Dr. Freeman

Hello friends

My first book has just been published by Peter Lang and is out now!
 
It’s titled: Post-Metaphysics and the Paradoxical Teachings of Jesus: the Structure of the Real… and you can check it at and even take a peek inside here…

It’s revolutionary stuff… Within its 330 pages I uncover the authentic voice-print of Jesus’ radical teachings on the Kingdom of God and thereby outlines a new approach to theological language after the end of metaphysics.

By showing that the paradoxical deep structure of Jesus’ most radical teachings survives the Death of God and the deconstruction of metaphysics in twentieth-century continental philosophy, this book aims to reconstruct the original teachings of Jesus in a way that can begin a new conversation on what it means to be a Christian in a post-Christian world, while drawing on a remarkable range of supporting material, including John D. Caputo’s award-winning theological appropriation of Derridas deconstruction, the pioneering work of John Dominic Crossan on the parables of Jesus, and the novel insights of Jesus Seminar scholars Robert Funk and Branden Scott. Beginning with questions surrounding the end of metaphysics in Martin Heideggers existentialist philosophy and moving on to the ethico-political dimensions of Derridas work, this volume examines Nicholas of Cusas notion of God as the coincidence of opposites, Buddhist genius Nagarjunas dialectic of Emptiness, and the Hindu concept of non-duality in raising the possibility of a post-metaphysical theology. Following an original unpacking of the parables of Jesus, the central thesis is woven together with reference to Moltmanns important work on the crucified God, as well as Kierkegaard and the Absolute Paradox, negative/mystical theology in the Christian tradition, twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro, and aspects of Nietzsche, Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, Meister Eckhart, G. K. Chesterton, Slavoj Zizek and Ken Wilber.

Here’s a couple of reviews to hopefully spark your interest:
 
“Cameron Freeman breathes a new life of interaction with the Word into the familiar stories of Jesus that we so easily and dangerously think we understand. Freeman shows how continuously subverting is the teaching of Jesus towards all complacency and all attempts to tame that radical knowing of God that is the Gospel and that has changed the way human beings see God and themselves. With intelligence and careful scholarship this book also transmits that first thrill of seeing what Jesus is really getting at and the relief of seeing superficial interpretations collapse.”

-Father Laurence Freeman director of the World Community of Christian Meditation and widely published author

“In this fascinating book, Cameron Freeman has done two things usually considered to be between the improbable and the impossible. First, he says something new and interesting about the parables of Jesus by pondering them not just as discrete stories but as a total discourse. Second, he challenges the long-held ascendancy of philosophy over theology by using the deep structure of that parabolic complex as normative not just for Christian theology but even for post-modern philosophy itself.”

-John Dominic Crossan world renowned New Testament scholar, best-selling author and co-founder of the Jesus Seminar

“This work undercuts the assumption that post modernism’s criticism of Western metaphysics leads to either nihilism or atheism. Dr. Freeman takes to heart the criticism of Heidegger and Derrida and uses their insights to illuminate the heart of the Christian message making it accessible to the post modern mind. It is an invaluable contribution that will set the pace of theology well into the future.”

-Rev. Gregory J. Mayers, C.Ss.R., Zen Teacher of the Sanbo-Kyodan Religious Foundation and of the Empty Cloud Sangha, Director of the East-West Meditation Program at Mercy Center in Burlingame, CA 
 
Take a look and buy yourselves a copy. Why? Because the paradoxical secret in radical center of Christ’s teachings is guaranteed to shatter the complacency of civilized normalacy with a weird intrusion from the Real… for Truth is not so much “inner peace” but a painful, traumatic encounter with the dazzling obscurity of the midnight sun!
The reverse side also has a reverse side.

For Part 1 Click here

To continue the surprising and generous response to this post I just want to turn this inquiry upside down and begin by showing that there is indeed a strong and significant overlap between the Integral framework and the basic tenets of the Christianity (at least as I see them). For starters, “Free to be Fully Human” – the creative tension between Freedom (human) and Fullness (divine) at the core of the Integral Life catch-phrase, corresponds exactly to the paradoxical nature of orthodox Christology – where the person of Jesus is held to be 100% divine (free) and 100% human (full).

Moreover, in SES (volume 1 of the Kosmos trilogy), KW also unpacks the interlocking and overlapping conjunction of humanity and divinity (“Free to be fully human”) in Christianity in terms of the Non-dual union of Other-worldly Ascent and This-worldly Descent, which is also an integration Eros and Agape… where Eros is the love of the human (lower) for the divine (higher), and Agape is the love of the divine for the human.

So where the Christian story holds to the Absolute Paradox of God-in-time, in SES Ken also maintains this same kind of secret non-dual union of Eros and Agape: where Ascending and Descending paths are inextricably interwoven, as he writes in his footnotes on the Real: “the realization of the One-in-the-Many and the Many-in-the-One, is, of course, common and definitive of all Non-dual schools”[1] an insight which also points directly to the paradoxical teachings of Jesus and a profound convergence between Integral and Christianity…

In this respect one of the key points of SES is that an emphasis either too much Eros/Ascent or too much Agape/Descent have their own distinctive and correlative pathologies. The shadow of a merely Ascending (Eros) path is called Phobos (a repression or avoidance of the material-sensual world) the characteristic dysfunction of Western monotheistic religion; while the shadow of a merely Descending (Agape) path is Thanatos (a fixation to the material-sensory world) what Freud called the death-drive and something that is commonplace in flatland…

So where the secret Non-dual embrace of Integral can help to re-imagine, re-contextualize or re-configure the Christian tradition, and balance some of the lop-sided perspectives that have prevailed in Western Christianity, there is also something about the Gospel story of “the god-forsaken God” that slips through the AQAL net and offers a distinct alternative to the Eastern (Non-dual) enlightenment traditions.

The (real/apparent?) dissonance here has been put well by Slavoj Zizek (see The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity 2003) who reminds us that the Great Chain philosophy that underpins the basic orientation of the Integral model is actually a pagan philosophy (as exemplified by Plotinus, the Neo-Platonic mystic-philosopher). That is, the notion that we have to throw off the lower world of the flesh (material-sensory), purify ourselves and advance through higher stages from body to mind to soul to union with the One – is a purely Ascending (or pagan) philosophy… It has nothing to do with the Gospel message that “Jesus is Lord” (i.e. Caesar is not!) and denotes the very movement from the human to the divine (Eros) that Christianity overturns and reverses with the “Logos made flesh” (Agape)…

To get to the heart of the matter, according to Zizek (arguably the most radical Christian thinker alive today), the primordial fact is the “non-coincidence of the Absolute with itself.”[2] This means that God is not at one with God’s self. There is an irreducible gap or tension in the heart of the Real that refuses any proper resolution or any mediation of opposites in a higher synthesis - i.e. there is no such thing as a secret Non-dual union… There is only the inherent gap of the One with itself – an Absolute Paradox - and this is particularly true of the Christ-event, the dividing point of Western history where God becomes “en-fleshed”, fully participates in the worst that the life-process has to offer, and puts radically into question all other man-made religions and philosophies, which in the wake of the crucified One are exposed as barely concealed and all too human attempts at self-deification…

The key difference here is that with Jesus and his death on the Cross, the fundamental gap between humanity and the divine is now radically transposed into God’s own self. This means that the very thing that once seemed to separates us from God (suffering, abandonment, death) is now the very thing that unites us with Him… That is, in my weakness and abandonment, when I am vulnerable and powerless - precisely then I am identified with Christ, the God-man, the one who was also abandoned and powerless on the Cross. As Zizek says, “we are one with God when God is no longer one with Himself, but abandons Himself, ‘internalizes’ the radical distance that separates us from Him. Our radical experience of separation from God is the very feature which unites us with Him – only when I experience the infinite pain of separation from God do I share an experience with God Himself (Christ on the Cross).”[3] For Zizek, the basic message here is that “God now trusts us” (i.e. the supernatural mythic God that guarantees an orderly universe is dead), and he goes on to argue that this is the only original freedom and fullness available to the Western tradition.

So in Christ, God becomes Incarnate (finite, temporal) and descends into the pain and messiness of life, God internalizes the painful gap between the human and the divine and becomes one of us, a broken, imperfect and suffering creature… and this Agape (descending) path is in direct contradiction to pagan (and Eastern) religions in which human are to purify themselves and move to the higher spheres of the Great Chain of Being.

So where Christianity finds an inseparable union with God in identifying with Christ crucified, the love of God in Christ is a radical disclosure of the “non-coincidence of the Absolute with itself”, the gaping wound in the heart of God’s own self… as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann says: God cannot love if God cannot make himself vulnerable.3 And just as Christian gospels tell us that God is radically present to us precisely when God is not at one with God’s self, the paradoxes of Jesus on the Kingdom of God also renounce all attempts to collapse this minimal difference (or irreducible gap between opposites) by either reducing one aspect to the other or enacting a “higher” synthesis of opposites.

The point here is that there is a paradox at the heart of things, or what Zizek calls a “structure of imbalance”– a paradox that was also alluded to by Ken Wilber at the end of SES (1995) when he gives an all too brief prelude to Volume 3 of the Kosmos Trilogy (still as yet unpublished). Given a working title The Spirit of Post-Modernity when summarizing the basic contours of Volume 3 Ken says that all of our endless dualisms (agency/communion, coherence/correspondence, integration /differentiation, etc) are fated to battle it out forever, with no side ever, ever ultimately winning – and here we have what Zikek calls “the Real of irreducible tensions as such”, where Yin and Yang never find any ultimate reconciliation.

So there is an irreducible tension, gap or antagonism at the heart of the Kosmos, and in the Incarnation (the central mystery of Christianity) what we call God is precisely that which is fully present (and therefore becomes real) in the midst of this absolute contradiction… And in the same way, just as the teachings of Jesus challenge and overturn the ‘rational order’ of the pagan universe with a paradoxical reversal of meaning – or a “weird intrusion” that interrupts the semantic code of the default (pre-given) world - Christ himself is the ultimate diabolic figure, insofar as diabolos (to separate, to tear apart the One into Two) is the opposite of symbolos (to gather and unify).

As the Absolute Paradox (the irreducible gap in the heart of the Real) Christ brought the “sword, not peace,” in order to disturb the existing harmonious unity and turn the world as we know it inside out and upside down. Thus the Christian stance is radically different from the teachings of New Age (pagan) philosophy and Western Buddhism which claim that the universe is the abyss of the primordial Ground in which all “false” opposites - good and evil, appearance and reality, light and dark, etc. - coincide. Christianity proclaims as the highest action precisely what New Age paganism condemns as the source of all evil—the gesture of separation, a principle of ir-reconciliation, an event of rupture, a drawing of the line, a singular truth-event, a clinging to an element that disturbs the balance of the All…

This is a pretty radical position but as far as I can see the paradoxes of Christianity are thoroughly orthodox, and they also evidenced in the parabolic structure of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom … And while there is indeed space for convergence between the Non-dual embrace of Integral and Christianity, as Zizek says of the New Age philosophy of ‘cosmic balance’, which seeks the global harmony opposites: “precisely what I find horrible in these new forms of spirituality is that we are simply losing our sense for these kinds of paradoxes, which are the very core of Christianity.”[4]

So the question here for me is this: Does the Absolute Paradox of Jesus Christ (God-in-time) reveal the secret Non-dual embrace of Eros and Agape, Human and Divine, Ascending and Descending currents, or is this “Kosmic balance” precisely what the paradoxes of Christianity break open and throw into question with the scandal of the crucified God and the non-coincidence of the One with itself?

That is, are we, like a good psychoanalyst to resolve the enigma of existence by supplanting it by an even more radical enigma? I don’t know the answer to this one, but any and all comments would be appreciated…

When it comes to the question of entering the Kingdom, we do have this memorable aphorism from Jesus: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it.”[1] So we enter the Kingdom through the narrow gate, which in contemporary terms means we are to live with Jesus’ paradoxes - the creative tension between opposing perspectives, and this is indeed the road less travelled…. and about as much fun as child birth.

So Jesus does not say that the Kingdom is “always already” within us, that it has always and already been there, and that we need simply awaken to what we have all along possessed. Were that the case, then the Kingdom would be a matter of Platonic “recollection,” of anamnesis, and entering the Kingdom would amount to nothing more than a kind of Neo-Platonic conversion, a turning in that recovers what we have always possessed but have lately forgotten. This is a very Greek metaphysical (and even an Eastern Enlightenment) view of things and essentially at odds with the temporality and historicity of biblical experience.

So I’m not sure it’s a good idea to simply conflate the Kingdom with either the Greek metaphysics of ‘recollection’ or Eastern Enlightenment teachings on ‘always already’ awareness… So while the Kingdom is indeed “entos humon”: inside you, within you – it is not simply that it has always been within us and we just need to remember something forgotten (in involution, etc) but it is already happening, right now, and you are in the midst of it. As Jesus says: “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out devils, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Lk. 11:20),

So it is more accurate to say that the Kingdom has “come upon us”, not that it has always been within us. The Kingdom is not always already present, but something that is happening now, something that has begun to happen today, with the advent of God’s rule that Jesus announces. It is a prophetic conception that God’s rule has come over us (ephthasen), and therefore an essentially historical conception- and not a Buddhist or Pagan theory about the make-up of the human soul which has driven off the highway of eternity into the ditch of time. So the proclamation of the Kingdom is not a theory about humans being always already perfect, but the announcement of an historical event, that the time of God’s reign has begun. Now, today… as a permanent challenge that is already beginning, where one becomes what one is not, and one ceases to be what one was. I have had a change of heart, I have been transformed. I have not become what I am but I have become something else, something new…

Jesus and the Kingdom of God

In a way that seems to go beyond the requirements of any other of the world’s religious faiths, Christianity stakes its truth-claims on certain historical events – particularly the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As the event of God’s most explicit self-communication to human beings, Christianity is about something that happened in world-history, where the person of Jesus is the Christ – the “Logos made flesh”, the embodied story of God in time.

So it is this Jesus, the one who absorbs evil with love, that one whois radically present in the tangible depths of human suffering and death, that we must turn to if we are to speak about God from a Christian perspective.

And when we begin to peel back the layers of literal-mythic Christianity (amber), with the tools of post/modern critical Jesus scholarship (orange science, green hermeneutics) the most uncontested fact today is that Jesus of Nazareth is the one who announced the Kingdom of God (basileia tou theou).

References to “Kingdom of God” are found more than one hundred times in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), and so our ability to understand who Jesus is and the origins of his historical mission is intimately linked to his understanding of the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom that is disclosed to us today in the enigmatic twists and turns of his recorded parables.

So with the tool of post/modern critical-historical scholarship, I want to briefly re-construct here what Jesus may have actually meant by the Kingdom of God, in order to isolate the Founder of Christianity from what was Founded in his name (the Church) in the hope of getting a discussion started on what an Integral Christianity might look like…

The Parable of the Leaven - Luke 13:20-21 (also see Matthew 13:33, Gospel of Thomas)

“What shall I compare the Kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount[i]of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

The parable of the leaven received the highest number of red votes of any parable among the participants of the Jesus Seminar, and is therefore considered (arguably) the most authentic of the sayings that have been attributed to Jesus in the gospels and handed down to us.

Leaven is made by taking a piece of bread and storing it in a damp, dark place until mould forms, and in the ancient world leaven was a well-known symbol or metaphor of moral corruption.[ii] So in 1st century Israel there’s an ancient association between leaven (moldy yeast) as “profane” and the un-leavened as “sacred”, e.g. the holy Jewish festival of the Unleavened Bread.

In this parable Jesus invokes a deliberate and unexpected reversal of the old standard, whereby leaven – which is held to be corrupt, is really the source of what is sacred. With Good News for those who are considered corrupt/sinful/degenerate by the established structures of power, the shocking reversal of expectation uttered with the simple word “leaven” would have thrown Jesus’ audience utterly off guard.

And just as the process of leavening is worked through until everything is corrupted[iii], those relegated to the outside of the Jewish socio-religious code would have been are astonished and overjoyed, while those inside the Temple would have been perplexed and confused, as Jesus overturns and abolishes and the boundary between the sacred and the profane and offends the deeply held religious sensibilities of the status quo.

For this itinerant Jew is essentially saying the last thing that people want or expect to hear about the Kingdom of God: it is in the concealment of something small and corrupt that the revelation of the Kingdom becomes manifest.[iv] The parable of the Leaven is typical of many of Jesus’ many pronouncements[v] and it provides a very good indication of precisely what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God. It is a decidedly “un-kingly” kingdom, one that explodes our assumptions about the very meaning of Kingdom, and one that offers a permanent challenge to our religious and political convictions about precisely who or what is sacred and profane

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

Mark 4:30-32 (also see Matthew 13:31-32, Luke 13:18-19, Thomas 20)[vi]

30Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? 31It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. 32 Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”[vii]

In this parable Jesus again reverses a 1st century symbol for the Kingdom, this time the mighty cedar of Lebanon, which was widely regarded to be a central guiding metaphor for Israel’s messianic hopes. However Jesus “lampoons the whole apocalyptic tradition”[viii] by comparing the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds while finishing with images of ‘trees’ where ‘birds made their home’ in the same breath to conjure up conventional associations with the mighty cedar of Lebanon (in Ezekiel and Daniel).

But it not simply that the mustard plant starts as the smallest of seeds and grows into a large tree for the birds of the air, it’s arresting impact is further witnessed in that the mustard plant is a relatively short lived shrub or tree that tends to take over domestic agricultural areas[ix] and grow out of control precisely where it is not wanted.

As Crossan describes it, the mustard plant is a “pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties, something you would want in only small and carefully controlled doses - if you could control it”[x] while also attracting birds within these cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired.[xi]

Moreover the mustard plant is a weed, and in ancient Jewish times the planting of mustard seeds in a garden is prohibited by Mosaic Law (Leviticus 19:19).[xii] So the paradoxical shock of Jesus metaphor is not simply that the mustard seed starts small and becomes the largest of all garden plants (which is true enough) but that its bigness is dangerous, deadly and illegal.[xiii]

We can therefore see that Jesus again invokes an arresting reversal of his audience’s background assumptions regarding the Kingdom of God. With a comic inversion of traditional assumptions Jesus pokes fun at the messianic expectations of 1st century Jews by saying that the smallest seed – and that one which grows into the most unruly and undesirable of all plants - is really the new symbol of God’s Kingdom (Empire, Caesar).[xiv]

Of course, by the time the New Testament was written (100 AD), Jesus’ early followers had buried and domesticated the radical edges of these and other subversive teachings. But in it’s original context, it now seems that Jesus used the term Kingdom to express his paradoxical wit, to given added intensity to his provocative message, to pop open awareness with a new configuration of reality that discloses to us what the world would look like if God was running the show…. The fact that much of our current language on the Kingdom of God is no longer dissonant or paradoxical only shows us how we have domesticated it over the last few thousand years…

As an Integrally informed scholar/practitioner, the most perplexing aspect of the Gospel story for me is that the Kingdom of God is not for the best and brightest, not for those who meet the requirements of second-tear awareness, and not for those with turquoise qualifications and credentials, as Paul said of the early Christian apostles,

“Not many were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world… to bring to nothing things that are.” (Cor. I:27-28)

In his privileging of those without privilege, Jesus of Nazareth was more of a Rebel than a King, and his parabolic discourse consistently challenges and overturns this implied structural network of associations between kingdom, power, sovereignty and God. As one recent Jesus scholar put it:

“The Kingdom of God was made – 1st, for children, and those who resembled them; 2nd, for the outcasts of the world, victims of that social arrogance which repulses the good but humble man; 3rd for heretics and schismatics, publicans, Samaritans, and Pagans of Tyre and Sidon… The doctrine that the poor… alone shall be saved, that the reign of the poor is approaching – was, therefore, the doctrine of Jesus.”[xv]

The point here is that the story of Jesus is still a strange, foolish, awkward and dangerous story when read through an Integral (AQAL) lens… The love of God in the scandal of the Cross defies logic while subverting many of our religious, cultural and philosophical assumptions in ushering in a revolutionary understanding of God. For in Christ God is now fully identified with the god-forsaken - as Chesterton said: from all the religions of the world it is only in Christianity and Jesus’ cry of desolation from the Cross does it look like God, for an instant, became an atheist…

So the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a radical paradox – it does not make everything make sense, it disturbs and unsettles and throws everything off balance… So for me (and I would appreciate any comment on this thorny issue) there is this deep tension between the second-tier “elitism” of Integral - an excellence to which everyone is invited, and the undeniable privileging of the outcast, the afflicted, the powerless in the Gospel story of Jesus – who is for me the human face of God…

As Paul writes, those who find their righteousness in Christ “glory in their weakness”… where the love of God is freely given in suffering and the Cross – and where the boundless love of God is revealed to us in the form of an executed criminal, a despised and abandoned heretic…

So there is no getting around the fact that Christ shows up not at the top of the socio-cultural pyramid, but on the margins, as the menace at the Temple gates, or as the mustard seed that slip through the crack s of the established order and de-centers all fixed enters of power and privilege with good news for the poor and the permanent possibility of offense for the sanctified who put themselves on the throne of the divine…

In contrast to meeting the requirements of an ILP as one who follows the way Jesus, my main form of spiritual practice is to risk letting go of my confidence and eloquence, and to confess not the abundance but the exhaustion of my verbal, intellectual and spiritual resources… I am only really praying when I acknowledge that I do not know how to pray.

Cameron

[i] The Greek here is “three satas” which is about 22 liters – a very large amount and enough to feed about 100 people. It also reminds Jesus’ listeners of the story of the angels who give a prophecy concerning Issac’s birth in Genesis 18, among the items Sarah prepares for them is cakes made from “three satas” of flour…

[ii]For more see Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (1989)

[iii] Scott 2001, p.27-34

[iv] The leaven is “concealed” krypto (Luke), enkrypto (in Matthew) is a much more negative word for hiding (it means to keep secret) than the more neutral kalypto. The phrase “by a woman” is also an unexpected reversal and a problematic representative of the sacred. Woman as the un-favored gender role in the Roman Empire, subject to fathers and husbands and at a disadvantage when it comes to purity codes, so Jesus’ use of woman as a symbol of the sacred is again arresting and provocative

[v] Funk 1996, p.157

[vi]Thomas has ‘falls on disturbed ground’ which is absolutely right, botanically. Mark has ‘is sown’ which is absolutely wrong… it’s a weed… but this fits with Mark’s chapter 4 ’sowing’ theme. Matthew and Luke (who used Mark) also have ‘sown’.

[vii]Only the version of this saying in Thomas refers to the herb as a “plant”. Mark 4 refers to is as a “shrub”, Matthew 12 as both “shrub” and “tree” and Luke 13 as a “tree”. In actual botany, the plant is called SINAPI (Greek) and in this parable it was an annual wild herb that never grew to a size that any Mediterranean person would ever call a tree. (Mahlon Smith CrossTalk - 14 Jun 1998)

[viii]Crossan 1991, p.277

[ix] Funk 1996, p.157

[x] In putting the distinction between insiders and outsiders into question, the mustard seed is “is a startling metaphor, but it would be interpreted quite differently by those, on the one hand, concerned about their fields, their crops, and their harvests, and by those, on the other, for whom fields, crops, and harvest were always the property of others.” - John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994)

[xi] Crossan 1991 as Roman natural historian Pliny the elder (23-79AD) writes, mustard “with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild… when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.” Pliny (the Elder) in Natural History 29.54.170 (LOEB), p.170-171 quoted in Scott 2001, p. 37

[xii] Douglas Oakman, “It is hard to escape the conclusion that Jesus deliberately likens the Kingdom of God to a weed.” (1986, p.127 quoted in Crossan 1991, p.278)

[xiii]Crossan 1991, p.278 In further establishing the mustard plants (Brassica Nigra) subversive meaning, it has been likened by Smith to “a colonizing annual that appears in disturbed ground and, often, after sturdier plants appear in a few years, disappears. This might have parabolic implications.” (CrossTalk - 14 Jun 1998)

[xiv] Funk 1996, p.157

[xv]Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus 1972, p.194-196

Jesus of Nazareth was brutally executed for treason and blasphemy - that is on both political and religious grounds. As the leader of a messianic movement growing in popularity and influence in and around Jerusalem he was a threat to both the Roman Empire, under which Augustus Caesar was said to be the one and only ‘Son of God’ and also the Jewish Temple authorities who alone mediated access to the divine through various religious rituals and sacrifices.

His public crucifixion outside the city walls of Jerusalem was therefore a decisive public statement by the Jewish priestly collaborators with the power structures of Rome that Jesus was a god-forsaken pretender to the messianic throne, just another one of the many Jewish insurgents and failed revolutionaries that were crucified under the Roman Empire and thrown on the scrap heap of history in the 1^st century.[1]

So where the messianic claims made about Jesus only began to crystallize amongst his followers in the wake of those radically unforeseeable events we now call the Resurrection (i.e. the Empty Tomb and the Appearances), during his public life and earthly ministry there was no substantial social consensus or agreement that this man - Jesus of Nazareth - was the ‘only begotten’ Son of God, the long awaited messiah and promised liberator of Israel from Roman occupation.

As Dietrich Bonheoffer, one of the twentieth century’s greatest theologians maintains, Jesus of Nazareth did things which looked, at least on first impressions, very much like he was a sinner (religiously), or a rebel (politically). He became angry, he was harsh to his mother, he slipped away from his enemies, he befriended prostitutes and undesirables, he broke the Law of his people, he stirred up revolt against the rulers and religious men of his country[2], and he even called God “Papa” (Abba), a blasphemous term denoting unusual intimacy with the Creator of the universe in a Jewish cultural matrix in which the name of God was not to be even allowed to be uttered by mere mortals.

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But not only must Jesus have appeared a sinner and rebel in the eyes of his contemporaries, we must also acknowledge the disturbing possibility that for many in 1^st century Palestine Jesus of Nazareth must have embodied the very archetype of evil: Satan, where Lucifer comes as a fallen angel, an associate of outcasts, and an antagonist of the existing order who seeks to overthrow the powers that be in the name of his own Kingdom. The demonic, the diabolical God-like pretender to the throne of the divine, is exactly how Jesus must have come across to many of his contemporaries, so much so that Jesus himself must have been personally aware of the seeming lunacy of his single-minded mission and the radical content of his life’s work.

To further unpack this disturbing ambiguity, from the very outset of his public ministry Jesus’ messianic identity was intertwined with the voice of Satan. After being rejected as a prophet in his hometown of Nazareth[3] and moving to Capernaum about twenty five miles away on the Sea of Galilee, even Jesus’ own family came to his house to seize him and take him back home under the belief that he was suffering from a severe delusion and had gone insane.[4] Not only was he accused of being demon-possessed by those closest to him, after his initial rejection in his Nazareth, the very first to proclaim that Jesus to be the Son of God were not his immediate followers but those tormented souls that were possessed by evil spirits. We see this in Mark’s gospel, where Jesus drives out an evil spirit from a demon possessed man who violently shrieks “I know who you are - the Holy One of God!”[5] This confession by a man driven to the extremes of inner torment is the earliest Christological statement in the historical development of the Church, and it comes directly from the voice of Satan. However, this is not an isolated example for Mark goes on to say that “Whenever the evil spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God’. But he gave them strict orders not to tell who he was.”[6] That is. Jesus explicitly denied that he was the Son of God and told those inwardly disturbed souls who proclaimed this publicly to be silent, and not because his messianic identity was a secret but because those who made this claim were simply wrong…

So at the earliest origins of the Christian movement it was demons and evil spirits proclaimed that Jesus is the Son of God. And rather than confirming their claims, this strange itinerant preacher immediately tells them to be silent, and moves on to another town before local townsfolk attempt to domesticate him and turn him into a guru or prophet to be worshiped, a decision that evoked vociferous public debate about the true identity of this singularly enigmatic figure.

The Gospel narratives are punctuated with many similar examples where Jesus refuses to claim the Messianic status attributed to him by others. In Luke’s gospel Jesus heals a leper and then tells him to go and make customary sacrifices to the priestly authorities that Moses commanded to deflect attention away from himself and his own healing powers. As soon as news about Jesus’ miraculous healing powers started to spread he withdrew to lonely places to pray[7], a clear indication that early in his ministry this all too human Jesus seems himself uncertain of his own true vocation and self-understanding.

Later, as Jesus’ earthly mission moves towards its unpredictable climax in Jerusalem, and with his messianic identity still clouded in mystery, he asks Peter (his closest disciple) the question that sits at the very core of any Christian faith commitment: “Who do you say that I am?”[8] In all three Gospel accounts of this dialogue (Mark 8:30, Matt. 16:20, Luke 9:21) as soon as Peter says “you are the Christ”, Jesus rebukes him, telling him that he has it dead wrong and then commands him to remain silent.

Having denied the messianic status attributed to him by Peter, Jesus then goes on to interrupt his disciples inflated expectations of a militant messiah that would liberate Israel from Roman occupation and institute a royal kingdom of sovereign power by explaining that he is now to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die because of his passion for the Kingdom of God. This reversal of expectations is a stunning declaration that again throws his privileged messianic identity into question, and is encapsulated in Jesus’ severe rebuke to Peter – the one that had just called him “Christ”, for as soon as Peter attempts to deter Jesus from his inevitable suffering and death he is told by Jesus in no uncertain terms to “Get behind me Satan”.

And in a final astonishing example of holy blasphemy, it was the Roman centurion at the foot of the Cross, perhaps the very man who drove the nails into Jesus’ tortured flesh, that first confessed that “truly this man was the Son of God”[9] From beginning to end, in true paradoxical style, Jesus’ messianic identity was shrouded in ambiguity and inextricably intertwined with the voice of Satan – from the demon possessed, to those (including his ‘virgin’ mother) who thought he was insane, to his deluded disciples, to his executioner, the utter lunacy of Jesus’ earthy mission always shadowed him…[10]

However the messianic expectations and assumptions projected onto Jesus by those around him were consistently frustrated by this subversive Jewish teacher. In fact, what makes the Jesus of history so authentic - so intriguing and unique, is that he shows up as the exact opposite of what a God-man or Savior figure would look like if we were to create him in our own image. For in our all too human seeking for God we normally construct idealized visions of an almighty and sovereign power beyond the mortal terrors of time and embodiment, and like to identify ourselves with one that displays his infallible divine status through signs of supernatural glory and miraculous interventions in the natural order – just look to the disturbingly popular ‘Left Behind’ series of novels for a contemporary example of Christ coming again in violence and glory to smite his enemies and carry off his chosen few into the eternal bliss of paradise - while the only world we know goes to hell.

But in contradiction to this fundamentalist distortion of the founder of Christianity we only have to look at the earliest written account of the historical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark to find the story of a strange, enigmatic, and even restless figure, a solitary individual constantly misunderstood by those closest to him. It is Satan (in various disguises) that calls him the Son of God, and everything he tries seems to fail, until in the end there is just the agony of crucifixion and three terrified women fleeing from an Empty Tomb…

If Jesus is the Christ it is only because he is a scandal – a kind of obstacle, an unfathomable X who slips through the cracks and disturbs the complacency of the moral order of things. That’s why the great German philosopher Hegel called the Incarnation – the revelation of God’s own self in Jesus of Nazareth, a “monstrosity” – as inappropriateness ‘as such’. Jesus comes to us as a madman, as an unspeakable trauma, as a blasphemous fool who does not make things make sense… Against all expectations Jesus does not require success, fame, wealth, or power to justify or validate his privileged status but instead he shatters the security of our predictable common sense world with teachings that embody deeper internal discord than the teachings of any other religious founder or tradition[11], culminating in the shocking monstrosity of his contorted body hanging on a Roman cross and the weird intrusion from some unheard dimension that eventually came to be called the Resurrection… That is, if we are really honest with ourselves, we will confess that an encounter with Jesus is a traumatic experience that shatters the illusions of the consensual social world - he is simply not the Messiah that we either want or expect.

³⁰In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. ³²So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. ³⁴He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

³⁶“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

³⁷The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Arguably the most well-known of all of Jesus’ parables, the Good Samaritan is a classic instance of the paradoxical teaching strategy employed by Jesus, as well as a foremost instance of how a moralistic misinterpretation of the early evangelists obscured what his parables are really about. For nearly two millennium the Good Samaritan has been taken by Christians as an example story illustrating what it means to be a good neighbor. We can witness this allegorical veil in its first evangelical interpreter - Luke, who takes it as an example of good behavior with a moralizing admonition appended at the conclusion: “Go and do likewise”.

However contemporary parable scholarship has concluded that in its original setting this narrative was not a pleasant tale about the friendly neighbor who does the right thing by helping a man down on his luck, but rather it is a deeply world-shattering narrative in which Jesus explodes the underlying assumptions of his 1^st century Jewish audience in regards to just who is a ‘neighbor’ and who is a ‘stranger’ when it comes to the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.

In summary, a Jewish man having been beaten and left in a ditch to die, is rescued by a traveling Samaritan after two Temple authorities – a priest and a Levite - “pass by on the other side of the road” to deliberately avoid an encounter the half-dead man.

Now what has been overlooked in the historical development of Christianity is the fact that in Jesus’ day the Samaritans were the mortal enemies of the Jewish people and looked down upon as a symbol of moral corruption ever since they split off from the rest of the nation during the reign of King David. So where the Samaritans were a despicable race of half-breeds, the Jewish priests and Levites were considered to be the moral and religious authorities and were thus given a high social ranking within the same cultural landscape. In the context of this parable, then, Samaritan and Judean stand in considerable tension with each other, one a hated enemy of the beaten man and on the other God’s specially chosen instruments of salvation. However in the shocking reversal at the heart of this most memorable narrative, the very structure that defines the world-space of Jesus’ audience is radically inverted as a hated enemy becomes the beaten Jews greatest benefactor while his greatest benefactors (the moral and religious authorities) are exposed as social and religious outcasts.

In asking the provocative question of ‘who is the real neighbor’ the whole thrust of the story confronts its hearers with an impossible decision, one in which their world is turned upside down and radically put into question: goodness and Samaritan coincide, while badness and Jew also go together. As Dominic Crossan puts it - if Jesus’ only intention was simply to take a shot against the Temple authorities “it would have been far better to have made the wounded man a Samaritan and the helper a Jewish traveler from outside of the priestly circles.”

However, when goodness (Jew) and badness (Samaritan) undergo a bi-polar reversal the very meaning of one’s world is shaken in its foundations, and we are faced with a radical paradox that profoundly undermines everyday expectations and opens ones awareness to an altogether new apprehension of reality. For the person struggling to come to terms with the creative tension of Good/Samaritan and Bad/Jew is simultaneously experiencing in and through the language of Jesus the arrival of the Kingdom, where this embrace of apparent contradictories in the deep structure of the parable bursts open familiar ways of seeing the world with new insight and illumination and leaves us “standing firmly on utter uncertainty.”

This basic thrust of this memorable parable of Jesus is pitted against the world as it is - the commonplace myths that are taken for granted in the so-called ‘real world’. For where Jesus’ first century Jewish audience would have expected an Israelite layperson to come to the rescue - one of their own and hence an acceptable hero figure, to their horror a hated Samaritan arrives on the scene! And even as the Greek translation for “came upon him” implies that this unforeseen stranger intends is to finish off the helpless Jew once and for all, against all expectations to the contrary the Samaritan has compassion for the wounded man, his heart is wrenched open, he is “struck in his soul by a lightening flash of mercy” and goes on to exceed all normal requirement in his endeavor to restore his mortal enemy back to health.

With the unexpected arrival of the Samaritan, everything is thrown off-center as Jesus directly and repeatedly challenges the dominant religious and political structure with an “imaginative shock that can overturn worlds,” where esteemed neighbors become hard hearted strangers and a worthless stranger becomes a revered neighbor. We can see here, then, an initial demonstration of Jesus’ paradoxical reversals in the universally recognized story of the Good Samaritan: the one deemed to be a despicable social and religious outcast (Samaritan) is foremost in doing the will of God, just as those who are deemed to be foremost in doing the will of God (Temple authorities) are despicable social and religious outcasts. Or in other words, the Jewish religious leaders who initially seem to be the agents of holiness and divine favor are really objects of scorn and religious derision; while the Samaritan who at first appears to be an object of scorn and religious derision is really the agent of compassion and grace, and a foremost example of neighborly love.

In a similar vein, another key message of the Good Samaritan is that in the Kingdom help is perpetually a surprise. For after the initial shock of hearing about a fellow Jew being robbed on the road to Jericho and left to die in a ditch in a ditch, Jesus’ audience is then told that the secret of this man’s healing is in receiving help from the place he least expects - his social enemy, and that healing and grace comes only when we are powerless to refuse it. The Kingdom of God may therefore be most active in what is most unacceptable to us, and most present to us when we are forced to acknowledge the goodness of those we detest or distrust, and perhaps even to accept compassionate service from them, as Funk writes:

“God’s domain is open to outcasts, to the undeserving, to those who do not merit inclusion. In other words, all who are truly victims, truly disinherited, have no reason and are unable to resist mercy when it is offered. The despised half-breed becomes the instrument of compassion and grace – Judeans would have chocked on that irony.”

So, in reiterating the paradoxical shock of Jesus’ time honored narrative, just as a respectable Jew on his way to Jericho becomes an untouchable victim cast aside the road, what initially shows up as an untouchable victimized outcast (Samaritan) is really the respected agent of healing and a fore-runner in the ways of the Kingdom.

Therefore, by disclosing the underlying structure of Jesus’ all too familiar story of the Good Samaritan, we can now see this parable as if for the first time, as a wisdom teaching that presents an explosive paradox to Jesus’ audience in a double-edged reversal of their commonplace expectations. For whereas the forces of good (Priest, Levite) do evil; and the forces of evil (Samaritan) do good, our preconceived assumptions and unquestioned values are torn asunder and we are invited to participate in a profound shift in consciousness, an unexpected reversal where that which appears at first to be unmitigated horror is really a wonderful disguise in which the inscrutable mystery of God enters our lives in the fullest possible manner.

As such, this well known parable of Jesus is not an example story or an allegory, as has been thought throughout the development of much of the Christian tradition. For where the loaded terms of the parable (Jew/Samaritan) have lost their original strong values, the paradoxical tensions of the story have been lost. So much so that for most Christians it has become little more than a story of the friendly neighbor and we seldom realize that as it was first uttered it was more like a ‘square circle’. So the widely held literal reading that interprets this (and other) parable(s) of Jesus as only a form of moral instruction or examples of ‘right action’ (i.e. help a man in need) derives not from the Founder of Christianity – Jesus of Nazareth, but only from what was Founded - the Church. Such moral or allegorical readings thereby diminish the original intent of Jesus’ radical paradoxes, which were originally invoked to directly attack conventional structures of meaning in a “damning indictment of social, racial and religious superiority.” And by overturning our man-made religious boundaries and prepackaged value-hierarchies, there is no way of deciding who is an insider and who is an outsider in the Kingdom revealed by Jesus, which is likely to come to us like a thief in the night, and often from the place that we least expect…

Thomas Keating “The Kingdom of God is Like”

Crossan 1973, p.64

Crossan 1973, p.65-6

Giles Gunn cited in Crossan 1973, p.53-4

Crossan 1973, p.55

Scott 2001, p.60

Scott 2001, p.61

Benedict XVI 2007, p.197

Tannehill in Perrin 1974, p.180

Funk 1996, p.180

Thoman Keating, “The Kingdom of God is Like…”, K, Ch. 1

Funk 1996, p.177

FTK, Ch. 1

Crossan quoted in Perrin 1976, p.257

Crossan 1973, p.57, 65

I have added a link here to a revolutionary paper I’ve written that was recently published in the Journal for the Renewal of Religion and Theology. I am in constant fear and trembling over the possibility that this constitutes the biggest breakthrough in the history of New Testament scholarship! Essentially, this article shows that ALL of Jesus’ parables have the SAME paradoxical “deep structure” (aka Source Code)… and these “unexpected reversals of meaning” cut to the heart of Jesus’ own vision and practice of the Kingdom of God. As Stuart Davis sings, it’s Jesus Christ without the Christians… A radical insight into the mind of Jesus that isolates the Founder of Christianity from the Church founded in his name. Expect the Unexpected…

There is a link below to a paper I gave at a Sacred Scriptures conferences on the striking congruency between the paradoxical teachings of Jesus and the enigmatic utterances of Zen Buddhist masters. There is scope in this discovery for a new kind of inter-faith dialog between Christianity and Buddhism, one that recognizes that the “deep structure” of Truth-in-Paradox has arisen independently at different times and places… Its enough to reconstruct the idea of Absolute Truth while scandalizing both atheists and fundamentalists alike! Click here for the PDF file…

As a Good Friday gesture I want to take a fresh look at the crucifixion of Jesus and develop an Integral short-circuit between the scandal of the Cross and the Always Already truth of the Non-dual traditions of the East, articulated so brilliantly by Ken Wilber in the last chapter of The Eye of Spirit (1998).

We can recall briefly that the radical secret of the Non-dual traditions is that you were never truly lost and that there is “nothing to attain” for ultimately: there is only Spirit. And therefore Non-dual awareness – as ones ever-present condition and True Nature - is not so much hard to find but impossible to avoid. Other ways of speaking of this profound realization on Non-dual Emptiness include: Primordial awareness, One Taste, the Is-ness of what is, I Am-ness, the Already Free Self, your Original Face and Consciousness without an object – and while these words are just fingers pointing to the moon and not to be confused with the moon itself, the basic point is that ultimate Reality is not something that can be attained, rather it is always already present and therefore impossible to avoid…

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Now, if we turn to Christ crucified and the scandal of the Cross we find the exact same teaching - but in a diametrically opposite form and context, for here also ‘the Real’ is something that is ever-present and therefore impossible to avoid… That is, in the last agonizing words of the crucified Jesus “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”(Mark 15:33-34) there is also sense of being directly exposed to the ultimate reality of “what is” – but in a contradictory and radically unexpected fashion.

For the extreme physical, emotional and psychological suffering experienced by Jesus on the Cross entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. And at this point, right where his suffering is “ever-present and impossible to avoid”, Jesus is riveted to being, haunted by the impossibility of escape, where the painfulness of his pain lies in the sense of being pinned to existence, directly exposed to rock bottom reality and hard-wired to the unavoidable is-ness of human existence in the here and now.[i]

In other words, in the crucified and god-forsaken Jesus there is an absence of all refuge from the present moment, nowhere else to turn, an impossibility of fleeing or retreating from reality that is virtually identical with the Non-dual pointing-out instructions of the East that the ultimate Truth is “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”.

To be sure, the unavoidable suffering of the crucified Jesus is not about standing tall against overwhelming forces and coming out on top, like a Mel Gibson’s version of Jesus in the passion of the Christ.  This kind of secret pleasure in masochistic suffering is one thing, but it is quite another thing to be beaten senseless, reduced to “crying and sobbing”, to be turned inside out, reduced from a subject to subjection, where my activity is thrown in reverse into passivity, which is what happens when suffering “attains its purity.”[ii]

The supreme responsibility of following Christ turns here into supreme irresponsibility, into infancy, where to undergo the Christian experience is to return to an infantile state of shaking and sobbing… where we pray and weep in the power of powerlessness and groan inwardly for the fulfillment of something, we know not what. So to die to self in Christ is to return to this state of extreme irresponsibility – for as Jesus says: one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom - and this is also a profoundly Non-dual state for there is no longer anything between I (self) and it (suffering).[iii]

There is, then, a subversive message in the Cross, a message more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss. For in the anguish of Jesus’ cry of dereliction there is a radical suggestion that  right here - at the very turning point of world-history - God is not at one with God’s self. That is, in the crucified Jesus – God was forsaken of God… there is a gaping wound in the heart of God’s own self, where we encounter God’s decisive self-communication to humanity in the person and place we least expect… in the very midst of this senseless nightmare, where we cannot make things make sense… and where God himself seemed for an instant to be an atheist.[iv]

The radical message here is the impossibility of Nirvana, the impossibility of us escaping from the instant of existence into the fictitious peace of Nothingness beyond the pull of contradictory forces. And furthermore, it is precisely this absence of refuge from suffering that strips away the mask of the false self and exposes the survival-lies and character defenses with which it masquerades in the world.

So the message of Good Friday is that enlightened awareness is occasioned not so much in a vast Emptiness where the entire universe arises inside your own primordial awareness, but in pain of the present – where salvation (metanoia) is occasioned in the very instant of suffering, where suffering is the precise realization that “I cannot escape myself”. From this Christ-centered perspective spiritual awakening or realization eventuates when we face up to the cold hard truth: the absence of all refuge from the gaping wound of existence where the incomprehensible Mystery is revealed in a suffering, vulnerable and broken human being.[v] And so Jesus is here the ultimate divine Fool, deprived of all majesty and dignity, the one who is ‘Lord of lords’ precisely for those who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness, astonished by the power of the Cross to make the impossible possible and who thereby cast themselves before the Cross trusting alone in his “mercy within mercy within mercy.” (Thomas Merton)

The crucified One also overturns all we thought we knew about transcendence, about a God who is identified as the one in control and having all power. And here it could be said that Christianity renounces the Jewish God of the Great Beyond, the un-nameable Real that resides eternally behind the curtain of appearances… For in holding still before the crucified God the Mystery behind this veil of tears is now the gaping wound in God’s own self. To be sure, it is not that we “renounce transcendence” in a this-worldly embrace of human finitude and mortality, but that the Great Beyond (Heaven, the Other-world) becomes accessible precisely in and through this vulnerable, suffering Jesus that we love. So far from being a projection of what is highest and strongest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the love of God is a fragile appearance that can only really shine through in an imperfect and suffering creature. For just as we love someone because of their lack, their vulnerability to suffering, their helplessness, as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann says: God cannot love if God cannot make himself exquisitely sensitive to our pain and vulnerable to our suffering.[vi]

Furthermore, at this point where the crucified Jesus’ cries out in god-forsaken agony and doubt, there is also an existential confession of radical Not-Knowing where we refuse the temptation to construct a meaningful universe that makes perfect sense of everything. For where we no longer demand a causal chain reason to provide a meaningful story to account of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (also see the Book of Job, which anticipates the crucifixion) and where we see through the New Age notion of ‘bad karma’ and challenge simplistic conclusions about the link between right behavior and reward… and when allow ourselves to acknowledge an irreparable loss that cannot be compensated for or covered over, it is then that we release the event of a new birth (resurrection) as the condition upon which our true nature in Spirit is awakened.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells us, when we strip it all back, when we shatter the precious illusions we hold about ourselves, when we penetrate the ignorance of Samsara and dig beneath all of the habitual thought-forms of our socially constructed reality we encounter not one but two undeniable realities, two different but inseparable realities that are “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”: irreconcilable pain and inexhaustible love.

With the influx of the Non-dual traditions of the East to the West we have been given the Non-dual secret of ever-present Awareness – “You are always already awake!”, “There is only the enlightened mind!” Of course, this has always been called Grace in the Judeo-Christian West – the ever-present self-offering of God’s to each and all, a radically free gift of God’s own self that is also “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”.

And in the crucified Christ of Christianity we encounter the other undeniable and unavoidable reality: the irreconcilable pain of human existence. And apart from this theology of the Cross (which originates with the Apostle Paul), the glorious Resurrection that follows (and the Eastern equivalent of Enlightenment) is only a side-stepping of pain—the same sort of “avoidance of legitimate suffering” that Carl Jung names as the root of all neurosis.

An encounter with unconditional love makes us divine and an encounter with irreparable loss makes us fully human… Love and Death, two equal but opposite realities both of which are “impossible to avoid” and both of which are ultimately inter-wined at the innermost core of our experience of being human, each one unhinging and deepening the other. Or as Ken Wilber put it so succinctly, as one’s awakening gets deeper, the pain of human existence “hurts more but it bothers us less”, that is, as we deepen our capacity for living consciously we begin, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, to let in more of both: more suffering and more love…

Again, the matter becomes too difficult for language at this point, but encountering the love of God in the impossibility of fleeing or retreating from suffering also reminds me of the story that Elie Wiesel reports in his book on Auschwitz called Night:

Two Jewish men and a child were hanged. The other prisoners were forced to watch. The men died quickly. The boy lived on in torture for a long while. Then someone behind me said: “Where is God?” and I was silent… After half an hour the boy’s body still convulsed and shook in the throes of death and my companion cried out again: “Where is God? Where is he?” And a voice in me answered: “Where is God? . . . He hangs there from the gallows…”

[i] Caputo, J. D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Indiana Press 2007

[ii] Levinas, E. quoted in Caputo 2007, p.332

[iii] Levinas, E. quoted in Caputo 2007, p.332

[iv] G. K. Chesterton “That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever… In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss… a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt… When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1] And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt… Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” [cf The Everlasting Man CW2:344]

[v] “A Cross is a blunt and graceless form. It has not the completeness and satisfying quality of a circle. It does not have to grace of a parabola or the promise of a long curve… A cross speaks not of unity but of brokenness, not of harmony but ambiguity, it is a form of tension and not rest… The cross is the symbol because the whacks of life take that shape… And unless you have a crucified God, you don’t have a big enough God.” Joseph Sittler quoted in Westhelle, V. “The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross” Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2006.

[vi] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1974).