The Naked Jesus
[T]he Gospels are the church’s memories of the historical Jesus transformed by the community’s experiences and reflection on the decades after Easter. They therefore tell us what these early Christian communities had come to believe about Jesus by the last third of the first century. They are not, first and foremost, reports of the ministry itself.
—Marcus Borg 34
Once recovered, the pre-Christian historical Jesus begins to take on a powerful new significance, one that will greatly interest many within the modern Pagan world. In my experience, a large percentage of Pagans have huge problems with Jesus’s divinity when it is spoken of in an exclusive way, even though they are intensely aware of the realm of spirit and deity. They are generally more than happy to see him as a person who was in some sense powerfully aware of and open to the divine, but this is quite different from the suggestion that he was uniquely divine in a way that the rest of the human world is not.
With the discoveries of the modern Jesus quest as a source, I will now put a little more flesh on the bones of my previous sketch.
Jesus the Spirit Person
There is almost universal scholarly agreement that Jesus was regarded as some sort of holy man who could heal and work miracles. In fact, however one understands them, some of the descriptions of his healing miracles pass all the tests of historical authenticity. As Jacques Baldet says, “The application of historical criteria can at times yield startling results. The most surprising for our present subject is that one of the most solidly established traditions speaks of ‘miraculous’ healings. This stands on more solid historical ground than other notable and often well-accepted traditions about Jesus’s life, such as his working as a carpenter … ”35 Clearly something was going on with Jesus that was understood as stemming from a divine source. It appears that Jesus was recognised as being some sort of channel for the spirit. It might be a surprise to hear Jesus being referred to as a shaman or spirit person, but these are precisely some of the terms various modern scholars have been using for him. A giant among these is Marcus Borg.
Borg has given the Jesus quest some of the most widely respected books over the last couple of decades. His Meeting Jesus for the First Time became a bestseller and remains the biggest-selling modern book on the subject of the historical Jesus. Borg sees Jesus as a man infused directly by a divine or spiritual experience. He uses the term “spirit person” rather than the older equivalent “holy man” because not only does “person” make the concept non-gender-specific, but “spirit” rather than “holy” takes away any possible pious or sanctimonious connotations. One can’t overemphasize how important Borg sees this aspect of Jesus’s character. It is primary to everything else about him. In fact being a spirit person is not simply part of his character. It is his character. This is the starting point. Nothing else makes sense without it.
I find this especially convincing from personal experience. The religious leaders and teachers I’ve met whose beliefs seem authentic, alive, and relevant have themselves been touched by a deeply personal spiritual experience. They are not usually bound by religiosity or rules. They tend to come across as open, free, and humble. They do not see their way as the “right” way and all others as “wrong.” They walk their talk. It’s as if they become vessels for the flow of spirit that moves through them.
On the other hand, the religious leaders I’ve met who seem to think that the rules must be followed at any cost and come across as rather cold or lacking in compassion have usually not had such deeply transformative spiritual encounters, or if they have they were a thing of the past. Surprisingly, they are usually frightened of such experiences and their religion keeps them safely immune to them. They have to be in control and thus end up trying to control others too. This is one of the reasons why I have generally found the Pagan world a far easier place within which to explore spiritual things than mainstream Christianity. Granted, one does hear of certain “control freaks” that run some of the more closed Pagan groups, but the vast majority are unhappy with any form of strict hierarchy and are genuinely open to spirit wherever it comes from. There is an enormous difference between religious/pious people and spiritually aware/soulful people. Indeed one might suggest they are polar opposites. It’s interesting that, for Jesus, the greatest obstacles always came from the religious law-abiders rather than those “at the edge.”
Jesus’s spiritual (divine) awareness was foundational to everything else. It meant that he saw the world through spirit-eyes or God-sight. Borg recognises that spirit persons are a cross-cultural phenomenon, showing up all over the world and experiencing this spirit dimension in a variety of ways. Some have visions, moments of seeing into other layers of reality; some seem to be able to journey into that other layer of reality—shamans; some sense that other reality coming upon them—being filled with the spirit; and some have momentary glimpses of a totally transfigured world—as if the other later rises to the surface and shines through. While exercising caution with regard to how he interprets what’s going on within these experiences, Borg states that they are real. They are transformative experiences and bring with them a deep sense of knowing. “Spirit persons,” he says, “are people who experience the sacred frequently and vividly … Sometimes they speak the word or will of God. Sometimes they mediate the power of God in the form of healings and/or exorcisms. Sometimes they function as game finders or rainmakers in hunting-and-gathering and early agricultural societies. Sometimes they become charismatic warriors or military leaders.”36
Spirit people are still common throughout the world and were common in ancient Judaism. One only has to open the Old Testament at almost any point, and tales of those who (it is claimed) heard the voice of God, saw visions, performed miracles, and were somehow seen to be very close to their God are discovered.37 This does not prove that these people could do all that was claimed, but it does prove that such people were believed to have existed. Historical records outside of the biblical materials also attest to there being some very powerful spirit people around near the time of Jesus.38
With all this in mind, Borg feels safely entitled to attribute the term “spirit person” to the historical Jesus—a term very close to that of “shaman.” This alone has huge implications for Christian-Pagan dialogue, and it opens up new doorways of possibility for both groups. The idea that Jesus—the real, historical Jesus—was some sort of open shamanic vessel for the divine suddenly paints a very different portrait to the orthodox God-Incarnate of Christ. It becomes more credible and also makes Jesus far more accessible and, dare I say, relevant. It gives us a Jesus whom people do not have to believe in as the only way to heaven, but follow and learn from, so that they too might become shamanic vessels of the spirit.
Jesus as spirit person makes him one of us again, a fully human person, and yet it also makes him something of a mirror—a reflection—so that when we look at what he was able to make real in his life we see what can be real in our own experience. This is something over which both liberal-minded Christians and Pagans could quite easily agree, without either one having to step a single foot in the other’s theological direction.
Another exciting quest scholar who portrays Jesus in a quasi-shamanic light is Bruce Chilton, who in Rabbi Jesus presents Jesus as Jewish mystic who devoted much time to contemplation and experiences of mystical communion. Chilton is an expert of languages of the ancient Near East and an authority on first-century Judaism. He explores the ancient esoteric practice of Merkabah (Chariot) mysticism (a discipline which is an ancestor of the Kabalah) and, with a mixture of historical reflection and intelligent guesses, suggests that Jesus practiced it. While Chilton’s Jesus is a thoroughly orthodox Jew who sees his mission as entirely to his own people, his terminology has a very magical ring to it, something that will excite the Pagan imagination. For example, with regard to Jesus’s first healing miracle, he says, “Jesus had spoken as a chasid, a rabbi who was able to dispense the mercy of God, and his words had resounded in heaven, unleashing a compassion greater than the paralysis.”A paragraph later he says this about the Chasidim: “These rabbis cured sickness and relieved drought through prayer: that was the mark of divine compassion working through them. Chasidim were ancient Judaism’s shamans, faith healers, witch doctors, and sorcerers. In one bold move, Jesus had joined their ranks. He had proved that he was anointed with the Holy Spirit: he was able to channel the energy of God.”39 (p.109)
Before moving on, what follows is a wonderful quotation from a man who served Jesus as an Episcopal (Anglican) priest before finding himself being drawn towards and then immersing himself within modern shamanism. In his book Soul on Fire, Peter Calhoun explains that he had to leave the Church in order to properly discover the true spiritual richness within. He now serves his Great Spirit as a shaman, and one who has come to know his old friend Jesus in a deeper way as a shaman than as an Episcopal priest. “A little more than three decades ago I began experiencing a spontaneous awakening of spiritual or paranormal abilities that I had always believed, if they actually existed, were exclusively reserved for native shamans or Eastern mystics. As a parish priest, in the Episcopal Church, I was no way prepared for what was happening to me. In fact, these bizarre changes had an unsettling effect on me, and I wondered if I were losing my grip on reality.”40 This was the stirring of his inner shamanic spirit and, as so many folk discover, he had to leave the confines of a religious institution to follow this inner calling. Within the shamanic tradition he was eventually able to make sense of, and use of, the strange spiritual stirrings within. He sees them as exactly the same as what Jesus was used to: “I discovered that many of these abilities that Christ said were inherent in each of us have always been recognised and described in story and myth and demonstrated by the holy men and holy women of various tribal traditions.”41
Compassion and the Motherly God
The deep God-awareness of Jesus was tangibly expressed in an ever flowing stream of what Robin Meyers calls “pure, unbridled, reckless compassion.”42 Scholars hold that one of the most authentic Jesus sayings is “be compassionate as God is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). Jesus’s experience of the compassion of God flowed outward, and when we look more carefully at this aspect of his character we see not only a man who saw his fellow humans in a remarkably different light to that of the general religious culture, but also see his God in a very original (and exciting) way to how we might imagine. Compassion means “to feel with.” A similar term and one that in English Bible translations is often used in place of compassion, is “mercy.” However, “mercy” implies a level of superiority that does not exist within compassion. Mercy also suggests that the person requiring it has done something wrong. “Compassion” has a very different resonance.
Etymological expert Phyllis Trible gives a marvellous insight into the Hebrew word for compassion. The root word rchm means “to have compassion.” The noun is racham and its plural, rachamim, means “compassion” and the noun rechem is translated as “womb.” The bodily organ of the woman, the womb, is thus associated with the act of compassion, evoking a profound female image. Rachamim could therefore be translated as womb-like compassion or even womb-love. It portrays the love of a mother for the child of her womb. It implies a range of feelings including goodness, tenderness, patience, and understanding. It expresses the tenderness of God’s feminine love.43
The kind of God Jesus experiences is one who feels as a mother feels. There is a beautiful tenderness in how Jesus views the divine. Indeed even when he uses the more usual male pronouns for God he often does so in a very intimate way, which is quite counter-cultural. He refers to God as “father” using the Aramaic term abba, which is closer to the term “papa’’ or even “daddy.” This was brought home to me when I visited Israel and overheard a little boy calling out to his father, “Abba, Abba.” One could therefore argue that, for Jesus, God was both divine father and divine mother. Not only that, but God is a father and mother who feels, who oozes womb-like compassion. Many stories told about Jesus speak of God as having compassion or being moved by compassion. The feeling of compassion leads to an expression of compassion. To be compassionate is to feel for somebody as deeply as a mother feels for the child in her womb.
The discovery that Jesus used feminine imagery for the divine comes as a delightful surprise for Pagans and is yet another possible doorway for Pagan/Christian dialogue. Of course it does not necessarily follow that feminine deities ooze compassion and motherly warmth. Indeed I know more than a few Pagans who find any notion of goddesses or gods who love us (or even care at all about us) to be a totally alien concept. The gods are simply forces of nature personified and therefore will kill just as easily as bless. And in reality this is a perfectly reasonable conclusion. However, there are also many Pagans who feel some sense of underlying compassion or love when it comes to deity. This book is not an attempt to harmonise various Pagan beliefs, nor is it an attempt to qualify them. It is simply my desire to demonstrate how Jesus and his teachings can be complimentary to various forms of Paganism rather than antagonistic. A beautiful example of a world-respected Wiccan author writing on the notion of the loving nature of the dual-gender divine is from Scott Cunningham’s best-seller Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. He says, “Wicca, in common with many other religions, recognizes deity as dual. It reveres both the Goddess and the God. They are equal, warm, and loving, not distant or resident in ‘heaven,’ but omnipresent throughout the universe.”44 Another lovely example comes from the excellent Pagans & Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience, by Gus DiZerega, who describes an experience of suddenly feeling himself being immersed in a sea of perfect and
limitless divine love: “There is no greater nor more perfect love than that from the Ultimate.”45 He also uses a term that I have heard many of the more progressive Christian teachers use when referring to Jesus’s notion of God’s love: “The experience [of divine love] encompasses complete understanding and unconditional acceptance, neither of which are purely human capacities.” And, “Because divine love is unconditional, each being would be treasured and cherished, regardless of whether that love was returned.”46 This language of the unconditional love of God/dess is in perfect harmony with what countless progressive and liberal Christians see as a major teaching of Jesus and symbolised within the notion of the Christ. Bible scholar and Chair of the Progressive Christianity Network Britain, Rev. John Churcher talks of Jesus as someone who experienced “Perfect and Compassionate Love” within himself and whose mission was to awaken that divine source in others: “We have [within us] the sleeping giant of Perfect Unconditional Love waiting to be recognised, responded to and lived by us all.”47 With words that would sit very comfortably with many Pagans, Churcher refers to what Christians have commonly called the Incarnation (the becoming human of God in Jesus) in a wonderfully symbolic and non-exclusive way: “Evangelical Christians often proclaim that there is a ‘God-shaped void in the heart of every human’ and that only Jesus can fill this void. Surely there can be nothing further from the truth? Within each and every person, regardless of creed or religious experience, there is the Presence (not the void) of the Sacred. Even though this Presence of Perfect and Compassionate Love many not be recognized, it is the true spiritual Incarnation. It happened to Jesus, and it has happened to you and me. All the power of Perfect Love is incarnated within all people, for all are temples of the Spirit that is God. In my opinion, what was so special about Jesus was his living awareness of the Sacred Spirit within him.”48
The compassionate and motherly image of deity is of course in huge contrast to the wrathful—and rather toxic—God images of certain Old Testament passages, as well as much of later Christian tradition (both Catholic and Protestant). The Jesus quest has shown quite clearly that the earliest and most original strands of the Jesus tradition portray a Jesus movement that had radically distanced itself away from God as apocalyptic judge to a gospel of healing and forgiveness. Jesus wandered the dusty streets, healing and exorcising the suffering peasants he met on his way. And he did not do so for any other reason that this: his life was an expression of compassion. He wanted to bring people back to themselves. He wanted to restore people to their rightful place as beloved by God. He wanted the ones who felt unloved and worthless to feel cherished. He cut across the orthodoxy of his day and refused to allow himself to perpetuate their manmade barriers. He was an astonishingly brave healer of religion-damaged souls. We are only now beginning to realise that the religion which now claims to own him as God is equally in need of his iconoclastic spirit.
Robin Meyers puts it like this: “Orthodoxy’s front door is gilded, but the rusty back door of the early church remains ajar—the one leading to the kitchen behind the creedal looking glass. There sits Jesus, cross-legged, amid the steam and misery of the world … His message is nonjudgmental presence. Without saying a word, the crowd gets it: we all matter; no exceptions.”49
Iconoclast and Counter-Cultural Wisdom Teacher
The deep God-awareness that oozed out of Jesus in the form of motherly compassion and affected the way he viewed the world around him, also forced him to try to correct it in a more anarchistic manner. While, on the one hand, the most recent phase of the Jesus quest has rightly re-Judaised Jesus, it has also revealed a Jesus who was highly critical of the religious and political systems of his day. He was a reformer and an iconoclast, and it was this that cost him his life: “ … unlike the claims of orthodoxy, Jesus did not come to die, rendering his life and teaching secondary. He died because of his life and teachings. He was killed for the things he said and did.”50
Clearly Jesus sided with the oppressed, the downtrodden, those outside the box. He turned things on their head and accused those who were outwardly good of hypocrisy, while wrapping the so-called sinful and impure up in a robe of unconditional acceptance.
We know from modern therapeutic spiritual communities like Alcoholics Anonymous that unconditional acceptance contains a deeply healing and transformative quality. It enables real growth and change for the better, whereas forced attempts at holiness simply create very ugly self-righteousness. As Meyers says, “Reversing the categories of pure and impure, Jesus lifted up women (impure), leaven (also impure), and children (neither pure nor impure, just invisible). Most disturbing of all, he ate with outcasts, criminals, and prostitutes, proving that if we are known by the company we keep, then it is no wonder they called him a drunkard and a glutton.”51
This is a Jesus who is far from that pious image we often have of a pure and holy do-gooder. This Jesus got his hands dirty. This Jesus loved real people and seemed to find the most “upright” to be a real pain in the arse. His lessons, paraphrased for the twenty-first century, might be along the lines of the following:
Be who you are, accept who you are, love who you are, and know that what you are is from a divine source. So do not attempt to convert to an alien religious perspective. Be what you are, and reclaim the deepest truth of your own tradition.
I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that Jesus hated religious superiority and hypocrisy. He hated it because he saw where it led; he had firsthand experience of what such unbending religiosity did to people. It resulted in a system that totally contradicted his passion for a kingdom based on compassion. The warfare between Jesus and the so-called Pharisees was a war between compassion and their rigid purity codes and ideals of holiness. The strict laws and codes inevitably left many people outside of their own religion (God), and Jesus despised it. Indeed he tackled it head-on and often in a deliberately provocative way. For example, he chose the sacrosanct Sabbath as an issue over which to fight. He didn’t have to but he chose to heal on the Sabbath, thus making an issue over it. Also the sharing of meals with those he should not eat with clearly demonstrates how compassion was more important to Jesus than religious obedience to purity codes.52 This all made Jesus different from all other contemporary or preceding prophets.
Through the new eyes given to us by the quest, the Jesus we are left with is one in whom we do not have to believe in for salvation, but listen to for wisdom. This is a figure more Buddha-like than God-like. He is human like you and I, yet filled with personal and divine awareness that overflows and affects those who meet him, putting them in contact with the same spiritual flow. In that sense he is a son of God—because he mirrors back to us our own naturally divine status.
Though Jesus—or to use his Aramaic name, Yeshua—was a proud Jew, much of his teaching and many of his practises were distinctly alternative to his own first-century Jewish culture. And the more I look at the ethos and actions that got him in trouble, the more they seem also to conflict with much of modern-day Christianity.
One of the most obvious ways Jesus blatantly ignored the religious customs of his day was by the company he kept. The three synoptic Gospels suggest that Jesus spent a large part of his time (perhaps because he had a natural fondness for them) with the “people of the earth,” the peasants of rural Galilee.53 As in most cultures, these peasants or country folk were looked down upon as inferior by the more urban and educated parts of the population. But even within this group, Jesus still seemed to single out for special attention the lowliest, most marginalised—often the so-called sinners, poor, and lame. These people had been shut out of society due to ritual impurity. By socialising with them, Jesus was contaminating himself in the eyes of the religious establishment.
Earlier in this chapter we saw that Jesus’s motivation for this religious rule breaking came not out of some recklessly anarchic game but from a spirit-drenched soul and a heart full of divine compassion. He knew in his deepest self that all people were equal, worthy, and valuable, and he would not sit back and see them suffer in the misery of what felt to them like divine abandonment.
According to many scholars, Jesus probably began his own vocation as a member of John the Baptist’s community with a John-like mission to warn of an approaching disaster. John’s goal was to encourage people to undergo a baptism of repentance as preparation for judgement but, over time, Jesus’s own ministry clearly modified and adapted this until it took on its own very distinct ethos and expression. Jesus, though John the Baptist’s “successor,” did not himself baptise, nor did he remain out in the desert pursuing some aesthetic life of denial. Rather, he left the wilderness and plugged himself back into the life of villages, towns, and cities, where he would befriend the disenfranchised, bringing the God experience to them directly. He turned his attention to the poor, the blind, the lame, the crippled, the lepers, the hungry, the sad, the persecuted, the downtrodden, the captives, the overburdened, the rabble, the law breakers, the crowds, the little ones, the least, the last, and the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Clearly Jesus saw his primary mission field as that unmistakable section of society, those on the margins, the unaccepted ones and the oppressed. As a Jewish religious preacher/teacher, this was astonishing behaviour, and many would have considered it suicidal in terms of an attempt to be granted any respect from the establishment. But Jesus didn’t want respect. Jesus’s heart was not concerned with propping up the establishment or being seen doing the right thing. His heart was motivated by love—love of God and love of fellow men and women made in the divine image. They were seen as sinners and thus outside the institution. Jesus, by embracing them, brought the divine-experience (which was the “possession” of the Temple and its official priesthood) directly into their lives, but the cost was enormous.
John the Baptist preached to these “sinners,” other prophets tried to exorcise evil spirits from them, but Jesus identified with them. He deliberately mixed socially with beggars and prostitutes. He frequented their world, eating and drinking with them, thus breaking one of the biggest cultural taboos of all—table fellowship, the strict conventions of which people broke at their own peril. Ritual purity (which was at the heart of all such conventions) was symbolic of the purity of the relationship between God and his chosen people. Yet Jesus put human emotional and psychological needs on a higher level of importance than ritual purity. This was nothing short of blasphemous, but what treasure it imparted to these despised ones.
As Albert Nolan says, “The scandal Jesus caused in that society by mixing socially with sinners can hardly be imagined by most people in the modern world today. It meant that he accepted them and approved of them and that he actually wanted to be ‘a friend of tax collectors and sinners’ (Mt 11:19). The effect on the poor and the oppressed themselves was miraculous.”54 To these outcasts (“sinners”) the fact that they were embraced and brought into a situation they were usually denied, gave them the experience of what some have called redemption—the healing of their own feeling of being unworthy and out of favour with God.
In first-century Palestine, sins were seen as debts owed to God—debts that had either been incurred because of law breaking (working on a Sabbath, etc.,) or contamination due to breaking of the purity codes (handling a corpse, perhaps). There were also those who’d been born into a state of permanent “impurity” (the lame, the lepers, the illegitimate). Their “sin” was viewed as having been passed down the family tree, so their “punishment” was not for anything they’d done personally but was their ancestors’ unwanted inheritance to them. There was no way out of it, and it made for a highly toxic notion of God and religion. There were, of course, some “sinners” who were not in a permanent state of sin and who, if they went through the right set of procedures, could be forgiven and made clean, but they’d need to have the means to acquire it—class status and/or wealth.
Jesus sat down with these outcasts and brought them senses of being valued and made whole again. He often declared forgiveness over them even though he really had no place to do so. By doing this, he was not just at risk of “polluting” himself but putting himself in great physical danger. However, his compassion overrode any possible concerns about
self-protection. The sense of liberation that must have been generated within those he befriended would have been life changing—nothing short of a de-toxification of a highly damaging God image. As a result, he himself became an enormous threat to the system itself.
This is an area where Jesus not only contradicts his own religious culture (by declaring people forgiven without them going through the usual temple-based mechanisms) but he also contradicts much of later Christian practise. When we look at Jesus in relation to the healing gift of forgiveness, it’s crucially important we remember that later notions of substitutionary atonement or confession followed by a penance had not yet been invented. Jesus did not “forgive” people after they’d confessed their sins to a priest and pleaded the sacrificial benefits of his atoning blood sacrifice. He declared the forgiveness that was already theirs. With regard to the story of Jesus declaring the forgiveness of the “sinful woman” who washed Jesus’s feet, Nolan says, “Jesus’s faith in God’s unconditional forgiveness had awakened the same faith in her.”55
One of the most familiar stories that Jesus told (and which scholars generally believe goes back to the historical man himself) is the parable of the prodigal son. I call it the tale of two lost sons because it is about two brothers, each one failing to understand their father’s unconditional love, though the more reckless one (the sinner) comes to discover and experience it in the end. This story is a pre-Christian, pre-atonement theology, a masterpiece of spiritual wisdom. This is not the place to do a complete text-by-text exposition or analysis; suffice it to say that the “God” in this parable (represented by the father) requires absolutely nothing from either of the two lost sons. What is his is theirs, and they can choose to be part of it or not. The son who insults his father by taking all his inheritance and blowing it on crap, only to return after losing everything and ending up feeling sorry for himself, is not punished or cursed or asked for any kind of penance or atoning sacrifice. He is simply loved, which brings him into a new sense of being. This ties in once more with Gus DiZerega’s Wiccan view of the divine: “Because divine love is unconditional, each being would be treasured and cherished, regardless of whether that love was returned.”56
This is the emotional/psychological effect Jesus had on people. He changed their lives—literally. They were brought into being again by his unconditional acceptance within a culture of punishments and rewards. Whether he knew the psychological implications of this or not, the effects were liberating. What he achieved in bringing a sense of forgiveness to these hurting people was deep inner healing, perhaps manifested in literal bodily cures. Scholars are divided as to whether his healings were physical as well as emotional/psychological, but they all agree on the fact that he enabled people to be brought back into an experience of wholeness they had not tasted for many years or perhaps ever. What we are really talking about here is, of course, self-forgiveness. By cutting across the conventions and rules of his day and bringing an actual experience of unearned and unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, Jesus brought these people back into a relationship with their God, their communities, and themselves. The important thing to remember is that he did not ask them to jump any hurdles or do anything religious at all. He did not give them something they did not already possess. He simply uncovered for them what was already there—oneness between them and the divine. In other words, he used the language of religion “your sins are forgiven” to make redundant all such language.
It was as if this man was so in touch with his own sense of being unconditionally accepted by the Divine that he was able to mingle with the broken and enable them to sparkle with their own god-light. And here, once again, we have a message that rings loud bells with the Pagan world. Self-forgiveness is a very close concept to that of self-awareness/self-knowledge (know thyself). We do not hear of rituals of repentance or requests to deity for forgiveness within Pagan circles. They take for granted the fact that there isn’t and never has been any separation between the divine and the human. Jesus, from within a strictly religious culture, used the language and customs of that culture to say the same thing as modern Pagans—“friends, brothers, sisters, there is no separation between you and the divine.” The following quote is from a book by a Roman Catholic priest who now co-leads an eclectic spiritual community which draws on Christian, Hindu, and Celtic wisdom. His name is Fr. Sean O’Laoire, and this is what he has to say about divine forgiveness. It is both provocative and strangely illuminating and, once again, touches that sacred space between the two traditions of Christianity and Paganism. Though he doesn’t actually say that this is what Jesus believed about God and forgiveness, he does imply it. His vision of Jesus is very much that of an eastern wise man/guru, not the dualistic heaven vs. earth Jesus of Christendom. It is a long passage but well worth quoting in full:
God is the only “person” in the universe, to use an anthropomorphic term, who can’t forgive and doesn’t forgive. Because in order to forgive, He first has to hold a grudge against me and then subsequently let go of it. And since God, as the ineffable ground of being is totally incapable of holding a grudge, God is the only person who can’t forgive. Forgiveness comes from inside each other.
It is very interesting to me that at the end of the Jewish year, before the book is closed, there is a ceremony called Kol Nidre. Kol Nidre is people acknowledging their misalignment, but none of it is about offending God. There is not a single statement in that entire liturgy about offending God. It’s all about offending each other because you can’t offend God. You can offend someone else, but you can’t offend the transcendent, ineffable ground of our being. Forgiveness is never a question of asking God’s pardon for having upset Her. Forgiveness is always coming to the realization that all sin is about failure to grow and that failure to grow affects my relationships, affects my culture and affects my world. And therefore those of whom I need to ask forgiveness are my brothers and sisters. All forgiveness is about the acknowledgement of the misalignment I’ve created between my essence and myself, and between myself and other selves; but I can’t really be misaligned from the ultimate ground of my being.”57
Apart from the so-called “sinners” and other untouchables mentioned above, another two groups that were treated as either inferior or invisible in Jesus’s culture were women and children, yet he broke convention there too. First-century Palestinian women were regarded as valueless and the property of their father or husband, yet Jesus allowed women personal and intimate contact with him58 and some women were numbered among his disciples.59 Nolan puts it like this: “Jesus stood out amongst his contemporaries (and most of his subsequent followers) as someone who gave women exactly the same value and dignity as men.”60 Children were looked down upon as totally insignificant, yet Jesus takes a little child and places her in the centre of a crowd, pointing to her as the image of the kingdom of God.
But there was one group to whom Jesus showed astonishing acceptance which broke every conceivable boundary, the enemies—non-Jews, Samaritans, Romans, Gentiles, Pagans. Perhaps the most counter-cultural statement of all Jesus’s radical teachings was “love your enemies.” It seems to suggest (as do plenty of his actions) that Jesus, himself a Jew, was prepared to at least question one of the most foundational aspects of his own cultural faith—that of chosen-ness. Many scholars agree that his ministry was primarily or wholly directed towards the “lost sheep of the house of Israel,” in other words, to his own Jewish people. Yet he also contradicted this time and time again by pointing to the complete outsider and using them as an example of true faith. For example, the well-known Parable of the Good Samaritan’s clear message was that the true practitioner of neighbourliness came not from the religious establishment. Neither was he even a member of the pure Jewish community, but a despised and sub-Jewish Samaritan.61 There is also the account of a Pagan Roman centurion who sends a message to Jesus asking that his slave be healed. Jesus responds and commends the man for his display of true faith.62 And there is the highly uncomfortable passage of when Jesus was confronted by a Gentile woman, whom he refers to as a “gentile dog.” She persists and Jesus helps her.63
Perhaps his attitude modified over time as he stumbled across more and more who did not fit inside the “chosen” box, and yet who impressed him with their faith and humanity. There are certainly many gospel passages suggesting that Jesus’s God did not seem to be interested in favourites anymore. In fact, if anything this God was more likely to be experienced within the lives of those outside the box, outside the chosen-ness and favouritism of the system.
While I was working on this particular section of the book, I had an experience I felt necessary to write about and add, for it enabled me to come to a deeper insight about that which I was trying to express. I often find that my morning walks in the countryside open me to the oft locked- up inner voice of the spirit within. It is as if the clutter and background noise of the head and mind are somehow quietened when one is embraced by nature, and the desk, PC, and phone are a long ways off. Occasionally I jot down my experiences. This was one of them:
I’m standing on the brow of a small hill. I’m beginning to find these daily morning walks invaluable. I talk to the divine constantly, which often turns into dialogue. It’s as if the deepest inner “God-voice” (Self) somehow awakens when I’m free from the constraints of home, office, or other pressures. The voices of nature—the crows call, the wind through the trees, the cows in the distance—seem to speak to a place within my soul that triggers what some may call innate wisdom. We all have this. We all do it. We just don’t usually notice.
This morning I know I will learn something new—something profound. Here I stand, open to nature in all her glory, at peace with God/dess and self. I start thinking about Jesus, which is probably triggered by the “orthodoxy test” I’m preparing for where I’ll have to answer doctrinal questions about the nature of Jesus Christ.
As I stand here, I hear myself saying that Jesus is indeed still something of a powerful gateway to the God experience. For me he breaks down barriers that I have set up in my own head between myself and the divine. Ironically, many of those barriers were erected in and through the world of Christianity, the religion that attempts to follow him. He always was an iconoclast, fearlessly tackling anything that was set up to obstruct or deny people’s God-given right to know the divine. The religious institution of his day was very good at doing precisely that, as is the religious institution of our day.
Often when I stand here I can hear the “sanctus bell” of the church I used to pastor. In many ways it triggers nostalgia, yet it is also a metaphorical sign of something different, a necessary change in my own spiritual understanding and growth. This experience of being here and hearing that sound somehow symbolizes the two approaches to the divine. Here I stand, a free spirit, out in God/dess country, outside the box, nothing between deity and me. And my good friend Jesus is here too, for neither can he be boxed up. And there, down in the town, the bell speaks of a God who descends into bread and wine … and who is then (a little later) boxed up inside a wall tabernacle. The folk who are meeting their deity there are genuinely meeting him, but it’s inside a structure that I often feel constricts, protects, and confines. I’m happier, by far, out here on the hill.
I still love the Mass when I occasionally go and hope, some day, to celebrate it myself again but it has become a sacrament of exclusivity and boxed up-ness rather than one of unity and opening out.
This is the difference between the wilderness God and the God of the Temple. Which did Jesus point to? Possibly both, but he most certainly did not wish the temple structures to get in the way for people.
I still love Jesus. I love him as a special friend who lives within my heart (through what we call Christos) not as the ONLY way to God or the sole door to heaven, but as someone who challenged ALL so-called only doors to heaven. He is for me a gateway to divine experience because of his challenges to religion and his beautiful pointers to deity. He reminds me that God is within, that Grace is God’s way, that unconditional acceptance is the name of the game. He reminds me that all such attempts to bargain, buy, or earn one’s
way into heaven are futile. Why? Because we are already there.
Jesus often used the phrase “the Kingdom of God.” For me this is his term for a spiritual experience of overcoming all such separationist doctrines and dogmas, where everyone is held by divine love and where there are no inequalities based on class, gender, background, or status. As Rex Weyler says in his book on Jesus’s authentic sayings, “Jesus taught that unadorned, unconditional compassion is the kingdom made manifest.”64
Many modern quest scholars have broken tradition with their predecessors and now see Jesus as pointing not to some future coming Kingdom, but to the fact that it is here already, on a level of reality that remains hidden to most. The kingdom of God, for Jesus, is clearly not a future “place” or “destiny,” but a possible present state where all are valued equally and where folk lean on the God that is found within them, a society where there is no prestige, no status, no class divides or separation between inferior and superior categories. Everyone is valued, loved, and respected, and not because of their education, wealth, ancestry, or other achievements.
The Kingdom of God has also been described as an internal experience, which is yet another area where there are some healthy Christian and Pagan parallel understandings. In the next chapter we will look at this and other areas of Jesus’s alternative wisdom that are counter-cultural to much of modern Christianity, yet perfectly in line with large parts of Paganism.
One of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read about Jesus is by a man named Brother John Martin Sahajananda, You Are the Light: Rediscovering the Eastern Jesus. Brother Martin was one of the monks of the astonishing Benedictine spiritual teacher Fr. Bede Griffiths, who for decades ran a Hindu-Catholic ashram in India. The book is an amazing fusion of Catholic and Indian/Hindu spirituality, and it has a most enlightening approach to understanding Jesus’s “Kingdom of God” which I will get to shortly.
The basic thesis is that the Christian Church (of which is the author is clearly a part) has yet to discover the good news (gospel) about Jesus. Human beings, he believes, are greater than all religions, and God is not locked away inside any one of them, but is everywhere and in all things, a little like an ocean to the fish that swim in it (we being the fish). Brother Martin teaches that All is God and that God is in All, and that Jesus, far from being the only Son of God, was a symbol of what is true for us all. He quotes John’s Gospel where its author has Jesus say, “I and the father are one,” but rather than the usual orthodox interpretation which assumes that this is only true for Jesus, Brother Martin believes that it is true for all humanity at the deepest level—they just have not woken up to it yet.
In the first chapter the reader is asked the question, “How is Jesus good news?” In order to answer and explain this, the author then goes on to show that Jesus’s message of good news had three parts to it. The gospels tell us that Jesus preached a message of the “Kingdom of God,” that it was “at hand,” and that to find it one must “repent.” Three parts: Kingdom, at hand, and repent. To Brother Martin, “Kingdom of God” neither meant a new, physical messianic state, nor a future spiritual kingdom beyond this world but one that is as Jesus said, “at hand,” which means close enough to touch. He puts it like this: “The kingdom of God is the dynamic aspect of God. It means that God is everywhere, God is among us, within us, and outside us, and we are all already in God. In saying that the kingdom of God is at hand, Jesus was announcing an eternal and universal truth.”65 But how do we realise this truth? How do we make real the experience of discovering that God’s Kingdom (the divine realm) is as close as breath? One word—“repent.” Before suffering the usual knee-jerk reaction against such an overused and “toxic” word, however, let’s allow Brother Martin to expound upon its more esoteric meaning. For while we might normally associate this word with ideas of unworthiness and sin, the actual word can mean something quite different. As he says:
“[T]he Gospels were written in Greek and the Greek word used for repentance is metanoia, which has the meaning of a radical change of mind. But metanoia also has a much more profound meaning. The word comes from Platonic philosophy in which reality is seen on four levels. The first is the body, the second is the individual soul, the third is the universal soul or nous, and the fourth is One, of God. The word meta means to transcend or to go beyond. For example, we can say that metaphysics is that which transcends physics of the physical world. So metanoia means ‘to go beyond the nous.’ To find God, each person has to transcend his or her identification with the body, with the individual soul, and even with the universal soul, and only then can the “One,” God or kingdom of God be found.” 66
The monk then goes on to give an astonishing explanation of what it means to repent—i.e., to go beyond the dualisms of the individual me to the oneness of all, and, shockingly, it does not mean to do anything but, on the contrary, to stop doing. It is about letting go, not striving to “be a better person.” He continues, “It is important to realise that the word ‘repent’ does not imply a positive action, a movement towards a positive goal. Rather it implies a negative action. It is like the little fish in the ocean that does not know that it is in the ocean and is searching for the ocean. The little fish asks a big fish, ‘Tell me, where is the ocean?’ The big fish responds by saying, ‘My dear little one, the ocean is everywhere. You are living and moving and have your being in it. You cannot live one minute without the ocean. Stop all your searching and realize that you are already in the ocean.’ In the same way Jesus announced the eternal truth to humanity that God is like an infinite ocean and we are all like little fish in the ocean searching for God. We cannot find God through movement, by going hither and thither. What we have to do is stop all our movements and realise that we are already in God.”67
Clearly for Brother Martin, Jesus’s message of “repent, the kingdom of God is at hand” is far more like that of an Eastern enlightenment teacher who cries “wake up out of your illusion of separateness” than a prophet of salvation from sin. Not only that, his Jesus also has close correlations to Borg’s spirit person. As he says, “Jesus had to experience the good news of the kingdom of God in his own life before he could proclaim it.”68 And, as we shall see in a later chapter, Brother Martin’s Jesus has not only woken up to the kingdom himself and shared that experience with his followers, but his own “Christ status” is also something that is not just his own, but belongs to all—the Cosmic Christ.