Water Into Wine. Tom Harpur
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feminine name. Mother, Latin mater, is the bearer of spirit. This story, then, is about the first solid step on the journey for all of us that ultimately, through much joy and struggling, leads to “home.” There is a point where, however expressed, one decides to do the will of the “Father.” Ego needs to begin to be controlled and made to serve a higher purpose than oneself. The road to spiritual maturity has begun.
Lest anyone expect that this road will be smooth or easy, let me hasten to say that it will require great courage and what the New Testament calls hypomone—tough endurance. The King James Version usually translates this Greek term as “patience,” but this is only accurate in a very antique sense of that word. What it really means is the ability to stay with or under a heavy task or demanding situation. Life, as Scott Peck says in the very first lines of his giant bestseller The Road Less Traveled, “is difficult.” The Buddha said so, the Gospels say so too. But, as I point out in Living Waters, the evolution of the soul is furthered much more by problems, doubts, anxieties—all forms of resistance to the Spirit within—than by purely halcyon days.11
There is a good reason why spiritually motivated people frequently experience “the dark night of the soul.” I have certainly known such episodes of “dryness” in my own life, and can say without hesitation that they have, in retrospect, been times of genuine advance in self-knowledge and eventual victory over some mistaken ambition, pride or other weakness. Looking back at my life, I can see that the roughest terrain encountered has often been the most fruitful land I ploughed. The medieval alchemists tried to find ways of turning lead into gold. Understood esoterically, this was a metaphor for the inner spiritual soul-work involved for every one of us as we struggle by the grace of the God within to transform the leaden dross of all our foibles, all our neuroses and all our empty vanities into the pure gold of Christliness. St. Paul describes this process thus: “And all of us . . . seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image [that of the inner Christ] from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”12 That is what I mean by the concept of spiritual evolution.
As the well-loved hymn by Edwin Hatch puts it so aptly:
Breathe on me breath of God,
Till I am wholly Thine,
Until this earthly part of me
Glows with Thy fire divine.
4 TRANSFORMATIVE STAGES IN THE JESUS STORY
The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
– ST. PAUL, 2 CORINTHIANS 3:6
WE BEGIN HERE with the profound summation of spiritual truth once made by Valentinus, who was the author of The Gospel of Truth, one of the many Gnostic writings found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. He was a Gnostic Christian, later labelled a heretic, who was Egyptian but lived in Rome from approximately 135 to 165 CE(he founded a school there about 140) and had a very large following. He wrote the powerful, life-changing formula: “What liberates us is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.”1 However far from this central theme the discussion may at times lead us, this insight underlies the whole of our exploration from beginning to conclusion.
First, then, there comes an obvious question: If you take the literal/historical route, how long did Jesus’ ministry last? In the schema according to Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, the ministry lasts approximately one year. This is because deeply underlying the entire message is the ancient myth of the solar god in his yearly round. John’s Gospel, however, which is, as we have seen, so unlike the other three in so many ways, seems to follow a three-year cycle. Scholars point out that in it there are at least three different Passover visits to Jerusalem. Since John’s Gospel is the most “spiritual” and the least concerned to give even the appearance of verbatim reportage of a fully human being (in spite of the final chapter, which is an obvious appendix by a later hand), this Gospel can opt for the potent number three and at the same time focus almost the entire story on Jerusalem itself. In any case, the ministry lasted at most three short years.
As the great New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann once put it, John’s Gospel is “all theology served up in the language of myth.” Mark, the earliest Gospel, has been described as a collection of loosely knit anecdotes intended not as history but for edification and general evangelizing. Its mystery or the “secret” it reveals on the surface, literal reading is that Jesus is the long-expected Messiah and that the Kingdom of God will soon be a reality in the here and now. At a deeper, esoteric level, however, its message, as we have said earlier, is an allegory of the evolution of the soul in matter, the soul of every one of us. The Gospel begins with Jesus’ baptism, which symbolizes the fact that to incarnate in the watery condition of the body is to be wholly immersed in the realm of matter. Just as Jesus descends into the waters of Jordan, so the soul of every one of us has descended into life in the body. The human body, as we know, is two-thirds water.
The Baptism
Few things, however, have been more distorted and misunderstood in the Christian religion because of a literal approach to the Bible than the ritual known as the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. In the past, indeed, many have died because of bitter differences over how, when and how often it should be administered, to whom and by whom. Today, even the fast-growing crowds of the unchurched—those whom the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, John Spong, usually refers to as “church alumni”—still want their infant children “done,” that is, christened or baptized. It is traditionally the key mark doctrinally of full membership in the Church; but, at the popular level, it is now commonly, for a growing number, little more than a social rite of passage and an occasion for a party.
Long ago, when I was a parish minister myself in the late fifties and early sixties, I baptized hundreds of babies and older children at my quickly growing suburban church, the majority of whom in all likelihood now belong to those swelling numbers who tell the census taker “no religion” when asked. I still vividly remember how weird it seemed at the time to be gazing down into the innocent faces of the tiny infant baptizands while reading from the prayer book service about their sinfulness and need for total regeneration. It seemed a poor way to welcome these young “souls” into Holy Mother Church, or into the world in general for that matter.
I am reminded here of Joseph Campbell’s anecdote in program 2 of The Power of Myth. There, in his commentary upon the way in which the Eden myth in Genesis shows nature as an enemy and God as opposed to nature, while man is seen as a disobedient sinner cast out of the Garden, Campbell told the story of the Zen Buddhist he once encountered in Japan. Remarking on this Genesis story, the monk said: “God against man—man against God; God against nature—nature against God. Funny religion!” Campbell noted that in the Japanese approach to religion there was no talk of depravity, a Fall from innocence, or original sin. They had a “mythology that includes all of life.” He found it all a strangely liberating environment in which to reflect upon religion and its impact on our daily lives.
In the Gospels, the very first mention of baptism comes at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark’s account. Without any of the preliminaries of the other Gospels, the drama commences with a quote from the Septuagint version (Greek translation) of the Old Testament: “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you . . . ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” Then John the Baptist appears in the wilderness “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” It is clear that Mark deliberately took the Greek version of the quote, which is from Isaiah, chapter 40, rather than cite the actual Hebrew text, because it suited his purpose much better. He actually twists the original—which is about the return of the children of Israel from exile—and makes it into what it is not, a Messianic prophecy.
As one reads on, however, it is readily apparent that the personage Jesus presents at the Jordan does not proclaim himself as Messiah, or the Son of God; he announces instead the nearness of the Kingdom of God as being “the Good News [Euangelion]