Shelby Spong Quotes

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.

...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.

When a human life is open to all that humanity can be, humanity and divinity flow together as one. It was and is a radical insight, and one the consciousness of the mystic is destined to understand.

I prepare for death by living.

Erich Fromm, a German-American psychologist and author, reminds us that “people never think their way into new ways of acting, they always act their way into new ways of thinking.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.

Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith. It is not just a benign nuisance that afflicts Christianity at its edges; it is a mentality that renders the Christian faith unbelievable to an increasing number of the citizens of our world. The

I have become convinced that we must put an end to atonement theology or there will be no future for the Christian faith. This

When any human group decides that they can define God, the outcome is always predictable. The “true faith,” once defined, must then be defended against all critics, and it must also then be forced upon all people—“for their own good, lest their souls be in jeopardy.

The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes do not normally see.

Word of God” or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate.

The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.

Whatever it was that people experience in Jesus has today come to be identified with medieval doctrines based on premodern assumptions that are no longer believable. That identification means that serious theological discussion seems to accomplish little more than to erect a division between the shouters and the disinterested. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me neither option is worth pursuing. Yet even understanding these things, I am still attracted to this Jesus and I will pursue him both relentlessly and passionately. I will not surrender the truth I believe I find in him either to those who seek to defend the indefensible or to those who want to be freed finally from premodern ideas that no longer make any sense.

Healing, for Jung, comes with the embrace of our shadow, the acceptance of our evil. Evil too is part of God, Jung suggested, because it too is a part of Being.

John sees Jesus symbolically as the serpent lifted up on his cross, drawing the venom out of human life, restoring wholeness. It is a powerful image. John

Prayer is rather the activity that enables each of us to be givers to and receivers from one another of the deepest meaning of life—a meaning I call God.

God is. Because God is, I live, I love, I am. Does that mean that God exists? I do not know what that question means. I experience God; I cannot explain God. I trust my experience.

God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.

Jonah’s “sin,” as noted above, was that he dared to limit God’s definition of what is holy to his own definition of what is holy. He assumed that God had no ability to love beyond the boundaries of Jonah’s love.

Hallowed be thy name” means that the ultimate, the mystical, the ineffable can never be captured in human words. Perhaps we need to learn from the Jews that if one speaks the name of God, one is pretending that one is able to know and to define God, which is the beginning of human idolatry. That is when we begin to create God in our own image, while pretending it is the other way around. Perhaps

In Yom Kippur, the status of being unclean fades before the divine presence. Yet if one cannot distinguish between God and Satan, if one calls evil good, if one’s religion places limits on the love of God, if one claims that being God’s chosen means that all others are God’s rejected, then there can be no atonement, and Yom Kippur is a failure.

As he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature.

It is the nature of human life to feed our ever-present security needs by displaying fear in the presence of anyone who is “different.

Paul drew, however, little more than hostility from those identified as the Orthodox party, for whom any change threatened their security.

The version of Christianity that is dying today is rooted in the grossly misunderstood concept of atonement

MY LATE BROTHER'S book, Heaven Inc., he wrote that the only resource on which God placed no limit is love. Thus, we are able to do as the theologian John Shelby Spong suggests and “love wastefully,” because if there is no limit on love, it cannot be wasted.   Can you be so trusting of others that you can love wastefully? If so, be grateful today for that gift.

I also learned that most clergy are either unable or unwilling to engage the great theological issues of the day because of their perception that to do so will “disturb the faith and beliefs” of their people.

We then tried other coping devices, drugs, alcohol and even suicide. As the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: “God is dead and modern men (and women) gather nightly around the divine grave to weep.”*

To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.” Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally.

This point must be heard: the Gospels are first-century narrations based on first-century interpretations. Therefore they are a first-century filtering of the experience of Jesus. They have never been other than that. We must read them today not to discover the literal truth about Jesus, but rather to be led into the Jesus experience they were seeking to convey. That experience always lies behind the distortions, which are inevitable since words are limited. If the Gospels are to be for us revelations of truth, we must enter these texts, go beneath the words, discover the experience that made the words necessary, and in this manner seek the meaning to which the words point. One must never identify the text with the revelation or the messenger with the message. That has been the major error in our two thousand years of Christian history. It is an insight that today is still feared and resisted. But let it be clearly stated, the Gospels are not in any literal sense holy, they are not accurate, and they are not to be confused with reality. They are rather beautiful portraits painted by first-century Jewish artists, designed to point the reader toward that which is in fact holy, accurate, and real. The Gospels represent that stage in the development of the faith story in which ecstatic exclamation begins to be placed into narrative form.

This is the picture of a woman cast in the role of a learner, a pupil, even a rabbinic student. Quite obviously this is a prohibited role for women in those days and in that culture. Yet Jesus affirms Mary in that role. Martha, however, rebukes her. Martha demands that Jesus order Mary to abandon the pupil role for the more acceptable domestic role of assisting with the dinner preparations. Jesus supports Mary and defends her consciousness-raising act by stating that she has elected a higher choice.

Atonement theology assumes that we were created in some kind of original perfection. We now know that life has emerged from a single cell that evolved into self-conscious complexity over billions of years. There was no original perfection. If there was no original perfection, then there could never have been a fall from perfection. If there was no fall, then there is no such thing as “original sin” and thus no need for the waters of baptism to wash our sins away. If there was no fall into sin, then there is also no need to be rescued. How can one be rescued from a fall that never happened? How can one be restored to a status of perfection that he or she never possessed? So most of our Christology today is bankrupt. Many popular titles that we have applied to Jesus, such as “savior,” “redeemer,” and “rescuer,” no longer make sense, because they assume

What we have done is to literalize the DeMille film while thinking that we are literalizing the biblical story!

IN MY LATE BROTHER'S book, Heaven Inc., he wrote that the only resource on which God placed no limit is love. Thus, we are able to do as the theologian John Shelby Spong suggests and “love wastefully,” because if there is no limit on love, it cannot be wasted.   Can you be so trusting of others that you can love wastefully? If so, be grateful today for that gift.

I have seen how in our history, people of color have been enslaved by “Bible-quoting” Christians. When slavery was finally threatened with being relegated to the dustbins of history in America, it was that section of this country known as “the Bible Belt” that rose to defend the enslavement of black people in the bloodiest war of American history. When slavery finally died as a legal option on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Antietam and Appomattox, the Christians of the Bible Belt, once again quoting their scriptures for justification, instituted laws of segregation with the full support of the federal government. When those segregation laws finally began to fall in the 1950s and 1960s, I watched the Bible being quoted to justify the use of lead pipes, police dogs, fire hoses and even the bombing of black churches in which little girls in their Easter finery were killed—all in an attempt to preserve “white supremacy.” I notice that even today the political party in America that most claims to represent what is called “the Christian vote” is still working to impede the political process for black people, to make voting so difficult as to prevent them from casting their ballot.

The words of Peter then became the new mantra for the Christian movement: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him” (10:34–35).

The survival instinct, however, is self-conscious in human beings; and when it consciously motivates our behavior, it defines us as radically self-centered creatures. Our self-centered drive to survive is a universal reality rooted in our biology. It was this aspect of our humanity that led our ancient religious mythmakers to try to describe its origins. “Original sin” was their answer to the question of the source of our universal human self-centeredness. No one understood that survival was an involuntary biological drive in life. Instead it was understood as the result of sinfulness and of disobedience. Atonement theology was born as a way to address this universal flaw in our understanding of human life.

So the first step that those of us who wish to explore the meaning of resurrection must take is to recognize that the founding moment of the Christian story is not about either an empty tomb or the resuscitation of a deceased body. Its original proclamation asserted that in some manner God had raised Jesus into being part of who God is. Jesus was raised by God into God.

self-conscious in human beings; and when it consciously motivates our behavior, it defines us as radically self-centered creatures. Our self-centered drive to survive is a universal reality rooted in our biology. It was this aspect of our humanity that led our ancient religious mythmakers to try to describe its origins. “Original sin” was their answer to the question of the source of our universal human self-centeredness. No one understood that survival was an involuntary biological drive in life.

And so God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven” (Gen. 1:6–8). When Jesus was baptized, Matthew says, God opened the firmament that separated the waters above from the waters below. That is, the heavenly waters were parted. All Moses could do was to part the waters of the Red Sea. All Joshua, Elijah and Elisha could do was to part the waters of the Jordan River. The “new and greater Moses,” as Matthew seeks to portray Jesus, could part the heavenly waters, which

Baptize these others in the name of the “Father.” That word must not be thought of as the name of some external deity, but rather as the name of the Source of Life that inhabits the universe, calling us all to live fully. Baptize, too, in the name of the “Son.” That word must not be seen as the name of the founder of an exclusive religious system, but the name of the Source of Love, which embraces us all and then frees us to love wastefully, to love beyond every barrier. Baptize them in the name of the “Holy Spirit.” Those two words are not another name for God, but are rather the name of the Ground of Being, in whom we all are related and in which we find not only the courage to be all that we can be, but also, perhaps even more important, the courage to allow others to be all that they can be in the infinite variety of our humanity. The human community contains people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, ages, political persuasions and economic statuses. The call of God to us to be all that we can be is also the call to rejoice in the very being of all others. That is what forms the universal community of which the church is but a symbol; indeed, to build the universal community is the ultimate goal of the Christian church, and in the achievement of that goal the church itself will finally be dissolved.

Augustine, who assumed that Genesis 1 was chapter 1 in a book that contained the literal words of God, and that Genesis 2 was the second chapter in the same book, put the two chapters together and read the latter as a sequel. Genesis 2, he assumed, described the fall from the perfection and original goodness of creation depicted in chapter 1. So almost inevitably the Christian scriptures from the fourth century on were interpreted against the background of this (mis) understanding. The primary trouble with this theory was that by the fourth century of the Common Era there were no Jews to speak of left in the Christian movement, and therefore the only readers and interpreters of the ancient Hebrew myths were Gentiles, who had no idea what these stories originally meant. Consequently, they interpreted them as perfection established by God in chapter 1, followed by perfection ruined by human beings in chapter 2. Why was that a problem? Well I, for one, have never known a Jewish scripture scholar to treat the Garden of Eden story in the same way that Gentiles treat it. Jews tend to see this story not as a narrative about sin entering the world, but as a parable about the birth of self-consciousness. It is, for the Jews, not a fall into sin, but a step into humanity. It is the birth of a new relationship with God, changing from master-servant to interdependent cooperation. The forbidden fruit was not from an apple tree, as so many who don’t bother to read the text seem to think. It was rather from “the tree of knowledge,” and the primary thing that one gained from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge was the ability to discern good from evil. Gaining that ability did not, in the minds of the Jewish readers of the book of Genesis, corrupt human nature. It simply made people take responsibility for their freely made decisions. A slave has no such freedom. The job of the slave is simply to obey, not to think. The job of the slave-master is to command. Thus the relationship of the master to the slave is a relationship of the strong to the weak, the parent to the child, the king to the serf, the boss to the worker. If human beings were meant to live in that kind of relationship with God, then humanity would have been kept in a perpetual state of irresponsible, childlike immaturity. Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden, not because they had disobeyed God’s rules, but because, when self-consciousness was born, they could no longer live in childlike dependency. Adam and Eve discovered, as every child ultimately must discover, that maturity requires that the child leave his or her parents’ home, just as every bird sooner or later must leave its nest and learn to fly on its own. To be forced out of the Garden of Eden was, therefore, not a punishment for sin, so much as it was a step into maturity.

Atonement theology is not the pathway to life. The ability to give ourselves away to others in love is. It is not the winners who achieve life’s meaning; it is the givers. That is the basis upon which a new Christianity can be built for a new world. Atonement theology was born in Gentile ignorance of Jewish worship traditions. It was fed over the centuries by literalizing biblical narratives in ways that Jewish worshippers, who knew about storytelling, would never have understood. I say it again: Biblical literalism is nothing less than a Gentile heresy. Its results are now revealed in the fact that Christianity has been transformed into a religion of victimization. For centuries we have practiced our faith by building up ourselves as winners, survivors, the holders of ultimate truth, while we have denigrated the humanity of others. That is the source of evil. That is why Christianity has given birth to anti-Semitism. That is why the crusades were initiated to kill “infidels.” That is why we gave our blessing to such things as the divine right of kings, slavery, segregation, and apartheid. That is why we defined women as sub-human, childlike, and dependent. That is why we became homophobic. That is why we became child abusers and ideological killers. What human life needs is not a theology of human denigration. That is what atonement theology gives us. What we need is a theology of human fulfillment.

Remember the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:24–30) they must grow together, Jesus said, until the harvest. We cannot remove the tares without destroying the wheat. Evil, like the tares, is part of the Ground of Being, the nature of reality, the meaning of God. My being is always light and darkness, love and hate, God and Satan, life and death, being and nonbeing—all in dynamic tension. I cannot split off part of who I am, confess it, be absolved of it, and seek to try again. I cannot pretend that I am made in God’s image until I own as part of my being the shadow side of my life, which reflects the shadow side of God. That is why evil is always present in the holy; that is why evil is perceived as relentless and inescapable; that is why Jesus and Judas have been symbolically bound together since the dawn of time. The Johannine myth was not wrong in suggesting that Jesus was the preexisting word of God who was enfleshed into human history. That is a very accurate conception of an ultimate truth. But it is not complete. Judas Iscariot was also mythically present in God at the dawn of creation, and he too was enfleshed in the drama played out in Judea in the first century. The mythical themes are woven together time after time. God and Satan, life and death, good and evil, sacrifice and freedom, light and darkness, Jesus and Judas—are all inextricably bound up with one another. I cannot finally step into the new being without bringing my own dark shadow with me.

It is fascinating to see the standards that religious systems through the ages have imposed on believers as necessary for the people to meet before they can pass through the doorway to a promised eternity.

The Battle of Tours in 732 CE stopped the encroachment of Islam into Christian Europe and divided the world into religious spheres of influence. The Crusades represented a hostile invasion of Christian power into Islamic strongholds

Mark provides us, for example, with the first mention in Christian history of the figure we call John the Baptist. Mark is the first to relate the story of Jesus’ baptism and the account of his temptation in the wilderness. He is the first to suggest that the betrayal was by the hand of one of “the twelve.” He is the first New Testament writer to associate miracles with the memory of Jesus. He is the first to assert that Jesus taught in parables.

Peter Gomes, Harvey Cox, Diana Eck and Dorothy Austin.

Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith.

So I am driven to find a different way to read the Bible that allows me simultaneously to be both a person of faith and a person thankful for and dedicated to the century in which I am privileged to live.

Lawrence Meredith

knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.

we do not possess a single scriptural document written any less than twenty-one years after the crucifixion that purports to tell us anything about the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth! We then have to face the fact that, at the very least, there is absolute silence for twenty-one years.

Prayer to me is the practice of the presence of God, the act of embracing transcendence and the discipline of sharing with another the gifts of living, loving and being. Can that understanding of prayer,

arena in which good must ultimately be separated from evil. Our

prayed for our daughter because that is what love does. We held her in our hearts before God as we do all those we love when they are in “trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity,” as the Book of Common Prayer advises, but that does not solve or illumine the question of prayer.

the meaning of prayer, rather than just to “pray,” became the goal of my lifetime and indeed the goal of my priesthood. Prayer is the sharing of being, the sharing of life and the

sharing of love. That hospital experience became a starting place for me in regard to the meaning of prayer. Prayer understood this new way became profoundly real for me, while the form that prayer had traditionally taken began to shift dramatically. From that day to this, prayer has been far more about “being” than it has been about “doing.” This

is to live into the future, it must recover its original meaning and identity. It must shed those aspects of its past that are divisive, condemning and authoritarian. It must abandon creeds and tribal oneness in favor of universal inclusiveness; it must use its formulas to include, never to ban. In short, to live into

I identify myself quite self-consciously with a man named Melchizedek, who was described in the book of Psalms as “a priest forever” (Ps. 110:4).

to live fully, love wastefully and be all that we can be. Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today (p. 286). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

John’s gospel, I now believe, challenges literalism at every point and invites the reader into a radical, strictly non-literal encounter with Jesus of Nazareth.

Justify your prejudices with the perfume of the Bible; that is what literalists do.

Paul also claims an excessive piety for himself: “as to righteousness under the law,” he pronounces himself “blameless” (Phil. 3:6). Who else might be “an Israelite in whom there is no guile”? It was to Paul, according to the book of Acts, that the vision was given, in which “the heavens opened” and Jesus appeared. Perhaps John wanted to tip his hat to Paul in the first chapter, but because he would ultimately disagree with Paul on the meaning of salvation, he did not want to use his name; furthermore, there is no historical data suggesting that Paul ever met Jesus. John, however, could have chosen in this manner to signify his appreciation of Paul and at the same time reveal to his readers that this Johannine character and John’s entire gospel needed to be read non-literally. This is my speculation, and it is only that; but I think that as this book unfolds and other Johannine characters are introduced and examined, it will be seen to be a worthy speculation.

John is a Jewish writer, writing a Jewish book that transcends literalism at every point, and he draws his major images from Jewish mysticism, as he seeks to tell the story of Jesus’ life as one who transcends limits, breaks barriers and invites us all into a new place that he represents. This gospel is not about God becoming human, about God putting on flesh and masquerading as a human being; it is about the divine appearing in the human and calling the human to a new understanding of what divinity means. It is about bringing God out of the sky and redefining God as the ultimate dimension of the human. It is about the spirit transcending the limits of the flesh, not in some pious or religious sense, but in opening the flesh to all that it means to be human. It is about seeing Jesus as the doorway into a new consciousness, which is also a doorway into God, who might be perceived as a universal consciousness.

what are we to make of these characters who dot the Johannine landscape and through whom he tells his story? Some of these characters appear in no other written Christian source of which we are aware; others, who do appear in previous Christian writings, have been newly defined in John’s gospel with images that have never before been attached to them.

You will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man” (John 1:51). It is a reference to that familiar vision of Jacob in the book of Genesis, a reference popular in Jewish mysticism and one that will appear again and again in John’s gospel.

The second level sought to understand Jesus as he was filtered through the Johannine community, a group that inevitably interpreted Jesus through the lens of the traumas which engulfed them

So you are Simon,” Jesus says, “but your destiny is to become as firm as a rock

This set the framework for the third stage in the transition of the Johannine community. In this new context the tensions became internal. As people sought to redefine themselves outside the context of Judaism, they wrestled with how far they could go in speaking about the Jesus experience as a God experience without making discipleship something that many of their own members, who had been raised in Judaism, found impossible to affirm. These formerly Jewish disciples might be able to see Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish expectations, but could they go to the place where God and Jesus were so closely identified that they could hear Jesus make the claim of oneness with the Father?

These formerly Jewish disciples might be able to see Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish expectations, but could they go to the place where God and Jesus were so closely identified that they could hear Jesus make the claim of oneness with the Father? Could they be comfortable with the suggestion that Jesus might have applied the divine name of “I AM” to himself? As they sought to come to a common mind on these issues, another split occurred in their community: Some who could not make this developing transition broke away and returned to the synagogue. To the Johannine community, those who did so were seen as traitors. Still others wavered between the two camps as doubters, as those who might abandon Jesus, might deny him, as those who were always on the verge of falling away before finally finding the courage to move into a new place and to embrace a new vision. Of course there were also some at the core of this community who were always faithful to their developing vision. They came to be known as the ideal disciples, even the beloved disciples. In the passion story, the Fourth Gospel appears to develop characters who symbolize each of these historical responses.

First, there are with him “some officers from the chief priests and Pharisees.” Judas in this gospel ultimately represents them all. He is, however, also accompanied by Roman soldiers. That is an addition that only John makes. The opposition of the Jews to Jesus will soon be portrayed in this gospel as the opposition of the world to the Jesus movement. So the Roman soldiers are introduced here to prepare for the final confrontation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate, an episode that will dominate John’s passion account.

If one reads John’s narrative of the cross literally, it will never be understood. Thus warned anew, we plunge into John’s story of the crucifixion, the resurrection, the gift of the spirit and the consequences of these acts as John understood them—namely new life, new consciousness, and a new doorway into the mystery of God. In this passion narrative John lays out clearly his purpose in composing this “new” gospel.

In the passion and crucifixion of Jesus, it is not the historical memory of Jesus that is front and center; rather, the current life experience of the community is the prism through which the story is told.

Obviously any new insight or movement within a particular faith challenges the religious status quo and produces tension. That was not the purpose of this movement, however: The followers of Jesus wanted only to expand Judaism to include Jesus, just as Judaism had been expanded many times in the past to include such figures as Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah and other prophetic voices. That is why in the earliest phase of Christianity the followers of Jesus kept trying to relate Jesus to Jewish heroes of the past, such as Abraham, Moses and Elijah. The tensions between the old tradition and this new possibility were not always comfortable, but they were at least tolerable until external circumstances made the price of any tension more costly and more threatening. That was the situation until 66 CE, when the outbreak of the Jewish-Roman war in Galilee did in fact make the price of any tension more costly and more threatening. When the war expanded to Judea, the city of Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed by the Roman army in 70 CE. At that moment, and as a direct result of that destruction, Judaism entered a struggle for survival. By the time hostilities ceased at Masada in 73 CE, Judaism had lost its national home, its holy city, its Temple and its priesthood. It could no longer tolerate any revisionist movement that sapped its energy and challenged its boundaries, and so the Johannine community was forced to flee Jerusalem.

In John’s story of the cross there is no external darkness at noon on the day of the crucifixion (as in the other gospels), because that external darkness has been incorporated into the life of Jesus. Judas thus disappears from the drama because he has been “absorbed” by Jesus. Light doesn’t destroy darkness; it shines within it and the darkness cannot extinguish it. Darkness is not darkness until it is confronted by light. Death is not death until it is confronted by life. One does not know who one is until one is confronted with who one can be. Jesus will not reject his own darkness. Rather, he will shine within it, but there will always be those who cannot make the journey into light. Through this imagery of dark and light, John presents Jesus as inviting others to step beyond all security, to embrace darkness and to transcend it, and to enter a new consciousness that relativizes all values by which life has previously been lived. That is the road to life, to mystical oneness, to wholeness. It is always scary.

John Sanford, a Jungian analyst,* sees Judas in Jungian terms as the shadow side of Jesus. Human wholeness in Carl Jung’s thinking is not possible unless one’s shadow is embraced. Shadows cannot be repressed or cut off. Sanford argues that the drama of the cross is an internal drama as much as it is an external one. He suggests that all of the characters in the passion narrative have counterparts in the human psyche.

Judas is lost. The Judah citizens he represents, who believe they have captured the holy in the forms of their religious life and practice, are lost.

The gospel of John was then tragically distorted, I now believe, by the Nicene and post-Nicene fathers, who used it to formulate their creeds. As Greek thinkers, these early Christian leaders had little appreciation for things Jewish and as far as we can tell no understanding whatsoever of Jewish mysticism. As dualists, they saw God and human life, spiritual things and material things, souls and bodies as two separate and divided, even antagonistic, realms. Not knowing the language of Jewish mysticism, these religious leaders could not possibly hear the Johannine mystical tradition, which saw Jesus not as an invader from another realm, but as the “defining” human life, bringing together into oneness the human with the divine, nor could they understand the divine as a permeating presence that opened its recipients to a new dimension of consciousness. These concepts would have been completely foreign to them. Jewish mysticism was never a majority movement inside Judaism. As mysticism tends to be everywhere, it was resisted and resented by the hierarchy of the Jewish priesthood and marginalized in the traditional Jewish community. It was, however, an option to which a Jewish community might turn when they were forced out of their normal boundaries by excommunication. That excommunication, I now believe, actually compelled the Jewish disciples of Jesus to redefine Jesus and their Jesus experience in a new, transcendent, mystical and universal language. The doorway through which mysticism entered Judaism was what is called the “wisdom tradition,” and it featured the “wisdom literature” that was composed by Jewish people in the post-exilic phase of their history. To understand how “wisdom” is used in this context, we need to go back a bit in history.

while an English scholar of Indian background, Jey J. Kanagaraj, perhaps assisted by his roots in Eastern religion, made a powerful case for reading this gospel through the lens not just of mysticism, but of a very specific school of Jewish mysticism. Kanagaraj identifies this school as “merkabah mysticism,” or “throne mysticism,” a school that New Testament scholars once considered historically irrelevant to the study of John’s gospel.

It is the word which proclaims that the life of God is found in our living, the love of God is found in our loving and the being of God is found in our being. John in this gospel is asserting that this word is made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. This does not mean that the external theistic deity comes out of the sky and enters the human Jesus in some incarnational way. It means rather that Jesus reveals in his life the freedom to live and in that living not to be at the mercy of every distorting force in life. It means that in Jesus there is a refusal to hide personal identity inside the security of tribal identity. It means that each of us can step outside the prejudices of our cultural roots, which serve to give us a sense of superiority that we think gives us a survival edge.

Peter wrestles with this. He fights, he denies, he flees, but he does not remain in the darkness as Judas did. He finally escapes. He moves ultimately beyond the human to see the meaning of Jesus, where the human and the divine are seen to flow together into oneness.

This is a literary composition, deliberately designed to move the Fourth Gospel’s story of Jesus to its grand climax. It is also designed to say to the early Christians, for whom this gospel was written, that in their conflict with the power of Rome in their generation, they must be open to the possibility that the Romans seemed to come closer to understanding Jesus than did the Jews. Indeed, winning the approval of the Roman Empire might well have been one of John’s goals. In some strange ways, his text suggests, Rome itself perceived Jesus’ power even though neither the Empire nor its representative was able to act upon it.

So we set the context for this dramatic confrontation: Judas has betrayed, Peter has denied and the religious authorities, personified by Caiaphas, have judged Jesus worthy of death. They deliver Jesus, bound, to Pilate. These Jewish accusers, however, balk at the entrance to the Roman praetorium. They refuse to enter this Gentile center of power, for it is to them unclean territory. If they do not keep themselves from this Gentile pollution, they will not be able to eat the Passover. The defining and routine rituals of religion are to be observed, and yet these accusers place themselves in the position of trusting a moral code that allows the death penalty to be carried out against religious troublemakers. Here the values of religion are deeply compromised.

The kingdom about which Jesus was speaking invites them into another realm of life—born of the spirit—in which there are no religious boundaries, not even a boundary between God and human life.

We have a law, and by that law he ought to die,” they say—and finally the real issue that separates the followers of Jesus from the synagogue worshippers is articulated: Jesus’ real crime is that he had “made himself the son of God.” He had identified himself with “the great I AM.” He had claimed that the “word of God” was spoken through him and that the “will of God” was lived out in his life.

He, like the mother of Jesus, is also nameless and enigmatic. He is called the “beloved disciple” or the “disciple whom Jesus loved,” and John will portray him as the first disciple to believe.

Now we watch as John places the mother of Jesus quite literally at the foot of the cross. That is also a unique Johannine twist. There is no reference in any other gospel to the presence of the mother of Jesus at the place of his execution. All of those great and magnificent pietàs carved or those portraits painted of the mother of Jesus holding her limp and dead son after he was taken from the cross are based solely on this single text. This detail is not history. It should be noted that it is the tenth decade of Christian history before the mother of Jesus and the cross are brought together in any Christian literature and when that juxtaposition finally occurs it serves a major Johannine motif. Christian piety and Christian art have through the centuries focused their devotional life so totally on this scene of the mother of Jesus at the cross that to point out the facts of biblical history almost seems like an act of irreverence. When we look, however, at the portrait of the mother of Jesus in the other gospels, we see why it took her so long to be placed in this role in the powerful Johannine interpretive story. She is not a major figure in any of the gospel portraits of Jesus. Her rise to prominence in the Christian tradition was very slow, far slower than most people realize.

For Peter Easter dawns as an experience of a rising and unresolved tension, a conflict between a human yearning and a lived reality; it is an experience of a struggle to believe, of an attempt, usually unsuccessful, to see meaning beyond the limits inside which life seems to be bound. There are no apparitions that appear in this episode to move Peter along. There are no revelations designed to give birth to or even to confirm his struggling faith. All Peter sees is a grave that cannot hold Jesus, grave cloths that cannot bind him. That was enough for the “beloved disciple.” Peter was, however, a harder case. Resurrection is not easy—not for him and not for us. Its truth dawns slowly. Death as the doorway to life does not seem apparent. Yet that is the way John suggests that the meaning of Easter broke into human awareness among those who came to be known as the twelve. Perhaps John is trying to say to us that the resurrection we seek is not so much that of Jesus as it is of ourselves. That makes sense if we remember that this gospel is the work of a Jewish mystic, for no one should ever try to literalize the work of a mystic.

He is portrayed as the ideal disciple, one who, in contrast to Peter, always understands immediately. The author of the Fourth Gospel has placed these two in tandem before and, as he tells the story of the resurrection, does so again. When they receive Mary’s message that the tomb has been opened, they run to see for themselves. The assumption is that both know where the tomb is and that the distance is not great. The “beloved disciple” arrives first. He will always precede Peter. At the entrance to the tomb, however, he waits, stooping down only to peer in. There he sees the burial cloths on the ground, no longer wrapped around a deceased body. John’s contrast is designed to be clear. This is not another “raising of Lazarus from the dead” story. Lazarus was a resuscitated body restored physically to the life of this world. He emerged from his tomb still bound in grave cloths. He had to be unbound and set free. Jesus, on the other hand, has clearly transcended life’s ultimate limit. He has already been transformed, raised to a new status and a new dimension of life. There will be no body on display. This is a new reality being introduced; something very different is forcing its way into their consciousness. The “beloved disciple,” who always sees beyond what Peter is able to see, does not rush into the tomb or into this mystery.

The religious authorities claim the Roman government as their ally in the struggle against Jesus and Pilate now has to decide on which of these two sides he stands.

The messianic claim has been renounced. God could never again be seen in the power symbols of either religion or politics, in church or state.

To put this placing of blame in context, we need to know that it was widely believed among the followers of Jesus at this time that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE was direct punishment for the Jewish refusal to receive Jesus. At the actual moment of the writing of this gospel, the Jewish nation was itself broken, destroyed and powerless, but the Christians were also oppressed by the world. There was hope for the world, but no hope remained in John’s mind for the religious authorities of Judaism. The message of the Christ must transcend both religion and the power of the state, so those two entities are now aligned in degrees of guilt as the drama rolls on.

Contrary to the earlier synoptic tradition, John portrays Jesus as bearing his own cross. John’s Jesus will be in control of every aspect of what John understands to be his ultimate revelation.

He is a mythological character, a symbol of those who see, of those who respond and of those who are transformed. He is the archetype of the Jesus movement. He represents the ones who are born of the spirit, the ones who are able to taste and experience, to share in the new life that Jesus came to bring. He is the “Lazarus” who has passed from death into life. The one who knows that to be in Christ is to have the life of God flow through him as the life of the vine flows through the branches. He is the symbol of the new creation, the first citizen of the new Israel, the representative of the first fruits of the kingdom of God. He is the one who sees, who believes and who understands. He is the ultimate representative of the Johannine community of believers, who have been excommunicated from the synagogue and then purged of those, like Judas, who cannot go all the way into the life that Jesus represents. He is the one who confronts those, like Peter, who waver and doubt, and he is the one who finally enables Peter (and those like him) to walk with his doubts and fears into the presence of all that Jesus means. He is the one at the Last Supper through whom Peter has to go to get to Jesus when the traitor is identified. Perhaps he is also Peter’s assurance that the traitor is not Peter himself. Perhaps John also intends it to be understood that the “beloved disciple” is the one who opens the door so the wavering Peter can get into the courtyard of the high priest. The “beloved disciple” will be the one who accompanies Peter to the tomb and then stands aside and makes way for Peter to enter before he does. Once inside the tomb, however, he will be the first to believe. Finally, he will be the one who identifies the risen Christ to Peter by the lake, the same risen Christ that Peter will finally see in the breaking of the bread on that lakeside. That experience, still to come in our investigation, is what finally will enable Peter, according at least to the author of the epilogue, to be fully restored and thus fully able to walk into the transformative Jesus experience. The “beloved disciple” is thus the ultimate definition of a follower of Jesus.

The tensions increased between the orthodox leadership and this challenging revisionist movement until finally, somewhere around the year 88 CE, the orthodox leaders of the synagogue expelled the followers of Jesus.

Pilate is the symbol of earthly power, the one who sees the kingship of Jesus, but only within limits, in vague outlines. He speaks a truth that he cannot finally embrace and becomes a symbol of the world against which the followers of Jesus must forever struggle. Finally, the “beloved disciple” is the symbol of what it means to journey beyond life’s defensive boundaries into the mystery of new life, new consciousness, that is to be found in the Christ experience.