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VIII. Jesus (1954) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next>> Man can make the distinction between life and death, because he has the capability within himself to be life or to be death. When Jesus of Nazareth said "I am the way-the truth-and the life" he meant "I am the life". We are so used to religious interpretations of his sayings that we often forget how shallow they are. Let's get at the philosophical interpretation. Yes, he is the life, and we can also be the life. He is the life, because he abolished death in himself and in his heart, so he is the life. We, if we abolish death in our hearts (and we can, by following him and understanding him) can also be the life. It is a change of heartbeat, so to speak. By such a change the human heart, the innermost inwardness of the will of a human person, can be. Now, let us take it still further philosophically. The human heart can be or it cannot be. That means it can be being, or it can be nothingness. We can be nothingness. We can have an empty heart, and an empty heart means that all of the world can be drawn into it and be destroyed there, or we can have a full heart. Jesus very rarely spoke about salvation. He never made the Platonic or Pauline distinction between body and soul, or spirit and matter, because here in the heart spirit and matter are indistinguishable. They are really one. Rather he talked about fulfillment, not salvation. He came to fulfill the law, to fulfill us, and to teach us how to fulfill ourselves. To be able again to have the fullness of heart which means to love as against the emptiness of heart which means to hate. To understand that these are our choices because between these two words man's innermost being lies. We have both possibilities. To be empty, or to be full. To be being, or to be nothingness. To be an active nothingness, a nothingness that draws everything into an empty heart and eats away at it until it has been destroyed and rendered valueless, or to be an active life. Love seems to be the only law of Jesus of Nazareth. He says to the Jews 'I have not come to destroy the law; I have come to fulfill it!' He has not come to destroy the law, and yet he breaks the Sabbath. The Pharisees say to him 'but you are breaking the Law and so are your disciples. The Sabbath is a law'. (8) How does he explain it? He says 'the Son of man can forgive sins ... can forgive even the breaking of the law'. But the Son of man is he, and you, and I. We can forgive! How is that possible? He says again and again 'they did it out of love'. Love overrules the law because the law is there in order to make love possible. There is no other sense of the law. As soon as man thinks that once the law has been kept then everything is done he is wrong, because this is only a predisposition. Laws, Jesus said, are made by men, not by God. He explains that in Chapter nineteen of Saint Matthew where he talks about changing the divorce laws. But how could anybody ever propose to the Jews of that time to change a law? Laws cannot be changed with the Jews, because they are the laws of God. They can only be gone around and interpreted, so the law that you can divorce your wife by just giving her a letter explaining the reasons is a law of God. (9) It cannot be changed. But he explains to the Rabbis 'Moses gave you this law (but) it hadn't been so before'. No, it hadn't been so before, and we know that now. Abraham knew no such law, because Abraham founded his religion and his whole religious thinking upon the first story of the creation where it is said "God created Man, man and woman created He them" and this is quoted by Jesus of Nazareth in Saint Matthew, and then he says "it was not so before", meaning there was no such law. So he forbids all divorce, which is really a reflection of the social circumstances of his times, because he means something different. What he means is to establish the equality of man and woman. To establish the equality of man and woman could have been done in Abraham' s time, and it was done in Abraham's time for a brief period and then was forgotten. But it had not been done anywhere else. Jesus re-established this equality, and no interpretation of Christianity from Saint Paul to Luther, not even the interpretation of Milton in one of the greatest world epics, has succeeded in destroying it, because otherwise we would not have fought so hard for it in the last century. We said before that Jesus established the equality of human beings in quality, in the immediateness of the relation of every human being before God, in the infinite possibilities of every human person, and therefore in the absolute inviolability of that person. But he knew that in order to establish this he had to first abolish the inequality between man and woman, because here every other form of inequality was anchored. What a thinker! Because we have found out through historical and political analysis that no inequality in the world, either of class or of caste, or whatever, can survive once the inequality between man and woman has been abolished. Here is the center of inequality, the very principle of it. If one abolishes it, then every other form of equality follows by itself logically and automatically. Then even Paul and Luther will not prevail over Jesus of Nazareth, and no Christian Saint, no Jewish Rabbi, or no Hindu Brahmin will ever be able to take that back again, because we all live it. The fullness of heart gives us this. Love is the highest law here, because it really is no law. A Christian theologian of our time, perhaps the greatest Christian theologian, Rudolf Bultmann of Marburg, has written a book about Jesus of Nazareth, and there is a funny misinterpretation in it which is also, in a way, one of the best interpretations I have ever read. It concerns the concept of obedience. He starts to explain, and rightly so, that obedience was of course, the Jewish Law, and that there is no other quality that can compare with obedience in the Jewish religion. That Jesus of Nazareth tried to replace this with a higher obedience, just as Paul and the entire Christian Church after him tried to replace the teachings of Jesus by a form of obedience even more severe than servitude, but what was this higher obedience and how does it differ from Judiasm? Now here Bultmann, because he is a German and has this wonderful possibility that the German language so often gives, uses the fact that obedience in German means "gehorsam", and that gehorsam contains the word "hoeren", to hear, so in effect, he makes Jesus say: You think you can obey God. You are absolutely incapable of obeying God. You can just obey the Law, but you cannot obey God, because you can only obey God if you have the possibility to hear Him. And by a slight of hand the distinction is made, and it is still servitude. At least the English language is more fortunate in that there is no possible bridge between obedience and listening to somebody. To listen to God, to hear Him, means to be capable of hearing His will but how is that possible? God is an absolute. Can we hear his will? Jesus said yes, in our own hearts we can hear Him, but that is only because His will is very simple. It is not obedience. His will is to love, that is all. To love, because there is no other will. He discovers here the creative activity of love, but only under the condition that it is taken entirely away from the capability of hatred, thus he "fulfills the law", because any time you break the law for the sake of love you do not break the law, you make the law better. It is often said that the love of Jesus of Nazareth is an entirely a-sexual love (non-erotic). Oh no!, The love of Jesus of Nazareth is real love, and since it has no relationship whatsoever to hatred it has no relationship to possession, because possession means destruction. The philosopher Hobbes once said "I have really possessed a thing only if I can destroy it" and that is true. Possessive love is destructive, that is, it is no love. It is rather a relation of power between men and women that has nothing to do with love. Love, as Jesus of Nazareth meant it, is the real relation of a man to a woman, the recognition that the other is inviolable for their own sake, that we want him or her to be, that even the loss of this love can only lead to scorn but never to hatred, that this scorn shall only be temporary, and finally, that one can never love another person if one is able to hate that person. There is nothing in that which in the least contradicts sex. There is only one thing it contradicts and that is the emptiness of the human heart from which comes the will to possess everything and into which everything can be drawn. The will that man can become nothingness and that nothingness can be a positive thing when in reality it is the murderer of murderers, the negative of Being, and the destroyer of Being. It is the de-creative capability of man and a capability that man carries within himself just as he carries the creative. To have real freedom then means to make the basic decision for freedom which is the decision for creation, to lose the capacity to hate and destroy, and to love all of God's creations. This is what Jesus of Nazareth meant by "purification of the heart", and everyone who makes this decision and who lives in the smallest circle of life does not need to be an artist or a genius, because he lives according to the law of love. Jesus said "The last shall be first". Let us say might be, because we cannot judge, but at least one thing is certain. This inward decision is the decisive one. Lecture XV (Part II) S-II 5-21-514 III Now, he says, he wants to establish the Kingdom of God. Where does he want to establish it? He says, "My Kingdom is not of this world!" Does that mean his Kingdom is of another world? Yes, it means that. Must this other world be an absolute other world: Namely, the hereafter, or could it be another world here? Is he also a Jew in that respect that he wants to establish the Kingdom of God on earth? Yes, he most certainly wants to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, and he had already proceeded very far in that direction. Because wherever people sit together in communication as persons out of a want to obey God more than men or the laws of the world then there is a part of the Kingdom of God. It is always there, and in this sense he established it to a certain degree. We have only forgotten that, because we thought it had been established in institutions which became almost hatable. In this sense there are more religious people outside the Christian church than inside which is something that should never be forgotten. We have seen he was a great politician, one of the greatest politicians, otherwise he would never have been able to transcend politics or to create this transpolitical position for man. Historians who now analyze his sayings have found that a great deal of his meaning has been distorted in nebulous so-called prophetic utterances about the end of the world and so on, which is all that later Christianity needed to liberate the slaves, which it did, and destroy the Roman Empire, which it helped to do. But all that the liberation of the slaves meant was that new masters would come with more hatred, and this time they brought all of their hatred into the Church, and with it came Hell, because Hell is the child of hatred. They forgot that the oppressed ones could not be liberated without doubling their hatred which is why Tertullian, one of the great fathers of the Church, could urge his Christian brethren: 'Don't go to the Roman games and see how the gladiators are torn apart by the lions, because we will have better things to see. There will be a greater show when we go up to Heaven and sit to the right of our Father and see how all of those scoundrels suffer eternally in death.' The slave who wants to enjoy the pain of others and the man with an empty heart as a Christian are really the same person. There we have him already, and he represented a majority of men as far as Christian Church goes. |
