An Easter Message and Some Heresy
He is risen
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
John 18:36
And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
Luke 17:20-21
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Mathew 6:19
If only we grasped this message fully, embodying it in every waking moment: if there is a price to be gained, it is not of this world; if there is a treasure, it is of a very different kind than the one chased after in the material realm; if there is a reward, it works in its own way: we cannot see it nor grasp it, yet it is more real than anything visible or graspable. And this we can know with certainty.
We know the kingdom of heaven because it pierces our minds, bodies and awareness, emanating from our souls, if we work to let it, shapeshifting even while it takes shape, discernible even while beyond our faculties, clearing up when we approach it even while fading into obscurity the harder we look.
Note that Jesus doesn’t say material treasures are inherently bad, or even that striving towards them is. But just as our reality is embedded in a higher mode of experience, a realness beyond the veil, so must any movement on earth on our part be an expression of it, whether consciously or not. A strict orientation towards worldly goals, whether earthly riches and power or even “spiritual ascendancy” poorly understood, just means aligning oneself with certain aspects of the real real that one may or may not wish to align with.
No, the kingdom of God is not of this world, although, as it is the source of this world, it is also not detached from it; the reward, whatever it is, therefore unfolds in this world too. It’s just that it manifests according to the principles of the higher world, not of the strictly utilitarian world of basic material human desires.
We can, by definition, access the source-world, and therefore reap the rewards that come with true understanding: reality will seem less erratic and more intelligible even as we suffer along; we become less identified with certain outcomes but rather grounded in the truth of our journey; we’ll gain insights into the flow of the universal pattern, using it to our spiritual advantage, weathering the many storms existence on earth comes with. We’ll be better able to take the right decisions; indeed, we’ll understand the subtle language in the air nudging us now to wait, now to take action, now to stand still, now to move ahead. We’ll know what that language is and how it works and patiently await its hum, seizing the moment when it speaks, discerning it from the voice of chaos, entropy and anti-agency that seeks to pin us down to the eternal, and ultimately pointless, circle of material-only existence.
I say all that as someone who would probably be considered a heretic by many Christians, although in some sense I would perhaps go so far as to count myself among them. Why a heretic? The history of Christianity is best understood, as any history is, as part of an eternal battle between darkness and light, between the material-minded plotting and scheming for power and earthly success for its own sake, and the spirit- and soul-minded striving towards the true kingdom of God. How could this conflict not run through the bible and Christian dogma, too? Clearly, the Old Testament in many ways reflects the political and religious battle between a tyrannical priest class hell-bent on micromanaging and threatening their subjects, invoking their mirror image of a wrathful god to do so, and the inevitable counter-movements this sparked over time, calling out their oppressors and desperately trying to break free, reconnecting with an older, more spirit-minded tradition that didn’t know anything about sophist-Pharisees peddling idiotic laws. Equally obvious, given this picture, is that the religious texts have been changed, re-arranged, messed with, interpolated over time, convenient messages and chapters added, inconvenient ones deleted, depending on all kinds of shifting political and earthly goals.
The same is true for the New Testament. I even learned this obvious fact in religion class in school both from catholic and protestant clergy, namely that the different gospels were written for different “target audiences.” It goes much further than that, however: insertions, interpolations, new made-up stories to counter-balance older traditions for religious-politicial expediency, and the rest. Speaking of heresy, I would even go so far as to say it’s highly doubtful that Jesus existed in any way, shape or form as portrayed in the gospels, which to my heretical mind, wouldn’t even negate Christianity’s core messages, given Jesus’ and Paul’s emphasis on the higher reality from whence ours flows, rendering the specifics of what went down and the demand for material proof of literal bible truth somewhat less of a gotcha.
Some Christian believers, too, try to approach these controversies from the epistemological perspective, claiming that spiritual orientation towards Christ is beyond rationalistic, modernistic, scientism-infected discourse. As regular readers will know, I’m sympathetic to such thought forms. But then, it shouldn’t really matter whether there is evidence for or against the existence of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels, or whether he existed at all in the flesh. Yet that’s not how the discourse usually goes, quickly turning as it does into a food fight over the authenticity of the evidence pointing in this or that direction. Christian orthodoxy clearly demands the material, fleshly truth of the matter, which makes it difficult for “believers” to wrap their heads around the idea of the primacy of the spirit, of the “kingdom not of this world” as it relates to bible interpretation.
At the end of the day, the history of early Christianity is opaque enough, the sources sketchy and interpolated enough with no irresistible evidence as to who tampered with what and when, as to allow both sides to live in confidence with their conclusions. (As with all study of history, what you see depends on the quality of the mind.) What I don’t like, however, is dogma: the idea that some specific truth propositions must be foregone conclusions. Not that I don’t understand the importance of tradition and of epistemic humility, or indeed the fact that our minds are limited by our historical consciousness, all of which should make us careful not to prematurely and irresponsibly break things. But at the end of the day, I want to know, and widen my understanding based on such knowledge. Such a widening of knowledge and alignment with truth, ordering and fine-tuning my outlook, I’m convinced, brings me closer to Christ, no matter what.
Christ is the most courageous of all; Christ spirit is attained via and leads to courage. Including the courage to question dogma: dogma that may or may not be an outgrowth of those pesky materialistic, unimaginative currents running through history, including Christian history. The battle has always been on, always will be. And as Jesus implied in the Parable of the Sower, not everybody is ready to get it and pierce through the dogma of his time. Indeed, very few are.1 Which makes it trivial to assume corruption, deception, rationalizations and general spiritual mayhem manifesting around Christian teaching over time, including making things up and pretending they happened or were written in the past. Sometimes, there might not even be evil intent behind it: some things could have been written as fictional stories as a teaching vehicle, only to be later taken literally and canonized as “history.” He who controls history and all that — a concept with a long tradition itself.
It should be clear, then, that the naive idea of the bible (or “tradition”) being infallible, God’s true word and so on is laughable on the face of it. Clearly it’s a mixed bag, and nobody can absolve us from the responsibility of separating the wheat from the chaff, making sense of it ourselves. In fact, it’s not that the authors of the text, or of tradition, had been guided by the Holy Spirit, at least not all of them and not always. Rather, it is us who need the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our approaching it. The kingdom of God is not of this world, which means it is also not in a book; a book, like anything else of this world, can only ever be (at best) a vehicle for deeper alignment with the Christ-reality, the unseen world, the spark of the Holy Spirit, not the direct expression or representation thereof.
Let me end on a less heretical note. While it is true that the naive idea of a 100% God-inspired, “true” bible or tradition is silly, the non-naive idea of the Holy Spirit having something to do with it is perhaps a little more convincing. Yes, it is all a mixed bag, with good and bad influences, various complex and corrupting political agendas playing out over centuries and so on. But you could turn that argument around, too: the fact that despite all that, we still got a tradition that produced much good while preserving some crucial core teachings as well as a way to disseminate them — in parables, for those with ears to hear — against all odds, against the combined evilness and weaknesses of mankind multiplied by millennia of motive and opportunity to destroy it all, this fact could be called a miracle.
The Holy Spirit be praised. Christ is risen.
Happy Easter you weirdos.
The Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20) is a good one to ponder:
“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”
Then Jesus said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”
[…]
Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”
See also:
Nice post, LP. I agree with you that whether Jesus actually existed or not, and whether he lived as told in the Gospels or not, matters less than the fact (ala Jung) that the conveyed stories about him clearly spoke to humanity's deep inner needs, which is what gave it the strength to survive, grow, and expand into the present era.
Personally, I also look at it astrologically: the Age of Pisces with the two fish symbolism, where the beginning of the age begins with Christ and the end of the age ends with the anti-Christ. As each age is ~2,000 years, and with the rapidly emerging CBDC Mark of the Beast approaching the latter doesn't feel far off. As noted gnostic Stephan Hoeller stated in an interview:
"One of the principal disclosures to be found in this work is Jung’s belief that the Age of Aquarius is upon us, that significant changes in the consciousness of humanity are taking place, and that more of the same may be expected in the future. The “Aeon of Aquarius,” as Jung calls it, will eventually bring great psychological changes in its wake, amounting to a new religious consciousness which will differ greatly from the religious consciousness of the Piscean Age. It will manifest primarily in a new God-image that was very important to the ancient Gnostics and that in various ways has made its appearance throughout history in the esoteric tradition.
Two thousand and some years ago a new religion constellated itself in the Mediterranean region. With that religion came a new myth of redemption, centred in the image of Jesus, the Saviour God. Now Jung is telling us in The Red Book that the Aeon of Aquarius is upon us, and with it comes the new God-image of the God within. This image is of course none other than the God to whom St. Paul referred as “the Christ in you, our hope of glory.” It is also the indwelling Christ affirmed and venerated in the Gnostic tradition.
There is no doubt that Jung saw in the new Gnostic Renaissance, which began with the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library, a manifestation of his own prophecy in the then still secret Red Book. The connection of Jung’s prophecy with the tradition of Gnosis is unmistakable.
In his Red Book, Jung stated clearly that the task of the present and near future was “to give birth to the ancient in a new time,” and he clearly meant the Gnostic tradition is in fact that ancient thing to which he and others were giving birth.
I have spent a very large portion of my adult life studying and commenting upon the work of Jung and the Gnostic sacred writings. I should say, then, that humanity today is experiencing the rebirth of Gnosticism, and its principal God-image is being born in a new time. The esoteric as well as the exoteric implications of this process are momentous."
Happy Easter.
Beautiful essay on this Easter Day, thank you!