Wisdom jesus pdf

The book also. The Heart of Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is the path to a wonderful and radical new way of seeing the world. It is not, as is sometimes thought, simply an act of devotional piety, nor is it a Christianized form of other meditation methods. Cynthia Bourgeault here cuts through the misconceptions to show that Centering. Jesus the Wisdom of God. Adding new depth to the ethical demands of our global ecological situation, Denis Edwards argues that commitment to ecological praxis springs from the very center.

After that episode, Jesus left Nazareth and returned to Capernaum to continue His ministry see Luke Everyone in Nazareth who knew Jesus also knew that He never went off to Jerusalem to study under one of the great rabbis of that day.

What they knew about Jesus Acts Note: Since Joseph is not mentioned after the incident in the temple when Jesus was twelve see Luke , he probably had died by this time. However, we do learn that Joseph and Mary had four sons and some daughters. Although Jesus was born of a virgin see Matthew , afterward she and Joseph had a normal family life that produced several more children. The idea that Mary remained a perpetual virgin throughout her life cannot be supported by Scripture.

Indeed, there is no reason to suggest it was necessary for Mary to remain a virgin once Jesus was born. Of course, Mary should be honored as a godly woman and one who had a unique relationship with Jesus; but she should not be worshiped.

An unaccepted Prophet Acts Even His brothers did not believe in Him at this time see John Note: Jesus was not surprised by their rejection of Him. His words indicate that He viewed His rejection by family and friends as more the rule than the exception to the rule. Both crucifixion and resurrection lay ahead. H o w would they know that this teacher whose being was pouring into them, sometimes in spite of themselves, in the midst of the crosscurrents in their hearts, would all too soon be crucified, die, and rise again?

It all lay up ahead. What caused them to say "yes" to Jesus? We may say "yes" to Jesus because we know now that he is the Son of God, that he died and rose again, and that in union with him we hope to do likewise. They didn't know this. What said "yes"?

I'd like to explore this question more deeply by looking at one of the most interesting and significant people who said "yes": the Samaritan woman at the well, whose story we read in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. To fill in a bit of the background, Samaria and Judea were adjacent Israelite kingdoms. While Samaritans and Jews were both Semitic people, descendants of the original twelve tribes of Israel, they had been at odds with each other for centuries, and Jews normally didn't speak to Samaritans.

Certainly Jewish men didn't speak to Samaritan women. So there's something very striking and odd in the configuration of this story to begin with. At high noon, Jesus draws up to a well in Samaria in order to travel from Galilee to Jerusalem one has to cross Samaria and asks a woman drawing water there for a drink of water. Here is the dialogue that ensues, found in John Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well.

It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink. The Samaritan woman said to him, " H o w is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and flocks drank from it? The water that I will Jesus as a Recognition Event II give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. When I listen closely, the first thing I hear is a sort of mutual boldness. Clearly Jesus sees something in this woman from the start, for him even to begin to address her.

And far from being intimidated, she returns his serves beautifully. When he talks about water she challenges him, but when he ups the ante and moves from literal water that water down in that well that you haul with a bucket to living water, she goes right along with him.

And when he says, "With the water that I give you, you will never thirst again," she catches his meaning exactly; she makes the leap right along with him. It's a fascinating exchange. There is a heart-to-heart connection and a heart-to-heart inner seeing. H e sees who she is; she sees who he is. And in the light of that mutual recognition they keep on empowering each other and drawing each other along to a greater self-disclosure, until finally, a few lines later, Jesus says to her, "The hour is coming and is even now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for that is the kind of worship the Father wants.

When he comes he will tell us everything. It is the first time in this gospel that Jesus reveals his true identity to anyone. Something he sees in her gives him the confidence to be so nakedly vulnerable; and something she sees in him gives her the confidence to follow his lead, to go higher and higher and deeper and deeper in herself, knowing far beyond what she could know from ordinary knowingness, knowing fully in the immediacy of her heart.

This quality of awareness is not something that comes from outside the moment. Rather, it grows up in the moment itself tfirough the quality and energy of the heart connection. It is pristine and clear, and it is the basis of all true belief. Bruno has some beautiful words to say about the nature of this transfusion a few paragraphs further along in Second Simplicity. H e , too, has been reflecting on the mysterious energy of the exchange between Jesus and this unknown woman at the well, and he observes: "This Jesus whom we encounter is a light at the center of the world, a fire at the world's edge.

He moves beneath the images of himself as an alternate center of energy. H e awakens that which lies at the core of my own being. The series of Jesus's healings in the gospels are the story of the gradual raising to life and consciousness, to freedom and fullness, of this nascent person that I am.

In the gospels, all the people who encountered Jesus only by hearsay, by what somebody else believed about him, by what they'd been told, by what they hoped to get out of him: all those people left. They still leave today. The ones that remained—and still remain—are the ones who have met him in the moment: in the instantaneous, mutual recognition of hearts and in the ultimate energy that is always pouring forth from this encounter. It is indeed the wellspring.

After heated discussion, the debate was finally brought to an end when one board member stood up and said, " N o way! If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for my son.

The majority of Christians are still decidedly more comfortable reciting the Lord's Prayer or Twenty-third Psalm in the old King James Version than in the many new translations now available my well-educated grandmother insisted that prayer sounded holier when spoken in "thees" and "thous". And one Sunday morning when I offered the Lord's Prayer in the original Aramaic of Jesus, several members of my congregation were distinctly troubled.

Jesus was a Near Eastern event. We need to keep reminding ourselves of this. From Palestine, of course, its influence radiated out in all directions. One line came west, carried by the apostle Paul through Turkey and into the Greco-Roman lands.

That's the line we're most familiar with. But the energy also traveled in directions that we know a lot less about. Another line went southwest to Africa and from there jumped across the Strait of Gibraltar and traveled up the west coast of France to the Celtic strongholds of Brittany and Ireland.

Still another line radiated east into Persia, India, and even China. And the energy certainly stayed right there in the Middle East, in lands that are today primarily Islamic: Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. All of these energy streams flowing out from the Jesus event had their unique flavors—and they are very different from the flavor we're used to in our own stream.

Back even fifty years ago the whole picture seemed a lot simpler. We had the Bible and for most people this meant the King James Bible ; we had tradition; we had our creeds; we had our rules; we had our story line right.

What was conveyed through the above channels was orthodox; what was not was heresy. And yes, some Christians did see things from differing viewpoints: there were Catholics and Protestants, and when they tried to converse with each other, this was known as ecumenism.

Even today, the great majority of North Americans still experience Christians as coming in only two flavors: Catholic or Protestant. Many of us will have heard of the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches— although that is pretty much the limit of the known Christian universe.

But what about the Ethiopian church? The Oriental Orthodox? The Nestorians? The ancient Syriacs? The Malabar Christians? The Chinese Christians of Xian with their distinctly Buddhist-flavored versions of the teachings of Jesus?

What do we know of all these other Christian streams of influence? It's easy to be dismissive, of course—to simply shake our heads and say, "That's all gnostic. We don't exactly know what it means, but the one thing we do know is that anything labeled "gnostic" is not scriptural and not orthodox; there's something suspect about it. Later in this chapter I will try to shed some light on the words "gnostic" Jesus in Context 15 and "gnosticism.

The two chief earmarks of the Roman filter are that it tends to confuse unity with uniformity and it puts a high priority on order and authority. You can see how over the centuries these two tendencies have played out in the Western Church. Speaking of orthodoxy, a lot of Christians assume that the word orthodox means right belief. It's all about catechisms and creeds: believing the right things about Jesus, believing the way the church teaches you to believe.

And yes, the word does etymologically derive from the Greek ortho right and dokeo to think —or in other words, it means "right thinking. Orthodox would then mean "right glory" or "right praise" , and while this may be linguistically, well, unorthodox, it does come a lot closer to conveying the spiritual ambience of most of nonRoman Christianity or in other words, the other degrees of the Jesus-event arc.

Particularly for the Near Eastern Christians, there was a strong sense that belief was not something that should be pinned down too tightly, like angels dancing on the head of a pin. People come from all different backgrounds and all different levels of spiritual maturity, and belief will fluctuate accordingly.

But what should properly hold the body of Christ together is right praise, the ability to transcend all these differing viewpoints and in one voice though maybe varied harmonies offer glory and thanksgiving to the Master whose life transforms the human heart. Whatever the literal meaning of the term "orthodox," this is its authentic spiritual meaning.

In the West, as I said, we early on lost that generosity of spirit. We'll need to regain some of that breadth of vision before it's possible even to entertain the notion of Jesus as a wisdom master, because some of ideas I will be presenting in support of it are slightly unorthodox if we stick with a Protestant, evangelical, Western definition of what orthodox means.

But as we allow ourselves to open to the wealth of new information and insights now coming our way, we begin to realize how tight a box we've been living in. In the Wake of Nag Hammadi It is no exaggeration to say that since the mid-twentieth century our Western map of the known Christian universe has been blasted wide open. From at least four directions new evidence has been streaming in to suggest that we are long overdue for a fundamental reevaluation of our understanding of the Jesus event.

While some conservative Christians still balk at the prospect, most of mainstream biblical scholarship has gotten on board. There is simply too much new information out there to ignore. Heading the list of these new sources of information is a whole new set of primary scriptural materials discovered in the early to mid-twentieth century, primarily in Egypt. The most stunning of these is the Nag Hammadi Codex, a veritable treasure trove of early Christian sacred writings, many of them heretofore unknown, or known of but presumed to be lost forever.

These priceless scrolls were found during the final days of World War II, carefully stored in a large urn in a cave near Nag Hammadi, along the upper Nile. In a great tale of international intrigue, they were smuggled out of Egypt, sequestered for a while in the manuscript collection of Carl Jung, and at last released to an international consortium of biblical scholars who could begin to edit and assess them.

The work continues to this day, and it still occasionally makes media headlines. The first questions, of course, were, "What are these writings? Jesus in Context 17 How did they get there? These writings had once been part of the monastery's sacred scriptures—their "bible," so to speak, in those fluid early centuries before the contents of the New Testament were nailed down—but they had failed to make the cut among tightening standards of orthodoxy. In the year , Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria ordered the monks to destroy all writings not specifically designated as canonical.

Heartsick at the thought, the monks sealed their treasure in a large clay time capsule until some wiser and kinder era when the contents could once again be appreciated. The Nag Hammadi collection is a huge find, both in size and import. Among the many important early texts recovered here, probably the most significant is the Gospel of Thomas, which gives us a radically new take on Jesus and the metaphysics behind his teachings.

I will have much more to say on Thomas in chapter 5. Scholars have been busy for several decades now evaluating these texts and assessing how they change our picture of early Christianity—which they do in big ways. The second influence widening the picture for us has been a relatively new field of scholarly study known as Syriac studies, which came into its heyday in the s and in its time was quite a high-tech enterprise.

Scholars began to discover that if they scraped beneath the surface of certain later manuscripts chiefly liturgical ceremonies in use among Syrian-speaking Christians, they found a living record of oral traditions that had existed from the earliest Christian era—long before the church consolidated around its Byzantine base of orthodoxy. Since Jesus himself emerged out of this stream Syrian as well as Jesus's native Aramaic are both part of the Semitic linguistic and cultural stream , these memories carried considerable weight.

It was a drastically different take on who Jesus was and what his mission was all about. The third major stream of influence also arrived from the desert at about the same time as the Nag Hammadi was found. It was the discovery, at Qumran, of the cache of writings commonly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Of course, these are not Christian texts. Scholars generally identify them as belonging to the Essene community, a mystical Jewish sect that encamped at Qumran and undertook rigorous ascetical practices in order to prepare for the Messiah's imminent return.

The importance of these writings for our understanding of Jesus is that most scholars now feel that it was in this matrix of Jewish mystical expectation and millennialist fervor that Jesus's own sense of vocation was most immediately shaped. The discovery of these scrolls allows us to see Jesus more clearly within his own context. It also gives a distinctly different accent to his teachings as we realize how much of what he had to say was already deeply present in the apocalyptic yearning and ferment of the Judaism of his times.

Finally and this may seem like it's out of left field, but in light of some of the things I was saying in the first chapter maybe you'll see that it's not , an important stream of insight once again available to us has come through the recovery of Christianity's own contemplative tradition.

The past forty or so years have been an era of contemplative reawakening. Christian seekers now have at their disposal two authentically Christian methods of meditation: Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation.

Centering prayer, the practice I myself have been trained in, was developed in the early s by the Trappist monks of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, and has been further refined and popularized primarily by Father Thomas Keating. Tens of thousands of people worldwide now practice it daily. Meanwhile, there's at least that many practicing Christian Meditation, a parallel form of silent meditation developed in about the same era by the Benedictine abbot Dom John Main.

What does it mean to have tens of thousands of Christians Jesus in Context 19 meditating? Quite a lot, because meditation is the universal and time-tested method for "putting the mind in the heart. For the first four centuries of Christian experience, this is the way it was done; Christians connected with their living Master present in their hearts the name for this practice was anamnesis, or "living remembrance". That's the skill set, if you want to put it in those terms, which meditation once again makes available to us.

The early church fathers used to speak of a pathway of perception they called epinoia, which meant knowing through intuition and direct revelation, not through the linear and didactic dianoia of logic and doctrine and dogma.

Sixteen centuries later we're learning the process all over again. And when we do so, we can begin to see through our own eyes what those early Christians saw. This inner seeing brings an important second line of bearing to all these wonderful new texts, resources, and treasure troves that the past five decades have bestowed upon us.

Savior o r Life-Giver? What emerges from this new picture? The main difference between the Christianity we're familiar with through our Western filter and the Christianity coming to us from these new sources can be captured in two words which are not nearly as formidable as they first sound: the difference is between a soteriology and a sophiology.

What do these two words mean? Jesus is seen as the one who died for our sins, who rescued us both individually and corporately from the exile and alienation brought about through the disobedience of Adam and Eve. This emphasis entered the theology of the West early, and it entered through the apostle Paul.

You probably remember Paul's story. If not, you'll find it in the first several chapters of the book of Acts. Prior to his conversion, Paul then known as Saul was an adamant foe of Christianity.

H e was a Pharisee and a perfectionist, intent on observing every detail of the Jewish law. Privately he was clearly worried that something in his being was dark and damaged he mentions this from time to time in his epistles , but seeing no other options, he was trying his best to work out his salvation through a meticulous observance of the Law.

Such was his state when, en route to Damascus to persecute Christians, he had a powerful visionary encounter with the risen Jesus in which he experienced himself as forgiven and saved. That dramatic experience became the emotional epicenter of all his theological reflection, and as he traveled west on his missionary journeys, he carried it with him. Four centuries later history repeated itself, with a person only slightly less influential to the course of Christianity in the West: Augustine of Hippo.

Like Paul, he had been trying to save his soul by meticulously following a path—in his case, a path of gnostic esotericism. And he, too, found himself suddenly transported out of his complicated metaphysics and brooding self-hatred into the radiant presence of Christ.

Augustine's personal experience of the contrast between human darkness and the light of Christ eventually found expression in his doctrine of original sin. Over time that contrast got even more accentuated, to the point where a strong vein of Western spirituality began to speak of "the total depravity of man.

I continue to be dismayed at the number of times during a Centering Prayer workshop that I mention the divine indwelling "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you" , only to have someone in the audience vigorously correct me: " N o , human beings are totally sin- Jesus in Context 21 fill; nothing of God lives within us. The Christianity of the East saw things radically differently. Theirs was not a soteriology, but a sophiology. The word "sophiology" has as its root the word "wisdom.

Christianity was supremely a wisdom path. In the original Aramaic of Jesus and his followers there was no word for salvation. Salvation was understood as a bestowal of life, and to be saved was "to be made alive. Jesus's disciples saw in him a master of consciousness, offering a path through which they, too, could become ihidaya, enlightened ones. A sophiological Christianity focuses on the path. It emphasizes how Jesus is like us, how what he did in himself is something we are also called to do in ourselves.

By contrast, soteriology tends to emphasize how Jesus is different from us—"begotten, not made," belonging to a higher order of being—and hence uniquely positioned as our mediator. At first the sophiological take may seem strange to you: definitely a variant and perhaps even a heretical position. But as the evidence begins to pour in from the other degrees of the Christian circle, we begin to see that it is the West that holds the variant position. From the Gospel of Thomas and the Nag Hammadi collection in general, from the Syriac liturgies, from the African desert fathers and mothers, from Celtic poetry and Chinese "Jesus sutras" the same sophiological message emerges.

I will be here to help you. But you must do the work yourself. They both imply an integral, participational knowledge carried not in one's head but in one's entire being. In fact, the Hebrew equivalent for tiiese terms is da'ath, which is the same word used for "lovemaking"—as in "David entered Bathsheba's tent and 'knew' her. In this broader sense, then, all sophiological Christianity is gnostic.

And Jesus is definitely gnostic himself. Where we get into trouble is when we confuse this broader meaning of the word "gnosis" with a late and specifically Greek heresy that began to affect Christianity during the second and third centuries and became the subject of considerable fulmination from the early church fathers. In this more restricted usage, Gnosticism is dualistic, top-heavy with nouns like most Greek philosophy , and metaphysically complex, and it tends to confuse integral knowing with esoteric information, often conveyed through secret initiatic rituals.

In this sense, sophiology is definitely not Gnostic. To further complicate the subject, you'll sometimes find teachings where these two streams seem to overlap—as, for example, in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, where some of the gnostic metaphysical language is used but within a clearly Semitic spiritual context. The confusion can be solved on a case-by-case basis once one realizes that Gnosticism capital G is the distortion that inevitably results when one tries to download gnosis integral knowing into exclusively mental constructs.

To reject the entire rich and authentic tradition of Christian sophiology as Jesus in Context 2? W i s d o m and W i s d o m Teachers When I talk about Jesus as a wisdom master, I need to mention yet another feature of the Near Eastern context unlike our own. In the Near East, "wisdom teacher" is a recognized spiritual occupation.

That's not so in the West. I remember how back in seminary I was taught that there were only two categories of religious authority within the Judaic tradition: one could be a priest or a prophet. That indeed may be the way the tradition has filtered down to us in the West. But within the spiritual traditions of the wider Near East including Judaism itself , there was also a third, albeit unofficial category: what I call the moshel moshelim, or teacher of wisdom, the one who taught die ancient traditions of the transformation of the human being.

These teachers of transformation, among whom I would place the authors of the Hebrew wisdom literature such as Ecclesiastes, Job, and Proverbs, may be the early precursors to the rabbi whose task it was to interpret the law and lore of Judaism often creating their own innovations of each.

The hallmark of these wisdom teachers was their use of pithy sayings, puzzles, and parables rather than prophetic pronouncements or divine decree.

They spoke to people in the language that people spoke, the language of story rather than law. How do we know that Jesus was seen as a wisdom teacher? Aside from the fact that throughout the gospels people spontaneously address him as "Rabbi," I can make my point by asking this simple question: "What literary form do you associate with Jesus's teachings?

A person who teaches in parables is teaching within a wisdom tradition. As we shall see shortly, Jesus not only taught within the tradition, he turned it end for end. But before we can appreciate the extraordinary nuances he brought to his understanding of human transformation, we need first to know something about the stream he was working in. There has always been a strong tendency among Christians to turn him into a priest—"our great high priest," in the powerful metaphor of the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews.

The image of Christos Pantokrator "Lord of All Creation" dressed in splendid sacramental robes has dominated the iconography of both Eastern and Western Christendom.

But Jesus was not a priest. H e had nothing to do with the temple hierarchy in Jerusalem, and he kept a respectful distance from most ritual observances. Nor was he a prophet in the usual sense of the term: a messenger sent to the people of Israel to warn them of impending political catastrophe in an attempt to redirect their hearts to God. Jesus was not interested in the political fate of Israel, nor would he accept the role of Messiah continuously being thrust upon him.

His message was not one of repentance and return to the covenant. Rather, he stayed close to the perennial ground of wisdom: the transformation of human consciousness. H e asked those timeless and deeply personal questions: What does it mean to die before you die? H o w do you go about losing your little life to find the bigger one? Is it possible to live on this planet with a generosity, abundance, fearlessness, and beauty that mirror Divine Being itself?

These are the wisdom questions, and they are the entire field of Jesus's concern. If you look for a comparable category today, the closest analogy would probably be the Sufi sheik, who wields the threefold functions of wisdom teacher, spiritual elder, and channel for the direct transmission of blessing bamka , in a fashion closely parallel to Jesus's himself. The sheik is a distinctly Near Eastern category, and it probably best preserves the manrie that Jesus himself once wore.

Jesus in Context 25 Jesus Was N o t a H i c k As we conclude this revisioning exercise, one other thing needs to be said in order to adjust the filters through which we look at Jesus. Within our Western tradition there has been a strong tendency to sentimentalize Jesus as an uneducated tradesman.

After all, didn't he grow up in a small town in Galilee as a humble carpenter's son? We're actually somewhat invested in this fantasy, because it strengthens our case that he learned what he learned directly from God. But when you read the Bible carefully, the picture doesn't hold up.

First of all, we need to recognize the implications of the fact that Jesus grew up in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. We tend to think of Jerusalem as the cultural center and that going up to Jerusalem from the Galilean lands was like going from Appalachia to New York City.

But in point of fact, it was the other way around. Far from being a cultural backwater, Galilee was actually the more cosmopolitan environment because it lay on the Silk Road, that great viaduct of human commerce which from time immemorial has connected the lands of the Mediterranean with the lands and culture of Central Asia and China.

The Silk Road went right through the city of Capernaum, where Jesus did a lot of his learning and his teaching. It was an environment in which he would have been fully exposed to a variety of ideas that could be seen as the New Age of his time.

And Jesus evidently soaked up spiritual teaching like a sponge. While he was definitely his own person, he was not operating in a cultural vacuum. His teachings show clear areas of overlap with the great stream of sophia perennis flowing through other spiritual traditions, particularly Buddhism and Persian light mysticism.

Second, we know that he could read. We learn this right from the scriptures themselves, when we see him in Luke walking into the synagogue in that great moment of his public debut, reading from the scrolls of the prophet Isaiah and then announcing, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled. H e was a literate citizen of his day. Further, we know that he almost certainly had some sort of religious training or apprenticeship. There has been a continuous effort to link him with the Essene community I spoke of earlier, whose teachings and spiritual practices are recorded in the Qumran scrolls.

The Essenes were a Jewish ascetical sect, rigorous in their pursuit of repentance and purification. There's a very good chance that John the Baptist belonged to this sect. And there's also a very good chance that Jesus came through this training. H e didn't finally stay with it, but it is highly likely that he would have been exposed to it and known about it.

Of course, this diverse cultural background was merely the springboard for his own original genius. H e was not only a teacher of wisdom, he was a master of wisdom. H e is particularly fond of taking a familiar saying or proverb and either pushing it to die limit or overturning it altogether.

We had a glimpse already of how his mind works in the quotation from the Gospel of Thomas at the beginning of the last chapter. In place of the familiar "Seek and you shall find," he presents a complex sixfold schematic of the spiritual search, encompassing both confusion and wonder as necessary steps in the journey of reintegration.

And in one of his most familiar but challenging teachings in Luke, he takes even the Golden Rule to its outer limits, pushing beyond all traces of enlightened self-interest into a no-holdsbarred exhortation to love without counting the cost: But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.

D o to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?

For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend Jesus in Context 27 to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Luke , We can see the razor edge of his brilliance as he takes the familiar world of mashal far beyond the safety zone of conventional morality into a world of radical reversal and paradox.

H e is transforming proverbs into parables—and a parable, incidentally, is not the same thing as an aphorism or a moral lesson. Its closest cousin is really the Buddhist koan, a deliberately subversive paradox aimed at turning our usual mind upside down.

My colleague Lynn Bauman refers to parables as "spiritual hand grenades"; their job is not to confirm but to uproot. You can imagine the effect that had on his audience! Throughout the gospels we hear people saying again and again, "What is this he's teaching?

N o one has ever said anything like this before. Where did he get this? Where did he come from? But in order to be able to keep him in sight, it is helpful to know where he is coming from. Within his authentic Near Eastern context he emerges as a sophisticated, fully attuned, and even cosmopolitan teacher, working in a genre that is recognized by his audience but teaching it so much more powerfully and boldly that he pulls people right up with a start.

As we actually taste the flavor of what he's teaching, we begin to see that it's not proverbs for daily living, or ways of being virtuous. He's proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood that we arrived on the planet with into the oak tree of our fully realized personhood.

H e pushes us toward it, teases us, taunts us, encourages us, and ultimately walks us there. How he does this will be the subject of our next chapter. Here is another place where the overfamiliarity that's bred into us as a Christian culture gets in our way. A well-known Southern Baptist theologian quips that the whole of his Sunday school training could be summed up in one sentence delivered with a broad Texas drawl : "Jesus is nice, and he wants us to be nice, too.

We know a few of die parables, like those about the good Samaritan or the prodigal son. Some people can even quote a few of the beatitudes. Most everyone can stumble through the Lord's Prayer. But how often do you hear the teaching assessed a whole?

When it comes to spiritual teachers from other traditions, it seems right and fair to ask what kind of path they're on.

What does the Dalai Lama teach? What did Krishnamurti teach? How about Adyashanti? But we never ask this question about Jesus. Why not? When we actually get below the surface of his teaching, we find there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. A whole lot more. And it doesn't have much to do with being "nice. Paul's powerful injunction in Philippians "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

It's true that for the better part of the past sixteen hundred years Christianity has put a lot more emphasis on the things we know about Jesus. In the last chapter I spoke about how the word "orthodox" has come to be interpreted as having the correct beliefs. Along with the overt requirement here to learn what these beliefs are and agree with them comes also a subliminal message: that the appropriate way to relate to Jesus is through a series of beliefs.

In fundamentalist Christianity this message tends to get even more accentuated, to the point where faith essentially appears to be a matter of signing on the dotted lines to a series of creedal statements. Belief in Jesus is indistinguishable from belief about him. But this certainly wasn't how it was done in the early church— nor can it ever be done this way if what we are really seeking is to come into a living relationship with this wisdom master. Jim Marion's book returns us to the right ballpark—to the central challenge Christianity ought to be handing us.

Indeed, how do we put on the mind of Christ? H o w do we see through his eyes?