What did Jesus (and the Comforter) ask people to believe? 3

[Guest guest]

" The Kingdom of God that we were promised is at hand. This is not a

phrase out of a sermon or a lecture, but it is the actualization of

the experience of the highest Truth which is Absolute, now

manifesting itself in ordinary people at this present moment. "

 

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

 

 

" So according to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus ridiculed those who

thought of the " Kingdom of God " in literal terms, as if it were a

specific place: " If those who lead you say to you, `Look, the Kingdom

is in the sky,' then the birds will arrive there before you. If they

say to you, `It is in the sea,' " then, he says, the fish will arrive

before you. Instead, it is a state of self-discovery:

 

" . . . Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of

you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and

you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father. But if

you will now know yourselves, then dwell in poverty, and it is you

who are that poverty. "

 

But the disciples, mistaking the " Kingdom " for a future event,

persisted in their questioning:His disciples said to him, " When

will . . . the new world come? He said to them, " What you look

forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.. " . . His

disciples said to him, " When will the Kingdom come? " (Jesus

said,) " It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter

of saying `Here it is' or `There it is.' Rather, the Kingdom of the

Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it. "

 

That " Kingdom, " then, symbolizes a state of transformed consciousness:

 

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, " These

infants being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom. " They

said to him, " Shall we, then, as children, enter the kingdom? " Jesus

said to them, " When you make the two one, and when you make the

inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the

above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and

the same . . . then you will enter [the Kingdom]. "

 

Yet what the " living Jesus " of Thomas rejects as naïve — the idea

that the Kingdom of God is an actual event expected in history — is

the notion of the Kingdom that the synoptic gospels of the New

Testament most often attribute to Jesus as his teaching. According to

Matthew, Luke, and Mark, Jesus proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God,

when captives shall gain their freedom, when the diseased shall

recover, the oppressed shall be released, and harmony shall prevail

over the whole world. Marks says that the disciples expected the

Kingdom to come as a cataclysmic event in their own lifetime, since

Jesus had said that some of them would live to see " the Kingdom of

God come with power. " Before his arrest, Mark says, Jesus warned that

although " the end is not yet, " they must expect it any time. All

three gospels insist that the Kingdom will come in the near future

(though they also contain many passages indicating that it is here

already.) Luke makes Jesus say explicitly " the kingdom of God is

within you. " Some gnostic Christians, extending that type of

interpretation, expected human liberation to occur not through actual

events in history, but through internal transformation. "

 

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels,

Random House Inc. New York, 1989, p. 128-29.

ISBN-10: 0679724532

ISBN-13: 978-0679724537

 

 

" What makes us free, according to Christian dogma, is knowing the

truth, which is Christ's Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection,

and this truth is to be known by faith, the faith that at a moment,

both in and out of time, these events once took place. When however

we say that what makes us free is Gnosis, or " knowing, " then we are

Gnostics, and instead of believing that something was and is so

(something that would be still different for Jews, and again for

Muslims), we rely upon an inward knowledge rather than upon an

outward belief. Gnosis is the opposite of ignorance, and not of

disbelief. As an ancient Greek word widely used by Jews and

Christians, Gnosis did not mean knowing that something was so, but

rather just knowing someone or something, including knowing

God. " Knowing God " has a special twist that makes it the Gnosis: it

is a reciprocal process in which God also knows what is best and

oldest in you, a spark in you that always has been God's. This means

that knowing God is primarily a process of being reminded of what you

already know, which is that God never has been wholly external to

you, however alienated or estranged he is from society or even the

cosmos in which you dwell….

 

Here is Valentinus upon our present state in his one complete

surviving work, the beautiful meditation The Gospel of Truth:

 

Thus they did not know God, since it was he whom they did not see.

Inasmuch as he was the object of fear and disturbance and instability

and indecisiveness and division, there was much futility at work

among them on his account, and much empty ignorance—as when one falls

sound asleep and finds oneself in the midst of nightmares: running

toward somewhere—powerless to get away while being pursued—in hand-to-

hand combat—being beaten—falling from a height—being blown upward by

the air, but without any wings; sometimes, too, it seems that one is

being murdered, though nobody is giving chase—or killing one's

neighbors, with whose blood one is smeared; until, having gone

through all these dreams, one awakens.

 

This nightmare of death-in-life, composed eighteen centuries ago,

need but little modification. The Gnostic Jesus of The Gospel of

Thomas, a wayfaring Jesus, closer to Walt Whitman than to the Jesus

of the Churches, speaks to us as if each of us is a passerby, and

with an ultimate eloquence tells us precisely into what we have been

thrown:

 

But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you

are poverty.

Fortunate is one who came into being, before coming into being. "

 

Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and

Resurrection, pages 243

Paperback: 255 pages

Publisher: Riverhead Books (October 1, 1997)

ISBN-10: 1573226297

ISBN-13: 978-1573226295

 

 

, " violettubb " <violettubb

wrote:

>

> What did Jesus ask people to " believe " ?

>

> ...Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and

saying, " The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and

believe the gospel. " (Mark 1:14-15)

>

> (p.378) Jesus' exhortation to " believe the gospel " does not refer to study of

or belief in scriptural writings per se.[1] In the original Greek in which the

New Testament was written, the word used for gospel is 'euangelion', " good news "

or " good message. " As used by Jesus it expressed the " good message, " the

revelations of truth, he was bringing to man from God.

>

> When Jesus said to " believe the gospel, " he meant more than a casual mental

acceptance of his message. Belief in general is that conditional receptive

attitude of mind that must precede an experience in order to cognize it. One

must have sufficient belief in a concept in order to put it to the test, without

which one cannot possibly verify its validity. (p.379) If a man is thirsty and

is advised to quench his thirst with the water from a nearby good well, he must

believe in that advice sufficiently to make the effort to go to the well and

drink from it.

>

> Similarly, Jesus emphasizes that truth-seeking souls must not only repent of

the foolishness of following unsatisfying material ways of living, and believe

in the truths experienced by him through God; they must also act accordingly

that they might realize those truths for themselves.

>

> To be an orthodox unquestioning believer in any spiritual doctrine, without

the scrutiny of experimentation to prove it to oneself, is to be ossified with

dogmatism. Jesus did not ask the people merely to believe in his message, but to

keep faith in his divine revelations with the assurance that by believing in,

and hence concentrating upon, the gospel, they would surely and ultimately

experience within themselves the truths in those revelations. Belief is wasted

on false doctrines; but truth poured out to man through the authority of

God-realized saints is worthy of belief and sure to produce divine realization.

>

> Even on the authority of the fame of scriptural text, one cannot judge what it

teaches, for various are the meanings and consequent distortions drawn from holy

writ, some of which defy the laws of both reason and wisdom. Also, who can deny

what errors might have come down through the centuries in the form of

mistranslations or mistakes made by scribes? The Bible and the Vedas may well be

inspired texts that came from heaven, but the ultimate test of truth is one's

own realization, direct experience received through the medium of the soul's

omniscient intuition.

>

> The Second Coming of Christ (The Resurrection of the Christ Within

> You) Volume 1, Discourse 22, pg. 378-379

> Paramahansa Yogananda

> Printed in the United States of America 1434-J881

> ISBN-13:978-0-87612-557-1

> ISBN-10:0-87612-557-7

>

> Notes:

>

> [1] " While two of the New Testament gospels use the word 'gospel' (it is

missing in Luke and John), they use it to indicate not the written works

themselves, but rather the message preached either by Jesus (in Matthew) or

about him (in Mark). Not until the middle of the second century are documents

about the words and deeds of Jesus called gospels. " - Robert J. Miller, ed.,

'The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version' (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).

>

> " The English word 'gospel' is a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon word 'godspel'

or 'good news'. 'Godspel' was an accurate equivalent of the original Greek word

'euangelion', literally a 'good message' or 'good tidings'. And the oldest

surviving Greek manuscript copies of the four canonical gospels bear only the

headings According to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John (the four books together

comprise the whole of the single 'gospel'; and the word 'canonical' derives from

the Greek 'kanon' or 'measuring rod' and indicates, in this case, those few

gospels that were approved as holy scriptures by the orthodox church of the late

second century). " - Reynolds Price, 'Three Gospels' (New York: Simon and

Shuster, 1997). ('Publisher's Note')

>