Jesus Christ demystified

Christ has been described as ‘the man no-one knows’ (Great Lives Great Deeds, 1966, p.448 of 448). As explained, the one type of person that humans have been unable to ‘know’, to confront the nature of, is unresigned prophets. The soundness of unresigned prophets was so confronting that humans deified them as a means of recognising their exceptional soundness without having to confront their own lack of soundness. By assigning to unresigned prophets a divine status as supernatural beings, unrelated to typical humans, people did not have to compare themselves with them. With reconciling understanding of the human condition found, it is at last safe and necessary to demystify unresigned prophets and admit and confront the fact that they were simply humans like everyone else, albeit ones who were exceptionally nurtured in infancy and exceptionally sheltered from corruption during childhood and thus, as adolescents, did not have to resign to a life of living in denial. The Resignation essay used the example of savants to illustrate the extraordinary sensitivities and capabilities of unresigned minds. While savants come from the opposite end of the soundness spectrum to unresigned prophets, their complete mental dissociation from the alienated world allowed them access to the extraordinary capabilities all humans would have if they were not resigned. Christ was clearly an unresigned prophet.

Being unresigned Christ could look into, and talk openly about, the human condition. Christ was recognising the power of the unresigned mind to think truthfully and effectively when he compared clever but resigned adult thinking to the thinking capabilities of the minds of unresigned children, when he said, ‘you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children’ (Matt. 11:25). He also recognised that, unlike him, most people were living in a state of extreme denial of the truth of integrative meaning when he said, ‘why is my language not clear to you? Because Page 429 of
Print Edition you are unable to hear what I say…The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God’ (John 8:43-47).

If Christ had been resigned he would have been party to the ‘lie’, the great denial, and thus been unable to expose the lie. While resigned prophets variously succeeded in their attempt to expose this ‘lie’, the truth is humans cannot very easily undermine themselves, self-betray, ‘rat on’ their condition; a human’s thinking cannot be alienation-free when they are alienated. A person cannot be a ‘keeper of the lie’, as Zarathustra described it, and also be capable of telling the truth. Christ made this logical point to those who were accusing him of being a dangerous, deluded charlatan when he said, ‘Satan can’t drive out Satan’ (Mark 3:23), and ‘a bad tree cannot bear good fruit’ (Matt. 7:18).

Part of the process of deifying Christ has been to rob him of his human vigour and righteous strength. Christ has usually been portrayed as a sorrowful, soft, even weak, saintly, pacifist-like individual, when, like all true prophets, he was strong, defiant and even warlike. Prophets took on the world of lies. A prophet was not like a ‘saint’. The 1971 Encyclopedic World Dictionary defines a saint as ‘one of exceptional holiness of life’ and a prophet as ‘one who speaks for God’. A saint lived a holy life while a prophet defied denial, acknowledged integrative meaning and all the truths related to it. A saint was passive while a prophet was active. If Saint Francis of Assisi, loving the animals as much as he did, was strong enough, he would have taken that love into battle against the denial of the issue of the human condition, sought to address it and by so doing solve the cause of the corruption and destruction of Earth and its animals. Saints were people who had become ‘born-again’ to acknowledgment of, and adherence to, the soul’s ideal world in a morally exemplary way, while unresigned prophets were people who had never left the state of innocence, had never resigned, and who sought to end the suffering in the world and bring permanent order to the divisive chaos in human life by addressing the underlying problem. In his 1966 book Beautiful Losers, the poet and musician Leonard Cohen clearly identified this difference between saints and prophets when he wrote that, ‘A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint Page 430 of
Print Edition dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.’

As will be explained later when the authority of prophets is raised, while prophets were ‘warlike’ they were the opposite of ‘arrogant’. It was the extraordinary authoritativeness of unresigned, truthful thinkers that made them appear arrogant to insecure, resigned minds.

It should also be explained that the class of prophets who were resigned but who managed to work their way back to confronting the truths associated with the soul’s true world, were not of the same category as saints who had become born-again to acknowledging and adhering to the ideal world of the soul. Saints did not try to penetrate the denial and dig up the truth about humans, as resigned prophets did, rather they simply transcended the whole issue of the human condition and adopted an ideal life, a life free of corrupt behaviour. One is a thinking state and the other is a non-thinking state. Saints adopted ideality to an exceptional degree, but avoided wrestling with the issue of why humans were not ideal.

While saints chose to influence the world by living an exemplary life, prophets sought to change the world by tackling the lies that people were practicing, and the issue of the human condition that lay behind those lies. Unresigned prophets, like Christ, were secure enough in self to confront ‘God’, the truth of integrative meaning and the associated issue of the human condition, ‘face to face’, as Moses described it. They were exceptionally capable of defying and penetrating the lies on Earth. They were immensely courageous in their defiance of lies or denial and they were immensely strong in the amount of soul they had guiding and supporting them. The unresigned prophet Kahlil Gibran had this to say on the subject: ‘Humanity looks upon Jesus the Nazarene as a poor-born who suffered misery and humiliation with all of the weak. And He is pitied, for Humanity believes He was crucified painfully…And all that Humanity offers to Him is crying and wailing and lamentation. For centuries Humanity has been worshipping weakness in the person of the saviour. The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of strength. Jesus never lived a life of fear, nor did He die suffering or complaining…He lived as a leader; He was crucified as a crusader; He died with a heroism that frightened His killers and tormentors. Jesus was not a bird with broken wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked wings. He feared not His persecutors nor His enemies. He suffered not before His killers. Free and brave and daring He was. He defied Page 431 of
Print Edition all despots and oppressors. He saw the contagious pustules and amputated them…He muted evil and He crushed Falsehood and He choked Treachery’ (The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran, 1951, pp.231–232 of 902).

In a public speech given in 1960 the incomparable Australian educator and resigned prophet Sir James Darling emphasised the need in life to be both sensitive and tough—precisely the capacities that unresigned prophets have, being sensitive enough to access the true world of the soul and tough enough to defy the all-dominating world of denial. Darling wrote that ‘the future, [Canon Raven] has said, lies not with the predatory [selfish] and the immune [alienated] but with the sensitive [innocent] who live dangerously [defy the world of denial]. There is a threefold choice for the free man…He may grasp for himself what he can get and trample the needs and feelings of others beneath his feet: or he may try to withdraw from the world to a monastery…: or he may “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them”…[and so] There remains the sensitive, on one proviso: he must be sensitive and tough. He must combine tenderness and awareness with fortitude, perseverance, and courage. The sensitivity is necessary because without it there is no life of the mind, no growing consciousness, no living conscience; nor is there any real communication one with another. It is necessary also if we accept Father Teilhard’s extension of the idea of evolution as illuminating the end of life. Only by a growth of sensitivity can man progress from the alpha of original chaos to the omega of God’s purpose for him…Sensitivity is not enough. Without toughness it may be only a thin skin…[only from] an inner core of strength are [you] enabled to fight back…Can such men be? Of course they can: and they are the leaders whom others will follow. In the world of books there are, for me, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, or Laurens van der Post’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, 1962, pp.33–34 of 223).

The following essay, One Solitary Life, describes the value of the contribution Christ’s soul-strength, toughness, and capacity to defy the world of denial has made in the world: ‘Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. He never owned a home. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never set foot inside a big city. He never travelled two hundred miles from the place He was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself. While still a young man, the tide of public opinion turned against Him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him; another betrayed Him. He was turned Page 432 of
Print Edition over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth—His coat. When He was dead, He was placed in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend. Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today He is the central figure of the human race and the leader of the column of progress. I am far within my mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, and all the navies that ever sailed, and all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of Man upon this earth as powerfully as has the One Solitary Life!’ (this essay is the common rendering of an original sermon by Dr James Allan Francis, The Real Jesus and Other Sermons, ch. ‘Arise Sir Knight’, 1926, p.123). The fact that much of humanity dates its history around the life of Christ—as either AD or BC—is another measure of the impact Christ has had on the human journey to enlightenment.

Incidentally the above passage says that Christ’s three years of ministry before he was crucified took place in his early thirties. While many accounts state that Christ was in his early thirties when he died, in the Bible it says ‘You [Christ] are not yet fifty years old’ (John 8:57). This strongly suggests that Christ was in his late forties when he undertook his ministry. The unresigned prophet, Sir Laurens van der Post’s formative writing period—the time when he first articulated his exceptional insights into the human condition—occurred in his late forties and early fifties, with his centre-piece book, The Lost World of the Kalahari, published in 1958 when he was 51. The unresigned prophet Plato, who died when he was 80, wrote his seminal works, Phaedo, Symposium and The Republic in his ‘middle period’, when he was around 50 years old. The resigned prophet Sir James Darling’s most powerful enunciation of his extraordinary vision for education was made in the annual Speech Day Address he gave at Geelong Grammar School in 1950 when he was 51 years old.

I have read somewhere that of all professions, the age when prophets ‘hang out their shingles’, establish their business, is the oldest. The journey of the maturation of a prophet is a long one. This journey is outlined in Free from page 180 onwards. In it I wrote that, ‘While our basic alienation/ personality was established in our infancy and early childhood we did not realise the full extent and consequences of it until we reached the middle and latter half of our life’ (p.205 of 228). For most people the full flowering of their personality in mid-life resulted in a crisis because it meant having to confront Page 433 of
Print Edition the shortcomings of their corrupted, alienated reality. For the very few who were sound, this was when their soundness became manifest, when they learnt just how free of shortcomings they were.