The term “messiah,” from the Aramaic m’shekha, means “the perfected form of humanity.” It is clear from this definition of messiah that Jesus assumed an identity that was meant to be an example of what was possible or even maybe the ultimate destiny for all of humanity. He did not think of himself as the great exception on the way to being elevated to a hard-to-obtain kingdom of heaven. He said as much in the Gospel. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do.” John 14:12
According to some teachers of Judaism, who were influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism, the Messiah would not necessarily arrive as a person, but more likely as a state of mind, an awakening or enlightenment. Jews and Christians were both influenced by these Zoroastrian teachings especially teachings related to the end of the world, the resurrection, heaven and hell and the idea of a savior.
“Science, as Justice Holmes was fond of saying, makes major contributions to minor needs. Religion, whether or not it comes up with anything, is at least at work on the things that matter most. When, then, a lone spirit succeeds in breaking through to major conquests here, he becomes more than a king—he becomes a world redeemer. His impact stretches for millennia blessing the tangled course of human history. ‘Who are … the greatest benefactors of the living generation of mankind?’ asks Toynbee. ‘I should say: Confucius and Laotze, the Buddha, the prophets of Israel and Judah, Zoroaster, Jesus and Mohammed and Socrates.’” The historian Arnold Toynbee, we should note, ranks Jesus among the great mystics and philosophers of all time.
Because P-B is not a profound context, it has the effect of crippling the ability of religion to respond to the real needs of its believers. The Simple Reality narrative will allow Christians to begin to understand “universally” applicable spiritual truths, such as those taught by Jesus and to distinguish those universal truths from those illusions held in merely sectarian and cultural “wineskins.”
Neither do men put new wine into old bottles; else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish; but they put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved. Matthew 9:17
The kingdom of heaven (higher consciousness) cannot be attained in P-B and the cost of remaining at that lower level of awareness is very high for humanity. Would be spiritual teachers, whether priests, ministers, gurus, rabbis or imams have a moral responsibility to wake up and lead the faithful to a more profound understanding of religious truth. Failure to do so poses tragic consequences for our posterity and the future of our planet. Jesus foresaw the unfolding disaster, as do all mystics, and spoke metaphorically and poignantly about it. “But who so offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:6
We can change the direction we are headed by returning to the original Christian beliefs, attitudes and values, to the context of Simple Reality. We find it hard to internalize Jesus’ stunningly true message, for example, because it is in such contrast to the illusion to which we are committed. “Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That is the way Matthew puts it in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus talks of our Father in heaven who lets the sun shine on the good and the bad, and lets the rain fall on the just and unjust alike. It’s both the rain and the sun, not only the sun. And it’s both the just and the unjust. Jesus stresses the fact that God obviously allows the interplay of shadow and light. God approves of it. If God’s perfection allows for tensions to work themselves out, who are we to insist on a false self identity in which all tensions are repressed? We are not meant to live our lives in continuous reaction but to embrace our suffering (including our shadow) and be transformed by it.
In his own life, Jesus lived with tension and embraced darkness. That’s the Gospel. In this man, who is fully human, and like us in all respects (except our self-alienation and identity as sinners) we see what God is really like. And that human dies, crying out loud, “My God why have you forsaken me?” At that moment darkness covers the whole earth, which is, of course, a poetic statement, not an historic account of what happened. At that moment Jesus reaches the greatest distance from God’s own being (his True self) and embraces the darkness of utmost alienation (his false self).
In that moment, the illusion of the old narrative is transcended, and by embracing death is death denied. That moment is, according to the Gospel of John, not the prelude to the resurrection, not something that is then reversed by the resurrection, but is the resurrection. Jesus had said earlier, “When I am lifted up from the earth [P-B], I shall draw all things to myself.” John 12:32 He has become one with all of Creation as we all are. The passion shows not what is to come but what is and always has been.
The realization of Simple Reality is universal among mystics like Jesus. “I am not in the world, the world is in me.” Jesus did not say that the kingdom of heaven is a future reward, he said, “The kingdom of heaven is within … the kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:21
Ye are the light of the world.
Matthew 5:14
Jesus revealed his realization of The Great Insight of Oneness as St. Paul himself pointed out in his first letter to the Corinthians. “Christ [consciousness] is like a single body, which has many parts; it is still one body even though it is made up of different parts. In the same way, all of us, Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free men, have been baptized into the one body by the same Spirit, and we have all been given the one Spirit to drink … All of you, then, are Christ’s body, and each one is a part of it.” I Corinthians 12:12-13, 27
Many Christians like the idea that Jesus did all the work of salvation for them (he being divine after all, and they only human). They find solace in the theory of “vicarious redemption,” that, by his suffering and death, Jesus somehow made up for and appeased God for all of our sins. However, we must eventually come to realize that is our responsibility to choose transformation, to grow in Christ Consciousness (present moment awareness) by choosing response instead of reaction again and again.
The doctrine of “Jesus as personal savior” in effect nullifies the “good news” of Jesus’ message that we are divine and free from sin and death. “We should separate the religion that was taught by Jesus from the religion whose subject is Jesus. Then we will understand the real meaning of the New Testament and follow it.”
The scholarship of Thomas Sheehan has helped to reinterpret, revitalize and humanize Jesus giving him a P-A identity. “Rarely if ever did Jesus’ parables speak of God or were they set in a religious context. Rather, they described God’s reign in terms of everyday life situations, as if to say that the kingdom had to do not with a heavenly Beyond but with concrete possibilities in this world.”
“In Jesus’ message, however, ethics was not a matter of pursuing the fulfillment of one’s nature within a framework of inevitability. Not, as in the religious orthodoxy of the time, did it mean scrupulously obeying a Law imposed from without. Rather, it was a free response to a complete surprise: the unearned gift of God himself, who had suddenly arrived in one’s midst. Here ethics was not an extension of ontology, not the exfoliation and realization of what is already, if inchoately, the case. Rather, it meant metanoia, conversion or repentance: completely changing, entirely new. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand. Metanoiete: change your ways.’” Mark 1:15
Carl Jung understood that Jesus’ message was directed at the heart not the intellect and was a call for compassion. “Jesus first appears as a Jewish reformer and prophet of an exclusively good God. In so doing he saves a threatened religious community, and in this respect he does in fact prove himself a savior. He preserves mankind from loss of communion with God and from getting lost in mere consciousness and rationality.”
Jesus told 39 parables, and the first one in the fifth book of Matthew. “You are the light of the world …” In speaking of the light within, Jesus was telling us that our True self, in each one of us, is the mediator in Simple Reality. This is the still, small voice within. Karen Armstrong points out that over many centuries “biblical scholars had proven that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.”
“Mark’s gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that included brothers and sisters. No angels announce his birth or sang over his crib … the doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not formalized until the fourth century. The development of Christian belief in the Incarnation was a gradual, complex process. Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God.”
“Paul never called Jesus “God.” He called him “the son of God” in its Jewish sense; he certainly did not believe that Jesus had been the incarnation of God himself, he had simply possessed God’s “powers” and “Spirit” which manifested God’s activity on earth and were not to be identified with the inaccessible divine essence.”
“St. Paul, the earliest Christian writer, who created the religion that we now know as Christianity, believed that Jesus had replaced the Torah as God’s principal revelation of himself to the world. Paul also talked about the man Jesus as though he had been more than an ordinary human being, even though, as a Jew, Paul did not believe that he had been incarnate. There were, however, no detailed theories about the crucifixion as atonement for some “original sins” of Adam: we shall see that this theology did not emerge until the fourth century and was only important in the West. The single Incarnation of Christianity, suggesting that the whole of the inexhaustible reality of God had been manifest in just one human being, could lead to an immature type of idolatry.”
He (Peter Abelard 1079-1147) “developed a sophisticated and moving rationale for the mystery of atonement: Christ had been crucified to awaken compassion in us and by doing so he became our Savior.”
“In 1553 Calvin had the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus executed for his denial of the Trinity. Servetus had fled Catholic Spain and had taken refuge in Calvin’s Geneva, claiming that he was returning to the faith of the apostles and the earliest Fathers of the Church, who had never heard of this extraordinary doctrine. With some justice, Servetus argued that there was nothing in the New Testament to contradict the strict monotheism of the Jewish scriptures. The doctrine of the Trinity was a human fabrication which had ‘alienated the minds of men from the knowledge of the true Christ and presented us with a tripartite God.’”
“… in the Gospel Jesus never claimed that he had come to atone for the sins of mankind. That idea, which had become central to Western Christendom, could only be traced to St. Paul, the true founder of Christianity.”
The real significance of Jesus’ message can be understood in the context of Simple Reality as a paradigm shift. “The ‘second coming’ of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness, not the arrival of some man or woman.”
The Church has twisted the meaning of the Jesus myth into a grotesque horror story. The following doctrine expressed by columnist Linda Chavez has some interesting implications related to time, metaphor and inappropriate guilt. “In Catholic teaching, all of us who have sinned are responsible for Christ’s suffering and death. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘All sinners were authors of Christ’s Passion’… the crucifixion itself is meant to make viewers uncomfortable—not in order to blame someone else, but to blame ourselves … ‘The Passion’ should inspire much soul-searching on the part of Christians as to their own culpability in Christ’s suffering.”
Notice how Eckhart Tolle sees more deeply into the significance of a key parable than is typical of Church doctrine. “‘Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master,’ says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master’s arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (staying present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don’t get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (they remained conscious).
“Even the men who wrote the Gospels did not understand the meaning of these parables, so the first misinterpretations and distortions crept in as they were written down. With subsequent erroneous interpretations, the real meaning was completely lost. These are parables not about the end of the world but about the end of psychological time. They point to the transcendence of the egoic mind and the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.”
The afflicted and the needy seek water in vain,
their tongues are parched with thirst.
I the Lord, will answer them;
I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
Isaiah 41: 17
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
