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VIII. Jesus (1954) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next>> Let us first consider the political deeds of this man, because we will never understand him or still think that he is partly an idiot, if we do not. It is always claimed that he did not understand anything about politics, that he was, so to speak, a-political, and that his actions (when considered within the historical and political context of Palestine at that time) were foolish. I think that Reverend Fosdick already to a great extent clears this up, because out of his research Jesus of Nazareth emerges as a man who had a tremendous knowledge of the politics of his time and who apparently almost devised all of his doings as a political strategy that aimed at more than politics and that transcended politics. It was, so to speak, not pre-political as Abraham's position had been, but trans-political, and in order to make it transpolitical he had to first go back to the pre-political position of Abraham himself. So we will have to make a small analysis of the political situation of that time and what he was doing in it, how he tried to use it for transpolitical purposes while still retaining a full knowledge of the social and historical conditions of his people. Religiously, he was of the same awareness. He wanted to be, in a way, the last of the Jewish prophets, the one who came to fulfill the law for the Hebrews. Since he didn't want to be anything else, he had to act in full consciousness of the religious conditions of his time, and in the process he developed a strategy that enabled him to maneuver within the strange mixture that was the political and religious state of the Jews in Palestine. He had the most brilliant insight into every one of those conditions, and the strategy moves accordingly trying to make the best out of all of them. If we can prove that, and we will start too in the next session, then we will already have approached him as a man of tremendous knowledge. He had almost all of the knowledge of his time. We know today that the old legend of Petros and the Apostles being illiterate men is a thing that grew out of later Christianity. We had believed that, because of the hope that the most simple of men could do anything, was made into a legend. Historically, they were all entrepreneurs of fishing in Galilea and were highly educated men who spoke several languages. Jesus probably spoke Arameic, Hebrew, Greek, and Babylonian, as did Petros, and we can suppose this to be a fair guess because recent discoveries seem to indicate that Galilea was the cultural center of the entire East and West of that time. Everything moved through Galilea, so if those men were in fact simple souls, then it could only have been in the greatest sense of simplicity, but they certainly were not simpletons, or men to whom it was given to speak out of nothingness. This then, will be our approach. To find out first what this man knew, to find out his actions, and then to find what he wanted, what he taught, and what he decided for us to do. Lecture XV (5-21-54) (Part I) II We have been talking about Jesus of Nazareth, about him, his ideas, and his deeds irrespective of the picture of his personality that has survived in the west and irrespective of the forms which his ideas and deeds have taken. We may not agree with those forms (the institution of the church, the endless religious struggles, and so on) and we have had to get rid of them to a certain extent, yet however that might be, the ideas, deeds, and personality of this man were enough to achieve the most astounding historical event in the history of mankind; Namely, to give history a decisive other turn. Everything that we today call the west would have been absolutely impossible without him, not only because through his ideas the fundamental achievements of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans merged into what we would later call western civilization, but also because of the very fact of this faith which, if we want to look at it in a secular way, astonishes us by how much of it has come true. As an example, let us take a look at the most astonishing of his sayings: "If you have faith, you will displace mountains". We have displaced mountains. We are always displacing mountains. Without him western thought would not have taken the decisive turn that finally made it possible for us to displace mountains. Nobody would have been interested in it. The absolute power of man over nature and the whole development of western science was made possible, in the first place, by this religion which was founded on the teachings of a man who discovered a thing so absolutely fundamental that it had never been thought of before him: Namely, the real meaning of the will. The will had not been tapped until he came along and tapped it. It is a mistake to believe that Zarathrustra discovered the quality of the human will. He did not. Rather he discovered a reasonable quality, the quality of decision. That a man is capable of distinguishing between the 'worse' and the 'better' and is able to decide between them, something which Socrates had to discover again. This is undeniable, but it has nothing to do with the will. The will has been interpreted by psychologists and by philosophers in many ways but one thing has not been considered. One has never thought that the will might be just that thing which Jesus of Nazareth called the heart. All of the philosophers we have considered up until now talked really about the mind. They discovered this great creative capability of the human person, liberating him out of the context of nature and myth, making him aware of himself, and rounding out, so to speak, the whole human picture. But the picture would never have worked. There was one thing missing and, if we say it in an American way, what was missing is the thing that makes it all tick. The heart. Here was the one quality that none of the others ever considered. As much as Buddha talked about sin, he himself had no real experience of sin. Perhaps only a man who had the experience of sin (although he is called the sinless one) could come to know what sin is in a philosophic sense. Now the Jews had always lived with sin, just as other people had always lived in sin, but there is a great difference between living with sin and living in sin. The difference lies in the consciousness of sin which has been for the Jews their main characteristic since the time of Moses. It may have been that Jesus inherited the means by which he was able to assimilate this great religious experience of the Jewish people, or it may have been that he himself had the direct experience of sin, but at least this much is certain. No philosopher before him had ever mentioned a term which for him was decisive: Namely, temptation. None of them were ever really tempted. It was no temptation for Socrates to become the great statesman of Athens rather than, as he would liked to have been, the first model of a citizen, almost a world citizen. It was no temptation at all, because he had made up his mind already. Heraclitus was never in temptation and neither was Homer. We cannot say it of a single one. Jesus of Nazareth was in temptation, and it is not only the best rendering of a story of temptation (where Satan comes to him in the wilderness and shows him all of the empires of the world and says "All these things I will give thee if you will fall down and worship me", Matthew.14:9) but also a reflection of real temptation, of a temptation which must be the heaviest that a man can bear: Namely, to give into the cry of his beloved people, to liberate them from the Romans, and to become the Messiah as the Jews wanted the Messiah to be. To resist that, to get out of that, could only have been done through an act of will, and it can clearly be seen in the Gospels just how that act of will was undertaken. It was undertaken with such consideration and deliberation that right up to the very last moment the political issues were held open in order to deceive everyone, in order to bring out more clearly the fact that it was a trans-political issue that was involved, that this man wanted to raise men above politics, above any worldly band, above society, above nature, above anything that can give man a law by showing to man that God has set him above all of those things. The suffering Messiah, the man who said "My kingdom is not of this world" only to establish his kingdom in this world was the discoverer of the idea of freedom in its innermost meaning, for the decisive turn in history, the historical event of which we have been speaking is that ever since he preached and lived from the moment the Christian church was founded in his name, the value of the human person has never been entirely forgotten. The fundamental distinction between the West and the East (with the exception of totalitarianism) is that the value of a human life has been considerably higher in the West, and this is not, as often asserted, because of reasons of population, but rather for a basic decision that once was made to never forget that value. |
