Another midrash from the WOJ that folks might find interesting... Today people say they “believe in Jesus”, but that means even less for them than it did for Paul – he urged his followers to believe that Jesus is God incarnate, that he takes away their sins and at a future time will welcomes them into heaven. Today, “I believe in Jesus” instead points vaguely toward a nebulous sense that he is the believer’s personal spiritual friend, poised to punish anybody the believer hates, and is always present in some undefined way as a kind of invisible guide and fixer-upper who has power to wipe away sins (so don’t worry about sinning, as long as you have My Buddy Jesus by your side) and reward the believer with whatever the believer wants (so go ahead and arrogate or destroy just as you wish). For both, Paul and many modern Christians, to “believe in Jesus” requires little if any actual change in behavior or thinking (if there is any thinking going on). As a result, I have personally observed far more selfishness and bigotry among supposed Christians than serious love for and aid to the unfortunate. But for John the Presbyter, the statement “Those who believe Jesus is the Anointed One” means a radical and complete change in the believers’ lives. John teaches us thus: if Jesus was sent by God to show us the way to the Æon through the unity of love, then we must love not just those we want to love, but all living souls, to the point of becoming one with them. If we do not follow exactly this path that Jesus as wayshower to the Æon points out to us, that is proof that we do not really believe he is the Anointed One. Those who hate, John says, are not among the children of God and are not followers of Jesus’s teachings. Modern people easily make a separation between thought and actions, as did Paul, the first modern man: people today see no inconsistency in going to church and talking about loving everyone, and then going right back to their jobs in which they make money by virtually enslaving workers in Third World factories or farms and selling the products at overinflated prices, and back to their, ahem, lifestyles, in which they associate exclusively with people whose skin is colored like theirs and who go to their kind of church and whose own lifestyles are approved. However, for classical people like John, thought and action were far more closely intertwined. Of course there were hypocrites, but the widespread recognition in classical philosophy was that a change in one’s thinking resulted in changes in one’s life. Paul would have agreed with this for in his letters he often insists that his life changed radically after his first vaunted vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. John, I think, would have said Paul was a hypocrite, that he had not really changed, that his behavior before and after this supposed conversion remained in large measure the same (see The Gospel of John, pages 245 and 331).
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 17:32:47 +0000
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