Last week I was telling a story about Saint Bill and how I learned that spirituality and intellect don’t necessarily have to go hand in hand—that somebody can be very spiritually “advanced” or perhaps better said: someone can have the love of God pouring through them, you can feel “Christ energy” coming through them, and yet that doesn’t mean their intellect matches their spiritual place, or that they’ve studied the words of scripture and understand them.
We can all be smart in some ways and not so smart in others, can’t we? Someone can have love and goodness radiating from them, and be good people in genuinely caring for other, and yet have no study of scripture in a real personal tangible way, through which they’ve discovered the wisdom and the truth of its words for themselves.
This really came up for me today when I thought about the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John, to me, contains the most spiritually profound verses to be found in the four gospels. I love them—I find the whole Gospel to be spiritual in nature. However, it is the most not-to-be-taken-literally of the four Gospels. It reads in a spiritual language. “Believe in me for eternal life” is so often interpreted to mean simply believe in Jesus and go to heaven but Jesus was speaking about something much more profound. Believing in the god in him and recognizing the God in him means that you have eternal life now. He is speaking about this is earthly context. To “follow him” is to “walk in the light of eternal life, rather than in darkness.” To never be hungry, never be thirsty…these are earthly matters. In doing this, as he later says in chapter 14, there will be a place for you in heaven.
It says in John 3:18 that those who don’t believe are condemned already. Again, that would mean you walk in the darkness, separate from God. And what’s so interesting is that you have all these spiritually profound, beautiful verses in the Gospel of John, and yet at the same time it also has the most hatred of Jews to be found in the four Gospels. “The Jews did this; the Jews did that.” “The Jews picked up stones to stone him.” Jesus was Jewish, all the disciples were disciples, and the Gospels tell us this plainly. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says that not one letter of the Law is to be ignored until all things are fulfilled (the Mosaic Law; the Torah; The first five books of the Hebrew Bible that most of us know as the Old Testament). So clearly what we have here is a group of people attached to this text who are venting their hatred towards Jews for some reason.
One strong theory for this is that there was a Johannan community of Christian Jews who were excommunicated from or thrown out of their Temple because they accepted Jesus as the Messiah. So when they were writing their gospel (the writing that ended up being a gospel, that is), they had a lot of vitriol against the Jews. But for us to look at that historically it’s kind of like saying the Americans killed John F. Kennedy (they were all Americans!). My point here, however, is that we have to recognize that even if the words of God are right here in front of us in the Gospel, that doesn’t mean the words of men are here too—side by side or on top of the words of God. We can have words of love and we can have words of hate and the two can co-exist in the Bible.
We need to get over this hump of needing to say that every word is the word of God. It is dangerous. Because the words of Love and the words of hate can, and are, side by side. Let’s use our minds and hearts when considering the Bible, rather than blindly accepting every single word as the word of God.
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YES! This!!!! Use your head when deciding what God actually said. So many words in the Bible came from man’s own EGO
This is wish of mine too. Thanks for the comment. I wish at least up there with “cleanliness,” would be thinking and reasoning are next to godliness. We were given our minds for a reason.