited to the dinner are unable to come.’ The master said, ‘Go to the roads outside and invite anybody you can find to the dinner (Gospel of Thomas 64a, translated by Stevan Davies).”

J: John the Baptist hated my parables. He didn’t understand them, and got very frustrated when some of my students understood something that he — the chosen Messiah — couldn’t grasp.

A: There are no teaching parables in the Gospel of John.

J: He stopped accepting the legitimacy of my parables when he realized I was using them to teach a message that was for all intents and purposes the opposite of his own message. He was also envious and angry because he didn’t understand the emotional meaning interwoven with the logical one.

A: It’s clear enough that in Saying 64a you’re turning the imagery of the Essene Messianic Banquet on its head.

J: That part John understood. He and I were constantly sparring on that issue.

A: No Messianic Banquet for you? No bread and wine? No body and blood? No occult ritual for specially chosen initiates?

J (grinning broadly): Hey. God invites everybody — all people — to the table of divine love, divine trust, divine forgiveness, and so on. If you’re too busy to come . . . well, that’s your problem. Healing and empathy take time. Relationship with God takes time. You want to know what God’s love feels like? You gotta take the time.

A: Obedience and righteousness can’t replace the benefits of good old fashioned time spent with loved ones, time spent with God?

J: Nope.

A: Following all the wisdom sayings in Sirach can’t replace the benefits of time spent in love with God?

J: Nope.

A: Logic alone can’t lead you to God?

J: Nope.

A: So fear of God probably isn’t going to help much either, then?

J: The one thing you’ll never see in my parables is a man who fears God. You’ll see a lot of pain, a lot of grief, but you won’t see fear. In the Kingdom of the Heavens, the methods for dealing with the pain and the grief are forgiveness, honesty, compassion, healing, and equality. This is the feeling of redemption. Redemption is what you feel when you achieve the remarkable insight that forgiveness, not fear, not righteousness, is the only path to being in full relationship with God. Nobody can “give” you this insight from the outside. You have to find it within your own heart, mind, body, and soul. Other people can help you find it, can help you work towards it. However, nobody but you can give you the actual insight. It has to be up to you to accept God’s invitation to come to the table.

A: Where I assume blood and body aren’t on the menu.

J: The table of God’s love is filled with so many wonders, so many joys! Everything that God touches — not just the Eucharistic bread and wine — is filled with divine love. There’s no end to the mystery of redemption, the mystery of love and forgiveness.

A: That sounds suspiciously like a mushy Hallmark card.

J: Angels are incredibly mushy.

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Posted in building your intuition, Davies (Stevan), forgiveness, Gospel of Thomas, historical Jesus, insight, Jesus Redux, Jesus' original writings, John the Baptist, parables, Purity Piety Perfection, redemption, relationship with God and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

25 Feb 2011

JR15: Parable of the Candlesticks

A: This morning I got up, and was talking to Jesus, as usual, and he said, “It feels like a parable day. Time to write a parable.” So here’s the parable he put together this morning. Once a parable writer, always a parable writer.

Parable of the Candlesticks

Candlesticks on Oak (c) JAT

Once upon a time there was a prayerful mother who had two little children, a boy and a girl. The mother owned two beautiful brass candlesticks that had belonged to her mother and to her grandmother and to her great-grandmother before that. The candlesticks were her pride and joy.

Every day the mother got out the jar of specially made brass cleaner and the specially woven cloth so she could polish the beautiful brass candlesticks. As she laboured over the candlesticks, she would quietly hum the prayers of devotion she’d been taught. Then she would place two pure white candles into the candlesticks and light them. The candles were made of the finest bleached beeswax. God had told her once in a dream to follow the light of the purest candles he had ever made. So each day she followed his instructions. She knew God would hear her prayers when she knelt before the table that held the beautiful brass candlesticks.

One day, as she was polishing and praying, her son came running into the room. “Mommy, mommy,” he called. “I’ve found the most wonderful treasures outside. Please come and see them with me.”

“What have you found, my son?” she asked as she picked up her buffing cloth to polish the brass base with all the devotion she could muster.

“There’s a half moon hanging in the sky and the robins are building a new nest near the roof of the front porch and blue and white flower buds are opening in the garden. It’s quite exciting. Won’t you come and see?”

“My child, I am polishing the candlesticks, and I’m sure you understand how important this task is for all our family. If I fail to polish the candlesticks perfectly, and if I fail to light the candles properly, then God will not be able to hear our prayers and answer them. It is more important that I ensure God’s blessing upon our family. Our family is so lucky to know the secret. We must honour the blessing God has given us. Otherwise he will take it away.”

The boy’s smile faded, and he nodded obediently. “Yes, mother. You are very kind and loving to look after us in this way. I am very grateful. Thank you for your prayers, Mother.”

“You’re most welcome, my son.”

A short while later, her daughter came running into the room. “Mommy, mommy,” she called. “I’ve found the most wonderful place in our neighbourhood. It’s filled with books. Beautiful, wonderful books. With pictures! Mommy, will you come and read me a story?”

“My child, you know how important it is that I finish work on the candlesticks so I may properly offer prayers on your behalf to God. You must be protected, child. I cannot ask God to protect you until the light shines perfectly from the mirror of the polished brass. See, my daughter? If you look into the polished brass, you can see your reflection there. Is it not wondrous?”

“Yes, mother. You are very wise. Perhaps one day, if you think I am worthy, you will teach me to light the candles as your mother taught you.”

“And her mother taught her before that.”

“We’re lucky, aren’t we, Mother, that our ancestors were so blessed by God?”

“Very lucky, my daughter,” said the mother, gazing with pride upon the candlesticks she polished every day with the purest devotion to God that anyone could imagine. “We’re the luckiest family there could ever be. Thanks be to God.”

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Posted in Jesus Redux, narcissism, parables, prayer, spiritual practices and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

05 Jul 2010

CC23: Seeing God in Black and White: A Parable

Here is your class assignment for the day: using only two tubes of paint, one white and one black, you are to paint a full-colour picture of something beautiful.

Get to work, everyone! Now! And don’t complain to me that the assignment is unfair. If you’re truly righteous, pious, and devout, God will show you how to paint a full-colour picture using only black and white paint. If you fail, well . . . if you fail, you obviously don’t have enough faith in God. Don’t blame me for your failure. I didn’t make the rules. If you fail, it’s your own fault (you poor sin-saturated thing, you).

Pray, people, pray! Pray with all your might! If you pray correctly, maybe God will grant you the grace of being able to paint pictures in glorious, divine colour. Prove to me that you have faith! Pick up your paintbrushes and paint! Anyone caught cheating by bringing in tubes of red, blue, or yellow paint will immediately be brought before the Inquisition. Possession of any paints except Lead White and Carbon Black will be considered a shameful act of hubris, because only God is allowed to have coloured paints. Those other tubes you’ve seen at the store are the work of the Devil.

That’s right, class — everyone down on their knees. That’s better. And remember not to look up while you’re painting. Don’t look up at the trees or flowers or clouds or hills that you’re trying to paint. Such viewing is an unpardonable sin. You will paint beautifully coloured images based solely on the black and white words I’m about to recite aloud to you. Are you ready, everyone? Good. Here we go. In the beginning was the Word . . . .

Ah. A question. What is your question, child? You want to know what the colour red is? Well, as all the great mystics have taught, you’ll only be able to see the divine colour red once you’ve let go of all desire to know what red is. Once you no longer care what red is, perhaps God will open your eyes for you so you can see it. But until then, there’s nothing you yourself can do. No one can learn how to see red, or be taught how to see red. To claim this would be the height of human pride and arrogance! Be grateful you can see black and white, child! Some people can’t even see that.

If you tell me you can already see red and blue and yellow, it’s proof that the Devil has captured your soul, you poor thing. Resist, resist! Pray harder. Ask for deliverance from the torment of False Colour. Ask that you may be given the divine gift of Church-Approved Sunglasses to block out those dangerous visions of colour. Life is much simpler in black and white. Everything is less confusing when I tell you what to do. Naturally, I always have your best interests at heart, you poor, weak, inferior creature, you.

I promise to look after you, as Christ looks after us all! It’s the least I can do in this broken, corrupted, black and white world.

Well, the day is over, and I see that once again no one in my class has enough faith in God to produce a thing of explosive beauty from the paints I have humbly provided.

Lilies of the Field (c) Image*After

You in the back corner! Joshua, Yeshua, whatever your name is! You will be turned over to the Inquisition, and tried on charges of heresy for presuming to tell the class that all people can learn to see red lilies in the field if they listen to God with open hearts and not with closed minds!

As if God even wants to talk to regular people!

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, humility, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Original Sin, parables, prayer, spiritual ascent and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

04 Apr 2010

CC7: Radical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

Today I’d like to talk about the Gospel of Mark.

As I mentioned above in my March 3, 2010 post, I think one of the biggest challenges facing the church in the third millennium is our theology. We believe our theology is an honest representation of what Jesus taught. Because we believe this, we don’t want to challenge our theological doctrines and beliefs. If it was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for us, goes the thinking. And who can blame Christians for wanting to hang onto the teachings that Jesus taught? After all, isn’t that the point?

For me, it’s definitely the point. I discovered to my dismay, however, that what Protestant theology classes teach in Canada in the third millennium is Paul’s theology, not Jesus’ theology.

We’re so used to thinking that Paul was a faithful believer in Jesus that few Christians until recently have examined the gulf that exists between the teachings of Paul and the teachings of Jesus. If you want to read an exploration of the differences between Paul’s Christ Movement and James’ Jesus Movement, I recommend professor Barrie Wilson’s book How Jesus Became Christian (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008). Wilson bluntly shows that Paul was trying to found a new religious movement that was in competition with the early Jesus Movement of Palestine. Further, Wilson shows how the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles wrote these two books to bridge the gulf between the two religious movements, and make them seem like a unified religion. But they’re not. And they never were.

Why do I agree with Wilson? I agree with Wilson because I’ve studied what I believe to be the earliest layer of writings based on the teachings of Jesus, and when I compare what’s contained in this early layer with what’s contained in Paul’s uncontested letters, I see almost no theological similarities.

For the record, I believe the earliest layer of writings based on Jesus’ teachings to be (1) the parts of the letter of James that Jesus himself wrote (I’ll come back to that in a later post); (2) the parables and anecdotes written down by the beloved disciple Lazarus in the earliest version of the”Q” source (again, food for future thought); (3) the sayings written down by the apostle John in his unattributed “proto-Gnostic” Gospel of Thomas; and (4) the Gospel of Mark.

Of these early writings, the Gospel of Mark would have been written last, about 30-35 years after Jesus’ death, by a person we call Mark. We don’t know much about this fellow Mark except that he was brave enough to write a radical theological statement in Judea during the dangerous and tumultuous decade of the 60’s when Jews were fighting Jews, and Jews were also fighting Romans.

This fish plate, with a small cup in the centre (probably for sauce) comes from the Roman Campania and is dated 330-300 BCE. (This plate is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, photo credit JAT 2017.)

Most New Testament scholars who analyse the different books of early Christianity will tell you they subscribe to the theory of “Markan Priority.” This is the theory that states that Mark was written before either Matthew or Luke, and that the authors of Matthew and Luke both used a “cut and paste” approach to Mark’s narrative by cutting out sections of Mark’s book, rearranging and changing those sections, and adding their own material. If you want to learn more about this fascinating bit of biblical history, I recommend the recent book by Pheme Perkins: Pheme Perkins, Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007). She provides a readable introduction to the main threads of scholarly research that every serious New Testament inquirer needs to know about.

(I didn’t find out about Perkins’s book until the second year of my graduate studies. I really wish I’d had it on Day 1. It would have saved me a lot of initial confusion!)

A lot of scholars and ministers don’t like the Gospel of Mark. (My New Testament professor, for one, doesn’t like Mark.) People think it’s too blunt and choppy. Fans of Luke, whose use of Koine Greek is more sophisticated, complain that Mark isn’t a very good writer. Others dislike the Christology of Mark. In Mark, Jesus is a confusing fellow. The apostles are confusing fellows. Jesus’ family members are confusing. Jesus’ female followers are confusing. The original ending of Mark at 16:8 is confusing. The Gospel of Mark is downright confusing if you’re looking for biblical evidence that conforms to orthodox Western Christian beliefs about Jesus.

Here’s a thought: maybe the Gospel of Mark is confusing because people have been shoehorning it into Paul’s theology, and have forced Mark to say something about Jesus that Mark himself wasn’t saying.

Maybe in the church of the third millennium we should allow Mark to tell us what he’s been saying all along.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is a Jewish Messiah — a very human teacher and healer — not a Saviour, as in Paul.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is not a monotheistic Jew, who believes only in God the Father, but is instead a quasi-monotheistic Jew who believes in both God the Father (Abba) and God the Mother (Ruah, Spirit, Holy Dove).

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is not a wandering Cynic philosopher, nor an apocalyptic prophet, nor an illiterate Jewish carpenter. There’s a great deal of proof in Mark to indicate that Jesus came from a wealthy, literate family. Jesus was a physician-scholar.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s narrative shows a sophisticated understanding of psychodynamics. Mark’s cast of characters behave in realistic, believable ways. He doesn’t pretend that Jesus’ students liked or appreciated his teachings. He doesn’t pretend that Jesus’ family liked or appreciated his teachings. Mark tells the painful truth, because the truth was painful.

Mark’s biography of Jesus is short (relative to other biographies of the time, including those written by Matthew and Luke) for two reasons: (1) he assumed his biography would be read in conjunction with the parables and anecdotes contained in “Q,” and (2) he wrote his narrative with the intention of creating a long parable of the kingdom.

(These two points are my own thesis.)

The first point has more evidence to support it, since scholars have been working hard to reconstruct the contents of the early “Q” source, and they’ve already shown the links among Q, Mark, and the later gospels of Matthew and Luke. There is every reason to suppose that Q was circulating in Judea at the time Mark’s gospel was written.

The second point has arisen through my own work as both an academic researcher and a mystic. It’s my contention that Mark understood what many have failed to understand about Jesus’ teaching parables: the long kingdom parables, most of which probably originated in “Q” and were later cut-and-pasted into Matthew and Luke, only make sense when you listen with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your strength to Jesus’ message about God (Mark 12:28-34). If you listen only with your mind, you won’t get it. If you listen only with your mind, and reject the input of your heart and your soul, the parables are almost gibberish. They’re illogical. They’re contrary to accepted wisdom. They don’t seem to be wisdom teachings at all. Therefore, they’re easily dismissed by those who’ve placed their bets on traditional wisdom.

Through the medium of a long parable, a teacher can say a lot of harsh things about other people’s religious beliefs, and not get caught. Jesus’ long kingdom parables hide the truth about God in plain sight.

This isn’t the same approach as the early Gnostics took. The early Gnostics believed in the existence of hidden, esoteric knowledge that could only be revealed to specially chosen initiates. They sometimes took steps in their writings to conceal their esoteric knowledge through the use of symbolism.

Jesus took no such steps. He wasn’t interested in hiding the knowledge, or making a “special club” of apostles to whom he would reveal his special secrets. He was forthright in his teachings about a loving Mother God and Father God who are not transcendent. (In Plato and in Paul, God was transcendent). A Mother Father God who are not unemotional. (In Plato and in Paul, God was detached from emotions like agape and forgiveness). A Mother Father God who are not pure Mind. (In Plato and in Stoicism, the Divine was pure Mind). A Mother Father God who do not choose some humans over other humans. (In most religions in Jesus’ time, Jewish and otherwise, the gods or God chose certain people or groups over other people). A Mother Father God who reject the pursuit of status addiction as the driving force of a loving human community (in dramatic contrast to the honour-shame values of Mediterranean culture in the 1st century CE). A Mother Father God who teach inclusive, egalitarian, relationship-oriented community life as the model for spiritual living.

These teachings are evident throughout Mark. But these teachings, then as now, were not popular with religious folk who wanted their religious accomplishments to raise them above their peers, to give them more status than others had, to take status away from others — to reveal how to climb the ladder of spiritual ascent.

This ladder of spiritual ascent was the darling of Plato and his many Platonic, middle Platonic, and NeoPlatonic followers, including orthodox Christians, who, from the time of Paul onward, have had a profound love affair with the doctrine of spiritual ascent — the belief that we have to climb the spiritual ladder one rung at a time to get closer to the Divine.

You have to remember here that Plato wrote about 400 years before Jesus. Plato’s idea of spiritual ascent was well known and deeply embraced by the Greco-Roman culture in which Mark wrote his breathtakingly radical book. So when Mark wrote a biography about a spiritual leader who rejected ascent, and instead embraced a horizontal path of service, Mark was pushing against the currents of his time.

When you carefully read Mark 9:2-9 — the Transfiguration — you’ll see that not only does Jesus reject the offer of staying on the “holy mount” and living in a tent there, but he comes down from the mountain and immediately makes himself religiously “impure” by touching and healing a boy who has epilepsy — a boy who in first century Palestine would have been seen as either “unclean” or as “marked by the gods” in the eyes of both pious Jews and Gentiles, a boy who would have been rejected and ostracized by people of status.

Mark’s Jesus is a human physician, trained in Torah, who thinks compassion, inclusiveness, courage, healing, forgiveness, agape, and service are the path to knowing God the Mother and God the Father.

Mark’s Jesus is a radical dude.

This topic is so big that one or more books could be written on it. I’ve barely scratched the surface here. But I wanted to introduce the idea that the Protestant church of the third millennium has some options open to it. One of these options is to courageously alter the theology we teach. We can alter our theological doctrines to better reflect what Jesus taught, and still have a biblical foundation for that teaching. We can reappraise Paul, and we can reappraise the earliest layer of writings based on Jesus’ teachings. We can reclaim the kergyma, or early teachings, of Jesus. We can have a church founded on teachings about our communal relationship with God the Mother and God the Father.

We can at last allow ourselves to accept the wondrous gift of God’s love.

Happy Easter Sunday to you!

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Thomas, Letter of James, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, parables, Paul vs Jesus, Plato, spiritual ascent and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “parables”

RS8: Timeless Courage and Kindness

JR55: Healing: The Easy Way and the Hard Way

JR53: Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas

JR47: "Knowledge" Versus "Truth"

JR44: Mark’s Themes of Understanding and Strength

JR17: Interpreting Jesus’ Parables: Some Guidelines

JR15: Parable of the Candlesticks

CC23: Seeing God in Black and White: A Parable

CC7: Radical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

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Wonder, Science, and Faith

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