Caroline Myss  with  Andrew Harvey

A  Mystical  Spring

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Jesus and the Birth of a New World

Andrew Harvey

Jesus has had terrible press. The horror of the sexual scandals in the Catholic church (and the church’s slow response to it), the scandal of the politicization of fundamentalism, the pervading ignorance among most seekers of the subversive glory of the Christian mystical tradition, the painful personal experience of hundreds of thousands of men and women at the hands of patriarchal churches: These are just a few of the reasons why so many spiritually awake people recoil from the name of Jesus. For them Jesus and the often-disastrous history and practices of the religion and churches created in his honor are synonymous. While such a reaction is understandable, it is a tragedy; the glorious and powerful message of the real Jesus is prevented from reaching us at the very moment when we need its hope and galvanizing joy the most, when its all-inclusive invitation to all of us to live a sacred life of service to all beings could provide one essential key to human survival.

It is time to come to know the real Jesus, the pioneer, inspired by the universal cosmic force of love and wisdom of a new humanity and the great tender revolutionary of love in action. What modern scholarship and the discovery in the 1940s and 1950s of long-obscured “gnostic gospels” has revealed is that Jesus never wanted to found a religion, let alone one that vaunted the exclusive possession of the truth, and he never aimed to create churches in his name, let alone ones that betrayed his egalitarian all-embracing vision in homophobic, misogynistic hierarchies, dedicated to the love of power and not the power of love.

Jesus’s mission was to forge a path for all human beings, a path of direct connection with an all-loving God that would increasingly divinize them, revealing to them who they really were and making them joyful, compassionate agents of transformative love in action. He did not come to preach a way to another worldly heaven; he came to show us how to transform ourselves in mind, heart, soul and body so as to live here on earth and in a time that he called “the life of the kingdom”, and so become powerful and wise enough to transform earth life into what he knew it was destined to be—a living mirror of the compassion and justice of the Divine.

Jesus lived a life in radical unity with the cosmic force of divine love and wisdom and shows us unforgettably how to do the same. He shows us the compassion for all beings this breeds, the holy joy it engenders, the sometimes miraculous powers this gives us all access to, if we are willing to surrender to and discover our divine identity and put our faith in a God that loves us magnificently and unconditionally. And he did so not to be worshipped as a unique son of God, but to demonstrate and share with us the power of the direct relationship with God that could birth us all into what St. Paul wonderfully called, “the glorious liberty of the children of God”.

The tragedy at the heart of Christianity is that this vision was lost, betrayed and perverted in ways that have profoundly damaged the history of the world and blocked the real astounding good news his whole life was dedicated to giving us from reaching and empowering us. By worshipping Jesus as a unique “son of God” instead of celebrating him as a revealer of our own divine human potential to ourselves, Christianity separated him from us and obscured the sun of the truths he lived to inspire and ennoble us with.

As Jung wrote, “the Jesus ideal has been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an external object of worship and it is precisely the veneration of the object that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the soul and transforming it into a wholeness in keeping with the ideal. Accordingly the divine mediator stands outside as an image, while man remains fragmentary and untouched in the deepest part of him.”