[Written around 2005. Commentary in 2013: Just to be clear, I have no clue whether or not Jesus actually lived as they said he did. I take him to be a very unusual and mythological person, and that’s how I’m writing about him…]
Jesus was a warrior, and his prime enemy was the family. He advocates open rebellion of children against their parents. Take Matthew 10:34:
“Think not that I have come to bring peace to the earth; it is not peace I bring but a sword. I have come to set son against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law; a person’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”
Jesus says reject your parents, reject the lies they raised you on, and find the honest truth within yourself. That’s why they killed him, Jews and Romans, and even one of his own disciples. Jesus threatened their way of life, and created a new mold.
Take his celibacy. This gave him the opportunity to avoid externalizing his internal conflicts. Few can handle the frustrations of conscious celibacy, and most who are celibate simply do so through unconscious defense, by splitting off and repressing their sex drive. This death-celibacy does not lead to enlightenment. It leads to disease.
And take his lack of having children. He never recreated the cycle of bringing others into the world to rescue him. It is difficult, if not impossible, to attain enlightenment when one becomes a parent. Projection, that most basic defense mechanism underlying acting out, becomes too easy and comfortable when one has offspring. They’re like magnets for parental projection of denied material, for one’s own unresolved childhood traumas, and are a time-tested vaccination against healing.
And take Jesus’s forty days and nights in the desert: his time of profound introspection – and temptation. Before Jesus could move forward cleanly he had to know who he truly was, where he was heading, and what was tempting him back. And his temptation was his family, their perks, and their ways. And once he’d figured this out he no longer had to mince his words.
Take his line to his own biological mother and brothers when addressing a crowd of his followers, from Matthew 12: 48-50:
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
Or this, from Luke 14: 26-27:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
Jesus hated his family because they betrayed his soul, and he made a new true family for himself – a family of true soulful companions, people open to his new, true, honest self. He had to reject his old self as well, the false self that he created to survive amidst them, and hate all that went with it, all the parts of himself that were just like them. However, as to his line about hating one’s own children (assuming he’s talking about young children), he’s totally off there. No child deserves the hate of his parents. After all, Jesus wasn’t perfect. He went far, but he still had his emotional work cut out for him – and he agrees!
Take John 14:12:
“He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do…” [italics mine]
Jesus realized that even he was an evolving person who had not reached the pinnacle of man’s consciousness. He was a person of his time, and one who died young, at a mere thirty-three. What might he have become had he kept on exploring, maturing, growing, developing his thoughts?
This he leaves to us to find out for ourselves…through our own lives, through our own healing processes.
Hey Daniel Mackler you said this “Jesus realized that even he was an evolving person who had not reached the pinnacle of man’s consciousness. He was a person of his time, and one who died young, at a mere thirty-three. What might he have become had he kept on exploring, maturing, growing, developing his thoughts?” Jesus Mission was to Die to Save the World. By him dying on the Cross we can now follow him to be saved from Eternal Death. Because He is God in the Flesh. Do you believe this?
Here’s some food for thought as to your question. Physicists are now finding more and more evidence of what they call a multiverse, which are alternate universes that parallel our own reality. Think of a cube with a sheet of paper on each face that intersects the paper on 4 other faces, then apply that same logic to a sphere, like earth, and you have an infinite number of intersections, then transpose this on a 4 dimensional reality of earth travelling through space-time. I’m not sure if you have heard of the Mandela Effect, but a lot of people remember Nelson Mandela dying 2 separate times, along many other oddities where history is not as they remember. I have had similar instances with Bible verses seeming to change what they were saying over time, which could be one meaning of, “The Word of God is alive and active.” I know it sounds sci-fi, but scientists are finding more and more evidence to suggest this is how the universe is designed–its like a game of Chutes and Ladders, where the Creator can swap out the game boarf and put us on a Chute or Ladder at any time. This perfectly reconciles predestination and freewill and how God is able to interact with us and perform miracles.
This applies to your question because the more I search scripture, the more certain I become that the millenial reign could have began when Jesus came the first time, or even the 2nd time when He arose on the 3rd day, but the Pharisees chose to crucify their Messiah, and this choice made from freewill caused the destruction of the temple, and God’s authority to be transferred from the Jewish people to the Roman empire. It was because the Pharisees rejected their own teachings, and they became just like Cain and killed the obedient Son, who obeyed His Father, did what was right, and found God’s favor. This is the same dynamic as between Moses and Pharaoh, David and Saul, and several other Biblical stories. A famous psychologist, Carl Jung, named this phenomenon, “the Shadow,” and it is precisely like what possessed Cain, precisely why Jesus died so that we can be reconciled with our sin, and it is precisely the dominant influence in politics today. The shadow is when a person denies a part of their nature exists, refuses to face it, and then from refusing to face it, it begins to control the person. Genesis 4:7 explains the mystery. Cain was told what was right, and he would be as well off as Cain if he simply did what Abel did–so it was definitely not jealousy that caused him to kill Abel or else Cain would have simply copied Abel and received God’s favor. It was the sin, crouching and hiding at his door, that God warned him was there, that caused Cain to kill his brother. It was the fact that Cain knew his sin was there, but he refused to face it, that caused the sin to consume Cain and possess him. I’ve seen it happen nearly everyday that I speak the Gospel to someone who believes they can lie and hide and manipulate to cover up their own sin, when they are forced to face the fact that they are not sufficient to overcome their own sin, they so often double down on the lies and manipulation. For example I confronted a guy who was selling pills to a close family member, and he said, “don’t blame me, tell her to quit calling and get off my nuts,” and still to this day my family member insists that the guy was my friend and not hers, and that I was selling her pills and not him. Even though I’ve recorded her admitting the truth, trying to get her to face the truth always causes her to become violent and to start making up lies and sick and absurd accusations. This is the precise psychological mechanism that causes an alcoholic to go off the deep end when you tell them they have had too much, or telling an adulterous woman that what she’s doing is not right, or correcting a person who is twisting Bible verses to justify evil acts–their sin consumes them, or possesses them, and causes them to behave like a demonaic.
My point is that if the Pharisees truly understood the scriptures they were teaching, they would have recognized Jesus as their Messiah, and He would not have had to die on the cross. But because they did not understand, and did not see with both eyes, that Jesus had to die so that God’s people could face their own sin and be reconciled with it. I hope this makes sense to you.
Some of your thought are interesting, but there’s no scientific evidence for a multiverse. Any discussion of a multiverse is pure philosophy. The idea is increasingly being discussed/ explored (even presumed) because our universe looks like it was intelligently (purposefully) designed, and that’s an unwelcome problem for many people. If people can convince themselves that there are an unlimited number of universes, they can then assume that one (ours) is bound to randomly look intelligently designed.
well I am thoroughly impressed with your musings on Jesus seeing as you are not a “Believer.” you are spot-on in many ways, in my opinion. thanks for sharing.
you understand some things about Jesus that many Christians have not even acknowledged. you’re taking the more difficult parts of his teachings, and having something constructive to say about them. you’re unique in the way you talk about him.
as for criticism, i have only a few! overall, your message is spot-on in my opinion.
“enlightenment” is a word that Christians would not associate with their relationship to God. a Christian has been born again; is being washed clean. but to become “enlightened” is not something the Bible teaches. it contradicts what the Bible teaches about out souls.
similarly, “evolve” doesn’t fit with the Bible’s teachings. to say that Jesus was an evolving person, who could have accomplished more if he’d had the time, is to miss the point of why he came. the cross was appointed for him from the beginning. to muse on what he could have accomplished other than proving to the world that our souls are eternal and that God is the supplier of life, is missing the point of his coming. I appreciate your thoughts there but am just letting you know what a Christian might think to themselves when they read that.
the meaning of the verse about believers doing greater things than him, didn’t mean that he wasn’t as good as some people in the future will be. he was already as capable as a person can be. what he was referring to is, there are people in the future who will lead more people to God than he did while in the flesh himself. there are billions more people in the world now, which means that indeed, someone else has the room to accomplish even greater works than him, for the harvest is greater now than before.
other than those things, I want to stress how profound your piece is. your understanding of what Jesus taught, is beyond what most Christians understand. you’re digging right into what is too hard for many people to face, because it’s comfortable for them to just attend church and go along with the world’s traditions and make their families more important to them than God. I really appreciate you putting these words out there for every kind of person to see. even with the criticisms i mentioned, I think your piece was certainly touched by God and that He has great plans for you. you are blessed in your ability to be painfully honest, with practicality. much loved reading this!!
Omg where did u spring from?!? This is so insightful and so clever. Are you a libra by any chance?
I am keeping this on my home page.
Abusive parents often use the teachings of Christianity to their optimum advantage. They tell their children that they are allowed to do whatever they want and the child must honour them and if the child asks for them to take accountability for their abuse they are often met with “i said sorry so you have to forgive and move on”. Sorry is the magic word that is said as licence to wipe their slate clean… until the next time. The “honour thy father and mother” motto is loved by self serving parents. But is taken on the premise that the parents are honouring and respecting their children and their autonomy. The same way that “treat your neighbor as yourself” is on the premise that you are respecting and honouring your own self….
I think it is really relevant that Jesus never had children because his purpose was not to be a parent. Being a parent is a full time job and vocation it is not just a right of passage as most of the brainwashed masses seem to think it is. As spiderman says “with great power comes great responsibility” being a parent means being responsible for another human being’s soul, mind, spirit, emotional needs and mental needs. It means changing the course of things for another thousand years in some cases where that child will go on to have more children and so on and so on….one child cna be equal to one nation… how do people just have a child and think nothing of that, as if it’s just a part of adulthood. Most do not even learn about child psychology or childhood development. When we learn to drive a car we take lessons and get a license so we know we will be competent drivers. There are people who have children and do not even spend time around children or infants.
The family cult is a brainwashing system that we need to get away from in order to truely come into our own self realisation and develope true spiritual sovereignty. Jesus was on the truth and he warned us against idolatry and yet most christian families like my own taught us to worship our parents and to see them as infallible, people who could do what they liked to their child and never be accountable for their actions – as they were Gods.
Idolising parents like mind controlled slaves will never allow anyone true salvation.
Some nice insights there. The family dynamic is the living expression of the matrix. To break out of the trap, you need to attack the family dynamic on the level of the mind Family projections are a type of forced reality projection, controlled by the Mother.
The mother is always the core control mechanism since our mother has complete control over the programming during the incubation period. Christ says during the wedding of Cana; Mother I can deny you nothing. He acknowledged in that moment, that his mother was still in charge.
““If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple.”
This implies that to join Christs discipleship, you need to halt the manipulation of your emotions and mind by family members, in fact not listen to the words of others. If you’re not repelled by the things they do to you through words, you are not at the right stage of your own personal evolution to take the lessons thereafter.
It implies you have enough understanding as to what is the source of the problem, in essence. I will not tell you this though. It is called realisation for a reason.
Take up your cross daily, means nail your ego to it and leave without it.
Hi Daniel. Just one thought:
Jesus rejected his biological family not out of hate, as acting out of hate is anathema to his teaching.Rather, he rejected his biological family out of Love and his drive to protect them. Rejecting them before the crowds of “followers” who would later demand his crucifixion and seek out any of his relations to lynch mercilessly.
I believe, in my heart of hearts, Jesus rejected his Mother in our to protect her from the mob he knew would betray him and hunt down his survivors.
Thank you for letting me share.
Please let’s remember All-Holy Mother Mary’s incredible pain and suffering, to have to watch her child being led off to slaughter by popular demand.
I relate to that..ive done the same…I felt I was protecting my own family.. as I loved them.. but I let them.. abuse me .. kick me out etc., when I became Christian… they hated me.. and I was meek turn other cheek type… in sorrow I left… but I still felt a warfare and a protecting of them…. I still feel to this day they are taken over or influenced by someone/something.. other than my true intent.. as I had faith…yes it says Mary’s heart is the one.. “pierced with a sword to determine the thoughts of many”…. many skip over that verse.. her pierced heart determines the thoughts of many! a mothers heart! looks like today many are abusing it willingly (Isaiah 29.. a girl is “tormented” by “many” and as a virgin..many think they can rule over her…and she can be swapped out.. (take place of Christ) it says she is being used in many verses..
Then he addressed apostles as they are my mother, father , brother .. to get them assaulted
Please read the context. Dont assume your own false doctrine
Hello sons and daughters of the one true living God, please pray always that you will be accounted worthy to escape the hour of temptation that is going to come upon the entire world. And pray always that you will also be accounted worthy to stand in the presence of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
First of all, let me say that I do enjoy your original and thoughtful (though disturbing to me as someone who has parentied three wonderful and challenging children) commentary about therapy. However, I think you’re trying to use Jesus’ credibility to support your ideas about parenting.
I would like to try to address why your enterpretation of the above scriptures are subjective and erroneous, but I will defer to a late, ancient literature scholar from Oxford university. He would tell you that an objective reading of the biblical texts, based on commonly used literary criterium, would lead you to only one of the following conclusions:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
hi Mark,
i agree that this essay/interpretation could well be subjective and erroneous — as i have no idea who jesus was. i was writing it in part (now that i think about it) to make the point that you can even intone biblical scripture on jesus to back up a point of view as presently unusual as mine. as i wrote in 2013 (in the intro to this 2005 essay): “Just to be clear, I have no clue whether or not Jesus actually lived as they said he did. I take him to be a very unusual and mythological person, and that’s how I’m writing about him…”
by the way, i think C.S. Lewis is way off here — lost in his own religious faith. i always did like his narnia series, though…
greetings,
daniel
p.s. i like this related gandhi quotation, though (not, by the way, that i think gandhi was the world’s best parental role model): “I may say that I have never been interested in a historical Jesus. I should not care if it was proved by someone that the man called Jesus never lived, and that what was narrated in the Gospels was a figment of the writer’s imagination. For the Sermon on the Mount would still be true for me.”
If by “mythological” you’re questioning whether Jesus actually existed — no credible historian questions that , any more than the existence of Abraham Lincoln. There is just too much secular literature from that time period that testifies to his existence. If you mean you doubt he did miracles or was raised from the dead, that’s another matter. A lack of openness to those possibilities can come from being “lost” in an anti-supernatural or new age spirituality bias. Of course, we all come at these things with our own preconceived biases. Lewis began studying the question of who Jesus was as an atheist in his 40’s.
My point in citing Lewis was that, as an ancient literature scholar, he is in the best position to objectively determine what the biblical texts were saying about Jesus and what he claimed about himself. It’s clear that the texts claimed that he rose from the dead and was therefore something more than a mere guru. Whether one accepts the testimony of those texts as factual in another matter.
Finally two unrelated things things: 1. I enjoy having these kind of discussions/debates and may be inclined to carry it on beyod the point of obnoxiousness. (I’m sure you’ve figured out I’m one of those bible-banging-evangelical types) If so, just let me know and I’ll leave it alone. 2. Do you know of any resources whereby I could find a psychiatrist or doctor who is willing to help people get off of medication? I met Whitaker when we appeared on a local NPR program together here in Columbus, Ohio and Suzanne Beachy, who you may know from her involvement with MIA, is a good friend of mine. Despite these contacts, I have failed in my attempts to find any doctor’s in this area who sympathize with the recovery movement. Any help you could give would be appreciated
hi mark,
hmm….i presently lack the energy to get into the religious discussion — though i grant it has value…..i am just fried!!! but hmm, columbus……. i don’t know any good psychiatrists there. or any psychiatrists at all…..
i did look on the ISPS-US member list — http://isps-us.org/membership_main.php?orderBy=lastName&city=*&state=OH&country=* — and saw Derrick Watley there, in cincinnati. at first i didn’t know who he was, but then i recalled him — he’s not a practitioner, but a very lovely guy who’s done a lot of research looking for good practitioners, and he might know someone. his email is public on the link. also, i saw there was a protest against forced psychiatry in columbus this past january. maybe you were there? if not, here is the facebook link, and you might find someone who has some good connections there: https://www.facebook.com/events/929668307067824/
and are you connected with Pat Risser in Ashland? i imagine you are…. he might know some good folks, and certainly would be a good person to talk with. (i can connect you if you wish.) he actually got me invited with his group to speak out there some months back, but then the bigwigs found out about my stance on psychiatry (not even what i think of parents, haha) and i got disinvited. that was just too bad. my final possibility is larry leitner, a psychologist and professor in oxford, ohio. he’s a radical guy, and here’s his university webpage. he’s trained some good folks and probably has some good ohio contacts. wishing you the best! daniel p.s. wouldn’t it just be easier if people were demon-possessed and we could figure out how to get the demons to go into a herd of swine?
Well, where else would you expect a Jewish rabbi to cast demons? Pork phobia, I guess?
Seriously though, I’ve seen some of this kind of thing. My friend, Mike Husch, was cured of 25 years of severe epilepsy through an exorcism. We prayed for him several times and he’d start growlig and foaming at the mouth. He’d get relief from his frequent grand mal siezures for a week or so and they’d return. We asked this guy, John Wimber, to meet with him to see what he thought (He was a seminary professor known for teaching churches about healing) to meet with him. He prayed for Mike, said it was demonic and told Mike to go back to his doctor to get checked. In fact, his siezures were cured from that day on. He was taken off of all medication. This was all medically documented at OSU Medical Center where Mike recieved his medical care. My friend Scott, who injured his shoulder in a mountain biking accident years ago, was healed at a healing conference last summer at church. I know because He showed me the next day when we went trail riding. I was praying about a question that troubled me deeply when my father was dying. That night my wife and two of my children had the same dream, which completely answered my question. A woman came in for counseling and was very vague about whatever was bothering her. I had a reocurring thought that she was having an affair with a guy named Mike. Somewhat sheepishly (God speaking to me? That would get me thrown into the psychiatric slammer pretty quick!), I told her what kept coming into my mind and she admitted it was true. I could go on with other things I’ve experienced, but suffice-it- to-say, this God thing is real. He/She is literally real, personal, relational and knowable in Christ.
Anyway, that’s my sermon for the day. No response expected. Just felt like sharing that.
Hello, do you have a personal relationship with our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ? The Son of God. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. – John 3:16
Jesus has known the joy to be raised, as a boy, in a Jewish family . And that mean an overbearing, castrating mother that will never allow him to have his own independent live. Jesus could have been Italian or Greek… in a way these families have similar ties and overbearing mother son relation. You will never be free and able to praise God unless you put your family and especially mother at their place : They are parents not partners.
This is from the Bible and not respecting this is what gives most divorces : “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”