Stephen C. Rose

The following is an edited version of sections dealing directly with Jesus in my book Beyond Creed.

The era of creedal Christianity is drawing to a close. The era of responsibility that Jesus announced and embodied remains ever at hand, however, awaiting our choice.

Jesus embodied values, which may be extrapolated from a study of what he said and did and from an experience of the direct narrative power of the gospels themselves. These values are rooted in a fundamental iconoclasm deriving from utter faith in God and absolute adherence to the commandment that God alone be worshiped.

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Jesus’ inaugural proclamation is that God is at hand, that the energy of the new age is present. But the primitive church, before a word was written down for posterity, tended to make Jesus a messiah and to downplay his message and the iconoclastic acts which characterized his ministry. Instead of being a leader and exemplar who would have us follow him, he was made the iconic center of the church’s devotion.

A creedal messianism emerged and the question of Jesus’ purpose and mission became secondary to the development of a theology in which the God he presented as near was restored to a distant place, and the Spirit fire within Jesus, who sought to convert persons to the way of the realm of God, became in the church’s eyes a badge of chosenness.

The Jesus once believed in as a speaker and doer of the right became more and more a supernatural being who would soon gather his favored ones from the morass of unbelievers and remove them to heaven above.

The one who had said the kingdom was in everyone and commended neighbor love and love of enemies was on his way to being the subject of theological debate relating to religion, not to the way he embodied.

But this is not what Jesus proclaimed or meant to achieve.

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Jesus says the kingdom or realm of God is at hand and so it is.

Fully half of his Biblical references to God are to the kingdom or realm of God. He then says to repent and believe this good news. I can only conclude that the good news is God’s at-hand-ness, that henceforth God is available to us and that we participate with him in ordering a world that is in harmony with God.

The rest of the gospels are mainly an articulation of what this means. Jesus thus intends the restoration of a fallen world to full harmony with the Holy One.

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Those who know the venality of life in the competitive marketplace and the utter cruelty of life for millions who are ignored, impoverished, left on fields of battle, abused and forced into situations of indignity, will scoff at the thought that Jesus had in mind a world closer to the way he embodied.

The way he embodied, cynics will say, is a recipe for anarchy, a naive exercise, and an idiotic attempt by unalloyed goodness to alter the status quo, where evil has the upper hand and people accept evil as the price of good.

Our world is one of prisons, economic struggle, envy and consumerism, not to mention illness, accidents and events we call acts of god.

But the gospel has remained true since Jesus proclaimed and embodied it. The consequences of ignoring it increase with time.

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We are encouraged to exist without reference to the world’s dominant understandings.

For example, Jesus commends a generalized and inclusive love that is far more important to him than love of family, to which he accords a secondary status. He is not as high on friendship as he is on active negotiation with adversaries and love for enemies.

When one looks at the sum of his teachings and acts, one concludes that Jesus emphatically affirms acts of direct helpfulness, tolerance and sharing and is hypercritical of anything smacking of religious show or hypocrisy.

On issues of property, one finds little encouragement for acquisition or ownership and a stark warning to those who assume they will win ultimate ease by having an abundance of material possessions.

When we ignore and modify these teachings we fall into the trap of “realism” which is, in the view of Jesus, primarily a mask for hypocrisy.

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Jesus is as realistic about the world as anyone. But he ranges himself at all times against worldly realism. Instead, he celebrates life as a free manifestation of God’s goodness and encourages us to counter the humanly- created evil which sustains the system, which requires the “realism” which enables the world to continue evading responsibility.

The good news or way of life proclaimed and embodied by Jesus is first a way of responsible living. It is not something to believe in as much as something to be manifested in human relationships and in the character of one’s dealings with God and the world. Thus its principal point of reference is not the Person of Christ as an object of veneration or worship as much as the realm where God’s will is to be done.

The realm of heaven is to be allowed to sprout up on the earth. It is not a realm, incidentally, that is contiguous with the boundaries of religious institutions, even Christian institutions.

Jesus is happy to see the virtues of the realm manifested wherever they are observed.

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Jesus bears a realism that is more profound and accurate about things than the self-interested realpolitik of those whose power is won at the expense of the values that make for life, happiness and community.

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If Jesus had intended to proclaim an otherworldly, perfectionist ethic, destined to be branded unrealistic by the best minds of the church, he would not have advanced the notion of God’s will being done on earth in the only prayer he ever taught.

He would not have gathered a following of men and women and spent the bulk of his brief, intense ministry providing them with myriad instructions and examples related to how to exist in the world.

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When Jesus said the poor are blessed he was not advocating poverty. He was telling people that their poverty would come to an end. That people who follow the way of Abba, his father, who is within us as a force for overcoming, will thrive.

Jesus introduced a new economic system, which most never noticed or understood. It was the miracle of sharing and the creation of abundance when people’s minds are oriented to Abba’s presence. When they put helping others first. When they put doing unto others into their daily agenda.

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There is a view of Jesus commonly held by sensitive non- Christians. It gives Jesus an unrivalled place in world history as the supreme manifestation of divine ethical intent for all humankind.

The Buddha will be honored for his ineffable character of unity with all, but not for being the progenitor of a dynamic and evolutionary ethic capable of world transformation.

Confucius will be revered for wisdom and his capacity to instill diligence, but not as one whose view of God and human possibility has implications that could turn the social order upside down.

When those who think of a new age in our time posit a global spiritual framework, Jesus is included as the teacher-exemplar of a non-judgmental, peace-affirming ethic of universal love and justice.

But if we were to ask Christians who Jesus is, and what he represents, the answers given above might not be prominent in the response. Descriptions would begin with designations such as Son of God, Messiah, Lord and Savior, personal Lord and Savior, the Second Person of The Trinity and so forth.

Emendations would encompass creedal elements relating to the Virgin Mary, the “only” Sonship, the suffering under Pontius Pilate, the crucifixion, death and burial, the resurrection and the locus of Jesus at the right hand of God, from whence he will come to judge the quick and the dead.

Without respect to the importance of any of these creedal statements, they all reflect the dominant ethos of the Christian enterprise, a proselytizing enterprise that seeks to draw people into a creedal religion rather than into a movement — a movement I believe can be inferred from a re-reading of the seminal canonical texts regarding Jesus.

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Jesus is the avatar of a seismic movement toward the humanizing of the world on the basis of a reappropriation of God as a presently and universally available energy or force for good.

He prefigured in his miracles the progress he affirmed as being within the grasp of faithful persons. He embodied and commended to others a value system and a way of living as relevant now as then.

This way of Jesus could not be encapsulated in a creed or institution. And indeed it was not.

New wine will burst old wineskins.

Pentecostal experience of a barrier-breaking spirit power refuses to be codified.

Direct experience of God’s realm imploding in human situations, weddings, healings, gatherings, meals, cannot be turned into articles of belief.

There is an inevitable disjuncture between a movemental Jesus, affirming worldly goodness and progress, and a process of religionization that is all too often eerily similar to the pharisaic modes, which he roundly excoriated, to his great personal harm.

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Jesus is the avatar of a seismic movement toward the humanizing of the world on the basis of a reappropriation of God as a presently and universally available energy or force for good.

He prefigured in his miracles the progress he affirmed as being within the grasp of faithful persons. He embodied and commended to others a value system and a way of living as relevant now as then.

This way of Jesus could not be encapsulated in a creed or institution. And indeed it was not.

New wine will burst old wineskins.

Pentecostal experience of a barrier-breaking spirit power refuses to be codified.

Direct experience of God’s realm imploding in human situations, weddings, healings, gatherings, meals, cannot be turned into articles of belief.

There is an inevitable disjuncture between a movemental Jesus, affirming worldly goodness and progress, and a process of religionization that is all too often eerily similar to the pharisaic modes, which he roundly excoriated, to his great personal harm.

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The iconoclastic power of Jesus is a force, which never fails to find its ways of accomplishing what is intended, regardless of the resistance of religion.

Religion’s belief-system is the basis for a self-perpetuating institution, known as the church, which is based on what may be called the Messianic Delusion.

The Messianic Delusion is foreign to the good news Jesus preached, embodied and manifested. The result is that churches constitute an ineffective and largely ignored “parallel structure” to the world’s flawed structures. No one wins.

The broad themes of Jesus’ teachings are relegated by the Messianic Delusion to the church’s general amnesia or are so distorted by such “ambassadors” as television evangelists that they emerge only in the context of occasional movements that bring home, for a brief season, the good news — to the world Jesus was trying to save.

When George Bernard Shaw said that Christianity was a good idea but that no one had ever tried it, he was commenting on the deleterious consequences of almost two millennia of institutional messianism.

If we are pressed we must locate the realization of Jesus’s good news in movements that have, at great risk, confronted the principalities and powers of this world and won precious rights which can generally be categorized under tolerance, helpfulness and democracy.

Tolerance is freedom of religion, association and so forth.

Helpfulness is ensuring the rights of laborers, of women, of children as well as whatever science achieves that is used to upbuild life and roll back ills.

Democracy in the widest sense is ceding to every individual a precious right to decide things for himself or herself. It is giving each person a voice in the general governance.

The clear, perceptible, progressive reality of Jesus toward a neighborly world and the paradigm implicit in his rendition of the good news suggests he would wish for the totality of his impact on the world to be perceived beyond the Messianic Delusion and the religion straitjacket.

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An anti-messiah is one who would most likely cringe at the slavish Jesus-worship that goes on in churches as being a mindless form of display that serves little or nothing that Jesus recommended.

Jesus recommended an anti-messianic program of individual decency and goodness, neighbor-to-enemy first, then neighbor-to-neighbor. Jesus never suggested that G-d would punish anyone for not following this program. He simply did what any prophet ought to do — pointed to the inevitable consequences of the mentalities of greed, war and political manipulation.

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The solution for us is not to prostrate our guilty selves to a messiah figure. It is to stand up and take our medicine and recognise that the GOOD NEWS Jesus brought to earth is true for us.

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Messianism stunts. Jesus frees. Messianism seeks converts. Jesus seeks folk who know the truth. The truth is not messianic. It is self-liberating. The result is a somewhat better world.

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The choice is between

1. A holistic (integral) understanding that is universal in every respect and thus affirming of all individual selves and

2. A messianic understanding which requires the displacement of self and obeisance to a messiah figure.

In the most simple terms, it is the choice between believing the apocalypse of Jesus, which is based on responsibility for serving the least of humankind (Matthew 25), and accepting the institutional-messianic declension of reality:

If you are not “in Christ Jesus”. you shall not be “saved”, here or in the world to come.

Or:

Jesus came walking from the mountain and said that his father Abba is near and if we repent and believe, it is very good news for us and our world.

Two statements, one an ethical summons, the other a creedal declaration, may be said to define the tension within the various remnants of Christendom today.

The ‘Jesus saves’ emphasis may be said to dominate the evangelical wings of the various churches.

The ethical call to care for the “least of these” has at least some hearing within all churches as well.

At no point in this essay should it be assumed that a wholesale judgment is being made regarding the degree to which messianism holds sway from one precinct to another.

The point is that when it does it diverts and deludes with resulting harm to the basic thrust of the gospel, which Jesus preached and embodied.

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One paradigm of faith in the New Testament is the woman with the flow of blood who pursues Jesus shamelessly after suffering from the misdiagnoses of the medical profession for over a decade. When she is healed by his energy, as the story suggests, Jesus cuts short her expressions of gratitude.

He says her faith has saved her. This can mean nothing but the notion of an inherent predisposition within the woman — her single-minded will — an integral part of the dynamic of healing that Jesus brings.

Such an interpretation is borne out by the fact that where this disposition does not exist, he can do little in the way of healing.

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Faith for Jesus is faith in God’s power and closeness — in God’s immanent rule over the earth, in the changed human environment which this transparent (to Jesus) fact creates.

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The seminal protection against messianism of all sorts is the first commandment, which forbids all forms of idolatry.

In essence, this places an absolute lid on the mechanism of idolization, which is to attribute to something finite an infinite status.

If only God is transcendent and, as Jesus states, only God is good, then the closest we get to transcendence is via the person and teaching and healing power of Jesus.

Jesus is the messenger of this God and his message is a celebration of values that stand over and against many of the values that are now used idolatrously to characterize a form of obedience that is hardly what Jesus had in mind.

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Light and dark

Good and evil

Male and female

Jew and Gentile

The dualistic connotations of all these distinctions vanish if the universalistic sweep of Jesus original teaching is accepted.

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The Jesus whom Schweitzer ultimately called the unknown had not come to be the messiah of Israel, or the spiritual messiah for a select group who developed a cult around his alleged messiah ship.

He had come to do exactly what, by some miracle, the gospel writers said he did:

To declare the vital immediacy and reality of a God who calls people, yes, but not to obeisance to a messiah, but to life in the realm Jesus described in minute detail as the kingdom of heaven.

This was and is a universal message whose partisans can present to the world not a call to allegiance within a church system mired still in the detritus of the messianic tradition, but to global community based on the reality of Jesus’ initial proclamation and an effort to follow the precepts of new life that he taught and embodied.

Only on the basis of such a movement can two millennia of creedal messianism give way to an era of responsibility and reciprocity based on genuine worship of God.

This worship would ascribe value to the central and liberating truths that Jesus announces, teaches, embodies.

Such worship would celebrate his death and resurrection — a resurrection for the world, not for a creedal-messianic church.

And in this way the chrysalis of the community that Jesus attempted to form would be formed in fact — universally — beyond the messianic delusion.

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Jesus defines and shows how to harness the “higher” power and he manifests it to such a degree that it has been understood to be the Holy Spirit, the very power that rules “in heaven” and that makes possible God’s rule on earth to the excent that its existence within all people is understood and acknowledged and becomes the basis for self-understanding.

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We are to embrace the good news with the deepest capacities of our conviction mechanisms. Jesus makes belief mandatory — it is the iron law that is delivered with the declaration of God’s closeness and the call to repentance. “Repent and believe the gospel.”

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Jesus is transfigured and God speaks, saying: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him well.”

Listening, I hear him referring everything to God, making God quite explicit, and not interposing layers of life-stages or necessary practice as gurus do.

I hear him telling Satan that we live not by bread but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

I hear him suggesting that service and worship are due God alone.

And I think: These are not the utterances of one who intends to upset the monistic foundation of reality by establishing a divisive, messianic dogma which requires the building of a church named for him in which he becomes the principle object of devotion.

This is one who will divide the world in a different and redemptive way.

I hear his various inaugural addresses that evoke the words of the poet-seers who inhabit the pages of the book of Isaiah. And

I derive from them the thought that Jesus is igniting in the world a light of profound justice that can never be extinguished, which will fire such things as the abolition of slavery and child labor and, in our own time, the gradual eradication of age-old mistreatment of women, age-old division by race and color and age-old religious wars based on the false premise that religions are in themselves somehow transcendent and worthy of universal acclaim.

If Hamlet plants doubt and becomes the archetype of modern man, Jesus long before him planted hope and became the archetype of a world beyond the divisive self- preoccupations of modernity.

I see and hear a Jesus who usurps the power of priests by making forgiveness an obligation of all — a political obligation if you. will, a necessity for Beatitudinal polity, for life in the circle of God’s rule.

When Jesus states that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, he is telling us that God’s rule is ready to begin on this planet insofar as we are ready to turn toward God, throw off our old ways, and embrace the teaching of the one whom God has designated the globe’s Teacher- Healer-Preacher.

I see and hear a Jesus who forgives sins.

And when the Pharisees reason that God alone forgives sin, Jesus puts them to the test by asking them which is easier, to conduct a difficult healing or to forgive someone’s sins.

Clearly for Jesus the difficulty will lie with the latter transgression, for with it he has brought the rule of God to earth — he can forgive and so can we and so should we.

I see a Jesus speaking of himself as a new being — the Son of man. This new being calls people to repentance and asks that all turn to God and receive new being hood. He reformulates worship in one motion by declaring himself
lord of the Sabbath.

Henceforth, true worship will be service to the needy, reconciliation with enemies, upbuilding of community — the altar comes only after these other things have been done. I see a Jesus who makes plain the happiness, which he is bringing.

The poor in God will be joyful and at ease. The hungry in God will be filled. The grieving in God will be comforted. But the rich, the established who have no need of a physician, the secure and the popular — they shall not know these new and profound happinesses.

This Jesus requires above all else repentance and belief. Repentance — turning from the sin and hurt of the time before God was near, and belief — fervently embracing the homeland law of heaven over all the laws of earth in
the belief that God is present to enforce them even if the price of that enforcement is death. See Luke 6.

I see a Jesus who outlines a universal strategy for action in this world.

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The good news that Jesus enunciates and manifests centers on the possibility of self- transformation.

The external casing of the self must be transformed or it will be torn asunder when it seeks to incorporate the new wine that Jesus brings.

The internal self, the heart or core of the person, must be made new in order to live harmoniously in the circle of God’s rule. God, who alone is good, wills that goodness be lodged within all peoples. To repent and believe is to begin this process. To receive and believe and act on the teaching is to realize it.

Practice is the way Jesus counsels; practice is what he means by the command to follow him. It is so selves can be transformed by practice that he has come into the world, for only transformed selves can begin to roll back the habitual rule of the principalities and powers, only transformed selves can begin to make reciprocity and neighbor love an accepted actuality instead of a much-declared hypocrisy.

Calling Jesus Lord, Lord is fatuous. Building a strong house on the powerful foundation of his transmission is the reason he comes. It is his entire transmission that transforms but the foundation is the epochal declaration of God’s global intent.

The cumulative effect of Jesus’ explication of the good news is inexorable. The word is a seed. Those mired in the cares of this world and glamorized by its riches — victims of the disease of materialism previsioned for our era by Thorstein Veblen — simply cannot or will not hear it.

The ones who do hear are able to see through the shabbiness of life in a world where the adversarial is the everyday, where conflict is the rule, where enemies are consistently created and set against one another. Rich against poor, well against unwell, religion vying with religion, nation with nation, party with party.

None of this holds sway within the culture and politics of God’s dwelling place — heaven — nor in the outpost of it that Jesus intends be established on this planet.

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The kingdom of god is expanded not by verbal confession of faith in Jesus but in complete acceptance of the living reality that he announces — from the initial letting go of repentance to the suspension of disbelief long enough to give God lodging in the soul.

This must happen one by one in the world.

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Jesus understands the truth of numbers.

If two go out and plant the seed in four others and they go out in twos and do the same a huge chain is created and the boundaries of God’s domain spread rapidly over all the earth.

What do they say?

They say that God is the power — not this or that god of this or that religion, certainly not a god that is related only to the institutional expression called Christianity — but the God Jesus pointed to and described — this God wants repentance and obedience, but this God is not some stern clone of the worst sorts of human instincts for cruelty and domination.

No, this God is a close and friendly Power who dwells with the one who repents and accepts, every step of the way.

This God does not want the world divided into warring religions and churches, ideologies and theologies.

This God enunciates but one desire, one law above all others. That people acknowledge God’s reality and that people therefore love one another and relate to one another as they are enabled to relate to themselves because they are beloved of God.

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The one to whom we are to listen well says (in Luke 8:5 ff) that everything will be made manifest. Nothing is hid that will not be spread abroad.

What is being said?

That the new day is here. That powers hitherto reserved to God or to a priesthood (however defined) are now available to all who turn, repent, accept and believe that this is indeed the acceptable time.

We are to let the dead bury the dead, moving on in confidence that what Jesus tells us is the truth — that our strength is in God alone, and that we are to desire that God’s will be done, God’s realm be established on the earth.

The followers of Jesus are to go out and heal and forgive and tell others of the nearness of God, the closeness of the kingdom.

When they pray they are to give first priority to the fulfillment of the good news that God’s will and kingdom can indeed come here.

The followers of Jesus know the means of being citizens of this kingdom can be transmitted by simply asking, seeking and knocking — the means being the very Spirit of God descending upon our hearts and acting within us.

This infusion of the Spirit is essential, for only as we are cleansed within can a dwelling place be created for the light from without.

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All talk of newness and cleanliness betokens the greatest hypocrisy, if deep inside we are still ravening wolves. (See Luke 11:33-39)

The good news is also one of profound engagement with the principalities and powers.

Harsh excoriations are part of the verbal arsenal of Jesus, who wears the prophet’s mantle and speaks in the tongues of the prophets. The upright and self-contained Pharisees and the careful if somewhat venal lawyers are the consistent target of his unrelenting words. (See Luke 11:43)

Jesus may grieve that they are hard of heart, but in no time he is causing them to plot his death.

Hear him: The lawyers take advantage of the weak.

Religious hypocrites build tombs for the very prophets that they kill.

Such persons have shed Prophets’ blood since the dawn of time.

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Jesus tells his disciples to beware because he knows the higher his prophetic arrows ascend the more danger exists — the hypocrites will, in the name of law and order, and even religion, do them in.

If the condemnation of Jesus were his only message, he would fall into the ranks of the dualists, Manichean overturners of the established order.

The “good news” would be more of the same, as indeed it is in the mouths of the fundamentalists.

But the good news is that Jesus is not one of these.

It is his supreme merit to plumb the very depths of our common capacity for evil — revealed in hypocrisy, sealed in the various manifestations of murderous impulses — and tell us that the only way we can resolve our problem is to overcome the self-division that is the source of the dialectic of doom within which we are all too prone to live.

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Jesus condemns hypocrisy but at the same time he commends faith.

Faith has had many meanings in Christian history. Most commonly it has referred to a system of belief. But for Jesus this is not the case.

Faith is an elemental spiritual quality, which seems to be unevenly distributed in the world. It is openness to believing in God, to believing in miracles, to believing in a person like Jesus — not in a cognitive, creedal way but in a visceral, direct even childlike and spontaneous way.

It is a sort of incompleteness worn without too much self-consciousness that begs for the elements by which it might be completed.

It is not belief in the sense of accepting a list of propositions — that is a form of belief only tangentially related to faith as Jesus describes it.

Faith for Jesus is a quality or attitude that relates to life and understanding of life. It contains commitment and trust; it lives by the perception that life is more than food or clothing, that the world and what we make of it is infinitely enhanced by being in the hand of a God who cares and who can effect change, even when we cannot.

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Jesus himself is described as son of man and son of God and it is true God is his Father. But this is also true for us. God is our Father.

Our true and ultimate first parent — for this designation can only be gender-defined in a secondary and ultimately inconsequential sense.

God is a Person in whom (as in Jesus) are integrated all archetypes associated with male and female.

This Person is powerful but does not deny freedom or responsibility; this Person is loving but does not abdicate the prophetic witness.

This Person offers access to a new age where wheat can gradually be winnowed from chaff, where souls mired in negativity and division can become whole and complete and fulfilled.

This person is a Universalist of the first order, never content to let a single soul go. Till the house is swept clean and the hundredth or billionth sheep found, the redemptive process must continue.

The Person to whom Jesus prays desires good and not evil. The One whom Jesus seeks out in solitude cannot abide hypocrisy for it is the manifest betrayal of the gift of freedom and, paradoxically, the living proof of human responsibility.

For this reason this One cries over Jerusalem, How long? How long? This one rushes like mother, like father to gather into loving arms the long-lost and profligate child. Where our possibility ends this One’s reality begins.

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Jesus did not embark upon his brief shaking of the world to the roots until the age of thirty or thereabouts. It is to be supposed that prior to then he engaged in practice which included meditation, prayer and solitude and that if he entered the religious sanctuaries it was for the purpose of trying to redefine the received tradition to harmonize with his sense of God.

The dialectic between aloneness and encounter seems to lie at the very center of Jesus’ approach to the world around him.

We see him mostly in the encounter mode, but the narratives make clear that at times he withdrew.

He retreats and is finally all alone with God.

It is this area of practice, this cultivated effort to spend time with God, to turn to God, to avail oneself of God, that creates the field where the fruits of faith are nurtured and grown.

This is the arena where the individual becomes his or her own judge of what is true and what is not.

This is where possibilities are sorted out. The heights achieved by closeness to God are unattainable to those who do not seek them out.

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Jesus moves in and out of solitude, most probably in a state of near-constant prayer, trying to find and train others who will live as he does in the Beatitudinal happiness of citizenship in the realm of God.

Practice involves considering, as Peter and Andrew do, the setting aside of one sort of life for another, one that promises a more centered and meaningful possibility.

This involves learning to love — not only God, not only others, including enemies, but also oneself.

For if one does not love oneself one cannot love neighbor as self without creating a parody of love or worse, a terrible and violent distortion of love.

The good news is that through practice these positives can come to pass.

That which is near at hand becomes immediate and real.

The power that was once abstract is now tangible.

The force for extending the realm of God within, without and throughout the world is indeed with us.

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Peacemaking is among the activities that Jesus blesses and confirms as a priority in the realm of God where we are called to live and move and have our being.

Jesus likewise sees a hunger and thirst for righteousness as appropriate equipment for the kingdom dweller.

The power of evil has been bound to the extent that the good can triumph if we believe and act.

To learn, appreciate and follow the Beatitudinal way as the true way of courage and honor — replacing the worldly substitutes that go with the forces of enmity, destruction and antagonism.

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The gospel stories suggest that the messianic delusion took early hold on the followers of Jesus and created the context for the formation of a dualistic, intolerant and hypocritical church edifice whose creedal formulations evaded the very good news that Jesus presumably died to vindicate and justify.

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Repentance as Jesus meant it is not an exercise in the self-indulgence of pathological guilt, but a genuine acknowledgement of the categorical difference between our limited effort and what we know needs to be achieved.

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Was Jesus fully God and fully man?

Was he the messiah?

Did his resurrection defeat Satan?

Is there salvation for those who do not confess his name?

Because humankind is ineffably free to distort truth and to trample pearls under foot, few voices were raised to suggest that a fundamental shift was taking place.

Jesus came forth with a radical and elemental understanding based upon the prophets and a bedrock belief in and faith in God alone as the source of good, whose will should prevail on earth as in heaven.

This may have been a hard or an easy pill, but it was easily communicated and understandable to those with ears to hear.

The shift took place inexorably. It was a shift to a grand production of sorts whose centerpiece was the “miracle” of the resurrection.

Jesus became the high priest. His sacrifice of himself was the earnest of a forgiveness that had taken place already.

Jesus became the veil between a still distant God and humankind and the church became the keeper of the mystery — how to enter the door to a redemption beyond the world. Lives were lost according to how one perceived the risen Jesus.

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The early church did not extend reconciliation in quite the way that Jesus did.

Its missionary journeys were in search of confessions of faith in the resurrected Lord.

The commands of Jesus relating to behavior were translated into exhortations to church members, but never presented to the world as the way Jesus came to vindicate.

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Jesus cannot be truthfully presented as a messiah in the evil mode of those who idolatrously divide, who feed on vulnerable selves, who indulge in manipulation of others via miracle, mystery and the imposition of naked authority.

But that the narratives reveal a messianic side is beyond doubt.

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Let us for the moment assume that the messianic allusions in the New Testament are in fact part of Jesus’ own true and real story.

Taking the narrative at face value, what are we to say?

We might well say first that they reveal Jesus to be human. They reveal Jesus also to be an antagonist of consummate ability. They show him, in fact, to be the author of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A careful reading of the Synoptics demonstrates that, from the outset, Jesus saw the Pharisees, scribes and priests as enemies, hostile to his preaching and his manifestation of powers that they attributed to Satan even as he attributed them to the Holy Spirit.

It seems quite likely that Jesus did not conspicuously apply to this group the strictures he put forth regarding love of enemies.

It seems indeed that Jesus courted their anger and their hate. We might suggest that to fulfill his destiny Jesus needed to make an exception to his own ethic of accommodation with opponents.

The reason?

He had to show that religion and society were constitutionally incapable of hearing and understanding the prophetic word underlying his good news.

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Jesus saw his task as one of bringing together two great streams of thought, understanding and practice.

The first was the prophetic stream that had roots deep in the history of Israel. This stream in the incessant demand within the ebb and flow of history that justice, God’s justice, be done.

The prophets understand that forgetfulness of God and God’s claims breeds insensitivity to injustice, that it gives rise to vain posturing by the powerful and to the thoughtful and greed-driven trampling of the weak and infirm, the poor and the wretched.

The sin the prophets most often excoriate is hypocrisy, the masquerade by which good is affirmed in outward observances but contravened by inner thought and actual behavior.

The prophet is the bearer of the jeremiad, an utterance of great severity, capable of cutting through the cortical layers we use to insulate ourselves from the searching eye of a just God. As a prophet supreme, baptized by the renegade John with God’s vocal approval, Jesus must speak harshly to those whose hearts are resolutely closed to the good news that he bears.

There can be no compromise with abstraction, legalism, circuitous questioning. Lawyers, Pharisees, priests and their minions must be roundly excoriated at every turn.

The true enemies of good news, if we accept this line of thinking, are not the bottom or top of society but a swing group somewhere in the middle or upper middle, roughly analogous to the membership of mainline, established churches today.

These are people exposed to Jesus’ word who refuse to see, hear or understand. And it is toward this constituency that Jesus manifests a take-no-prisoners attitude.

When he encounters the Roman centurion or even Pilate, Jesus is consistent with the one who speaks of tolerance, of not casting the first stone.

When he speaks to a diverse multitude by the shore of Galilee, he exhorts and tells it like it is, but without condemnation. Instead he extols the kingdom that is at hands and advocates the understanding of happiness as allegiance to the principles enunciated in the Beatitudes.

If we can accept the general emerging portrait of Jesus as one acutely sensitive to his true and abiding opponents, we might well argue that some of the messianic elements in the Synoptics emerge in Jesus’ defense of his holistic, enemy-embracing good news teaching.

His excoriation of those who would blaspheme the Holy Spirit is an obvious example.

It is possible that Jesus is enraged when those who ought most to understand are allied with existing power elites who might be threatened by hints that a realm transcending that of Caesar has become a possibility, if Jesus is to be believed and given credence.

It is also possible that Jesus believes God will vindicate his statements about the overturning of the order of the principalities and powers; if this appears not to be the case, one could argue that his prophetic anger is supplemented by the material of an inner struggle.

Has he presumed upon God? Has God failed him?

Certainly Jesus does not go to the cross in an entirely passive manner. While he abides by the nonviolence implicit in his Beatitudinal reading of the law, he goes to his death having invaded the grounds of the Jerusalem Temple, insulted the lawyers and priests and castigated hypocrisy wherever he has found it.

If such an interpretation were valid, one could see the fruit of the resurrection as a vindication of the early preaching of good news by Jesus and as an ultimate guarantee that the perfection and righteousness espoused in Jesus’ teaching is indeed the leaven in the loaf of world history.

The resurrection would vouchsafe the final ascendancy of self-giving, God-centered love. But this prophetic interpretation is not adequate as an explanation of the messianic temper that crops up in the Synoptics. Nor does it explain much in the gospel stories that could be categorized under such headings as miracles, sayings, wisdom and gnosis.

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Jesus’ proclamation that God is near, God’s realm or kingdom at hand, is confirmed by a ministry that shows at every point the all sufficiency of God.

In Jesus this is seen in a capacity to meet all needs that are in accord with God’s power and desire for a new order on earth.

Only in terms of this divine sufficiency does it make sense to take the miracles attributed to Jesus with seriousness.

The healings and other miracles of Jesus are in absolute contrast with the feats that Satan seeks to get Jesus to perform in the desert.

Stones to bread, leaping from tall pillars and taking over the world in an orgy of Satan worship are not the stuff of Jesus’ ministry.

Nor indeed is there much of brouhaha over the things Jesus does.

Essentially his miracles are those of healing and sharing.

Only his walking on water would be perhaps best taken as a parable about faith under duress. What is being shown in all of Jesus’ deeds is God’s all sufficiency.

The healings uniformly stress faith as the key to becoming whole and faith, as we have seen, is precisely the person’s affirmation of God’s power and sufficiency to the need in question.

The feedings of various thousands are manifestations of the fact that human-natural unity can, in the context of faith in God, produce all that is needed for abundant life upon this planet.

Even walking on water could be seen as an indication that things need not be as they have always appeared to be, as scientific and technological progress has witnessed almost exponentially since the time of Jesus.

It is God’s all sufficiency and availability that accounts for Jesus’ worst conflicts with his disciples.

When they cannot successfully emulate Jesus in the healing and casting out of demons, Jesus shows profound impatience.

The disciples’ response is to move toward venerating him. Gradually they become partially integrated into the enlarging web of unbelief that surrounds Jesus.

God’s all sufficiency should mean that when people follow the way taught by Jesus, the mustard seed is planted that will grow so large that one day birds can rest in its shade.

Jesus exhorts us to ask and seek and knock to attain the Holy Spirit fire within our breasts.

Who is to say whether it is a lack of faith or fear of Jesus’ enemies that creates a change from the first blush of discipleship?

As in the prophetic declension, in the divine self-sufficiency reading of the ministry of Jesus, it is frustration at people’s hardness of heart that gives rise (perhaps) to messianic elements in the narrative.

Not only do people reject righteousness, they turn willfully from the love and care of God.

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Is there an indication anywhere that Jesus regarded the faith-choice of himself as Messiah with a capital M (or Christ with a capital C) as an efficacious substitute for embracing his original preaching of good news based on God’s nearness and the advent of God’s kingdom on earth?

Is it not as likely that when he saw the principalities and powers rising up about him to frustrate the obvious and self- evident realities he was presenting, he began to realize that only a tiny remnant would actually hear and understand?

And that he therefore postponed in his mind the advent of the kingdom and engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric out pf a prophetic frustration with the unmalleable religious-legal establishment of his day?

If we change the context of these questions we can understand that Jesus’ frustration is not terminal and that his approach is not ultimately defeatist.

In essence, what Jesus showed was that without the combination of the prophetic with faith in God’s all sufficiency there could be no progress of God’s realm upon the earth.

When John the Baptist says Jesus is mightier than he, he means that Jesus will be the vehicle for a baptism of fire and that the Holy Spirit will lodge in the hearts of those empty and poor in spirit.

He means that as the declarer of God’s all sufficiency, Jesus will take the prophetic and turn it into the normative self-understanding of the community.

Because God is all sufficient, then, the ethic is possible.

In a world where God is not sufficient or where God’s grace is turned into a distorted form of self-regarding animism, the ethic, which is still the center of Jesus’ teaching, is impossible.

Even the reciprocal neighbor-love that is its center becomes horribly distorted when it is people “doing” for their friends and families while ignoring their enemies and those who suffer at the gate.

Simple and all transforming Beatitudinal faith is the key to the spirit of the koinonia that Jesus sees as the fruit of his work on the planet.

In the koininia, where God’s sufficiency is acknowledged and experienced in mutuality, dog eat dog, eye for eye, tooth for tooth jungle law can be replaced by the affirmation that as we challenge the jungle law with the higher law of Jesus, as we suffer for that, we are somehow those to whom the future belongs.

The good news becomes good news only to those who will finally bear this cross and live with the “holy presumption” which Jesus embodies, that God is near and that God wills the transformation of this world from jungle to heaven.

The messianic elements of the gospel, seen in this remnant context, are Jesus’ form of railing at the failure of human beings to see and understand.

It is not just that we avoid the ethic but that we either do not accept or woefully distort the meaning for us of God’s all sufficiency.

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Jesus did not feel the solution to the world’s deafness and blindness lay in the creation of a koinonia that would make him the center of an other worldly cult.

He never appears to have regarded worship of himself as necessary to anything, quite the contrary.

It is the entirety of his message that he is concerned with; it is that he be listened to that God cares about.

None is good save God, Jesus tells the rich young ruler.

But the young church which remembered him and gave us the record of his ministry a half-century after his death and resurrection subtly altered the focus of Jesus to conform with their move from following to veneration which we see reflected in the gospel narratives.

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The early church turned the non-entropic message of Jesus into an other-worldly faith based upon the idea that Jesus’ suffering on the cross and his resurrection proved out his “claim” to be the Messiah or Christ and that by believing in Christ we achieve reconciliation with God and that this reconciliation involves our being part of a chosen group who will join God after death in heaven.

Henceforth the only survival of Jesus’ gospel message is in terms of behavior within the church and this is always secondary to the creedal imperative — confessing Christ becomes the paramount activity of … Christians.

The problem with this is that it stops God and Jesus in their tracks.

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Jesus castigates worship stasis regularly in the surviving narratives of his cornfield encounters with critics, in his appropriation of the Sabbath and his declaration of the precedence of human need over altar activity.

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But it appears that the unity that Jesus achieved — a vindication of both the prophetic strain and God’s all-sufficiency — was quite literally more than his followers could bear.

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Creedal messianism led to enthronement of Jesus as the Christ and the elaboration of priestly worship built around events in his life and on belief that he rose from the dead.

It erected a screen between Jesus’ gospel — the prophetic, Beatitudinal way — and his insistence on God’s all-sufficiency.

Creedal messianism found its way into the narrative because it already existed as an active belief of Christians within fifty years of the death of Jesus.

It has survived and flourished through the years, grist for the manipulative mill of mystery, miracle and authority, stoking fires built by Armageddon-mongers. It has thived on the acceptance of disempowering dualisms.

But if we return to the narrative, which must be acknowledged to have more than one level or strain, we can advance a different construction than that of creedal messianism, one which does not deny elements within the creed, but which sees them as consistent with the gospel that Jesus proclaimed and manifested.

In fact Jesus’ victory lay precisely in the abolition of the power of dualism in the world. Jesus vanquished of the very power of dualism, the person of Satan.

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Satan, for Jesus, does not exist as an eternal principle of evil, but as an entity who has existed as part and parcel of the fallen world.

Jesus defeats Satan.

Jesus does this by building his gospel on twin principles of unity and responsibility.

God is now in power and by repentance we can become God’s. God is ultimate unity and repentance is our acknowledgement that we are in fact responsible; we cannot any longer project our evil onto an external screen and call it Satan.

Jesus’ battle with Satan is a battle to put in place a new paradigm — a holistic schema in which all dualisms are finite entities which can ultimately be transcended.

Thus the good news is not that evil no longer exists, but that the power now is in place to overcome it.

Evil is finite.

Principalities and powers are finite.

Both are conditions or states for which we are responsible.

The explanation for the horrendous ills that wrack our world does not lie in Satan or in our stars — they lie squarely in us, in our propensity for the waste of life, the crushing of creativity, the disfiguring of beauty and the rape of natural resources.

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Faithlessness, idolatry, violence, hypocrisy and greed — these are the bad ground of the unrepentant and spiritually proud where the seed of Jesus’ preaching is choked by thorns.

We are speaking here not of eternal and immutable factors that exist because of an external principle of evil.

We are speaking of Jesus as the victor over Satan and therefore of the transmutation of evil into regressive and immature characteristics which it is our responsibility to modify or eliminate by means of repentance and belief in the gospel of Jesus.

Jesus’ victory over Satan is implicit in Jesus’ response to his critics who say his healing is from Beelzebub, the prince of devils.

Jesus naturally asserts that the healings are nothing less than the will of God through the power of the Spirit given to Jesus at baptism.

His answer to his critics is that a Satan cannot cast out Satan. Only God can enter the house of Satan and bind him. Only then can the house stand.

In essence the implication is that the power previously attributed to Satan is now bound and overcome by the power of God.

Or: In the house where Satan is bound, and “at an end”, the issue of good and evil is placed in a holistic context.

In such a house one can grow beyond slavery to the imperious wants of the infantile body to the gradual development of an autonomous self and ultimately to the practice appropriate to a complete or realized person.

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We need to make sense of the considerable emphasis Jesus places on purity and, by implication, on the debilitating nature of self-division.

Satan is the principle of division.

Victory over Satan banishes the need for the personification of evil on an outer, or inner, screen.

Jesus’ teaching is predicated largely upon this victory.

It is now possible for people to become Beatitudinal. To engage in active love for opponents and adversaries. To cultivate purity of heart. To see themselves as good ground where the seed of God’s word can grow and flourish.

There is no basis in Jesus’ teaching for the invidious, seemingly innocent, displacement of self that is an abdication of responsibility and a diminution of the possibility of living as Jesus would have us live.

If the end of Satan means the end of an externalized power of evil that removes responsibility from individuals and hope of progress from the purview of humankind, then one can understand something of Jesus’ frustration with his opponents.

Jesus has arrived on the scene after thirty years of preparation to introduce a cosmic shift in consciousness away from all dualisms beginning with those between good and evil and God and Satan.

In both cases what is substituted is the concept that individuals contain within themselves the full possibilities inherent in these defeated dualisms but that the way is now clear for the (gradual) move within the spectrum of consciousness from primal thralldom to the vestiges of the evil and the Satanic to a growing liberty in the more exalted realms of obedience to the new law that is maturity and completeness.

Jesus is in this declension the avatar of individual responsibility, as suggested by his emphasis on repentance.

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Since Jesus, the conflict between God and Satan has become humankind’s conflict with itself.

With everyday fears and insecurities and compulsions. With the range of temptations, suspicions and recoil from change.

Jesus has a grand vision, a pearl of incalculable price, and he has few if any takers.

So he reacts. He excoriates. He rails. And finally he simply accepts.

And then, from the cross, forgives.

For in reality they and we know not what we do — although we should.

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Within the gospels themselves there is a large quantity of material that somehow got through the skein of creedal messianism.

This legacy is the good news and it can be stated in many ways:

The realm of God is at hand and all who turn to God in repentance can learn the ways of this realm and be happy in the practice of Beatitudinal living.

This expression is a monistic, universal declaration integrating the ethical and the creative.

It is what comes through in the powerful, compelling statements of Jesus in the gospels.

We cannot understand the distortion that took place without seeing this delayed-action time bomb within the canonical gospels.

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The original character of Jesus did not succumb to the creedal messianists.

His prophetic essence was not so co-opted that it could not shine through.

The very spirit that would continually call an apostate church to discipleship was possible because within the canon its reality was more than once evoked.

Of course, gradually, finally, it would emerge that the individual would be the judge of what was dominant and authoritative within Scripture.

And when that took place, beyond the influence of creedal messianism, the great movement that Jesus inaugurated would be fired anew and the baptism and beatification of life and of earth would proceed apace, as Jesus intended it to.