Out Beyond
Ever been frustrated by Jesus’ communication style? Get in line because even his first followers throw their hands up in the gospels and ask why he doesn’t just speak plainly. Why always in parables and figures of speech. Jesus is a poet. One of the best. He knows he can’t express spiritual truths directly, but only through stories and metaphors that point without limiting.
I’m sure this is a big part of the allure of Buddhism in the West: Buddha is more engineer than poet, giving us Three Universal Truths, Four Noble Truths, an Eight Fold Path, all interconnected and breaking down into further sublists. Something to hold on to. Jesus never gives us lists or interlocking structure. He points toward the experience of top-level concepts and principles, what it feels like to live them. Frustrating, because he is always challenging embedded thought, always introducing paradox and mystery, attempting to take us beyond. Beyond where we are, beyond where we think we can go, even beyond what we think proper.
Between Jesus’ poetic lines, we find him taking us beyond obedience—to realize that law can only frame the door to life; walking through is experiencing law being fulfilled in relationships that are no longer contractual, that live and breathe in the freedom to break the code whenever love requires. Beyond certainty—to realize that certainty is an illusion, that re-introducing mystery and paradox is to thrive in grateful unknowing, in faith. Beyond belief—to realize that ideas don’t transform us until we act on them, risk losing everything we believe will save us to experience what really does.
Our codes and beliefs, our need for certainty, our conscious minds are hardened targets. They have to be to sustain us through the fears of physical life. But Jesus is taking us beyond physical life, to the life that exists beyond our fears. Like Abraham, asked to kill his miracle son and promise, Jesus is taking us beyond all the defenses we build around what we believe will save us…to experience that we already are.
