February 5, 2009

• Logion 13 and Mark 8:27-33

  The following is again based on Stevan Davies’ discussion of Mark’s use of the Gospel of Thomas, Part I, and part of my ongoing exploration on how the nature of Jesus’s teachings was altered in the transition from the simple sayings of Thomas to the narrative gospels which began to appear on the scene 10, 15 and 20 years later.

  Logion 13 is fascinating, even without the additions Pursah offers to it in The Disappearance of the Universe, in which she proposes what the three things were – which of course the whole world has been guessing at ever since the text was discovered. Here is the text in the Pursah rendering from Your Immortal Reality:

  J said to the disciples, “Compare me to something and tell me what I’m like.”
  Simon Peter said to him, “You are just like an angel.”
  Matthew said to him, “You are like a wisdom teacher.”
  Thomas said to him, “Master, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.”
  And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him. When Thomas came back to his friends, they asked him, “What did J say to you?” Thomas said to them, “If I tell you one fo the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and consume you.”

  
  

  Mark, 8:27-33 (NIV):

  Peter’s Confession of Christ
  27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
  28 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
  29 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ.^[a]“
  30 Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

  Jesus Predicts His Death
  31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
  32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
  33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”

  Again, we can only be amazed at the difference, as Jesus becomes domesticated through the subsequent editing of the tradition about him (instead of: of him). For one thing, of course in the context of the emerging orthodoxy, it is Peter who gives the winning answer, though up to that point the gist of the story might be somewhat comparable with the Thomas version, namely that the world is not ready (by definition) to hear Jesus’s teachings of a Kingdom not of this world. However the further framing of the story in the Markan context again hijacks the pure teaching, and frames it now in the Christian mold where the upcoming death of Jesus is of the essence, and his presumed suffering beginning to be construed as an important sacrifice ordained by God, which is very, very different from the simple image which is evoked by the notion of simply saying that the world is not ready to hear this message. Peter’s recognition of Jesus as “the Christ,” likewise serves the Christian purpose of validating Jesus as special, and a “savior,” when the point of his teaching was exactly the other way around. The section headings of the NIV reinforce this Christian theological slant even more.
  

  With the availability of the Course and the deeper psychological understanding which it fosters, we can now also increasingly understand why it is that we do resist the message so much, namely because our ego has us convinced that accepting the atonement will be the end of us, when the truth is that it would be the end of the ego, not of us as who we are in truth — namely spirit. In other words the risk is that we would be happy, instead of miserably hanging on to the ego.

  The original teaching of Logion 13 makes that simple point, which in the story Thomas is apparently beginning to appreciate, namely that the world really is not ready to hear Jesus’s message, nor will it ever be, by definition, based on the understanding that the world was made as an attack on God, being the embodiment of the ego-thought of separation from God. Jesus’s message, or the atonement, after all is the message that the separation did not happen, so neither the ego, nor the world it projects are real. The only thing that is real and eternal is the love of God, and what keeps it out of awareness is our identification with the ego-self, the false self, the persona, and that is how our ego keeps us wrapped around the axle, fearing we will perish when we accept the atonement for ourselves, when instead it is the ego which will perish, and which we are NOT, in spite of its best efforts to convince us otherwise.
  

  Thus the real issue is not that the scribes and Pharizees, or whoever, out in the world, is not accepting “Jesus,” but rather the other way around, that we don’t take responsibility for the fact that we don’t accept him, while the Course is really showing us the mechanisms why we don’t and helps us to remove the cloaking of the ego, and learn to look at its seething snake pit of hatred with the love of Jesus beside us, so that ultimately we should be able to forgive ourselves for what the Course calls the “tiny, mad, idea” of the separation, and laugh it all away with Jesus, as he also suggests in the Course. The critical passage is:

  Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM:T-27.VIII.6)
  

  • 8:51 am
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