While putting together a post on the main site called “A Look At Jesus” made up of writings from Honest to Jesus by Robert W. Funk, I was struck by one particular sentence.
Ever notice how that happens? You’re reading along and suddenly, “Zap!” you get kidnapped by a sentence that most wouldn’t even notice, but, for some reason, in you it seems like a secret door that suddenly drops you down into another, deeper level of thinking.
Trouble is, you go back over it and try to put it into words and it really begins to turn into a smoke ring destroyed by your attempts to grab at it. But, like with a tooth where a filling has fallen out, you can’t help touching the thing!
Funk started off a long sentence with, “There is a profound difference between a new theory of reality and a new reality…” That was the rabbit hole I fell down into. As best I can translate the experience, it is like this:
There are always those who offer up their theories about life, God, an afterlife and more. It’s sometimes called Philosophy, and can be dry and abstract. Some of the theories, however, get elevated up as religion, where they become codified and concretized into teachings, into theories that are to be accepted as fact.
For me, Jesus is singularly different. He didn’t come armed with moral teachings, preaching a religion carefully linked back to the writers of the Old Testament to bolster some kind of an argument. He didn’t offer up a new theory or start a new school to study this or that.
Instead, he came with one simple message that he tried to point at through humor and shocking juxtapositions of word pictures and images. It was a simple message that was, in reality, nothing beyond a simple joyous invitation. It went unheard by the wealthy and the powerful in the arenas of religious and political life. Instead, it was aimed at and received by the poor and the questioning amongst us, the children who were too innocent to be jaded by the past or entertained by abstracts.
The message? Jesus seemed to say something like this: “The way I live and the way I will die, the things I do that you call miracles, none of these things are some new theory of reality. Theories have no place in the Presence of Ultimate Reality. You must do the most difficult thing possible – you must become who you are in the Reality of this moment. You can choose between the religion ABOUT the Reality and the Reality itself, the invitation live right now and right here, for that God’s Presence can be nowhere else.”
Peace,
Rev. Brian Robertson
It’s a wonderful testament to man’s inherit need to complicate things, turning the simple message of Jesus into so many differing sects with so many differing points of view.
Just sit.
Todd.