Analogue 4: The Messianic Imperative
ANALOGUE FOUR
The Messianic
Imperative
The Anointed One has come! And in coming some he
ransoms, others he releases and
restores, and there are those whom he rescues. He ransomed strangers and made them his own. Those who came to him,
he restored. All this he gave as a self- offering out of his own love and desire.
Not only did he willingly give himself at his appearing, from the very beginning of
the kosmos it was his longing to do so. And so
now in this way he comes to receive back what he has always loved—releasing all who were held captive by thieves of
the soul, redeeming everything in the kosmos, both good and evil.
• In this Analogue the defining elements are given of the Messianic Work to save the world. It is the Messianic Imperative and Messianic because it is anointed with Spirit.
• It takes an inner anointing to do it and yet it is clearly to be done within the human field.
• This is the seeding activity that takes place in winter. It is the Bodhisattva tradition of Yeshua found within early Jewish mystical tradition and in later Kabbalah.
• The Messianic Imperative is what is being done, known as spiritual agriculture, in temporal existence -- this is what we are tasked to do. This is the Work that we are called to join which is the Messiah's sapiential and transforming work—the restorative Work of sapience.
• The whole Work is done as a form of "self-offering" (egoless self-giving), and practiced out of the principles of Love: the underlying basis and manifestation of the Messianic Imperative.
• It’s inner motivation is Love's work—the work of eternal
compassion. .
• It's eventual outcome is clear—the restoration of all things, apocatastasis.
• This work has been running through and underneath the cosmic structures from the beginning of time and through temporal existence.
• The opposite of this work is a form of criminal activity—going against the cosmic and eternal Laws of divine Love. Yeshua is here to expose these “crimes against humanity.” The particular category of this lawlessness is known as—soul thievery—people are experiencing a theft from their souls, stolen away by the surface structures of the kosmos.
• This socially constructed surface structure is known as the kosmos— because it is “cosmetic” and only thinly layered. It has held captive the deep structure of the soul for its own purposes, and only self-less love and compassion can liberate and put it to right.
• Through experience of the divine Presence and its energies, this is what Yesnhua has learned and knows. It goes against conventional religious dogmas.
• His is an alternative reality to the current kosmos—he brings to bear the Ultimate Realities of "Summer's Kingdom" (here metaphors pile up on one another explaining the many relationships).
• Yeshua's work is ultimately therapeutic in the psycho-spiritual sense--to buy back out of the pawn-shop of time what has been stolen and sold as mere merchandise or a bill of goods.
• Yeshua’s Imperative is to bring healing and relief to the souls of the suffering and the wounded, to release them into freedom from bondage and slavery all those that have been held captive to the kosmos.
• In order to establish these deep relationships and friendships, he makes adopts them, not as his property or part of a religious institution, but takes them them into his own family out of love.
• The restoration to fullness of being is the whole point
COMMENTARY
The Role of the Messiah
Every Gospel that comes to us from the ancient past has at its core what is known as the “Christ event.” The life of Yeshua, his teaching and ministry, are at the center of this “Good News” which is offered to the world. All the canonical Gospels are formed around a narrative of a portion of this life, as is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Thomas preserves a chronicle of his says. The Gospel of Philip is centered in the secret teachings he transmitted to his close circle of students, going to the heart of the mysteries around which the Good News forms.
A feature of early Jewish and Mystical Christianity, is the Messianic Imperative, which is the central mission of the Jewish Messiah’s role on earth. Love-in-Action is the Messianic Imperative, which is also at the heart of the the wisdom tradition forming in the sacred world of Christianity, which is the core teaching of this analogue. The Jewish followers of Yeshua, who were students of his wisdom, teaching and mystical vision, understood that he was an “anointed” Master in-love with God and the world. To put it as vividly as possible, as a wisdom teacher and sage (Master of the Hebrew wisdom tradition), he was super-saturated with the divine Spirit whose heart is an outpouring of care, concern and love for the world and all sentient beings. This anointing was the secret source of his wisdom, vision and mission. It was also what gave energy to his work on earth. To understand it perfectly, we could say that both his being and his consciousness were fully transparent to Spirit where light, love, and its divine energy put into action from beyond this world (and sourced in Ultimate Reality) poured through him.
According to later theological categories, Yeshua embodied both Wisdom and Logos (the divine expression of revelation and knowledge from its source in God). To understand and enter this inner stream of understanding was to accept Yeshua as Messiah. This is the Christological doctrine around which the Gospel of Philip is written. Philip appears to reflect what Margaret Barker and other religious scholars suggest about early Jewish Christianity: Yeshua was Messianic in this way—he was an exemplar of Messianic consciousness and being filled with love and compassion. It is also consistent with an understanding of who Yeshua was, formed under the leadership of James (or Yaakov, the brother and first bishop in Jerusalem). It reflects as well what Barker and others are calling “First Temple Mysticism” (spiritual practices and teachings based on the symbolism of Solomon’s first temple in Jerusalem). These understandings appear to have been taught and transmitted by Yeshua before his death.
This is a fresh understandings of Yeshua and his religious practice, challenging those understandings in the West that have been shaped by a form of orthodoxy whose Christology is very different. In traditional western thought, Yeshua/Jesus was a totally unique being, unlike any other human, without sin and perfect in every way as the Savior for sin. He is without precedent, appearing almost out of nowhere. First Temple Mysticism gives him a believable historical context and grounds this Gospel.
The Christological Formulations of Philip
Philip expresses a form of early orthodoxy that is largely unknown to us in the West, but one that was fully Jewish, yet powerfully Christian and part of what is called Oriental Orthodoxy. This analogue not only expresses this unique Christological viewpoint, but also outlines the core of the Messiah’s work and mission on earth. Using the metaphors of the previous Analogues, Yeshua appears to be seeding the field of space-time in the metaphysical wintertime. He is practicing a form of spiritual agriculture within temporal existence which is not an easy work, which is why his anointing (super-saturation by Spirit) is so essential. The categories and nuances of that Messianic work in the human conditions of earth involve an understanding of the world’s incarceration, slavery and death (see Analogue Two). These are the difficult circumstances under which Yeshua must labor to help humanity. The particulars of each act of healing, transformation and love differ, however, according the uniqueness of each individual’s need.
In this analogue
we hear something about the interior motivation by which Yeshua maintains his work of restoration. Philip says that his
mission is saturated with the energy
of love and self-offering which the author himself has come to know intimately from having walked with Yeshua.
This energy in-action is the sure
sign of the presence of Spirit within him. Yeshua is bound and energized by love, which manifests in egoless acts of
self- giving. In this analogue, we are
also told that his work (and the energy it comes
from) are voluntary, deliberate and gratuitous—there are no strings attached. It is unconditional love and
this divine motivation has been constant
from the very beginning of time, from the created world itself. This secret labor of love has been running
through and underneath the cosmic structures
from the inception of temporal existence. There has never been any deviation from this path, and the
divine energy motivating it is what Yeshua
has learned and knows from his own deeply personal and intimate relationship with God as Source
(Father). Such an understanding went against
the religious conventions and dogmas of his own day which taught that divine love was conditioned by human
obedience. The Judaism of Yeshua’s
day was a shame-based religion, as is ours today. Yeshua opened up an alternative reality,
going against the conditioned structures of the kosmos existing all around us including
in the religious world. His work was
to bring into our wintertime-world the Ultimate Realities of "Summer's Kingdom,” revealing something perhaps we
have never properly understood about
our world—we are already the ongoing recipients of summertime and
unconditional love.
Criminal Activity
Yeshua goes onto expose a secret and unsuspected, criminal activity that has been working on the inside of things called “soul thievery.” The substance of the souls of men and women is being stolen away by the kosmos, (the very system of the world around them). The systemic distortions deep within the surface structures of the kosmos have burglarized the deep structure of the human soul and stolen eternal substance from its heart. Only self-less love and compassion can stop the thieving, putting an end to it. Seen in another way, from a medical perspective, Yeshua's work is spiritually therapeutic—a form of complete healing. And then to mix the metaphors, to heal the soul, Yeshua must buy it back from the pawn-shop of time where what was stolen and put up for sale as merchandise in the world’s bazaar, is bought back. All of these are complex and arresting in a mix of metaphors.
Oriental Christian and Jewish mystical theology remained profoundly hopeful about the future of human existence, while the western theologies became more and more pessimistic. Not only would every soul be redeemed back from this temporal thievery, none and nothing would ultimately be lost. Everything in the kosmos would be brought back to its original goodness and design. Good and evil would be reconciled in an ultimate unitive oneness which it called apocatastasis.
In this visionary seeing, the divine Intention is and has always been that all creation will be restored and brought into an ultimate fullness of being through the process of transformation. This work is comprehensive and, in the Abrahamic world, it reflects what is called in the East the Bodhisattva tradition. In Buddhism, for example, the great souls of this earth will not leave the temporal plane of suffering until all are released from it. Something very similar is being expressed here. This intention will be clarified and expanded on as we move through this powerful and mysterious Gospel, explaining secret mysteries in the teachings of Yeshua.
Liberation Theology and Therapeutic Methodology
A theology of liberation and the restoration to the fullness of being as the ultimate soteriological act are the twin themes preserved in Oriental Christianity explaining the task and work of Yeshua as Messiah. He is the Savior of the world in-so-far as he is liberating folk from their captivity, restoring what has been taken from them in “soul thievery,” healing them from the wounds that they have suffered here. All this is accomplished through the supersaturation of spiritual anointing which he passes on to others as well. Each of these processes is combined with the others and not necessarily separate actions. They continue the therapeutic methodology that Yeshua is using to liberate and restore the world to its paradisal perfection.
Rather than seeing this as a clinical act of divine medicine (though it is certainly that), or an institutional formulation performed by clerical privilege or hierarchy, Yeshua practices a methodological formulation of “transcending and including.” He transcends the mundane definitions of the kosmos, and its social constructions imposed on the soul, and begins to establish a relationship of friendship where, in the end, those who come to him and walk his path are included in the family structure of the divine Reality as members of one great extended and sacred family members, all of whom have been released from bondage. The family dynamics of heaven take in and embrace the children of earth (the inhabitants of space and time) making them its own in a network of familial connexions. To use the previous metaphor, he invites them into the Great Age, the summertime of the Eternal Now where each one is included and warmly welcomed, not simply as citizens of a society, but as family members—part of the vast extended network of family relationships. Heaven is not an institution, a political body, or even a society of sacred beings—it is one extended family in-love with each other.
Yeshua's work, then, is ultimately restorative and therapeutic. This is the precise meaning of the term salvation (sodzo) in the Greek, which is restoration to fullness of being and not simply salvation from sin, as it is taught in the West. In the spiritual sense he does “buy back” soul-essence out of the pawn-shop of time where eternity has been stolen from it. When the soul is seen as mere merchandise or a “bill of goods” of far lesser value in the consumer-reality in which we currently live, Yeshua knows and sees its eternal value. As a result of this theft and loss, what we each experience as a kind of suffering—a dis-ease that wounds our souls which must be healed and restored back to full health and perfection. To anoint and bring relief to the suffering soul, is the curative and therapeutic work of the Messiah—it is his Messianic Imperative to do so out of extreme love and compassion. Throughout this Gospel we will continue to see that Yeshua creates a whole new partnership with these “wounded healers” who continue his work and ministry extending into the world and throughout the ages. We might even think of this as the college of wounded healers—for we are colleagues now in this vital work. In the end, everything will be reconciled and brought into the restoration of all things (apocatastasis) which has been the Messianic Imperative and the trajectory of the divine Agency all along.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND PRAXIS
1. How have
you understood Yeshua to be a Jewish Messiah? The categories introduced here about his Messianic work and
consciousness may run counter to
the way you have traditionally understood him. What do you see in this Gospel that you may not have seen before or elsewhere?
2. Love is the
foundation of the revelation being made in Philip. It is also the energy behind Yeshua’s mission
and vision. In your own words write
out what you understand about this work. Do any of the descriptions or images used for this analogue support your own views?
3. How might
you have been wounded by the kosmos—the
socially constructed human world? How
has it shaped you and limited you? How has
it perhaps stolen something vital from you? Are you liberated from its structure, or is it in some way still
wrapped tightly around you? What kind
of liberation or divine therapy have you already experienced or, perhaps more importantly, what do you
sense you still needed to experience
in your life now?
4. Allow
yourself time to sit with the images and metaphors suggested by this analogue. They may help to expand
your own vision and understanding of what has been called the Gospel’s
Good News. They are
meant to support and strengthen your understanding. How have they done that so far in this Gospel
in this previous analogues?
5. Is there anything in this analogue or its supporting images that troubles you?
6. Yeshua’s mission
is placed against
the background of eternity. What do you understand about this backdrop that
is framing time and your own temporal
experience?
7. How have
you aligned yourself with the work of the Messiah? If the messianic work is one of liberation and
anointing (a form of healing), then
how do you understand its liberation theology and therapeutic effects
in the current world?
8. Do you feel
yourself to be a part of some larger divine family whose roots are in a realm other than the historical family and its
relationships you have known here?
Journal your sense of these larger relationships. What is present and available to you, and what
may be lacking?
Notes
A. From
ancient times, the practice of anointing with oil was a sign of the bestowal of blessing, and the transmission
of divine authority through the
sacred Spirit. At his baptism Yeshua experienced anointing, receiving the Spirit of the prophets,
transmitted to him through John the Baptist.
It is said that he also received a vision of heaven, and was filled with the Spirit which saturated and
overflowed into and out of his whole being.
It was this Spirit that drove him into the wilderness experience of 40 days and compelled him back to his
homeland for ministry. (See these
canonical Gospel passages: Matthew 3:12-17, Mark 1:9-11, Luke 3:21-22, John 1:29-33)
B. The early
tradition affirms that Yeshua was a healer with extraordinary capacities. His healing ministry was
extensive, its popularity sometimes overwhelmed
other aspects of his mission and ministry. In the surrounding societies of the eastern Mediterranean world, there
was also a wider tradition of healing
based upon the work of the therapeutae (local healers). This group and their
work might be thought of as forms of
folk medicine, naturopathic healing, and Shamanic practices. Could it be that these influences were also
aspects of the sources of Yeshua’s power augmented by an infusion of Spirit
from his anointing?
C. As a soteriological doctrine, the salvation of the soul, is a venerable and ancient teaching central to all biblical and Pauline theology, and of course the whole western theological tradition. Based on the ancient Jewish rites and practices of the atonement for sin through sacrificial offerings in the Temple, Yeshua’s death was seen through the lens of these metaphors as sacrificial offerings to God. Soteriological doctrines in the West framed its teaching in terms of salvation from sin and the appeasement of God’s wrath by means of the sacrifice of an innocent lamb. Philip, however, sees salvation in a very different way—as a self- offering of Yeshua’s own soul out of love for the good of all. His is a sacrifice of life made from mercy and compassion, not based on the necessity to appease God’s wrath, but to heal, strengthen, transform and invite all into the inner circle of God’s life. Salvation, then, is the restoration of the soul to its fullness, not a covering for sin. It is ultimately a family affair which offers complete restoration to fullness of being.
D. It is
perhaps important to recognize an important sociological difference between western and Middle Eastern
societies that is central to this Gospel.
In the West we prize independence, and though we live in and love our families (if they are functional
and sane), we nevertheless, attempt
to live independently from them. In the Middle East this frame is entirely different. Each member of
society grows up within an extended family
that maintains itself as a network of intimate interdependent relationships across time and space. Even traditional
housing reflects this social
structure where the extended family of mothers and father grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins
often live in physical proximity, and
care for and main the health of each individual within the structure of the whole network of family
relationships. The author of the Gospel
sees relationships in the world beyond this one as just such a society. The great City, the new
Jerusalem, is just such a world, where all
of its members live in proximity to one another, treat each other as family members, and no one is excluded.
There is no “we” and “they.” The
whole of humanity is one extended family, living in mutuality and love, and
knows itself as such.
E. The doctrine of apocatastasis (the great restoration and reconciliation of everything back to God) has a long and convoluted history. Early in the Christian tradition it appears to be a doctrine accepted by almost of the early fathers and mothers. Later, after Augustine (d. 430 C. E.), however, it began to be seen to be a heresy and was increasingly treated as such. The original text of the Greek New Testament supports this early teaching in many ways, and uses the word in the Book of Acts (3:21).
Footnotes to the Translation
• The Anointed One translates the word Messiah in its full meaning.
• The original words for ransom, release, restore and redeem run the gamut of meaning about how the Messiah (the Anointed One) acts to restore the kosmos. Ransom has the normative idea of purchasing, or paying the price to buy something. Release means to set captives free, restoring them to full freedom. Redeem has the connotation of rescuing from danger or the bondage of inner darkness.
• The word self-offering could be translated pledge in the sense that one pledges (or offers) him or herself to do certain things.
• Love and desire translate a single word that also implies a deep longing based on love.
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