Being Born Again, Thomas Style

Today we have Part 3 of Bob’s reflections on the Gospel of Thomas:

Being “born again” is a popular term in some Christian denominations, but it is generally not so popular among many mainline Christians. In the Gospel of Thomas I learned of a new way of understanding this phrase, one that is quite radical and subversive.

In saying 3 Jesus says, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look! The Kingdom is in the sky!’ Then the birds will be there before you are. If they say that the Kingdom is in the sea, then the fish will be there before you are. Rather the Kingdom is within you and it is outside of you. When you understand yourselves you will be understood….If you do not know yourselves, then you exist in poverty and you are that poverty.”

Andrew Harvey says this about the significance of this saying: “Jesus is, consciously and with the most subversive imaginable scorn, mocking all versions of the spiritual journey that place the ultimate experience beyond this world, in some transcendent ‘otherwhere.’”

I mentioned earlier that the so-called gnostic heresy is condemned, rightly I believe, because it denigrates the world and creates all sorts of metaphysical flights-of-fancy that take us astray. In this saying, Jesus is claiming that the otherworldly perspectives of most Christian orthodoxies ultimately are guilty of the same heresy: when the Kingdom is transcendent and the world is an illusion, the status quo is kept intact with all its misery, horror, and injustice. In this framework, God does all the work—all we must do is believe—and the good stuff will be given to us in the future, otherworldly Kingdom.

Thus far we have explored mainly what the Kingdom is not for Thomas, with a metaphor of light for what we will experience if we achieve Jesus’ Kingdom-consciousness. But what is involved in taking this path? Perhaps the most revelatory saying is number 22:

“Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples: These infants taking milk are like those who enter the Kingdom. His disciples asked him: If we are infants will we enter the Kingdom? Jesus responded: When you make the two into one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the upper like the lower and the lower like the upper, and thus make the male and female the same, so that the male isn’t male and the female isn’t female. When you make an eye to replace an eye, and a hand to replace a hand, and a foot to replace a foot, and an image to replace an image, then you will enter the Kingdom.”

There you go—that seems easy enough! Riddles indeed… Tomorrow I’ll have a go at unpacking this key passage, using not only other sayings in Thomas, but also what we now know about Ken Wilber’s higher consciousness from his studies of gurus such as Sri Aurobindo from India.