Date: 2009-01-08 16:02 Subject: Be Your Own Messiah: Righteousness Security: Public Location: Temple of MM Mood: creative

Christianity usurped Israel’s birthright as first born much like Jacob stole his brother Essau’s blessing. St. Paul certainly saw the message of the Christ trumping that of mainstream Judaism. Yet, I think we are missing a deeper teaching here. People of Jewish faith and of Christian faith are members of the same family despite our cultural, theological and ecumenical divides.

Whether you are Jewish and waiting for the messiah, or you are a Christian waiting for the return of the Christ we will find that we are in the same predicament. We are all waiting for the Messiah. The theological arrogance of Christianity insists that one must believe Jesus to be the messiah and accept him into your life as your personal savior otherwise you will be denied heaven. Yet Judaism seems to have a different, more even handed and just take. One simply must be righteous before God. It doesn’t matter if you are Jewish or not. The ways of God, his statutes and the nation of Israel were to be the beacons of holiness. It is the light that is to draw all who live in darkness toward God’s love.

Our rational post-modern world hates the word righteousness. The idea of it makes us uncomfortable. It conjures up narrow minded church congregations and tent show revivals. It reminds us of nuns slapping our wrists harshly with rulers. The concept of righteousness – not unlike the concept of sin – leaves a foul taste in our mouths and makes us think of tee totaling religious people who rob the color and joy out of life and condemn seemingly every behavior.

Righteousness properly understood brings color and joy to life. It does not rob us of anything. Rather it allows us to experience the awe and wonder that is the ineffable mystery of God and the abundance, joy and love he showers on all who chose him, and even those who don’t chose him. God gives freely and lovingly to all.

 

Righteousness simply stated is to be “right before God and our fellow men and women.” Righteousness is experienced in our attempts to live by God’s statutes and to accept his grace into our lives. It is the practice and observance of the fundamental law of God that is the pillar of both the Torah and the Christian Gospels – Love. 

Love is the law. Occultists, Wiccans, Christians, Jews as well as New Thought and New Age people all have this written somewhere, in some form, in their teachings. We often consider it to be quintessential to the so-called Golden Rule, which tells us to “do unto others as we would have done unto {us).” Every religious or spiritual teaching seems to have some expression of this teaching at its core.

Those of us versed in the Gospel Teachings think of it as the great command “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength and your neighbor as yourself.”

The great Jewish sage, Hillel the Elder summed up the teachings of the Torah by saying, “That which is offensive to you, do not do to another. The rest is explanation.”

At the very center of righteousness is justice. Love demands that we seek out the truth of what is just and see to it that we apply it in every situation. If I love my neighbor as myself I will not intentionally harm him or her. If I find that my actions have somehow harmed a neighbor I will seek justice on their behalf and strive to set what I made wrong right. My neighbor’s pain becomes my pain; his joy, my joy. We share in each others blessings and in each others misfortunes. We are after all God’s children and therefore members of the same family.

Whether you are waiting for the messiah or the second coming of the Christ you are waiting in vane unless you are meditating on the messianic qualities of the Christ archetype. We know from Proverbs and from The Book of Samuel that God looks beyond the surface. He sees past our skin and into our hearts. He weighs what is there and evaluates what he finds.

None of us can be certain of what the “world to come” is going to be like. We can’t even be certain that there will be one or that death is not the end of our existence. What we have is faith. But faith cannot afford to be arrogant. What we do in this life matters. We cannot afford to push our agenda to the exclusion of anything else.

The gospels of Christianity are as much propaganda as anything else. Definitely, the teachings of Paul can be seen in this light. Apologetics is the attempt to build a case for your point of view persuading others that you are correct. Paul was certainly the chief apologist of his time. His teachings are the foundation upon which modern Christianity is built on. But, all we have is his say so. There is no empirical way to prove that Jesus is who Paul or the gospels tell us he is.

The Gospels even leave room for interpretation on the nature and character of Jesus. Was he the son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity or was he simply an itinerant Jewish teacher in the vane of Judaism’s messianic tradition? This is both a matter of faith and of interpretation. I will leave that to each of you. I, for one, tend to have a more humanist vision of Jesus in mind when I reflect on him.

The only thing we know for certain from the Gospel’s regarding “The World to Come” or the Kingdom of Heaven is cryptic and open to interpretation. Jesus’ statements that the “Kingdom of Heaven is within” and also that the “Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand” often get interpreted in mystical and apocalyptic ways. The other implication that it is something to be realized in the here and now often gets ignored. 

This third interpretation is what those of us involved in the Mutant Gnostic Cabal’s Be Your Own Messiah Movement concern ourselves with. How can we make the present world more like heaven? For one thing we need to have an idea of what heaven is. That is not the same for everyone.

We need to disregard all notions of heaven for the duration of our life. We have no way of truly looking beyond the veil of mortality with any degree of accuracy or sanity. We should probably disregard the archaic term “Kingdom of God” as well as it is bound to have much negative connotations for people.

What we really need to concern ourselves with is how do we bring more light into this dark world? The world has many wonder and beautiful things to offer. Unfortunately, human nature often overshadows this with its shallow self interest.

Human beings are neither basically good nor evil. We simply are self-centered creatures that left to themselves will often choose our own desires or interests over others. We have to learn to be spiritual. We are not necessarily spiritual to begin with. We have a spiritual potential but very few us understand what it means to be “of the spirit.” It is a rebirthing process that starts with mindfulness. Mindfulness leads us to a reckoning with our inner most self. How do I stand before God and my fellow human beings?

Mindfulness leads us to an understanding of the interconnected nature of existence. We learn how our actions, even the smallest ones, affect others. Through mindfulness we learn to connect with the world around us. We rise above mere ideology.

At the beginning of this post we talked about the theological arrogance of Christianity and how it usurped Judaism. Paul’s words were later used to create an attitude and then a practice of anti-Semitism in Christianity. The portrayal of the Jewish religious authorities as simple minded one dimensional characters in the Gospels is both ungracious and inaccurate. This speaks to the propaganda of the Gospels and, indeed, the propaganda evident in all ideologies religious and secular.

To bring the Kingdom of God into the world we need to remove God from the religious particulars of our chosen faiths. A philosophy of life is a consequence of a thoughtful approach to ones existence. Religious community can lead to quality communion among people. But when a religious community thinks of itself as superior to others or to that it is the one and true way we begin to have an impediment to justice. The way to ensure that this does not happen is for the individual to take up the question of their own righteousness, not to be haughty as we all fall short and fail to live up to our standards, but as a way to ensure that we live as blamelessly and lovingly among our fellow human beings as is possible.

To be continued…