IF JESUS CHRIST HAD LIVED TO A RIPE OLD AGE, AS DID SIDDHARTHA BUDDHA, I think Jesus still would have become one of the greatest spiritual teachers in human history. Instead of falling prey to a tragic and brutal Roman execution after only a year or so of ministry, Jesus would have been able to share his wisdom with his followers for three or four decades.
Yes, I know, this is speculation, but it’s an interesting thought experiment — one I think will lead us to an important point.
Since the first Easter almost 2,000 years ago, the Christian tradition has focused on the transformative significance of the resurrection (that is, on the “Christ of faith”). For the last 200 years (give or take), and especially for the last 30 years or so, certain biblical scholars have focused on who Jesus was as an historical figure (that is, on the “Jesus of history”). Not surprisingly, their studies have given us a fairly wide range of “Jesus portraits,” some of which have proven to be historically unsustainable while others have proven to be more satisfactory.
Two of the more satisfactory portraits, in my opinion, have been those developed by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg. Their portraits of Jesus differ, but they seem to complement each other more than compete with each other. Crossan’s portrait brings clearly into focus the nonviolent prophetic resistance Jesus offered to imperial domination systems through his call to enact distributive justice. Borg’s portrait also recognizes Jesus as the leader of a nonviolent renewal movement, but goes further to bring into view the depth of spiritual experience that empowered Jesus as a healer, exorcist, wonder worker, and teacher of wisdom. Taken together, these two portraits model the dialectic Matthew Fox sees sustaining both inner-directed mysticism and outer-directed prophecy.
In Days of Awe and Wonder, the book published shortly after his death, Borg describes spiritual experience as a direct and intuitive knowing” (p. 66). While Borg doesn’t use the term, I think this knowing is what we now call gnosis (but it’s not Gnosticism, which isn’t really a thing anyway). Borg points out that the knowing Jesus acquired through his spiritual experience is characteristically Western and differs from Eastern mysticism.
In the East, the experience of spiritual union is understood to be one in which the self-versus-other duality and all other differentiations dissolve into the underlying non-dual Reality. For Jesus and Western mystics, spiritual experience culminates in a realization of communion in which one’s ego is transformed but remains in a creative relationship with God. In Jungian terms, the Western experience is the realization of what Edward Edinger called the “ego-self axis” in which the ego is the “center” of the conscious psyche and the self is the “center” of the psyche as a whole, both consciousness and the unconscious.
The Eastern understanding of nondual mystical union is logically consistent, even as points to something ineffable. The Western experience of communion, on the other hand, is a profoundly paradoxical mystery.
Which brings me to the point of this thought experiment.
Unlike in Eastern spirituality, the foundational gnosis Jesus acquired through his spiritual experience of communion remained embodied and soulful. The spirit filled his soul, and the two together produced in him the saving wisdom he shared with his followers and the world.
So now, try to imagine how much more wisdom Jesus would have been able to offer his followers, had his life not been cut short on a Roman cross. Perhaps they might have learned how to manifest the “Rule of God” — on earth as it is in heaven.
Thank you for reading my blog. If you enjoyed this post or found it insightful, please share it with your friends. And feel free to invite them to follow the blog, too. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not check out my book, Moonlight Shines in the Darkness, a Jungian study of Jesus and the feminine in the Gospel of John.
Soul Spirit Wisdom 