Analogue 2: The Diagnosis of the Human Condition
Diagnosis of the Human Condition
A
slave longs only for freedom and not
for his Master’s fortune, but a
son is not only a child of the Master,
he is an heir with claim
to his father’s wealth. Likewise
children of death are not only dead, death is their
only inheritance. Heirs of life, on
the other hand, are themselves alive, and they can inherit both life and death. The dead, however, inherit
nothing, for how can a dead
person become an heir?
But if those who are dead should inherit
life, not only will they live, they will never die.
A
citizen of this world, in fact, cannot
die, for he or
she has actually never lived, but one who has
begun to trust the truth is fully alive—having come to life on
the day of the Anointed
One’s appearing; that
individual, however, may well face the danger of dying, for this world’s system
is a construct, adorning itself with cities, from which they carry out the dead. In our early Jewish days we remained
orphaned, having only a mother, but when we became followers
of the Anointed One, for our
sakes the Father joined our
Mother.
SYNOPSIS
• This analog contains a series of wisdom
aphorisms either spoken by Yeshua or at
least belonging to the stream
of his wisdom tradition related
to human realities and the
world’s systems understood and transmitted in his
day.
• Specifically, these aphorisms are sapiential principles concerning:
1. Freedom versus slavery
2. Life
versus death
3. Possession by inheritance (inward deep knowing and integration) versus ownership through the purchase
of something.
4. Eternal life versus temporal life.
• All of these
principles combine in a trajectory that leads to
a new form of Life—the
God-form that cannot die or cease (as biological life does).
• These principles are what the Messiah (in his anointing wisdom and visionary seeing) brought to the world of conventional Jewish religion in the first century of the Common Era. With them he began to change human life by offering this new life-form, not through the characteristic death-dealing conventions of conventional and exoteric religion, but by introducing the practice of resurrection as an awakening of the human spirit to its origins and goal (telos).
• Yeshua unites
the mothering and fathering principles, restoring unitive
balance to a system of one-sided dualism that privileged one side of the duality over another, creating imbalances.
• This
analogue exposes the surface structure (the “cosmetic nature”)
of the present world's
system and its religious structures (cities) as a death-dealing system.Through it Yeshua brings a life-giving and better understanding of God as
Source and Father to unite
with the mothering principles of wisdom in the Jewish tradition that had been rejected earlier according to some
scholars during King Josiah’s reforms (see Margaret Barker).
• Inherent in this text may be an early, implicit Kabbalah which developed into later Kabbalah.
The Practice of Resurrection and the Reversal
of Death
As we enter the main body of the Gospel of Philip in the second analogue, we seem to be hearing a series of lost sayings from the wisdom teachings of Yeshua. Contemporary scholarship suggests that there were multiple collections of his sayings kept in remembrance by many early communities of followers, one of which was the the Gospel of Thomas. Here, perhaps, are further sayings preserved and reflected upon by Philip in the Gospel that bears his name.
In order to see and hear his words more clearly as
separate aphorisms, we can reconstruct and arrange them in
the following manner:
A slave longs only for freedom and not
for his Master’s fortune, but a son is not only a child of the Master,
he is an heir with claim to
his father’s wealth.
Children of death
are not only dead, death
is their only inheritance. Heirs of
life are themselves alive and they can inherit both life and
death.
The dead inherit nothing, for how can a dead person become an heir?
But if those who are dead should inherit life,
not only will they live,
they will never die.
A citizen of this world
cannot die, for they have never lived. But the one who has begun to trust the Truth is fully
alive.
This world is a construct, adorning itself with cities, from which they carry out the dead.
In our early days we remained orphaned, having only a mother, but for our
sakes the Father has joined our Mother.
Seen in this way, these sayings help us understand how Yeshua
and Philip saw the world-
system and culture of their time and
the spiritual conditions of humankind living within it. They
can be understood as diagnostic tools identifying the underlying
conditions of human life and the
remedies for the troubles
plaguing humanity, for Yeshua
was an extraordinary healer.
Wholeness and well-being (and a new form of life beyond the reach of death) were the
mission of the Messiah,
the goals of his divine work in this world.
In order to accomplish all of this it was necessary for him to understand what the human condition actually was and what the necessary
remedies were that could bring
humanity back to health
again. To restore humanity’s health
to fullness-of-being he first had to
properly diagnose and address the underlying
conditions themselves.
Two Fundamental Conditions
There are two basic conditions outlined in this first analysis: the issue of freedom and slavery (or conditioning) and the intractable problem of life and death (mortality and immortality). Using the metaphor of a slave serving in a large household, Yeshua saw that his or her most basic need was not to have more material possessions or even more money but to have freedom—to be released from the condition of slavery. Spiritually speaking, this metaphor highlights how freedom from enslavement is a necessary requirement in order to complete one’s spiritual quest. To change positions from being a slave to being a free-born being, one must become an heir, as improbable as that may sound. It is also perhaps the most critical step that must be taken on the path toward ultimate fullness-of-being. For Yeshua, freedom meant to change one’s status—to become a child and heir of the household—not simply to walk away, escaping from the relationship to the family to which one was enslaved because one was not a part of it. The goal is not simply to lift humanity out of enslavement and spiritual poverty but to raise it up into the status of full familial relationships, being birthed into the divine family and thus becoming heir to its inner realities. Spiritual wealth inevitably follows from this kind of radical change in status, while no amount of wealth can give a person birth-rights to their divine inheritance.
Enslavement also
constitutes a form of death, for it arrests
the spiritual evolution and development of life itself. From the viewpoint of the author, this seemingly
unalterable state (called death) can be completely reversed: death can be transformed back into life through resurrection. This transformation into Life is one which transcends biology and creates a new life-form that is Eternal. These
transformations offer a
radical new vision of human
possibility, one held secretly in the
wisdom teachings of Yeshua and transmitted to and through his students (including, of course,
Philip).
The World-Structures
Yeshua deepens
the diagnosis. The kind
of death he is talking about is not
simply the ordinary
biological kind we each know personally as the
end of our life on the
planet. It is much deeper and more mysterious than that, involving the whole of humanity as a collectivity and rooted in the very structures of this world (which this text calls the kosmos). Though
we are presently alive biologically, the deeper
truth is that we are systemically made
to die at the hands of the
social
structures around us. It is
possible to say that human society executes or murders
its own citizens, constantly putting their happiness and well-being to death.
All the while we are
deceived into thinking that we possess life, but from the perspective of Yeshua and Philip we have never known what the fullness of life really is—for we live in a state-near-death. This is difficult for us to understand because this state seems normal to us. We call it the “real world,” seldom questioning it.
We know, of course, that we
are going to die biologically, but at least for a
time, we possess what we think
to be life and so imagine that we know what life actually is. There is, however, a
way out of this conundrum and Yeshua, the one
who was anointed with Spirit,
appears on the horizons of our
existence in space and time to bring
us the antidote to death, leading us out upon a path that will
take us into the living land of Eternity
where death no longer has
sway or hold over us.
The Appearing Messiah
The coming of the Messiah into the human world delivers to us a kind of “truth serum” that will revive and restore us. Taking it does not relieve us from biological death, but it brings us something greater, an entryway (if we will trust and take it) into the realm and life of Eternity, which is a domain that we can experience now and which will remake our future condition into a form that never dies. To enter this realm now—to stand up into it—is the practice of resurrection which this Gospel will champion. Standing up out of this world, being raised into resurrection now in this present moment, means also that we will mysteriously die before we die.
In this this Analog
Yeshua teaches two things
necessary for us to understand. The first is that the social construction of this world
is a death-dealing system, dressed up cosmetically and pretending to be life-giving. The second
is that there must be a revolution within
traditional religious teaching, a
new way of perceiving the divine.
In Yeshua’s view, the Jewish
tradition of his day must turn away
from seeing God as the
punitive, avenging patriarch in the
sky toward a relationship with the loving Father and Source of All as
he did—as an intimate, personal
Presence. In Yeshua’s teaching this Father who is Source unites with the Mother
who is Wisdom, and together they become
a single, generative and sacred whole—the heart
of sacred tradition and Perennial Wisdom. This reconstruction inside his faith tradition is a spiritual mystery
which will be revealed slowly and powerfully
throughout this Gospel.
At this juncture, however, all we need to know is that through Yeshua’s revelation and teaching (and with our own
turning toward the Messiah
as he appears on the horizons of our world), the Father and Mother are united for our benefit to bring about release from slavery into freedom, constituting the great (and almost unimaginable) reversal of death
into the realm of
life and resurrection. This is the
path (called the Way) on which the Anointed One will lead us.
The Uniting of the Father
and the Mother
One often thinks of a sacred tradition as being the mother of a culture and its religious tradition. This text seems to feel that way about it, calling it “our mother.” Yet, what is interesting about first century Judaism based on second Temple theology in the Jewish world was its patriarchal nature and strong emphasis on the masculine aspects of God. The divine feminine (which exists in a lesser way in the Jewish scriptures, for example Proverbs 8-10) was, however, formally expelled from Jewish worship around the time of King Josiah’s reform. This was both a religious and political act that was seen to be a cleansing of the Jewish tradition from alien and contaminating influences. Forms of the divine feminine were excised from the temple structure itself and altars to her were thrown down, removed and burned along with the sacred groves which often surrounded those altars.
The Gospel of Philip, based upon the tradition coming from Yeshua himself, appears to be restoring to Jewish worship and understanding not only a more balanced view of God as Father, but also of God as Mother and a wisdom figure. As we shall see, she is being honored in a very special way within this text, and the balance between the divine masculine and feminine are being restored throughout it. God is called abba, which is a very intimate term (almost, but not quite, like our term “Daddy,” — perhaps more like our word “Papa”). This loving being as the masculine principle is joining with the rejected force and form of the divine feminine who is both mother and nurturing wisdom. Together these will help to heal us and restore our world and will birth humankind into a new form of life.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND PRAXIS
1. This longer analogue takes us quickly into a spiritually complex and sophisticated understanding of the many mysteries and complexities of our own existence. In it we begin to gain insights into First Temple Mysticism as well. It is easy, perhaps, to become lost in its many metaphors and their nuances. To read this Gospel properly, therefore, one must practice patience, allowing them to unfold one by one. Read this analogue over several times, view the images created for it, and let both begin to teach you.
2. This
is the first of many
diagnoses that this Gospel
will make concerning the human
condition. In this analogue a
basic foundation is created for a
proper understanding of these conditions. How do you understand and
apply the spiritual physician’s words concerning humanity’s and perhaps your own state of health? What is
that diagnosis?
3. Have you ever known any kind of enslavement? Have you ever thought of yourself
as a slave to anything? Could you possibly be enslaved and yet think
you are free? How?
4. Can you understand that there are two
types of life,
one biological and the other divine or eternal, and that you need
both of them to be fully
alive? You know what it is
like to feel yourself alive biologically. What do you imagine entering the “divine
biology” (if we can use that term for the divine
Life-form), would feel like? Can you imagine it? Journal your understanding of this and any difficulties you have understanding or imagining this.
5. You have certainly had times in your
life when you felt “dead” in some way. Describe the
experience of deadness. Do you see evidence for it in
yourself (or in the world around you? What do you see? What might be dead to the realm
of Spirit?
6. Why do
the systems of this world “adorn themselves with cities?” Does the
metaphor suggest that it is
a kind of cosmetic application that fools us. or
does it tell us that cities are some kind of palliative care for human beings? We never recover from the world, and eventually we are laid to rest in it because
of it. How do you understand the metaphors of Yeshua’s diagnosis
about the world of cities or civilization around you?
7. What
do you imagine the “truth serum” that Yeshua is seeking to give us to be? Do
you trust it?
8.
Take time to read
Psalm 107, for it contains a similar diagnosis from the Hebrew
wisdom tradition. If you can read it in the translation Ancient Songs Sung Anew, it might help to make the diagnosis even clearer.
9. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we have
strong images of God as
Father. We have fewer of the divine Mother. How
would you explain or describe these two important sacred archetypes? How
have they been traditionally represented?
10. Why do you think it is necessary to unite
the Father and the
Mother in the wisdom tradition of Yeshua in what
is perhaps a very unique way by Yeshua
himself?
Notes for Reference
and Study
A. In early
Christian teaching and writings, the word kosmos
in the Greek language was used to describe the “made up world” of human
society (the term “cosmetic” comes from this original Greek word). Think
of a cosmetic application to something in order to hide its distortions, flaws
and blemishes. In the view
of the early tradition, and
in wisdom teaching, the world we
live in is a system of distorted relationships and
the results are often tragic
because they both hide and distort the truth. Humans are trapped in this system of things
and blinded by it. Often one needs to be “sprung free” from the trap by someone who is already liberated (who in the tradition of conventional Christianity is
called a Savior or Liberator).
B. The Anointed One (which is the meaning of the two terms Messiah and Christ) is someone who is super-saturated with Spirit. Like oil that saturates everything it touches, the Spirit infuses and enlightens an individual. Metaphorically it is this oil that ignites with fire to give light. Yeshua was given this title because he was known to be someone who was enlightened—saturated with Spirit and full of Light. This will be one of the main metaphors used in this text. The relationship between oil, fire, light and Spirit are all important signifiers of the condition of spiritual Enlightenment described by their Semitic and Abrahamic metaphors.
C. In the second paragraph of the analogue
the phrase “citizen of this world” indicates a
Gentile citizen. This is
another indication of the Jewish character of this Gospel
since it
spells out differences
between Jews and Gentiles within
the thinking of the early followers of Yeshua based on ethnicity, culture and religious tradition. The two cultural
categories are signifiers for beings who could be either awake or asleep, free-born or slaves, dead or alive.
D. It is critical to understand that in the thinking and teaching of early Christianity there are two life-forms described by two very different terms in the Greek language. One term, bios, refers to what we normally call life today and it relates to all the varieties of biological life on this planet. Another form of life, higher than and different from biological, is also said to exist and is called zoe. God is alive though not a biological creature, for example, as are the angels. This higher, divine form of life does not suffer death and so is said to be eternal. That which is higher can be shared with biological creatures, bringing their life-form from the biological dimension (which Is mortal) into a new and higher dimension which is immortal.
Footnotes to the Translation
- In the last sentence of the first paragraph the two propositions are reversed in the original text.
- A “citizen of this world” translates a word that indicates a Gentile citizen. Metaphorically speaking, from the perspective of Jewish thought, such an individual only inhabits the dimension of space-time.
- The phrase in the second paragraph, which indicates that for one who is alive there is always the danger of dying, could perhaps be understood to mean someone who in danger of death as a result of martyrdom.
- Some translators make the sentence concerning the world as a construct to reflect positively on the coming of the Christ and translate it: “Since Christ came, the world has been created, the cities adorned, and the dead carried out” (Isenberg). This translation, however, appears to violate the sense of kosmos used here and elsewhere in the text as a world system that is in opposition to the Great Age (aion). See, for example, the following analogue which precisely illustrates the difference.
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