The Spiral Path

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Archive for the category “Purity Piety Perfection”

17 Aug 2012

RS24: Some Thoughts on Healing From Jesus

A:  I’ve read some interesting theories over the years to explain the healing miracles in the Gospels.  Some of these theories fall under the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” umbrella. There’s the theory that the miracles stories are reports of true supernatural events — proof of Jesus’ divinity and sovereignty over the powers of evil. (This theory appeals to devout evangelical Christians.) On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the theory that the healing miracles should not be understood as fact but as pure metaphor — as literary window-dressing to enhance the credibility of the main character, Jesus. (This theory appeals to liberal and progressive Christians, who often don’t believe in miracles.)

“. . . [Jesus] said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners'” (Mark 2:17). Photo credit JAT 2017.

Then there’s the bizarre group of theories that attempts to “explain” your healing powers through analogy to altered states of consciousness as they’re understood today by some anthropologists and psychologists. Stevan Davies’s book Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Continuum, 1995) is a particularly egregious example of this kind of thinking. (At the bottom of this post I’ve pasted in a book review I wrote about Davies’s book for an Historical Jesus course, a review which explains why I’m not fond of Davies’s thesis. This is the same Stevan Davies whose translation of the Gospel of Thomas we’ve been using in the Jesus Redux series of posts.)

So whatcha say, big guy? Were you wandering around the Galilee as a Jewish magician with serious DSM-IV issues? A wannabe charismatic prophet suffering from a dissociative disorder? A delusional shaman who had a honkin’ big need for an olanzapine prescription? Is this who you really were?

J (chuckling):  These guys make me sound like a creepy bad guy from the Criminal Minds series.

A:  Yeah, like that two-part episode where James Van Der Beek plays an UnSub who has a multiple personality disorder (Season Two, “The Big Game” and “Revelations.”) One of his “personalities” (the really dangerous one) is an apocalyptic Christian prophet.

J:  That’s a good example. A person suffering from a dissociative disorder is not a well person and needs intensive medical care from a team of trained professionals. To suggest that it’s a good idea for a religious teacher or shaman to intentionally induce a state of altered consciousness (“spirit possession”) or a permanent state of dissociation in his/her followers is not only morally reprehensible but is also questionable from a legal point of view.

A:  So you didn’t try to teach your followers how to have spontaneous dissociative experiences of being possessed by Spirit?

J (shaking his head):  No. I did not. I taught my followers that the key to knowing God is to first know yourself. This is, by definition, the very opposite of dissociative experiences.

A:  What about Paul? Did Paul encourage these states of “spirit possession”?

J:  Absolutely. He not only encouraged these states, but promoted them as one of the major “drawing cards” of his new religion — buy my Saviour and as an added bonus you’ll receive a free gift from Spirit!  Discover how with my easy salvation you can receive, at no additional charge, a special gift of the utterance of wisdom or the utterance of knowledge or faith or gifts of healing or working of miracles or prophecy or discernment of spirits or various kinds of tongues or the gift of interpretation of tongues (one gift per customer, choice made by Spirit at time of purchase, no substitutions, all gifts subject to laws of Divine Cause & Effect, this is a time-limited offer, so call one of our helpful customer service agents now!).

A:  It never ceases to amaze me how rarely Paul talks about healing in his letters. Why doesn’t he talk about medical healing — the kind of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-touch-your-neighbour kind of healing you engaged in? Why doesn’t he care?

J:  He wasn’t interested in helping people find healing. He had different concerns — occult concerns related to power and order and perfectionism, as we’ve discussed. As far as Paul was concerned, sick people were defective. They’d already proven their imperfection and undesirability in the kingdom of God. Corrupt mortal flesh — sarx in Greek — was an ongoing source of shame and judgment, so who cared? Paul’s focus was the mind and the soul, which were infinitely superior to mere flesh, in his view. To choose to heal flesh, as I did, by starting with the flesh — with the actual physical body instead of the pure Platonic Mind — was an incomprehensible paradigm to Paul. In other words, he thought basic medical science made no sense and was a complete waste of time and divine energy.

A:  But that’s what you actually did. You started with the actual physical body, not the pure mind or soul. You helped heal people’s bodies so they could find the courage and strength to build their own relationships with God.

J:  Early on in my journey as a practising mystic — not as a dissociated prophet, but as a mentally healthy mystic and channeller — my guardian angel (my daemon in the Greek — not to be confused with the English word “demon”) gave me an excellent analogy.  She said this:

“The flowers in the field that you admire, that stop your heart with wonder and beauty, are not like dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus in the field.  You cannot treat them in the ways you’ve been taught. You must think of the flowers in the field as the emotions of God the Mother and God the Father — their memories, their feelings, their stories from times far more ancient than you or any other human being can remember.

The journey through this field of flowers cannot be like the Labours of Heracles if you want to feel the wonder of knowing God. You must tread softly. You must not trample in your haste to get to the other side. You must listen with all your heart and all your mind and all your body and all your soul to the quiet whispers of the lilies.

Each person you meet is like a lily of the field. The roots and the leaves of the lily bear the weight of the colourful blossom, but without the unseen roots and the hard-working leaves, there would be no chance for the lily to produce its harvest.

Treat the body of all you meet in the same way you would treat God’s lilies. Respect all parts of the plant, including the most humble and least attractive parts. Even the smallest root has a part to play. Do not despise the leaves for the sake of the flower’s beauty. The flower fades quickly, but the strongly rooted plant produces blossoms again if it is properly cared for.

Care first for the roots and the humble green plant, and, with time and gentle handling, it will reward you.”

This is why I rejected all religious models about the nature of the human body, and turned to a scientific model with the help of my guardian angels and God. There was a lot I didn’t understand about the inner workings of the human body, but one thing seemed clear to me:

If God made these bodies for us, they must be worth looking after.

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Book Review
STEVAN L. DAVIES.   JESUS THE HEALER: POSSESSION, TRANCE, AND THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY.  NEW YORK: CONTINUUM, 1995.  ISBN 0-8264-0794-3

Review by Jennifer Thomas    November 1, 2007

Breathe deeply before you begin to read Stevan Davies book Jesus the Healer. There’s no index, no table of contents, no glossary, no illustrations or diagrams, not even an introduction to orient you in this book, so if you lose the thread of Davies’s argument, you have to retrace your steps. This isn’t a book where you can jump in at any point and quickly grasp the author’s argument. Davies’s thesis is quite complex, and he keeps adding to it chapter by chapter as he attempts (in his own words) to “bring closer together the two continents of Jesus research: historical scholarship and theological reflection” (p.18). On the plus side, the book is a mere 216 pages long, including its 7-page bibliography.

One puzzling aspect of this 1995 book is the lack of biographical information about the author. We’re told nothing about his education or background. Is he a professional journalist or is he a member of academia? We don’t know. All we know is that he’s the author of three other books. A search of my own bookshelves produced a copy of The Gospel of Thomas (2002), translated and annotated by Stevan Davies, Professor of Religious Studies at College Misericordia in Pennsylvania. An internet search yielded the same information. So we can rest assured that he deserves our attention.

Davies begins his book with a brief overview of research into the historical Jesus over the last hundred years. Rejecting the prevailing view of Jesus as some form of teacher, Davies tackles the less well examined paradigm of Jesus as healer. His approach is secular, not theological. For him, New Testament reports of supernatural occurrences are a goldmine of anthropological and psychological data that other researchers have wrongly ignored. He sets out to show us how we might reexamine the passages about exorcisms, healings, and the Son of God, and reinterpret them in light of 20th century theories about “spirit-possession” and “demon-possession.”

Chapter 2 summarizes the anthropological and psychological models Davies relies on to categorize possession: the state wherein a person’s normal persona is believed to be displaced by a “possessing” spirit or demon. Davies is very clear that it’s the belief that’s important. The belief makes it somehow “real” to the people experiencing it. And this in turn makes it an “historical event.” In other words, researchers of the historical Jesus can use biblical passages about exorcism without fear that they’re endorsing the paranormal. This part of Davies’s thesis may prove to have more lasting value to the field than some of his other conclusions.

In Chapter 3, Davies briefly examines descriptions of 1st century Jewish prophets in Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and the New Testament. From here, he leads into the baptism of Jesus, which he asserts is the correct starting place for understanding Jesus. Davies uses spirit-possession theory to suggest that John’s baptism triggered a spontaneous dissociative experience in Jesus that led Jesus (and others) to believe he was possessed by the spirit of God.

Building on this novel approach, Davies looks at questions about Jesus’ healings (Chapter 5); demon possession (Chapter 6); Jesus’ exorcisms (Chapter 7); and Jesus and his associates (Chapter 8). But all of these chapters are really a prelude to Chapters 9 and 10, where Davies tells us that Jesus induced in his followers an altered state of consciousness (ASC) called the “kingdom of God.” The paradoxical nature of some of Jesus’ parables and sayings is proof to Davies that Jesus was using a healing method akin to the hypnotherapy techniques of American psychotherapist Milton Erickson.

In the last section of the book (Chapters 11 to 13), Davies, not content with a basic model for how Jesus might have healed others, tries to expand his thesis to explain to modern readers why the Johannine-style sayings attributed to Jesus should be considered just as historically authentic as synoptic-style sayings; why we should view early Christianity as a “missionary spirit-possession cult”; and why we must conclude that both Paul and John used “inductive discourse” (that is, intentionally confusing speech) to generate a spontaneous experience of spirit-possession in potential converts.

By the time I finished reading the book, I had found several inconsistencies in his argument, two or three outright contradictions, and an instance where the statistical figures he quoted did not add up (quite literally). Likely these were unintentional errors. And I can look past them. What I can’t look past is Davies’s preposterous theory that the authors of Q and the synoptics recorded only the sayings of Jesus when he was speaking in his own voice as Jesus, and that the author of John wrote down only the sayings of Jesus when he was “possessed” by the Spirit of God (Chapter 11). And that’s two different people, so of course the sayings sound different!

My ultimate impression? I couldn’t escape the sense that Davies had gleefully picked fruit from the tree of knowledge in anthropology and psychology, and had tried to put it in a nice, neat gift basket he could present to other New Testament scholars as a sort of sublime “theory of everything.” Unfortunately, he didn’t know when to stop filling the basket. He damaged his own thesis because he failed to grasp its limits. So I would advise caution in relying on the material in this book.

Jesus the Healer is not currently in print.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dissociation, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, parables, Paul vs Jesus, Purity Piety Perfection, Realspiritik, relationship with God, religion and mental Illness, science & faith and tagged , | Leave a Comment
13 Aug 2012

RS23: Spit-Wives and Dead Goats

A:  I saw an interesting story on the BBC News site this week about a young Palestinian man named Ayman Safiah who is the only classically trained male ballet dancer to emerge from the Palestinian culture.* He grew up in the Galilee in a town where Arabs and Jews treat each other well, and where some of its artists and writers have achieved international recognition. Despite his success, he’s meeting with intense prejudice from his own community. He reminds me a lot of you. Knows who he is. Doesn’t let prejudice and hatred stop him from doing what his heart and soul tell him to do.

I like the quotes from him: “‘My desire to study classical ballet was simply beyond the understanding of my classmates,’ he explains. ‘They only knew that it was something women enjoyed.  It was completely alien to them.'” He also says, “‘My parents knew that ballet was going to be a large part of my life from early on . . . Even my grandfather accepted my career choice even though he didn’t fully understand what it entailed.'”

Yup. He reminds me so much of you. So stubborn. So determined to break through cultural taboos that have nothing to do with God or soul or faith.

J:  Well, yes, I was told more than once I was more stubborn than a Hebron camel. It was a saying from my time.

A:  Ayman Safiah faces huge opposition from the Palestinian community because men aren’t “supposed” to be passionate about dance. Even the fact that he’s worked extremely hard for many years and has graduated from the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in Richmond, England, has not earned him any respect from his Arab compatriots. Some insist that performing ballet is against Islam. Two thousand years ago, you faced the same kind of rejection and prejudice for daring to practise medicine in the Galilee. Tell me more about that.

J:  It’s interesting that Safiah makes the link between ballet and women. In my time, the same kind of link existed between healing and women. Healing was something that women did, and only women were interested in learning more about it. No respectable man in the Judeo-Hellenistic culture I grew up in would have stooped to the level of the local village spit-wives. But I was passionate about healing.

A:  Spit-wives?

J:  A derogatory term for the women who carried on the ancient traditions of herbal medicine. They used poultices and teas and medicines handmade from various plants and minerals. From time to time they were known to use spit in their remedies. Since bodily fluids, including spit, were considered unclean — religiously impure — in the Jewish religious tradition, these traditional remedies and their practitioners were looked upon with contempt. Women from the lower classes of society shared healing information among themselves and did their best to help each other, since nobody else was willing to help them.

Photo credit JAT 2022.

A (eyes rolling):  Oh come on, now. What about all those religious temples where people could make their sacrifices and prayers for divine healing? Who needs medical science when you can ask a priest to slaughter a female goat for you?

J (smiling):  A sentiment I certainly agreed with and talked about. Often. And loudly.

A:  Didn’t win you any popularity contests, did it?

J:  People of prejudice don’t like to have their prejudices challenged. And prejudices about illness and healing were extreme in my time. There’s a ridiculous idea floating around in liberal religious circles today that people should tolerate and excuse these ancient prejudices because “it’s just the way things were” and “they didn’t know any better.” This is crap. The Greek culture had a long tradition, dating back hundreds of years before my time as Jesus, of treating illness and healing as a field of science. They’d written many treatises about the workings of the body. Some of their scientific remedies were quite effective — not all of them, of course, but there was an ongoing interest in studying illness and healing from a scientific perspective. This was a perspective I sympathized with, much to the horror of my pious Jewish relatives.

A:  Were the spit-wives trying to be scientific, too?

J:  Women who are desperate to care for their families and relieve the suffering of their children can become shrewd and careful observers of scientific principles. They don’t have the time or skills or status to consult with learned scholars of religious scrolls, so they fly by the seat of their pants. They pay attention to what works. They remember what works. They tell their friends what works. They base their decisions on intuition and careful observation, not piety. They catch on fast when you show them how to wash and dress a wound so it won’t go “green.” They might have to do their healing work in secret, where the men won’t catch them engaging in apostasy, but they’ll do it if it means saving the life of a beloved child.

A:  In this model, it’s okay for individuals to take personal responsibility for the problems created by illness. It’s okay for individuals to go ahead and try to fix it instead of wringing their hands and claiming that only God and the priests can fix it.

J:  Exactly. It’s an integral part of the Peace Sequence we’ve been talking about on and off. You’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of bringing Peace to the wider community if you ignore the imperatives of illness and healing. For most human beings, illness and healing are the number one issues. If you don’t have mentors who can teach others about the realities of illness and healing, there’s no way for individuals to move on to the subsequent step of the Peace Sequence, which is personal responsibility. In the world human beings actually live in — as opposed to the world of false myths created by the likes of the apostle Paul — people have to accept that they themselves have a huge stake in this whole “illness and healing” thing. They can’t hand over their power and responsibility for healing to any religious group, no matter how big or successful the group.

All people are part of God’s world of science and faith, and all people are considered equal by God, so all people are called upon to uphold the steps of the Peace Sequence. A big part of this process, as I’ve just mentioned, is to apply the steps of education, mentorship, and personal responsibility to the questions of illness and healing. This is what I tried to do two thousand years ago. I tried to teach others that healing miracles are possible if you let go of prejudice and hatred and treat those who are ill with compassion not judgment.

Angels tread where fools fear to go.

*Please see “First Palestinian male ballet dancer battles prejudices” by Sylvia Smith, posted on BBC News on August 10, 2012, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19202612

 

Addendum May 4, 2017: For those who are scornful of the idea that ancient healers were able to devise useful medical remedies by engaging in objective scientific observation preceded and followed by powerful intuition, I found this article today which is a follow-up to an preliminary story that appeared two years ago. In a story posted by Erin Connelly — “Medieval medical books could hold the recipe for new antibiotics” — the author talks about Bald’s eyesalve, a medieval recipe that contained “wine, garlic, an Allium species (such as leek or onion) and oxgall . . . cured in a brass vessel for nine nights before use.” It sounds terrible to modern ears, but according to the researcher, it’s a highly effective antistaphylococcal agent.

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Posted in healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Purity Piety Perfection, Realspiritik, science & faith, soul purpose and tagged , | 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 | Leave a Comment

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