Essay #10: Who Was Jesus?
In John 1-18, we find a very intentional description of who Jesus was both in regards to creation and to our developing relationship with God. In other words, John stands alone among the gospel writers in specifically providing us with a theological context for Jesus in addition to an historical description of his life. Surely, the historical life of Jesus is filled with theological implications. However, John alone delves directly into the cosmological, ontological, and existential backgrounds against which Jesus appeared.
Because of this, the Gospel of John carries special authority. Nowhere else that we know of is it defined for us in such precise metaphysical or philosophical terms what the mission of Jesus was in relation to God’s overarching plan of the universe and in relation to our very being. (Cosmology addresses the plan of the universe and ontology is “about being.”) Moreover, the historical life of Jesus can be understood much better once we grasp the metaphysical principles behind it that John elucidates. Without this metaphysical understanding, we are much more likely to go astray in our interpretation of Jesus’s life, and his words. In fact, there are numerous examples of such entrenched misinterpretations scattered throughout Christianity both in earlier eras and in our own time. It may be that whole branches of the faith have been founded on cherished misunderstandings of the Gospels. We will need to ponder the meaning of John’s Greek afresh in order to discover in John a much bigger invitation to return to God than is revealed in any of the translations heretofore attempted.
John wrote against the background of Hellenistic philosophy, which was stuffed full of incredibly rich theories of the universe. It had developed a vocabulary stretched very wide with meaning over hundreds of years to express these ponderings. Of all the languages of the world, it has been said that Greek and German are the most philosophical and spiritual. In both languages new words have originated to capture subtle and complicated ideas as these have arisen in the minds of philosophers, and familiar words have been enriched with whole new layers and shades of meaning. Thus both languages have been elevated to a high plane of spirituality, subtlety, and metaphorical richness. The development of the English language, on the other hand, was primarily driven by commerce. Hence, its vocabulary inclines towards the materialistic. It’s as if English wants everything to become a particular this or that, something we can hold in our hand. Greek inherently inclines to see every particular thing in terms of the universal principle that it exemplifies. It invites us to become broader, expansive, included. English—especially the hip vernacular of the present day—inherently encourages us to see the things that make up our world–and even ourselves–as individual, contracting, commodities. Consequently what seems effortlessly expressed in Greek can be both extremely difficult and hazardous to translate into English. In retrospect, it perfectly befit his subject that John wrote in Greek somewhere in the Middle East during the first century A.D. For us reading and writing English in the West twenty centuries later, however, it is not a simple matter at all to acquire his meaning.
With this brief introduction and caution, let us go right to John’s gospel and translate anew the first 5 verses:
In the foundation was the principle, and the principle was before [i.e., in front of] God, and God was the principle. This [principle] was in the foundation before God. All things came to be through it, and apart from it came to be not one thing which came to be. In it was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
From now on, we will use brackets [ ] to insert references or meanings we believe are implied by the text but not expressed word for word. These first verses read like Genesis. What is usually translated “in the beginning” has a far broader meaning than just a temporal one. It is closer to the Greek to translate it: “in the bedrock.” John is telling us nothing less than this: that in the bedrock of the universe was a principle. In other words, God did not make the universe at random, but according to a strict plan or conception—a logos. “Logos” has such enormous metaphysical meaning in Hellenistic Greek that it cannot possibly be well-translated by “word”—which is nevertheless the popular English translation. (Notice again how restrictive the English wants to be and how expansive the Greek.) Nor is there anything at all in these specific verses to suggest that the logos is Christ—any more than the author of Genesis invoked Christ when he talked about the Creation. John is setting the largest possible stage by making this (implied) connection to Genesis. By no means does this diminish the role of Jesus. Rather it helps to set it out in its full context, without which we cannot truly understand who Jesus was and why he came.
The statement that this principle was in the foundation before God further echoes Genesis, where God is made to seem to stand back and look at his creation before him and declare that it is good. In this very principle was existence, was life, and this life was the light of men. John’s references to light and darkness unmistakably recall Genesis. In Genesis, it is said that God made light in the creation of the world. Then he separated the light from the darkness. Before that was a formless void. The creation of light, and its separation from darkness, brought form and dimensionality into existence. These were the very basis for life. John also tells us that the principle of creation, which gave or was life, was light. It’s as if he is saying, “Look, God created light and made the whole world through it. Now I’m reminding you that the same principle by which He made the world is also the light of men. He made us and gave us light according to that principle, too. At the Creation, when God brought forth light and separated it from the darkness, it did not collapse back into the darkness. So now also, the same light continues to shine. The darkness did not absorb it then and now the light shines as ever.”
We are being reminded that the principle by which God created the universe is the same life and the same light that is in us. Apart from this principle there isn’t a single thing that was made, but God made everything according to it. There is a huge sense of both wonder and oneness in these first 5 verses of John. They are undoubtedly set against the rich background of Greek philosophy known as “monism,” which had developed over hundreds of years. Monism seeks to identify the one true principle or substance that unifies all of creation. John comes right in that tradition, and his language is bursting with the fervor of someone who has a great discovery to share. We are roused. We want to know: what is this principle in the bedrock of the universe that is also our light and life? How do we access it?
John goes on in verses 6-11:
There was a man, having been sent from God, whose name was John [the Baptist]. This [man] came for [the purpose of] testimony, to give testimony concerning the light, in order that all [men and women] should have confidence [trust, faith] through it. He was not that light, but [he came] in order to give testimony concerning the light. It was the unhidden light, which enlightens all men, appearing in the world. It was in the world, and the world was made through it, and the world did not discern it. It came into its own, and its own did not receive [i.e., take delivery of] it.
Jesus is not mentioned in these verses any more than in the first 5. Rather, they continue to unfold the backdrop against which the coming of Jesus will be presented. In verses 1-5, that backdrop was essentially cosmological and ontological. The origin and architecture of the cosmos (cosmology) were discussed and the source of man’s very being (ontology) was identified as the life or light emanating from God’s own creative principle, the logos. In verses 6-13, the backdrop becomes distinctly more existential. That is, John expounds upon man’s relation to the light as that relation has impacted man’s existence in the world. These verses are markedly different from what came before. Verses 1-5 offered a lofty metaphysical discussion of creation. Verses 6-13 begin with the introduction of a man sent from God to utterly and forever change the course of man’s existence—i.e., John the Baptist. The existential focus thus bursts upon us in the first of these verses. It’s as if John were saying: “I already told you how the universe was made and where you came from. Now I’m going to tell you what is the right way to live in relation to that principle of your origin, and where you have gone wrong. Or rather, I’m going to tell you about a man whom God sent to convey all this and teach you how you could come around right.”
It is worth pausing to note again the change of direction we are taking here from the pondering of cosmology and creation that we undertook in our Early Efforts, where we examined the World of Excursion. There we were interested in how the universe expanded out of God through his act of creation. Here we are more interested in learning how to trace that expansion back, as it were, to its Source. Together with John, we look to Jesus and attempt to follow him back to the Father. By observing how he comes from the Father, we aim to discover how to come from the Father ourselves. Through Jesus our study of the World of Excursion loops back. Our interest in cosmology and ontology becomes refined into an intention to discover a map showing the Way of Return.
John makes it clear where we have come to. The world and men were made through the light. This is unshakable. But even though we came from the light, we somehow failed to discern it. “It came into its own,” namely to us whom it had given life, and yet—on some level—we failed to discern, even to properly receive it. It’s as if we were sent a bar of pure gold and not only didn’t we notice it coming, we didn’t even take delivery of it when it arrived! So what did God do? He sent John the Baptist to call us out! He endeavored to break into our existential malaise by sending this locust-eating crazy man to beat his drums and sound his trumpets in front of us. In fact, he garnered so much resistance once he began his mission, that he apparently lasted a very short time. What he did do, however, was to call attention to the fact that a correction needed to be made. We who had been created by the light had forgotten what our right relation to that light was meant to be. John tells us that the light was unhidden. The Greek word is commonly translated “true,” but it conveys the sense of something “come out of hiddenness.” Yet even though God made it unhidden, we weren’t seeing it, at least not most of us, John implies.
At almost this point, Jesus appears in John’s recounting. In Jesus, he tells us, the principle became flesh and dwelt among us (verse 14). Thus the appearance of Jesus is perfectly timed in John’s “story.” He comes in order to lead us back on track, that is, to help us discern the principle of our origin and to learn to live once again in right relation to our Source. However, just before John turns squarely to introduce Jesus, he inserts a short bridge or preface of monumental importance in verses 12 and 13:
However many received it [i.e., the light], it gave to them the power to become offspring of God, to those having [built] confidence [trust, faith] in its name [i.e., authority or power], who not out of blood, nor out of the will of the flesh, nor out of a man’s will, but from God’s [will] were made to be.
Jesus is not mentioned in these verses, although every other translation interpolates him into the passage. That this is incorrect becomes clear once we see this passage for what it is: a bridge defining the very conditions under which Jesus himself–and we, too–become true offspring of God. Jesus fulfilled those conditions so perfectly in himself that John could say immediately afterwards that the very logos itself became flesh in him. In our case, we might say, the logos is still becoming flesh, or we are still striving to live in alignment with it, which is the same thing.
By defining the conditions under which one receives the power to become a true child of God, this remarkable passage establishes both the uniqueness of Jesus and our right to the very same power which he exemplified to perfection. Rather than making Jesus himself the Source who grants the power to become God’s offspring (as other translations are wont to do), this passage shows precisely how Jesus became–and we, too, can become–such offspring. Thus it brings fully alive the possibility of following Jesus home to the Father. It reminds us of St. Paul’s teaching in Romans that we are “heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.”1
While elevating Jesus to the role of supreme exemplar and teacher, this reading of John removes the mystique whereby personal salvation issues only from an acceptance of and belief in Jesus. Jesus, himself, it is worth noting, did everything he could to eschew such a mystique. He refused to accept the appellation “good,” deferring it only to the Father. He explicitly said that he came only to do the Father’s will and not his own. And he repeatedly asked those he helped or healed to keep quiet about it so as not to stir up interest in him, personally. These are neither the words nor the actions of someone who intended to claim he was the Source. However, insofar as Jesus came from the Father, he spoke with the Father’s authority and the Father’s power came through him. In this way, he was born purely out of God’s will, and not out of the will of the flesh or of the human ego. The conditions for such birthing are open to us as well, as John makes quite clear. Otherwise, it would make no sense for him to talk about offspring of God, in the plural. Jesus is made out to be the only begotten son of God by a further mistranslation, as we shall see. Rather, here, just before he introduces Jesus, John portrays the conditions for his arising like a common root from which we, too, can spring. He thus shows us linked to Jesus as frail branches are linked to the mightiest limb: they all spring from the same trunk and the same root.
Nor does John limit the arising of God’s offspring temporally to only follow after Jesus. His statement is temporally quite vague: However many received [the light], it gave to them the power to become offspring of God. Were there those who came before Jesus who received the light and got the power? It has become quite a theological hangnail whether there were enlightened men, who had received God’s light, before Jesus came or only after or through Jesus. Those who claim the latter must explain away the enlightenment of the prophets, for example, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, and of such non-Judeo-Christian masters as Lao Tzu and Buddha. It is a perilous task and one made wholly unnecessary by this passage in John. John leaves fully open the possibility of “other Christs” besides Jesus, both past and future, relative to his time. And Jesus seemed to have hoped for the same himself, saying almost with his last words, “He will do even greater things than these [which I have done], because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12).
John the Baptist himself must have received a strong measure of God’s light, since he was sent by God to give testimony of the light. His would have been false testimony had he himself not received the light. He could still differentiate himself from Jesus (John 1:15 and 1:30), describing him as a man coming after me, who was before me, insofar as he was ahead of me. Jesus was ahead of John the Baptist according to the same measure that John the gospel writer is here using to show us short. The measure is just how much light we have received. This topic is embraced fully in verses 14-18, where Jesus is formally introduced, which we will turn to shortly. However, we still have yet to leave verses 12 and 13. Before we can fully appreciate who Jesus was and the extraordinary conditions of “sonship,” we need to set those conditions against their historical background.
Let us look again at Verse 12:
However many received it, it gave to them the power to become offspring of God.
Drawing from Greek mythology, we know that the Greeks of John’s time considered it extraordinarily rare and difficult for a human being to cross the line that divided the gods from men. To attempt to do so was considered by the gods to be hubris, i.e., arrogance, and it was the one offence of men that the gods never failed to punish. There were a few men, such as Hercules, who were the progeny of gods and humans who had had intercourse. However, mankind was generally banished from sharing in the booty or the power of the gods. Prometheus served as an example of what the gods did to those who stole their property. He stole fire from them and gave it to men. Consequently, he was tied to a rock and had his liver torn out every day by vultures. Then at night it grew back again so he could suffer the same fate day after day.
John certainly knew this mythology, although to him it would have had the status of a long-prevalent religion. How utterly revolutionary, then, was his statement that by receiving God’s light, we can get the very power that offspring of God would have. In the context of Greek mythology or religion, it meant not only access to a long-forbidden realm, but extraordinary power. No Greek would have glazed over like we do when we read this statement in verse 12. Modern translations turn it into a kind of pabulum because we have heard the phrase “children of God” so many times it has lost most of its meaning for us. But the Greek would have taken note that the word translated as “children” is a word that comes from a verb meaning to generate or produce in the way that fruit is able to produce more of its own kind. John’s use of this word carries with it the connotation that as God’s offspring we should have the same kind of power within us that went into creating us. And he is even explicit. He says: it gave to them the power. The Greek word translated “power” is exousia. This word often means “supernatural power.” It literally means “from being.” John clearly intends for us to see invested in children of God the kind of power that was expressly forbidden to humans in the Greek religion of his day.
What stands behind verse 12 is the question: If all this power is possible for us by receiving the light, then who has been given the power, and where have many of us gone astray and thereby failed to receive it? John also begins his answer in verse 12:
to those having [built] confidence [trust, faith] in its name [i.e., authority or power].
It is a somewhat cryptic answer. This is not at all as straightforward as it has been made by translations which imply that it is those who believe in the name of Jesus, who receive the light. Of course, believing in Jesus is not wrong. Such translations just utterly fail to convey the depth and sweeping breadth of John’s language. For “to believe in its name” means vastly more in John’s Greek than merely to recite or invoke Jesus’s–or any other–name in order to elevate oneself in some way. The latter sounds like sorcery, that is, a reliance on some external power or extraordinary person. However, the power granted to children of God is exousia, power that springs internally from the Source of one’s own being.
The very word in Greek for “belief,” pistis, strongly connotes confidence and trust rather than the kind of mistrustful surprise at the extraordinary that goes with most magical power and belief in the same. We may recall here what was said in Essay #8 about the dangerous elevation of God’s particular caring for us to the level of the extraordinary. Similarly, when belief in a name elevates what is named to something extraordinary and external to us, this opens the door for the ego to draw attention to itself as it seeks to invoke that name to its own advantage. We earlier saw that God’s particular caring for us is nothing more (or less) than his universal caring given special emphasis for us by further manifestations of his grace. Likewise, true confidence in a name enables us to identify the person or thing wearing that name as a demonstration of God’s universal caring at a particular place and time, not as an icon with its own particular power and mystique. Our ego prefers the icon because it loves having the room to generate rules and behaviors that fit the particular mystique of the icon it chooses to orbit. However, the true child of God, like Jesus, never wants to be at the center of anyone’s orbit. And he will not accept any name, such as “good,” which he knows to be the proper name of the Father only. The true child of God is always and forever modeling for us how to direct our faith and our confidence back to the Source within ourselves. Jesus did say, “Believe in me,” and “Follow me,” but these must always be taken in the context of his prayer that we should dwell in the Father as he dwells in the Father and the Father in him. Jesus posed himself as an example for us of this internalization, which is what he meant for us to follow. The path home always leads back through oneself to the Father, not outside of onself and through another. Yet this has been the source of countless misunderstandings of Jesus and his message.2
Again, as the Greek word for “faith”, pistis, in its various forms implies being able to rely with confidence on the focus of belief, it stands somewhat apart from the concept of what we would call “blind faith.” Blind faith certainly implies reliance, but it often stands opposite to confidence. In fact, it is typically recommended by preachers as an alternative to confidence. Here confidence is implicitly or explicitly equated with self-confidence, which in turn is equated with pride. So blind faith is recommended as an alternative to pride. This might make sense were it not that blind faith without some kind of confidence or discernment to guide it passes perilously close to reliance on the will of the preacher to define and guide (if not control) it, or should we say, “the preacher’s ego.” Of course, when blind faith receives true confidence, it is no longer blind but informed by discernment. This is not the self-confidence of the ego, nor the ego’s pride, and neither is it the so-called “wisdom” of the preacher. Rather it is something that grows through and only through our direct connection with the Father. That our faith “gets sight,” so to speak, does not, however, mean that “seeing is believing.” Jesus’s response to Thomas taught us differently. But here John is really talking about receiving the light of God into the eye of the soul, not into the physical eye alone. His point is that that light, above all else, is reliable and builds confidence and trust as we receive it.
It is as if John is saying to us: “Those who get the power that goes with being offspring of God are the ones who have received, recognized, and discerned his light. It’s those who have practiced such discernment and become good at it, so that they have confidence in it and what it can do. When you discern something, you can recognize it and call it by its true name. When you have become practiced discerning the light, you have confidence that you are naming it correctly. You recognize it. You can name it. You trust that name and have confidence in it, that it is the true light.”
Having conveyed all this in highly compressed language, John further describes the offspring of God in verse 13 as those
who not out of blood, nor out of the will of the flesh, nor out of a man’s will, but from out of God were made to be.
What more could he do to convey the full nature of such offspring? He is using a 100,000 power lens and looking past the matter of a man, even past a man’s individual will—we might say “ego”—into the very essence or core of man, which is fashioned out of God’s own substance and will. When we discern God’s light and see it in ourselves, we see God. And we see it not with our eye of blood, and not even through the lens of our own individual will, but through the eye of the soul, which is the selfsame substance with God. The answer John gives, then, to our existential malady is to refocus our attention and receive the light—and the power and authority that go with it—by deepening our power of discernment and building our confidence in the very light within us. Again, to do so involves looking deeper than our material bodies and our own will. Of course, this immediately leads a reader of John to the question which prepares him for the appearance of Jesus: Who will lead us? Who will show us how to do in practice what John is teaching us in outline or in theory?
Thus the appearance of Jesus is perfectly timed in John’s “story.” He appears in answer to the cosmological, ontological, and existential exigencies that John has described. The cosmos was made according to a principle by which God’s life-giving light is infused into every part. Jesus comes to further the emanation of this light among humankind. The ontology of man is that he was made from out of the same substance of God, out of life-giving light. But in man that light has grown dim in the weakness of his discernment. Jesus comes to help mankind bring that light back into fullness, so that man returns to God in his very being. With his diminished discernment man’s existence has become limited by his inadequate power to use and rely on God’s light. Jesus comes to liberate man from these bonds by teaching him how to return to a right relation with God, in discernment of God’s light and God’s will, looking beyond the claims of man’s flesh only and beyond man’s own limited will.
In verses 14-18 John presents Jesus’s “qualifications” to fulfill these roles:
And the principle became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his effulgence, effulgence as of one kind from the Father, full of grace [i.e., a special manifestation of the divine presence] and unhiddenness. John [the Baptist] testified about him and called out saying, ‘This was whom I spoke of who coming after me, was before me, insofar as he was ahead of me.’ For out of his fullness [of the divine presence] we received grace [special manifestation of the divine presence] followed by grace [another special manifestation]. For the law was given through Moses, [while] grace and unhiddenness came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God: [he who was of] one kind [with] God, he being at the bosom of the Father, revealed him.
Jesus sweeps into the picture in a dramatic parallel to the opening verse of John. In Verse 1 we were told that the principle of the world’s founding was with God and was God. In Verse 14 we are told that the very same principle became embodied and dwelt among us. Thus in Jesus is a direct link between heaven and earth. John makes this point explicit by telling us that Jesus is “of one kind from the Father.” The Greek here is typically translated “the only begotten son from the Father,” but it does not explicitly say that. For starters, the Greek word for “son” is not here. A similar phrase occurs in Verse 18, and the word for “son” is not there either. (There is a variant manuscript of the Greek New Testament in which the Greek word for “son” does occur in Verse 18, although not in Verse 14. However, this is almost certainly an interpolation on the part of the copyist probably because he was preparing a later manuscript, and the Greek in Verse 18 as we have it from earlier sources violates rules of grammar and is hard to understand. He was probably trying to clean it up.)
The actual Greek under discussion here is the word: monogeneis. In Greek vernacular it can mean “only begotten.” It can also mean “born from the same mother.” Nothing in this second meaning precludes the possibility of there being multiple sons born to that mother, but it would make no sense in the current context. What tells against the first possible meaning is that it would make John contradict himself. In Verse 12, as we noted above, he said that it is possible for anyone who receives the light to become a child of God. If John meant to tell us just two verses later that God has only one son, this would be blatantly inconsistent with his earlier claim.
However what tells more than anything against the translation, “only begotten son of God,” is the whole context into which John has set his description of Jesus. Up to this point, John’s use of language has been anything but vernacular. He has pushed even the Greek to the outer limits of its ability to express metaphysical concepts. His reader has had to stretch his understanding of many Greek words in order to begin to comprehend what John was getting at. There should be no exception in coming to terms with the word monogeneis. John is pushing the limits with this word, too. He means to convey yet another subtle metaphysical understanding. So we will need to look at this word very carefully in order to follow him.
Monogeneis is formed from two other words, monos and genos. The first of these means “one” and the second is the root of the Latin word, genus, which was imported into English. It can be rendered as “kind.” Thus the Greek strictly means “one kind.” God and Jesus are “of one kind.” They are “in the same genus,” so to speak. Then we come to the question: What does “of one kind” mean if it does not mean “only begotten?”
The answer, as we have said, comes from the context of John’s description of Jesus, that is, from the very careful explanation that he gave before. He told us that the world, although created by the light, did not fully discern or receive it. Those who did receive it and kept confidence in it accrued in special power to become offspring of God. The world’s problem is that it lacks the fullness of light. It incompletely manifests or expresses God’s creative principle, the logos. Against this background, Jesus came not as one lacking light but rather as one in whom the logos was made flesh to dwell among us. And we beheld the effulgence of his light. Thus, in Verse 14, John’s first reference to Jesus, he presents him in explicit contradistinction to our own lack of fullness. In that respect, Jesus is of a different kind from us, which John explains further.
In Verse 16, he talks about the fullness of the divine presence that was in Jesus, and makes a point of saying that we received from out of that fullness grace [special manifestation of the divine presence] followed by grace [another special manifestation]. In other words, unlike us, Jesus had received God’s light fully. And unlike us, he took God’s creative principle into the flesh intact. Christ is full of grace, that is, God’s presence, while we have some measure out of God’s fullness. We have some of it, namely, one instance of God’s grace or presence, followed by another, discontinuously. Jesus, like the Father, lacks nothing of presence, light, grace, or creative principle. He dwells in God’s presence continuously. It is in precisely this sense that Jesus and the Father are “of one kind,” while we are not. But there is nothing in this about ancestry, pedigree, or lineage that would prevent any of us, in principle, from becoming of the same kind as Jesus and the Father.
It’s as if John is saying: “We humans are of the sort who have lost sight of the light. We don’t fully embody God’s creative principle. We will become children of God once we do, with all the rights and powers that go with that. Now Jesus is of the same sort as the Father. He came absolutely filled and effulgent with light. He has God’s presence all the time. And since he perfectly embodies God’s creative principle, he is the ideal one whom God sent to lead us back to God, our true home. By following Jesus, we may one day hope to dwell in the Father in kind with him.”
Were Jesus the only begotten son of the Father in the traditional sense, we could expect to remain always at some further remove from our Source. We could expect always to have to rely on some sort of mediation between us and God, lying outside the circle of God’s own progeny or immediate family, as it were. We could expect to carry feelings of exclusion for which the rituals of the church might be soothing, if not ultimately healing. Through all of these expectations, we would hold ourselves as outcasts and our vision of Heaven as but a distant memory, perhaps before the cataclysm of “the Fall.” Fortunately, and thanks be to God, these expectations are the manufacture of our own minds, and not what John is attesting to in his gospel.
To have John tell it, there is nothing to prevent us from becoming “of the same sort” as the Father, just as Jesus was. John explicitly sets forth the things that entitle one to become a child of God, defines us as lacking in those things, and presents Jesus as one who dwelt among us replete in all those things. In fact, to be replete in those things–i.e., “full of grace and truth”–was for John part of an explanation of the somewhat cryptic adjective he used to describe Jesus in the same sentence, namely, monogeneis, “of one kind.” We should see monogeneis as explained by the appositives, came from the Father and full of grace and truth. We should be very cautious to interpolate an additional meaning to it which runs completely counter to what John said two verses before.
Jesus came not as any ordinary teacher because we were meant not just to follow him but to take him into our very selves. This may be John’s point when he distinguished Jesus from Moses and the law in Verse 17. Those following Moses obeyed a set of laws that remained external to them. Those who followed Jesus took him inside.
Jesus is the very embodiment of all we need to return to God. It is no wonder that we are inclined to eat Jesus’s flesh and drink his blood. These are, of course, symbols for the spiritual gifts we receive from Jesus. The overarching point is that Jesus came just so that we could draw close enough to absorb him into ourselves and in so doing approach closer and closer to becoming of the same sort with him and the Father. As Jesus is “bosom close” with the Father, so we seek to be bosom close with him in order to have the Father revealed to us through him:
No one has ever seen God: [he who was of] one kind [with] God, he being at the bosom of the Father, revealed him. (Verse 18)
With this sense of who Jesus was, and some grasp of the ontology that he embodied, we are prepared now to embark on an exploration of the Christology, or specific practices of return, that he came to teach.3
Notes:
1. See Romans 8:17.
2. Often quoted in this regard is Jesus’s statement that “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me” (John 14:6). Yet we can discern from the foregoing that Jesus could not possibly have meant that he alone as an individual had the authority and power to grant access to the Father. What he meant was that he had such power as the perfect exemplar of one who had fully received God’s light. In that regard it is true,–no one comes to the Father except him who follows the example of Jesus, who conforms himself to the ways practices that Jesus exemplified and taught, and who thereby receives God’s light and life in himself along with God’s power. To gain additional discernment of this truth, we might ask ourselves what would be the greater saving act. Would it be to lead another by teaching and by example to a fuller awareness of his divine origin and likeness and to his restored ability to manifest Godliness? Or would it be to issue passage into Heaven to any and all who would profess faith in one’s ability to do so, regardless of the condition of their souls? If the latter, would it not still be true that at least some such souls would need education or refinement before being either able or willing to live in such close proximity to the Father? If Jesus would have to teach us in Heaven how to live, how much greater is God’s grace that he sent Jesus to teach us here on Earth, where we are blessed with a world that is much better suited to our level of awareness.
3. We realize that the foregoing exegesis violates a well-established preconception about what John is telling us regarding Jesus’s relationship to God. Nevertheless, it is absolutely critical to step outside of that preconception and return to the Greek in order to take flight again from what John’s precious words really mean for us. The consequence for us if we stick dogmatically to any preconceptions is to be limited in our understanding of how to return to God. If the foregoing interpretation of John seems reckless, then we must admit, following Jesus is a very dangerous business indeed and does at times involve a kind of reckless digging after the truth. It can involve us in something like an archaeological dig into the Gospel. We need to come prepared for that and what it might uncover that we had not expected.
Mere repetition does not get us home. If we truly want to follow Jesus, if we want to return to God, then we have to learn to think like God, in the boldest and most creative ways. God’s creativity, God’s thoughts, cannot be contained fully in words, not even in Greek. It takes us getting inside the words like birds getting inside the wind and riding it and letting themselves be carried to faraway places. In our instance the wind is the Spirit. We must believe that the Spirit lives inside the words, and also that the Spirit blows through them and far, far beyond them into the highest reaches of the universe. We can surely catch the Spirit in the words. But then, if we are to hold on, we have to be willing to let it take us with it to entirely new visions of ourselves, our world, and God—visions which may separate us from familiar institutions, from men, even from beliefs we once held dear. The words become like monuments to a great promise seen from space. In our flight we look down fondly upon them even as we give deep, deep thanks that the Lord has remembered us and filled us with more of the One True Light that is vast beyond all uttering and all taking of pen to paper.
John told us that Jesus came full of “unhiddenness” in addition to grace. Jesus was always about showing us how to come back to God’s presence. He did it not by writing a single word that has come down to us, but by revealing what of God’s essence was hidden in each situation he encountered. What was hidden was precisely what needed to be exposed to enable his people to re-align themselves to receive and to share the presence of God. The same revelation is available to us as we embrace Christ consciousness with an open mind and an eager heart.
Karunandaji's Mind 