Life got back to normal for me today. And it felt so very good! Oh sweet quotidian life, why do we take you for granted? Only when a nasty storm like Irene comes along and robs us of your quiet charms, do we see, and then only briefly. (But watch out, we may get another chance — there’s something called TD 12 over the eastern Atlantic, soon to become ‘Katia’; which sounds a bit too much like ‘Katrina’ for my liking).<\/p>\n
During my lunch hour at work today, I mostly slept!! My body is trying to recover a bit from the stress of the recent hurricane watch. I have a lunch-hour book to fall asleep to, Dale Allision’s “Jesus of Nazareth, Millenarian Prophet”. After I woke and before I got back to the computer screen, I pondered a few more lines from Prof. Allison’s extremely detailed and irrefutable exposition of how and why the Gospels reflect Jesus as a ‘millenarian’, i.e. the self-appointed announcer of the imminent arrival of God’s Kingdom in Jerusalem. <\/p>\n
(Yes, in Jerusalem in 30 CE, not up in Heaven or some other realm in the distant future; but immediately, right here on earth, pushing aside the evil Romans and the others in cahoots with them, e.g. the Temple priests. That was the real Jesus, like it or not; and I suspect a lot of Christians would NOT like it).<\/p>\n
So it makes sense that Jesus demanded his followers to give up everything from their regular lives to follow him. The disciples gave up their jobs, their money, their families, everything. Why? Because Jesus convinced them that God was going to shake everything up with the arrival of THE KINGDOM, in very short time. <\/p>\n
Think about that — Jesus must have been VERY charismatic, to convince a band of people to give up EVERYTHING that they depended upon in return for a stake in a promised Kingdom of God. It was a bold decision on the part of Jesus’ followers, one for which there was no turning back.<\/p>\n
And what ran thru the heads of these people once Passover was over, once Jesus was gone, and the Kingdom had not arrived? Again, they probably could NOT go home again, could not take up their old lives where they left off. They had burned their bridges, big time! So they had to keep going — they had to keep the dream alive. They had to come up with a story that would keep public interest and support alive.<\/p>\n
And that story was that the Kingdom was still going to happen, it was just gonna take a bit longer than previously thought. Jesus was back with God, but only for some last minute preparations before returning in glory to cast out the Romans, sweep aside the Temple and all of its corruption, and bring forth the New Zion. To boost that story up a notch, they added, as an aside, that Jesus had already given a clear sign that he wasn’t really dead; i.e., that he survived the Roman crucifixion and then left for Heaven on his own schedule. <\/p>\n
By demanding that his followers forsake the option of ever going back to where they came from, Jesus insured that no matter what happened to him, his vision would not die even if he did. Pretty shrewd. And quite successful! The seeds of Christianity were well planted by Jesus, whether or not the plant that grew from it (Christianity) was what Jesus would have wanted.<\/p>\n
Hey, and one more interesting thought from another book — this time, The Tao of Zen by Ray Griggs. In regard to the Zen and Taoist traditions, Griggs says that both “are assiduously mindful of avoiding the pitfalls of a word system that builds its own structure of understanding and invents its own truths.” Ah yes, “word systems” that build their own structures and invent their own truths. Sort of like western philosophy. And Christian theology (which overlap, to a large degree). <\/p>\n
Did Jesus envision that he would inspire a huge body of philosophic doctrine, of writings and teachings, on the nature of God? I.e., a huge body of words that self-organizes its own structure and invents its own truths? Probably not! But then again, Jesus and his disciples were inventing their own truths, truths that turned out to be not-quite-true (i.e., the imminent arrival of God’s Kingdom on Earth).<\/p>\n
And yet, Griggs points out that “there is no wordlessness without words, no selflessness without self . . . true wisdom needs some foolishness as a useful counterpart”. <\/p>\n
And finally from Griggs: the difference between those who are enlightened and those who are not is that the enlightened ones realize themselves to be no different or better than others, and thus know nothing of their enlightened status. By offering himself to the Romans for torture and execution, Jesus saw himself to be no better than his followers; he realized himself as expendable, nothing special. In that, we know him to have been enlightened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Life got back to normal for me today. And it felt so very good! Oh sweet quotidian life, why do we take you for granted? Only when a nasty storm like Irene comes along and robs us of your quiet charms, do we see, and then only briefly. (But watch out, we may get another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2296"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2299,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions\/2299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}