Jesus’s intense relationship to the world of Spirit thus enables us not only to glimpse what he was like as a historical figure, but also to understand the origin and appropriateness of the titles with which he was later proclaimed. Clearly, Easter played the major role in leading the followers of Jesus to describe him in the most glorious terms known in his culture. Yet the seeds of the church’s proclamation lie in the experience of the historical Jesus, even if the full-grown plant needed the experience of Easter to allow it to burst forth.
The cumulative impression created by the synoptic Gospels is very strong: Jesus stood in the charismatic tradition of Judaism, which reached back to the beginnings of Israel. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all portray him as a Spirit-filled person through whom the power of Spirit flowed. His relationship to Spirit was both the source of and the energy for the mission he undertook. According to these earliest portraits, Jesus was one who knew the other world, who stood in a long line of mediators stretching back to Elijah and Moses. Indeed, according to them, he was the climax of that history of mediation. Moreover, Jesus’s relationship to the world of Spirit is also the key for understanding the central dimensions of his ministry: as healer, sage, revitalization movement founder, and prophet.
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Originally published in Jesus: A New Vision (1987).
Chapter 5
Reclaiming Mysticism
Jesus as Spirit Person and Prophet
A Spirit person is one known for his or her intimacy with the sacred and for the ability to perform miracles. Here I wish to comment further about the first dimension of a Spirit person’s experience. Namely, a Spirit person is not only a channel for primordial power, but knows that power. Essential to a Spirit person’s experience is the “breaking of plane,” frequently expressed as movement in a vertical direction. This involves both alteration of consciousness and movement in a new dimension, often symbolized by a “celestial pole” that permits mystical ascent to the heavens.1 As such, a Spirit person’s experience is one form of mystical experience, a union or communion with God, or even with “God beyond God,” that is, with Reality itself, that which lies behind all conceptualizations, including all conceptions of God. Those who have such experiences speak of them as ineffable, incapable of being described precisely, for the experience is beyond thought and beyond the subject-object distinction or classification that both thought and language presuppose.
Yet those who have such experiences also insist that it is a knowing, and not just a feeling; it is a noetic and not simply a subjective emotional state. The knowing is direct, immediate, intuitive, quite unlike the modern Western understanding of knowledge as necessarily involving observer and observed and thus subject-object separation.2 Some mystics describe the experience as one of union in which self and God merge indistinguishably, others as a communion in which self and God interpenetrate but “particularity” somehow remains, a difference generally (though not universally) characteristic of Eastern and Western mysticism respectively.3
This way of knowing God was present in Jesus’s milieu. There were other Jewish Spirit persons contemporary with Jesus.4 Moreover, Jewish mysticism is known to antedate the time of Jesus. Though all of its extant literary products come from a later period beginning with the oldest Hekhaloth books from no later than the third century CE in Palestine,5 Jewish mysticism clearly had its roots much earlier, at least as early as the first century BCE.6 Furthermore, quite apart from tracing a literary tradition, it is clear that this way of knowing God is very ancient in the Jewish tradition. Moses and Elijah were the two Spirit persons par excellence in the Hebrew Bible, and the prophets of ancient Israel knew God in this intimate way.7
That Jesus knew God in this manner is apparent not only from his sharing the general characteristics of a Spirit person, but from specific indications in the synoptic texts. The intimacy of his knowing is reflected in his addressing God in prayer as Abba (Mark 14:36), an informal Aramaic word used by very young children for their father that may perhaps be translated “Papa,” which points to the intimate experience of the divine. The usage is very uncommon in Judaism, where the few parallels are found in rabbinic texts about other Jewish Spirit persons.8 Closely related to this point, a Q text9 reports that Jesus spoke of the intimate knowing that occurs between father and son and used this analogy to speak of his own experience of God: “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son” (Matt. 11:27; Luke 10:22).10 The two halves of the statement are a Semitic idiom that means simply, “Only father and son really know each other,” the Semitic way of speaking of a reciprocal relationship of knowing and being known by.11
Thus, as a Jewish Spirit person, Jesus knew God. Out of this intimate knowing flowed his understanding of God’s nature or quality and his perception of what Israel was to be. Among the passages that give expression to Jesus’s understanding of God’s nature is the classic Q text:
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? (Matt. 6:26–30; Luke 12:24–28)
According to another Q text, Jesus said:
Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. (Luke 12:6–7; Matt. 5:29–30)
In these texts, marked by an imaginative and poetic appeal to nature, Jesus invited his hearers to see reality as characterized by a cosmic generosity. God feeds the birds, clothes the grass with lily blossoms, knows every sparrow, numbers every hair. Even those things that have little value to human beings have value to God: the grass thrown into the oven, the sparrows sold in the marketplace five for two pennies. Reality is permeated, indeed flooded, with divine creativity, nourishment, and care.
To see God as gracious, nourishing, and encompassing is consistent with the Hebrew Bible and the tradition in which Jesus stood.12 But the freshness of imagery and intensity of expression in these texts require more of an explanation than tradition. The most satisfactory explanation is that he knew God in his own experience.
The depiction of ultimate reality as lavishly nourishing care upon creation without regard to human valuation is intrinsically connected to the understanding of God as compassionate. The same cosmic munificence that clothes the grass also “makes the sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45). This perception flowed from Jesus’s own subjective experience of the mysterium tremendum as gracious and compassionate, encompassing and present. As a Spirit person who knew the nature of the sacred, the “numinous,” from his own experience, Jesus proclaimed the acceptance of the outcasts in both his teaching and actions. Moreover, his articulation of inclusive compassion as the paradigm for Israel to follow was similarly grounded in his own experience. Thus Jesus’s basic “program” for the internal reform of Israel—“Be compassionate as God is compassionate” (Luke 6:36)—flowed out of knowledge of God that he, as a Spirit person, was given in his own internal experience.
The sense of mission that he received as a Spirit person led him to undertake the role of prophet. As a prophet, he aggressively and provocatively challenged the corporate direction of his people. Violating the taboos of table fellowship, subverting the Sabbath, criticizing traditions regarding the Temple, he reversed the expectations of the future held by his contemporaries. Motivated by a profound love for his own people in a time when their future was at stake, he repudiated the burgeoning momentum leading toward armed res
istance to Rome and called his hearers to the path of peace. His table fellowship, because it included quislings and publicly enacted the breakdown of holiness as separation, pointed to an understanding of Israel different from that advocated by those seeking a holy, separated nation.
He also repudiated the Temple ideology that augmented the dynamic of resistance with the expectation of success. Contingent upon Israel’s response, Jesus promised peace instead of war, most evidently in Luke 19:42–44, in which he spoke not only of peace but, by contrasting the way of peace to the impending destruction of Jerusalem, made it clear that peace was not merely a depoliticized spiritual experience but embraced political peace. Peace as a consequence of response to Jesus was also implied in Jesus’s acted fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9 in the entry into Jerusalem narrative.13
The admonition “love your enemy” would have been understood as an explicit reference to the Roman enemy and an unmistakable command to eschew the path of armed resistance. The saying, a source of perennial debate in Christian ethics, was in fact intended not simply for personal relationships, but as “public policy” at a particular time in history toward a particular state.14 In an episode reported only by John but with allusive support in Mark (John 6:14–15; Mark 6:30–44), Jesus spurned the attempt of a desert gathering to make him king, that is, the leader of a national liberation movement, vetoing resistance as the way for Israel, though the incident also hints that Jesus was more concerned with national issues than is often affirmed.15
Finally, the most famous pronouncement in this connection, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17), must be regarded as answering the question about the tribute tax, even though it was probably not as important as it is usually claimed to be.16 The tax was to be paid, and as such it was a pronouncement that radicalized anti-Roman elements could not have endorsed.17
To this disavowal of national resistance, two qualifications must be added at once. First, it did not imply a positive evaluation of Roman imperial order, for the Roman emperor was undoubtedly to be numbered among those who lorded it over their subjects, which was an object lesson of how not to behave.18 It was Rome that committed atrocities, that would destroy Jerusalem, that would commit the abomination of desolation, that thereby, indeed, was Nebuchadnezzar redivivus, Antiochus redivivus. Rome was no more viewed as good than Assyria and Babylon were viewed as good by the preexilic prophets. Herod Antipas, the local incarnation of Gentile power, was described contemptuously as “that fox” (Luke 13:32).19
Second, because of this reversal of Israel’s political aspirations, the injunction to nonresistance, and the advice to pay tribute, Jesus is widely held to be nonpolitical. But such a conclusion is incorrect. Jesus’s attitude toward Rome was not based on an apolitical stance, but on the conviction that in the political affairs of the world the judging activity of God was at work. Regarding his own society, he was intensely political in the sense we have given to that term: he was concerned about the institutions and historical dynamic of Israel. The means he used, including public revolutionary gestures, challenged current practice. The end he sought was the transformation of the cultural dynamic of the quest for holiness into a cultural dynamic that would conform Israel to God as compassionate.
As a prophet, Jesus called Israel to a national reorientation in which both attitudes and institutions would be conformed to the inclusive compassion of God. Such a reorientation included a repudiation both of the path of resistance and of the quest for holiness that sustained it. This national reorientation is included in the word “repent,” which, though it does not appear frequently in the teachings of Jesus, is joined to the programmatic summation of Jesus’s preaching in Mark 1:15: “The kingdom of God has come near; repent.” For repentance, though done by individuals, was not a turning from individual sins so much as a turning from a certain understanding of God and Israel to a transformed understanding.20 It called for a departure from the established structures that had shaped and nurtured the existence of those who heard Jesus to a new understanding of Israel as a community of inclusive compassion that would allow it to face a future that was largely unknown, with only the promise that ultimately God would vindicate them.
Repentance so understood entailed risks. There was not only a risk to the individual who responded, but also a risk to the existence of Israel, for the function of Torah and Temple as institutions preservative of Israel’s cohesiveness would largely disappear if they were subordinated to the paradigm of compassion. Indeed, the perception of the importance of these institutions for Israel’s survival was a fundamental reason for the opposition offered to Jesus by his contemporaries. What seemed threatened by the transformation of these institutions was national identity and national survival itself. Yet what was called for was a course of reckless abandon in a time when the destiny of Israel was at stake.
Thus, like the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Jesus sought to divert his people from a course that was leading to catastrophe. Apparently knowing that the likely outcome would be his death, he went to Jerusalem during the season of Passover, there to make one final dramatic appeal to his people at the center of their corporate life.
Jesus as Sage: The Importance of the Heart
Jesus also appears in the role of sage, a teacher of wisdom. Sages are important figures in traditional cultures. Classic examples are Lao Tzu in sixth-century BCE China, the Buddha, and the authors of the wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Bible: Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes. Vast in its scope, ranging from matters that are virtually questions of etiquette to ultimate matters such as human nature and the nature of ultimate reality, the source of sagely teaching is reflection upon existence from a particular perspective. To put that negatively, its source is not revealed esoteric truths from another world or deductions logically derived from an authoritative tradition (even though the tradition may affect the sage’s reflection). The authority of the teaching depends upon its own perspicacity rather than upon some external authority. Frequently sages use analogies drawn from nature or common human experience to illustrate what they are seeking to communicate, thus inviting their hearers to see things a certain way rather than insisting that tradition or revelation dictate a particular way of seeing things. The parables and aphoristic sayings of Jesus (and other figures in his tradition) are good examples of this.
The perspective from which the astute observations flow is commonly age, that is, from reflection upon experience over many years. Frequently an older person, the sage has observed much and pondered long, and many cultures associate wisdom with “the elders.” Occasionally and remarkably, sagacity is found in younger persons, as in Jesus and the Buddha. In such instances, the vantage point is obviously not the product of age. Rather, the transformation of perception is the product of the sages’ spiritual experience. The mystical perception of both self and world is sub specie aeternitatis, a vantage point beyond time from which ordinary consciousness and experience seem like a state of estrangement. Indeed, the stronger the mystical perspective, the more sharply ordinary existence appears to be a life of blindness, bondage, and misery, a plight that triggers compassion, sadness, and sometimes even anger. When this experience is combined with a sagacious intellect, the result is insight.
As a sage whose perception flowed out of his experience of the sacred, Jesus developed a set of teachings about God, the human predicament, and the way of transformation. In this section, we shall focus on his perception of the way of transformation.
Like the teaching of other renewal movements, Jesus’s teaching also involved an intensification of the Torah.21 The other renewal movements intensified the Torah in the direction of holiness, emphasizing various forms of separation—from society as a whole, from the Gentiles, from impurity within society. Jesus, however, intensified the Torah primarily by applying it to internal dimensions of the human psyche: to dispositions, emotions, thoughts, and desires. Moreover, as we sh
all see near the end of this section, this internalization had immediate socioreligious and politico-religious consequences.
Jesus’s application of Torah to internal dispositions can be seen most clearly in the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount. Some of these most likely go back to Jesus himself, and all of them provide evidence for the stance of the Jesus movement. Not just killing, but also anger is prohibited; not just adultery, but also lust is enjoined (Matt. 5:21–22, 27–28). Such is also the thrust of the saying in Mark 7:15: “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” That is, what matters is what is within; true purity is a matter of inward purity. In Mark, the passage continues:
Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer? . . . It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. (7:18–23)
Though almost certainly Marcan and not to be attributed to Jesus, the words are an appropriate commentary, extending the meaning of the previous saying and explicitly introducing the notion of the heart. Impurity is a matter of the heart, not of external behavior. Indeed, the latter has its source in the former. Conversely, true purity is purity of heart, as Jesus is reported to have said on another occasion: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8).
The intensification of Torah by applying it to what is internal is thus seen most centrally in Jesus’s teaching concerning the heart. In Jewish psychology, as disclosed in both the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic tradition, the heart is “the psyche at its deepest level,” “the innermost spring of individual life, the ultimate source of all its physical, intellectual, emotional, and volitional energies.”22 As such, the heart is the seat or source of thinking, feeling, and behavior, of intellect, emotion, and will. They do not shape or control the heart; it shapes them. The rabbinic tradition affirmed that the heart in turn was ruled either by the “evil inclination” (ha-yetzer ha-ra) or the “good inclination” (ha-yetzer ha-tob).23 The power of the evil impulse was great: like a king, it ruled the 248 parts of the body. According to other images, the evil inclination ensnared the self with threads that, though thin as a spider’s web at the beginning, soon became as thick as a ship’s rope. Beginning as a visitor in the heart, it became a regular guest, and finally the host.24 Thus one could have either a good or evil heart; the self at its deepest level could be inclined (or driven) either of two ways.
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