Dr. Freeman

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

One of the more significant contentions of Integral theory is that evolution is going somewhere, i.e. the 13 billion year process that led to the relatively recent emergence of the human species on this planet has a direction or teleology – what might be called a self-transcending current of increasing Eros/Love or successively higher levels of interior consciousness/exterior complexity. From the primordial chaos that followed the Big Bang, to the relatively rapid formation of stars and galaxies, to the stunning complexity and diversity of self-replicating life here on Earth, we are all part and parcel of this tremendous sweep of creative activity, a “creative advance into novelty” (Whitehead) that has become conscious of itself for the first time in humans and looks to all intents and purposes like it will eventually culminate with the self-realization of God, by whatever name…

Of course, the fanciful suggestion that there are purposes “other than” merely human purposes is widely held to be a useful fiction by philosophers of science like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. And so while this view that evolution is headed toward some kind of far-off Omega point where “God will be All in all” may well just be a useful hallucination, a motivational strategy to help one cope with the crippling lack of hope in the post-Enlightenment West, there is also a spiritual basis for skepticism and suspicion of this teleological view that sees the hand of God in the evolutionary trajectory from atoms to amoebas to humans…

For not only did two world wars and the atrocities of the 20th century decisively puncture the bubble of historical optimism, the very attempt to offer some sort of over-arching explanation for such evil by fitting it into some larger account of God’s Providential design in which such abysmal barbarity is but a necessary moment in an overall evolutionary trajectory, is an obscenity that defiles the very names of each of its victims, of each one, taken singly, one by one… There is something callous and inhuman in an evolutionary world-view that sees in “teleological” history a good news/bad news story in which the countless deaths were cost accounted as a good investment in the progress of the World Soul, the high but affordable toll the Spirit must pay for advancing from one historical epoch to the next.

As theologian Emmanuel Levinas denounced in the preface to “Totality and Infinity” teleological history is one in which many an innocent flower is tread on the way to the Promised Land, so we would do well not to project deeper and more sweeping patterns of redemptive meaning onto occurrences such as the Holocaust which are unambiguously evil. The death of 8 million Jews in the Final Solution is not a sacrifice in exchange for something higher, rather we may do well to turn to the New Testament and take heed of the innocent flowers, the tender shoots that are trampled under the boots of teleology and the secrets of the heart that are unknown to the “judgments of history”.

A more compassionate and inclusive perspective would be to oppose such teleological obscenities, which rear their ugly head today in the pyrotechnic vision of the Christian Right in the USA that gleefully anticipates how a thermo-nuclear war would wondrously fulfill Scripture’s promises of God’s final judgment and usher in the return of Christ, the Lord and Giver of life!

Instead of such world-historical triumphalism we might want to re-contextualize the innate capacity of the world-historical process “to go beyond what went before it” in an inexorable development from chaos to order and from darkness into the light. Such teleological views domesticate both the unspeakable horrors and the unexpected wonders of the world-historical process and falsely renders predictable and necessary an unforeseeable passage through accident, contingency and unpredictability that has no guarantee of a positive outcome and is likely to disrupt every overarching law of nature and pattern of history if it does… In other words, the ability of a thing to be reinvented and to surpass itself goes hand in hand with its vulnerability to destruction, which is all part and parcel of the beautiful risk of creation. To illustrate this point, I will end this with an often quoted passage on human origins from the Talmud

“Twenty six attempts preceded the present genesis, all of which were destined to fail. The world of man has arisen out of the chaotic heart of the preceding debris; he too is exposed to the risk of failure, and the return to nothing. ‘Let us hope it works’ exclaimed God as he created the world, and this hope, which has accompanied the subsequent history of the world and mankind, has emphasized right from the outset that this history is branded with the mark of radical uncertainty.” Talmud

This quote is cited by André Neher, “Visions du temps et l’histoire dans la culture juive,” Les Cultures et le temps , ed. by UNESCO, Introduction by Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Les presses de l’UNESCO, 1975), p. 179. This text is itself cited by Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 193-94, who is herself citing Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos, (Boulder: New Science Library, 1984), p. 313, whose translation (from the French) we are using.

For Christians it is the most decisive event in all of human history, the truth upon which ones faith is said to stand or fall, for others it is a pernicious superstition that props up an out-dated and irrelevant institution. Whatever else it may be, the Resurrection event that founded the 2000 year history of the Christian tradition is an intriguing and singular phenomenon that many of those awakened to the Midnight Sun are naturally drawn to question and inquire into…

So for starters, we can begin with a brief Integral summary of the successive stages of developmental unfolding in all 1st-tier approaches to the Resurrection:

Red-Ego: At this level Jesus is a divinely ordained magician and his Resurrection is a divine power play, expressing for its adherents a denial of death and mortality awareness, and a triumph of magical wish-fulfillment released from the very real limits of space, time and embodiment…

Amber-Traditional: At this stage God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. The Resurrection here is physical and bodily and it believed in as an event in which God intervenes in human history to save a new group of chosen people… The gospel narrative is taken to be literal reality, and so with the Resurrection the figure of Jesus is vindicated as God’s one and only begotten Son, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and coming again to judge the living and the dead.

Orange-Modern: With the world-view of modern science and reason there is no historical evidence for the Resurrection which is seen to be just another one of the miracles attested to in the Gospels, all of which contradict universal Laws of Nature. Although the resurrection is seen to be a myth, from this stage it may also be said that either the life of Jesus symbolizes a universal human possibility or that the Resurrection simply means the memory of Jesus lived on in the hearts and minds of his followers, who may have been suffering from some kind of delusion or hallucination in the wake of their leaders execution.

Green-Post-modern – Here the Resurrection is not so much a historical event but a myth that is found in many different pre-modern religions, or possibly a New Age symbol of the coming global transformation. The question is not, “how is such an event physically or historically possible?” but rather, “what event do these stories harbor?”, “what do these stories mean?” At this stage there are no facts, just interpretations and so all things flow in a river of meaning. The Resurrection is therefore intended above all as a matter of subjectivity or interiority

Now, while an Integral approach can see the relative degrees of truth and meaning in all these previous value-structures, it also adds its own important contributions, based on the capacity for vision-logic (multiple perspective taking) and the discoveries of the modern and post-modern world. It is these that we shall now turn to:

Firstly, from within an evolutionary context of inter-locking hierarchical systems, the Resurrection is a foremost instance of Spirit’s creative advance into novelty (Whitehead), where the risen Jesus is the first fruits of an altogether new kind of humanity… As Pope Benedict XVI said at his first Easter mass, borrowing the language of evolutionary science, the Resurrection is

“The greatest ‘mutation’, absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history.”

From an integral perspective, we see supporting evidence of Pope Benedict’s somewhat surprising view of the Resurrection event in the serendipitous creativity of the evolutionary process. From a primordial fireball that gave rise to countless swirling galaxies to a hot house planet teeming with carbon-based life to the collective passions and unceasing ingenuity of the human endeavor, the amazing metamorphoses and stunning transformations of the evolving universe are paradigmatic of the Resurrection event and give a contemporary expression to the very substance of what Jesus of Nazareth is always doing in the Gospels.

For just as evolution is marked by an inexorable capacity for bringing “order out of chaos” in consistently going beyond what went before it (from matter to life to mind), Jesus’ is also transforming lives in all of his works and deeds, giving people hope where there was despair, love where there was fear, and the intimacy of companionship where there was only isolation.

And when it comes to Jesus and his radical enactment of the Kingdom of God, none of these transformations is more amazing than his being raised from the dead. In the transformation from death to life, we see Jesus bring - not eternity - but a new time with new hope for the future out of the abject horror and radical injustice of his crucifixion. For just as evolution consistently brings forth new forms of living complexity out of the incredible pain, waste and accident of the 3 billion year history of life on Earth, the Resurrection shows us that the love of God flourishes precisely by taking up meaningless suffering and absorbing the finality of death, even as the Creator Spirit also brought forth abundant life from a planet that was formless void in the book of Genesis. In other words, Resurrection is reality.

Moreover, in accordance with Integral theory, the Resurrection can also be likened to what Ken Wilber calls a “Kosmic groove” that has been laid down by Jesus of Nazareth in inaugurating the Kingdom of God and the creative emergence of an altogether new kind of humanity. According to Wilber’s theory of Kosmic grooves, once a difficult task has been accomplished anywhere in the world—from crystallizing complex molecules to stabilizing Non-dual awareness—the same task can more easily be repeated anywhere else on the planet. In this respect, the Resurrection is a Kosmic groove laid down in human history, first by Jesus of Nazareth – who is the locus of the transformative energy of the Kingdom and the one in whom the evolutionary trajectory of Spirit’s own self-realization becomes conscious of itself for the first time. And through the temporal process of human evolution this initial Kosmic groove is now being slowly crystallized into a Kosmic habit – as more and more rare individuals take up Jesus’ radical path of crucifixion and resurrection (losing self to find Self) that constitutes the meaning authentic Christian discipleship.

Furthermore, with the recent integral insight that Enlightenment itself is perpetually evolving along with the rest of the universe, the Resurrection is not merely “always already” accomplished for each and all in and through God’s self-offering in Jesus Christ but it is also deeply and profoundly still “to come” – as an event that is by its very nature beyond any horizon of meaning and action that we can currently program or foresee. So while an Integral approach maintains that both the “already” (sudden) and the “not-yet” (gradual) perspectives are held to be 100% true, there is also a suggestion here that with the “Logos made flesh” in the Christian tradition that God is not ultimately real (in the Hegelian sense of “concrete universal”) until He/She//Thou/It actually enters into the stream of time and space and expresses God’s self as a flesh and blood human being in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

In view of the Resurrection event, then, there is an impulse to New Creation in the depths of the Divine, which is now seen to be radically present in “anguished intimacy” with the long and painful evolution of increasing exterior complexity and deeper interior consciousness, from atoms to amoebas to humans to God knows what in the future.

For just as St. Paul tells us that all of creation “groans for fulfillment”, with an integral understanding of the evolutionary nature of enlightenment, in the passion of Jesus to go all the way, to go to the point of maximum intensity where ones soul reaches it breaking point and yet does not break - but instead shifts into a deeper expression of it’s own inherent potentials, we discover an archetypal expression of Spirit’s own self-realization through the creative advance of the world-historical process into radically new forms of sentient life and consciousness.

And from this perspective, the Resurrection is not so much an historical fact but an eschatological event. In other words, the Resurrection does not conform to our demand for historical evidence and neither does it fit into our conventional expectations or categories of thought, rather it is an event that signifies a new reality breaking into the business as usual world, bringing with it hope for a New Creation.

And importantly, as an eschatological event those who hope in the Resurrection can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. In Christ, peace with God now means conflict with the world, and as such the Resurrection, as hope in that which is “to come” becomes the source of Christian orthopraxy. Those who follow the way of Jesus and the hope and promise of his Resurrection therefore behave in this world with the eschatological goal of transforming it, in expectation of a divine transformation. Daniel Migliore grasps this well:

“Authentic Christian hope will certainly stand in opposition to present injustice and to every effort to absolutize the status quo. However, in the struggle for justice, equality, and human rights, Christians will always insist on “more”—on a different, greater future than what is ever achievable by human effort and ingenuity, a hope beyond hope. Utopian hope finds in humanity itself the resources and capacities to remove all suffering, establish universal justice, and complete history. A Christian theology of hope, by contrast, knows that the fulfillment we seek is an incalculable gift of God. Consequently, Christian hope will generate criticism both of the status quo and of all absolutized programs of progress and strategies of revolution.” (Faith Seeking Understanding, 341)

In working to honor the hope and promise of Christianity to bring about a fundamental transformation of the world as it is - as a gift from God, at the heart of an Integral Life is a call to live with paradox, to navigate irreducible perspectives (e.g. the 4 Quadrants), and to hold the creative tension between opposites in the recognition that no single perspective is privileged or pre-given.

This capacity to live with paradox and ambiguity, as well as being central to the teachings of Jesus, is also found within the somewhat fragmentary Resurrection narratives recorded in the New Testament gospels. From the two women fleeing from an empty tomb in fear and trembling (Mark), to the disciples on the road to Emmaus where Jesus disappears at the instant he is recognized (Luke) to doubting Thomas, the Resurrection is an event that is constantly vulnerable to human misperception – a precarious, delicate, insubstantial and fragile Reality – and therefore utterly precious, much like a new born baby. So, just as the risen Jesus tells Mary “do not cling to me”, the Resurrection will slip through our fingers if we hold onto it too tightly, and so we cannot be too sure that we have ever gotten hold of it fully. As such an encounter with the risen Christ breaks into our human experience world as a mystery to be approached with astonishment and awe, and is disclosed in an act of faith that is held with courage and often in spite of deep trepidation and cognitive uncertainty.

And in further developing this point, just as the crucified Jesus is himself an expression of the love of God (see Good Friday blog), if we look at the earliest forms of Christian art that depict the Resurrection we find that the glory of risen Christ is always expressed in the visual form of the wounded Jesus. The risen Christ has wounds. That is, we cannot separate the risen Christ from the wounded Jesus, they are to be held together in the creative tensions of an integrally informed faith, where the authority of the risen Christ is found precisely in his precariousness, in his very wounded-ness and vulnerability.

So, just as the passion and suffering of the crucified Jesus is always already an expression of the glory of the risen Christ, the glory of the risen Christ is always and already expressed in the form of the wounded Jesus.

So at this point of maximum intensity, where we accept and embody the irreducible paradoxes of Christianity, the more we experience the tension and intensity of the crucifixion – i.e. the violence, injustice and unspeakable horrors that have been suffered by the countless untold dead of human history, the more radically we awaken to and deepen our capacity for faith, hope and love in the Resurrection “to come”. In other words, where living through irreparable loss releases the event of a new birth, the more we pray and weep for the irredeemable sufferings of the past (in Auschwitz or Belfast, in Kosovo or the West Bank) the more we resurrect an irrepressible openness to the future.

And from this more dynamic and evolutionary perspective, the Resurrection can now be seen an Omega-point of Christ consciousness (Teilhard de Chardin), an Omega-point that has already entered into human history and been accomplished in the person and work of Jesus Christ, but whose ultimate temporal horizon is radically unforeseeable…

And moreover, the paradoxical secret that stirs within the Resurrection event also points to the transformative potential of Christianity. For if losing ones life is a necessary condition for finding it again then the critical deconstruction of the Christian faith tradition in the modern (Darwin, Marx, Freud) and post-modern (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida) world is precisely the condition required for Christian renewal, and as such may well be the greatest achievement of the last 2000 years of Christianity.

Of course Christianity has already undergone five or six major historical turnings, suggesting that it is a faith tradition that is open to transformation and novelty. And in the wake of the Death of God in the 20th century (or any over-arching center of truth and meaning) and an institutional Church that is more concerned with self-preservation than renewal, having exhausted the potentials of its traditional forms and structure, it seems that the Church is again on the threshold of crucifixion/resurrection, and as such more prepared to transform itself than any other religion.

Of course, what Christianity will become is totally unpredictable, but if it is to be true to its origins and re-activate the challenge and invitation of Jesus of Nazareth, the future of Christianity will involve an unpredictable earthquake, an event that exceeds our comprehension and expectations. For if Christians are really honest with themselves they will admit that Jesus is not the Messiah (Christ) that we either want or wish for, since the Kingdom will come “like a thief in the night” and at a time and place that we least expect…

Are you sick of pretending to have your shit together? Is the task of feigning sanity driving you mad?? Is the honest confession that you may be totally deceived in your highest aspirations precisely the thing that makes your passion for life authentic?

No, not me either… for just as the real journey only begins when we do not see exactly where we are going, and just as existential resolve is never stronger than in the morning after the night when it was never weaker, in a time of peace the war like man sets about surrendering everything to a passion for Not-Knowing that undermines all his claims to premature self-actualization with a free gift of Love that costs him precisely everything…

And just as God created the world “ex nihilo” (out of Nothing), when this very same God wants to bring forth a great man he must also firstly reduce him to nothing… and thereby show him that in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in a life and death struggle to subvert, transgress, deconstruct the thin veil of righteousness that centers everything around itself, become vulnerable to the strange truths that threaten one’s self-boundaries and honestly face up to the Impossible/Real in which the absolute Truth is logical nonsense…

So with a tremendous affirmation of the Mystery that derails or unsettles the standard use of language on the basis of its established meanings, leaving it’s reference (developmental signified) Empty, I will infuriate politically correct thought police and hereby maintain the radical un-decidability between the sacred and the obscene, the existential ambiguity between love and murder, and the phenomenological confusion between God and Terror – for all of these are radically Not-Two!

Both the actual occasion of ones profound spiritual awakening and the most overwhelming forms of violence (e.g. the Tsunami that occurred on the day after Christmas 2004 destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and the world-wide shock and awe stemming from the terror attacks of 911) - both of these events – the wonder of radical awakening and the horror of meaningless suffering – events that are said to be at opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience, are intrinsically unforeseeable, utterly unimaginable and totally unbelievable. That is, both Love and Death come to us from out of nowhere and leave us spell-bound and speechless, both come to us as an absolute surprise, and often as something monstrous, a horrendous apparition that explodes all our standards for harmony, order and ethical conduct… Yes friends, both Terrorism (Death) and God (Love) go past all conventional standards and ethical value-judgments in a dreadful awakening to the groundless abyss, and so the question remains: how much truth can you handle without the sugar coated defense against the shattering experience of chaotic vulnerability??

As all those Christians who read their Bible and all radical Muslims know, just like Abraham going up the mountain to sacrifice Issac, when we obey the unconditional claim of God on our lives we must give up any human justification, any rational grounds, and any merely human calculation. For as soon as you know for sure where you’re going and seek make everything turn on a clear-cut distinction between the Divine and the Demonic, the saint and the heretic, the messiah and the false prophet, as soon as you think you have a handle on this distinction, then that is the foreclosure of faith, the end of hope and an obstacle to love!

When you are sure you have the Real one, you can be sure that you’re lost in the wilderness, and so maybe it is better that the Secret remains secret after all… for who can we trust to administer it, interpret it, protect it?? In other words, if the Secret were given, the cure would quickly turn to poison…

And so in the cloud of Un-Knowing, where we give up any calculation, any claim to know the Name of that One, if God is found anywhere it is in the Nameless - i.e. the crucified, the abandoned, the destitute and those despised by those well bred, well-fed upholders of the established structures of goodness, truth and beauty…

Yes indeed, there is time-honored trajectory in the Western tradition from Isaiah to Paul to Luther to Kierkegaard to Derrida: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise… I will deconstruct the civilized madness of the ones who are supposed to know… for the foolishness of God always trumps the wisdom of the world.

The Christ-event is therefore a radical New Beginning, accompanied by the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of Another Dimension that disrupts and destabilizes the predominant symbolic code. And since this event is not mediated by the domain of terrestrial finitude with its propensity for corruption and the abuse of power, this intrusion of the traumatic Real - this crucified God - renders obsolete the conventional distinction between the believers and the infidels, the saved and the lost, the theists and atheists with an amoral reversal that cuts to the heart of Jesus’ own radical teachings on the Kingdom of God.

For in the in-breaking of the already/not-yet Kingdom where everything is turned inside-out and up-side down, who can be left out?? And who can say for sure that they are in?? For where the absolute religious experience is made possible by “an asymmetrical obedience to an absurd order” (Derrida), an space that is otherwise than the structures of power that service the privileged few, everything that goes by the name of religion, philosophy, truth and goodness would actually get in the way – lest we forget the dangerous memory of Jesus of Nazareth - for the Truth will strike us as deeply Absurd, and come to us as something that we did Not see coming… so all we can do is stay open to an unpredictable earthquake, and hope and pray for something, we know not what… as our true purpose in life will come over us in an event that at first looks like a sheer accident, a complete failure or an unmitigated disaster…

So, when all the boundaries between God and Satan collapse then we have no way of telling a terrorist from a freedom fighter, a democratically elected leader from a religious fundamentalist, a nation of civilized people from a collection of fearful and desperate barbarians, an illegal bombing from a legal war… and when we shatter the categories that hold together our fragile grasp on (so-called) reality then we are in a fruitful space, an empty/pregnant/void in which all values can be created anew. So rather than radically dissociating Good and Evil, Us and Them, Resurrection and Death, I suggest that we are to assume our mortality and suffering in its most radical form. To be sure, the incomprehensibility of Terror IS indistinguishable from our divine stupor before the un-knowable Other-ness of God… and neither of these limit-experiences can be domesticated or made ones own… for they both elude all our programs of mastery, slip through the grasp of all our schemes, and resist reduction to all history, revelation, and all truth…

And so maybe behind it all there is Nothing behind it all, there is nothing to prop up our established beliefs and practices – maybe that is the condition of Truth. It is there, from a time out of mind… It already has me, before I have IT, before I Am – it is there – a matter of my undoing, like the heat death of the Universe… I am made destitute by It… I am debilitated by It… It holds me there ‘without remission’… I cannot say what it is - Being and God and Truth have been reduced to ashes and consumed by this nameless, formless Impossibility… this indeterminate desert-like emptiness that antedates all determinate forms and structures… it is Nothing that I own but Something to which I must own up… I call out and it doesn’t answer – there’s no body there… Its bottomless depth eludes my grasp, haunting me, unknown, ungraspable, an Abyss that threatens to swallow up everything that keeps me here… like a black hole that follows the death of a star absorbing the light of all the smaller bodies around it. Yet, it is there. This is what has us…and maybe all our little truths, and virtues and institutions and programs for self-improvement will be reduced to ashes without a trace… for all we know the stars twinkle in the void of endless space and the little planet teeming with life will one day sink back into the sun… Will anyone ever know that we were here?

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).

Check out the following links for two papers I presented at a “Christianity After Darwin” conference at the Flinders University Center for Science, Theology and Culture.

The first is titled “Heading Towards Omega?” and it leans heavily on Ken Wilber’s magnus opus “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality” by arguing that modern science has recently discovered the “self-organizing” capacity of the universe towards higher levels of complexity/consciousness. This paper therefore provides scientific evidence for the notion that “self-realization through self-transcendence” (Jantsch) is the defining feature of a fully fledged evolutionary spirituality. Simply put: the evolving universe is a God-in-the-making…

The second paper “Evolutionary Christology” looks at the the darker aspects of the evolutionary trajectory from star dust to Shakespear and identifies a dynamic pattern of “transformation via instability” through the cosmos, the biosphere and human history… It then asks the question: who is the person of Jesus and what is the finished work of the Cross in the evolutionary context of modern science? Enjoy…