Who Is Deepak Chopra’s “Third Jesus”?

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Who Is Deepak Chopra's " Third Jesus " ?

An excerpt from " The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore "

 

Jesus is in trouble. When people worship him today — or even speak

his name — the object of their devotion is unlikely to be who they

think he is. A mythical Jesus has grown up over time. He has served

to divide peoples and nations. He has led to destructive wars in the

name of religious fantasies. The legacy of love found in the New

Testament has been tainted with the worst sort of intolerance and

prejudice that would have appalled Jesus in life. Most troubling of

all, his teachings have been hijacked by people who hate in the name

of love.

 

" Sometimes I feel this social pressure to return to my faith, " a

lapsed Catholic told me recently, " but I'm too bitter. Can I love a

religion that calls gays sinners but hides pedophiles in its clergy?

Yesterday while I was driving to work, I heard a rock song that

went, 'Jesus walked on water when he should have surfed,' and you

know what? I burst out laughing. I would never have done that when I

was younger. Now I feel only the smallest twinge of guilt. "

 

No matter where you look, a cloud of confusion hangs over the message

of Jesus. To cut through it we have to be specific about who we mean

when we refer to Jesus. One Jesus is historical, and we know next to

nothing about him. Another Jesus is the one appropriated by

Christianity. He was created by the Church to fulfill its agenda. The

third Jesus, the one this book is about, is as yet so unknown that

even the most devout Christians don't suspect that he exists. Yet he

is the Christ we cannot — and must not — ignore.

 

Redeeming the Redeemer

 

The first Jesus was a rabbi who wandered the shores of northern

Galilee many centuries ago. This Jesus still feels close enough to

touch. He appears in our mind's eye dressed in homespun but haloed in

glory. He was kind, serene, peaceful, loving, and yet he was the

keeper of deep mysteries.

 

This historical Jesus has been lost, however, swept away by history.

He still lingers like a ghost, a projection of all the ideal

qualities we wish for in ourselves but so painfully lack.

 

Why couldn't there be one person who was perfectly loving, perfectly

compassionate, and perfectly humble? There can be if we call him

Jesus and remove him to a time thousands of years in the past. (If

you live in the East, his name might be Buddha, but the man is

equally mythical and equally a projection of our own lack.)

 

The first Jesus is less than consistent, as a closer reading of the

gospels will show. If Jesus was perfectly peaceful, why did he

declare, " Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the

earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword " ? (Matthew 10:34)

If he was perfectly loving, why did he say, " Throw out the

unprofitable servant into the outer darkness, where there will be

weeping and gnashing of teeth " ? (Matthew 25:30) (Sometimes the

translation is even harsher, and Jesus commands " the worthless slave "

to be consigned to hell.) If Jesus was humble, why did he claim to

rule the earth beyond the power of any king? At the very least, the

living Jesus was a man of baffling contradictions.

 

And yet the more contradictions we unearth, the less mythical this

Jesus becomes. The flesh-and-blood man who is lost to history must

have been extraordinarily human. To be divine, one must be rich in

every human quality first. As one famous Indian spiritual teacher

once said, " The measure of enlightenment is how comfortable you feel

with your own contradictions. "

 

Millions of people worship another Jesus, however, who never existed,

who doesn't even lay claim to the fleeting substance of the first

Jesus. This is the Jesus built up over thousands of years by

theologians and other scholars. He is the Holy Ghost, the Three-in-

One Christ, the source of sacraments and prayers that were unknown to

the rabbi Jesus when he walked the earth. He is also the Prince of

Peace over whom bloody wars have been fought.

 

This second Jesus cannot be embraced without embracing theology

first. Theology shifts with the tide of human affairs. Metaphysics

itself is so complex that it contradicts the simplicity of Jesus's

words. Would he have argued with learned divines over the meaning of

the Eucharist? Would he have espoused a doctrine declaring that

babies are damned until they are baptized?

 

The second Jesus leads us into the wilderness without a clear path

out. He became the foundation of a religion that has proliferated

into some twenty thousand sects. They argue endlessly over every

thread in the garments of a ghost. But can any authority, however

exalted, really inform us about what Jesus would have thought? Isn't

it a direct contradiction to hold that Jesus was a unique creation —

the one and only incarnation of God — while at the same time claiming

to be able to read his mind on current events? Yet in his name

Christianity pronounces on homosexuality, birth control, and abortion.

 

Reclaiming the Stolen Jesus

 

These two versions of Jesus — the sketchy historical figure and the

abstract theological creation — hold a tragic aspect for me, because

I blame them for stealing something precious: the Jesus who taught

his followers how to reach God-consciousness. I want to offer the

possibility that Jesus was truly, as he proclaimed, a savior. Not the

savior, not the one and only Son of God. Rather, Jesus embodied the

highest level of enlightenment. He spent his brief adult life

describing it, teaching it, and passing it on to future generations.

Jesus intended to save the world by showing others the path to God-

consciousness.

 

Such a reading of the New Testament doesn't diminish the first two

Jesuses. Rather, they are brought into sharper focus. In place of

lost history and complex theology, the third Jesus offers a direct

relationship that is personal and present. Our task is to delve into

scripture and prove that a map to enlightenment exists there. I think

it does, undeniably; indeed, it's the living aspect of the gospels.

 

We aren't talking about faith. Conventional faith is the same as

belief in the impossible (such as Jesus walking on water), but there

is another faith that gives us the ability to reach into the unknown

and achieve transformation.

 

Jesus spoke of the necessity to believe in him as the road to

salvation, but those words were put into his mouth by followers

writing decades later. The New Testament is an interpretation of

Jesus by people who felt reborn but also left behind. In orthodox

Christianity they won't be left behind forever; at the Second Coming

Jesus will return to reclaim the faithful. But the Second Coming has

had twenty centuries to unfold, with the devout expecting it any day,

and still it lies ahead.

 

The idea of the Second Coming has been especially destructive to

Jesus's intentions, because it postpones what needs to happen now.

The Third Coming — finding God-consciousness through your own

efforts — happens in the present. I'm using the term as a metaphor

for a shift in consciousness that makes Jesus's teachings totally

real and vital.

 

From " The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore " by Deepak Chopra.