readoldthings

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 12, Verses 33-37 reads:


Re-Tread

Notice that I'm repeating some of the verses from last time; that's because these selections together form one coherent thought. In many Bibles they are grouped together.

It's worth noting that the original text is divided neither into chapter, nor verse; this came much later, and is seen as a serious problem by some. Why? Well, when was the last time you heard someone quote a Bible passage-- those in this particular chapter are very commonly used for this purpose-- without any context, in order to prove a point? It's much easier when your Bible itself is divided into little sections which can be pulled out and re-arranged in more or less any order you like.

Karma

That said, what are we really being taught in this section? The lesson is not, I believe, that God is a kind of intergalactic Stalinist, who sends his angelic goons to write down everything you say so that he can use it against you later on. This is the lesson that I picked up in my Catholic childhood, and which led me to run as far away from Christianity as I could for many years.

No, what I believe Jesus is teaching is very simple: All of your actions have consequences. And that includes your words, which arise from your thoughts. We have already discussed the way that mental events are as real as events in the material world. Jesus reiterates that point here, and also points out that the mental or psychic world exists in a causal relationship to the material world. Purify your heart and good words will flow from it. Make the tree of your soul good and pure, and the fruit of your actions will be good and pure. No, God isn't going to literally sit you down and say, "You called your sister a brat when you were 12, and you stole a Snickers bar from the 7-11 when you were 16, and you've spent the last 20 years staring at the backside of every woman that walks past you, so I'm just going to go ahead and set you on fire until forever now."

What really happens is simply this: You will eat the fruit of your own tree.

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The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 12, Verses 22-30 reads:


A Time of Devils

This passage concerns exorcism, so it's worth taking a moment to make an observation: In Jesus's time, exorcism was extremely common, and evil spirits seemed to be everywhere. It's popular in contemporary thinking to view the triumph of Christianity over the pagan religions of the late Classical period-- and, later, over other pagan religions through the Middle Ages-- as simply an act of violence, or cultural imperialism, or genocide. And to be fair, there was a fair bit of that. But the truth is that one of the single most important reasons for Christianity's success was its effectiveness as a system of practical magic and spirituality. And in a time like that of late Classical antiquity-- that is to say, a time burdened by demons-- that very much meant its effectiveness at performing exorcisms.  

Now, that said, there is another issue that this section immediately raises:

Can Satan Cast Out Satan?

Here are our old friends the Pharisees again. They see Jesus healing the people, which they cannot or will not do; they see him cast out demons, which they are unable or unwilling to do. And what is their claim? It is by the power of the Devil Himself that he casts the demons out!

Jesus very quickly and very characteristically tears apart this bit of idiocy. He gives us a parable, an image on which to think, which contains a straightforward bit of practical wisdom. 

You see, it is possible to know whether he is casting out demons by the power of the Devil. You don't have to guess or wonder; you can put it to the test, and the test is this:

Is the soul healed?

If so, it is not and cannot be the work of evil spirits. God is One; God is Absolute Unity. The coming of the Kingdom of God is the healing of division, especially that division within the soul that is caused by the Devil-- his name, diabolos, literally means the divider. 

Now, the implications of this should be obvious, though many Christians have gone out of their way to avoid noticing them for the past, oh, one thousand nine-hundred eighty-nine years or so. 

God Heals

Any spiritual path which heals the soul and brings it toward unity with the Divine, regardless of the particular Names and Images by which it invokes the Divine, necessarily and by definition is Divine and is the work of God. It's not that names and images don't matter-- they do matter, a great deal. But it is the case that whether a particular spiritual path is the work of God or the Devil is very easy to determine. Simply look at the behavior of those who follow it. If they act like they are possessed by devils, it is the work of the Devil; if they act like saints, it is the work of God; if a particular path heals the souls of those who are afflicted by demons, then it is and can only be the work of God.

And this is absolutely critical for our own time, because we, like Jesus himself, live in a time and a place in which the demonic is rampant. Here are two pieces of evidence for that claim. First, the number of drug and alcohol related deaths in the United States per year is between 180,000 and 250,000. Addiction has a physical aspect, but its cause is spiritual in nature, as anyone who has ever worked with recovering addicts can tell you The cure for addiction is a life dedicated to an appropriate spiritual practice, which is one of the ways you can tell it is a spiritual illness, because spiritual solutions don't typically help purely physical problems; it's far easier to pray your way out of alcoholism than colon cancer (though the latter does happen, of course). 

The second piece of evidence is simply that exorcisms and requests for exorcisms are at record highs.  

And, what is more, we also live in a time and place where our traditional religions-- while still very effective for many, have also failed many, and become actively harmful. Please don't misunderstand: I write and share the traditional practices of Roman Catholicism, my birth religion, because I believe in and have seen their power and their efficacy, and I want to get them into the hands of as many people as possible. But there are people out there, good people, who simply cannot read the posts I do on Christian magical practice or the Bible itself. It's not because they consciously reject God-- it's because they've suffered such severe abuse by clergy or zealous parents or others acting in the name of the Church and of Jesus that even to encounter these words produces PTSD symptoms. 

And this sort of thing isn't new, either. 

The Fall of the Gods

Publius Ovidius Naso-- known today as Ovid in English speaking countries-- was a contemporary of Jesus who died while the latter was a teenager. Ovid is today remembered as one of the great poets of Roman antiquity, and justly so. His greatest and most ambitious work is the Metamorphoses, which re-tells a great many Classical myths in what was then the contemporary style.

Here's the thing about the Metamorphoses which interests me right now: In it, the Gods appear as absolute monsters. If you read earlier works of mythology, like the works of Homer or Hesiod, or the Homeric hymns or the Orphic hymns, the Gods can be very difficult, to be sure; they're sometimes petty, sometimes jealous, sometimes tyrannical. But there is always a sense of majesty and grandeur that accompanies their actions, and always a sense-- this is critical-- that what seems capricious or arbitrary to mortals is driven by a higher moral law. That higher law is sometimes harsh, by our standards; it can sometimes be understood only by a great effort of the mind, and sometimes not at all. The fact that it can be hard to understand the goodness of the Gods is one of the reasons that Plato suggested in the Republic that the traditional poets, with their episodes of Divine cruelty or deception, should not be read at all, except in very special, ritualized circumstances. But the goodness was there, even when hard to see.

Not so in Ovid. In the Metamorphoses, the Gods are spiteful, petty, jealous horrors. In such a situation, it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to worship the Gods, and it is very easy to see how people would turn en masse to a system which offered them liberation from the spiritual tyranny to which they were subjected. 

Can we not see the same pattern in our own time? Isn't it very easy for us now to look at great Mysteries like the Fall from Paradise or Noah's Flood or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and simply see the petty cruelty of a cosmic tyrant? How easy is it for us to look at the episodes of seeming cruelty in the Bible, set them alongside the behavior of the contemporary Church, and see the same kind of spiritual tyranny that people like Ovid lived under? Are we not awaiting the coming of a new savior, who will be to us as Jesus was to the pagan world? I think so. But it is my hope that the best in Christianity will survive, and survived in a more intact fashion than ancient Paganism did. That is a major part of the reason that I'm doing this work here. 

 The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 12, Verses 1-14 reads: 


The Machine Stopped, But No One Noticed

Imagine a town built around a nuclear power plant. Every household has at least one family member employed at the plant. At work, the employees wear personal protective equipment: hard hats, safety goggles, gloves, steel-toed boots. Over time, the culture of this community becomes thoroughly built around the power plant-- weddings, birthdays, even funerals, all take place at the plant. Everyone wants to work at the nuclear plant, and so even those who don't work at the plant go about in hardhats and safety goggles and so on.  

After a while, the plant itself ceases to function. Funny enough, though, no one realizes this. After long centuries, the cultural activities centered around the plant have become the point. Engineers go to work and oversee machines that no longer function. Welders and machinists repair pipes through which nothing passes. Reactor operators press buttons in prescribed sequences handed down from long ago, totally unaware that nothing at all is happening. And everyone dresses in hardhats and safety gloves and goggles and steel-toed boots, despite the lack of anything very much to be protected from. Indeed, the dress code is enforced all the more rigidly, now that it is an end unto itself, rather than a means. 

This is what superstition is: the continued use of spiritual practice-- or, far more commonly, fragments of spiritual practices-- whose meaning and purpose is no longer understood. Very often, the practices are in fact useless, because the Power which animated them has departed. 

In Jesus's time, many of the practices of the Jews have degenerated into superstition. Moreover, it's quite likely that the Power of YHVH had indeed departed Jerusalem, as demonstrated by the temple's destruction just a few decades later. 

The Man Came Around

Let's go back to the defunct nuclear power plant.

Suppose that, one day, a man turns up who claims to be the plant's owner. Along with a trusted crew of engineers and workmen, he manages to restore power here and there and get parts of the plant up and working again. 

He quickly becomes quite popular. One day, he and his engineers are sitting around the plant's cafeteria, eating lunch. Because they're in the cafeteria, they have their gloves and hardhats off, and they don't bother with goggles. 

The Board of Safety that runs the plant are upset. They're used to screaming at people to put their hat and gloves on, even if they're at lunch, or in the bathroom, or outside smoking a cigarette. And here's this jerk that claims to be the plant owner, sitting around eating a sandwich with his bare hands! When they ask him just what he thinks he's up to, he calmly replies that gloves were made for man, and not man for gloves, and in any case this is his plant and he'll do whatever he darn well pleases. 

The Board of Safety are not pleased.

The Trouble With Abraham

If I didn't have a deep and abiding love for the Christian religion, I wouldn't be writing these posts. That much should be obvious. That said, Christianity has a problem, and it's one that it shares with the other Abrahamic faiths, for the most part. To understand that problem, let's go back to the nuclear power plant. 

Suppose that when the plant was built, the Board of Safety demanded that the town use it as its only source of energy. When some people refused, the employees went out and destroyed every coal-fired power plant, every hydroelectric plant, every windmill and solar panel they could get their hands on. After that, the Board of Safety insisted that nuclear was the only possible source of energy, that no other energy source existed, and that any claims by anyone to have produced energy from any source other than nuclear was a lie. Several other nuclear plants were built, but after a few centuries, rivalries grew up between the different Board of Safety. So that now, each Board of Safety insists not only that nuclear is the only possible source of energy, but that its own plant is the only possible source of nuclear energy. Other nuclear plants are schismatic frauds, which only seem to produce energy to the foolish or malicious. 

In such a situation, it would become impossible to determine whether a plant was working or not, because it could no longer be tested. If Plant B seemed to be producing enough energy that people in the surrounding territory could turn the lights on in their homes, what of it? We already know that Plant B is a schismatic power plant, and Plant A is the only true nuclear power plant. So the idea that nuclear power allows people to turn lights on is merely a superstition. In fact, it's probably pure paganism, since those wicked people who make use of coal-fired power plants make similar claims. No, the proper way to judge a nuclear power plant is whether it adheres to the same Manual of Safety Procedures yours does-- or whether it's obedient to your Board of Safety-- anything else is mere superstition. 

The Circle is Unbroken

Much of CHristianity, then, is in a similar state to the Judaism of Jesus's day, with the added difficulty that many churches not only cannot judge the efficacy of their practices, they have in fact prohibited themselves from doing so! Indeed, much of Christianity largely consists of people going to the defunct nuclear power plant every Sunday to share coffee and sandwiches in the old cafeteria. 

This is why I say that we can always judge the conditions of our own souls, as the soul is the sum total of our thoughts, emotions, and actions. If we fail to do so, we wind up like Pharisees, performing actions we don't understand for reasons we've never known, or else we wind up treating spiritual practices as if they didn't matter at all.