Forget the Birth – Celebrate Christ the man
Philip Farruggio
The Cleansing of the Temple – Bernardino Mei
Funny how so many ‘so called’ Christians kneel and perform such pomp and circumstance every December 25th. All the beautiful Christmas decorations and wonderful seasonal songs are in fitting tribute to … WHAT? Do any of the myriad of hypocrites and phony spiritual seekers ever actually read what the baby Jesus said as a man:
And when the people saw him come they said ‘All hail! Behold the king!’ But Jesus answered not; he saw the money changers in the house of God, and he was grieved. The courts had been converted into marts of trade, and men were selling lambs and doves for offerings of sacrifice. And Jesus called the priests and said ‘ Behold, for paltry gain you have sold out the temple of the Lord. This house ordained for prayer is now a den of thieves. Can good and evil dwell together in the courts of God? I tell you NO!’
And then he made a scourge of cords and drove the merchants out. He overturned their boards, and threw their money on the floor. He opened the cages of the captive birds, and cut the cords that bound the lambs, and set them free. The priests and scribes rushed out, and they would have done him harm, but they were driven back; the common people stood in his defense.
To this writer the priests and scribes were symbolic of today’s religious, political and media hypocrites who flourish in great comfort and style. Jesus laid into them as well:
Woe unto you , you Pharisees and Scribes! you love the highest seats in synagogues and courts, and bid for salutations in the marketplace. Woe unto you, you tinseled gentry of the land! No man would EVER think of you as servants of the Lord of hosts by what you do… Woe unto you, you masters of the law! You heap great burdens on the sons of men, yea, loads by far too great for them to bear, and you will never help to bear a feather’s weight yourselves… Woe unto you, you masters of the law! You snatch the keys of knowledge from the hands of men…
Putting materialism and crazy consumerism aside when each Christmas season is once again upon us, please focus on something else for a moment. Stating it succinctly, those who run our Military Industrial Empire have hijacked Jesus! They begin with the baby born in but a manger, and snatch him right up until he is crucified. Even that aspect of his ending has been skewed.
The fools and hypocrites who run this empire and influence many of its religions will tell you that his purpose here on earth was to ‘ Die for your sins’. They go on to tell you how the Heaven after our death is all that counts etc etc.
Yogananda, the great Hindu teacher who introduced yoga to the West, and even taught it to Gandhi, revered Jesus as the Logos or The Christ. He revealed how this carnal existence is but a dream, and the manner in which each of us acts and behaves in this dream is so ever important to what will follow us after we leave this plane. Reading the New Testament carefully will instruct anyone who really cares that what Jesus stood for was unconditional Love and forgiveness … and just as paramount: JUSTICE!
As the old saying goes: “Let justice prevail or may the heavens fall!”
Happy Christmas!
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If you’re looking for Jesus the man (or more relevantly, Jesus, the son of god) you need to look beyond Irenaeus’ heirarchical mashup of Saul’s pock suckit misappropriation of his memory.
Incidentally, Jesus was probably born in September:
“Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the nearly new king…”
Jesus has been hijacked by the fascists, the neoliberals, the Establishment, the warmongers, the ministers and priests. They pervert his messages to suit their own ends. Most of us here can see that so clearly.
Whether we realise it or not, whether we are religious or not, we are de facto his disciples because we’ve realised that, as he proclaimed, “the truth will set you free”.
Peace be with you all and your families and friends.
Seasons Greetings to all here.
May peace love and harmony come to all.
Exactly. I would only quibble with using the term ‘christ’ in the headline. I would think the human name, Jesus, would have been better used there rather than the name of the sky god invented by Saul / Paul that has little or nothing to do with the teachings, actions, preachings and wise words of the human Jesus.
The love and forgiveness of Christ is neither universal nor unconditional –
‘He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned’ Mark 16:16
You shouldn’t believe everything you read just because a bunch of imperialist butt-kissers wrote it down and/or gave it the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Or confuse the person of Jesus, son of god, with the empire building superhero Christ.
“… the common people stood in his defense …”
Wow, I would like to see that today.
Happy Christmas to all here who recognize, seek and value true justice.
I would like to see that today.
The birth of the Christ-child within what you take to be You – is not about setting up or struggling for a kingdom in a fear-made perception of a world. But to the mind in such framing there is NO other world but fear’s tyranny. The world of sin is death – a living death of slavery to thoughts that subvert and deny love’s waking, rising or nativity in any respect to protect ‘power’ from fear of loss.
Unless you make some room for willingness of a different purpose than divide and rule, consciousness of union cannot find welcome to move through you to wake you from your own nightmares.
The image of the clearing of the Temple of purpose that has no true belonging in it, is the same theme. The idea of taking possession and control is the idea of getting a private sense of self and life FROM others and at expense of wholeness.
To be conflicted is to be effectively blocked as a communication medium – such that the idea of a private mind, private agenda, and isolating struggle all become seemingly meaningful substitution for a direct and shared quality of being.
The ‘mind’ of Man is captured… by his own miscreative abilities.
Unless we recognize ourself in the act of denying the movement of love’s being. we shall not open the awareness of a choice in place of an old ‘survival’ conditioning reaction. We are essentially self denying and self depriving in attempts to ‘do alone’ what was never ours to do. Love is our being – not the result or reward of our doing. A mind trapped in or defined by its own guilt-judgement cannot escape by doing anything to atone or overcome or become different. But it can disinvest from allegiance to a negative sense of self and life in the opening of a channel of willingness, now.
This is the same as recognizing false devotions and ‘sweeping them’ from your ‘template’.
Jeshua Ben Joseph was using the forms, ideas and customs of mind-in-the-world to teach those with eyes to see, a different basis from which to relate to others and world – as an extension of relation of self in God – as a wholeness of being – as unified will. The cherry picking of the Temple clearing as propaganda for revolt is taking it out of context.
The ability of the mind to take the forms of anything out of living context and reformulate its reality as a private self-agenda is the essential error from which a sense of -self-lack arises. And the greed or driven compulsions of the self-lacking are the root of all evils.
No one else can give you wholeness – because it is already true – but covered over. But in any extension of wholeness we join with the truth of another instead of reinforcing their (and our) illusions.
The idea of attacking others as if to be therefore morally righteous – is not the teaching of Jesus – but rather what he sought to undo and heal.
Yep, cannot be emphasized often enough that the humanistic teachings of Jesus Christ – allegedly the bedrock of our civilisation – are in stark contradistinction to the pitiless values of neoliberalism. A glaring anomaly that is never mentioned by the neoliberals who monopolize mass media. Instead, their Christmas message is to celebrate the “well wishers” who showed up at Sandringham church at 4am!
Merry Christmas to all you offg sceptics!
Apropos of this article, economist Michael Hudson’s recent interview with Chris Hedges specifically addresses the New Testament excerpt describing Jesus and the temple merchants. Hudson was being interviewed about (monetary) debt forgiveness and his book ‘…and Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year’.
I found the interview very interesting, particularly the comparison of the Near Eastern cyclical view of economy and the Western linear view — seems the latter was engineered by mafias.
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/446574-michael-hudson-global-debt/
this review of his book is worth a read too:
“Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong: A Review of Michael Hudson’s New Book, And Forgive Them Their Debts”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/11/145003.html
Happy Every-Day (living in the Every-Moment: celebrating the unity of life, not hijacked by capitalist materialist values)!
My short answer to Phillip’s premise is no: let us not celebrate ‘Christ-the-Man’ …but ‘Christ-the-Everyman’.
We should all resist the ‘Moneychangers’ of capitalism: but there is no need to create a set of unverifiable metaphysical truth claims to do this. When Yogananda said: “this carnal existence is but a dream, and the manner in which each of us acts and behaves in this dream is so ever important to what will follow us after we leave this plane.” To go where exactly?
Consciousness is embodied: fully existent in the here and now. Ergo, true spirituality should be embodied – as fully existent in the here and now. There is no other time: and by extension, there is no other place (indeed, ‘time’ is a metonymy for ‘Being’. Time, or our conception of time, is ‘ontogenetic’ – creative of Being. We can only ever extend ourselves metaphorically (through metaphysical ‘Time’ and ‘Space’ (i.e. spatiotemporal extension is a linguistification – an unverifiable metaphysical truth claim – an ontological metaphor we cannot substantiate)). We begin and end Here. (Beginning and) End of.).
A bit heavy for today, maybe, but I would rigorously defend the principle that we do not have “unconditional Love and forgiveness … and just as paramount: JUSTICE!” in this world precisely because of the unverifiable metaphysical truth claims we make. The collective act and encultured repercussions of this are to take us away from the only moment when these qualities can be felt and embodied …NOW!
[Even the ‘moment is Love’ is a belief: however, it is better to embody a present belief than a set of transmigratory fictions. We become whole only when we stop taking ourselves away from the moment: thus, we become whole in Love – only in the NOW! This is the beginning and end of Belief.]
Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the (Father’s) kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father’s) kingdom is within you and it is outside you.
“Jesus said, “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.”
From the Gospel of Thomas.
Peace to all.
To each it’s own is what I always say. To me, this season has become so phony, so hypocritical. And as soon as the New Year rolls around, back to the old ‘habits’ of lying, deceiving…you get the picture.
Jesus was an ordinary bloke who realised ‘God’ as Being within himself.
Ditto for the Buddha, Mohammed, Krishnamurti, Meher Baba, Ramana Maharishi, Douglas Harding and a host of other folk.
Then the priests came along, hijacked the story, exploited the ignorant and screwed the masses.
Then the Capitalists came along and hijacked Christmas to well stuff.
I think the fact that so many people flocked to them gives the lie to the claim that they were ‘ordinary’ blokes.
Extraordinary embodiments of the ‘ordinary’, perhaps? Then we can each make the ordinary extraordinary by embodying our humanity thus.
There are lots of fascinating mysteries around these two figures of Jesus and Christ. What we can be certain of is that the Christ (the Logos or Word with which John begins his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word/Logos and the Word was with God. And the Word was God”) was not born at Christmas, hence strictly speaking ‘Christmas’ is a misnomer.
In fact, if we are prepared to accept the evidence of the Luke and Matthew gospels, there was not one birth, but two. The stories in those two gospels are completely incompatible. At some point (I don’t know when) the two different stories were simply lumped together, so that we now have the nonsense of a single Jesus visited first by shepherds and then by the Three Kings.
These were two different events, around two years apart! One child was born in Bethlehem, the other in Nazareth. Matthew’s story has Herod, the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt – nothing of which is reported in Luke.
This is why two different days are celebrated in western and eastern Christianity – 25th December and 6th January. Eastern Christianity also celebrates 6th January as the day of the baptism of Jesus by John. In esoteric Christianity this is seen as the moment when the spirit of the Christ (the Logos) ‘took over’ the man Jesus. Only after this date can He be correctly named ‘Jesus Christ’.
Virtually nothing is known of what Jesus did between the time when he is recorded as having conversed with the priests in the temple at around the age of 12 and when he is baptised by John at the age of 30. William Blake imagines him having travelled to England. Others have suggested that he travelled widely, learning what he could from sages in many countries.
Perhaps we can imagine the spirit of the Christ hovering in turn over the stable and the inn (another point of difference in the two stories). What is certain is that the unconvincing jumbling together of these two stories has only impeded an understanding of this unique incarnation of the Son of God and its purpose.
Confusing to some extent, indeed.
But somehow the logic of the heart seems to be able to cut through the brain logic, while personal experience can teach us to trust both – in their proper place, of course.
The Gospels are remarkable for what they leave out as much for what they contain.
There is no physical description of Jesus, for example.
Instead we have 4 separate accounts, each about 30 pages long, of the same events, the birth, life and death of Jesus.
It would have been more logical, perhaps, to have one much longer account supplying more information.
Some people are even sceptical that Jesus actually existed – the references in Josephus and later Roman historians are dubious in some respects.
That notwithstanding, people have tried to read between the lines and make some sense of the scriptural accounts.
It is assumed, though not explicitly stated, that Joseph married a much younger Mary who was already pregnant. Orthodox Jews dismiss Jesus as the bastard son of a Jewish prostitute and a Roman soldier, a blasphemer boiling in a pit of boiling excrement in Hell for all eternity.
It is known that Jesus had 4 brothers and 2 sisters. If as seems likely, they were younger than him, it is plausible that Jesus became the head of the family on the death of Joseph, and had to provide for his family before setting off on his religious mission for 2-3 years at age 30. The Catholic Church take a different view with their concept of the Immaculate Conception. Mary became something very special by giving birth to Jesus and could not have gone on to lead a normal life as a housewife afterwards – so the 6 brothers and sisters must have been older than Jesus, from a previous marriage of Joseph.
This is all a matter of doctrine or dogma, or guesswork, if you prefer it. There is no Biblical account to settle the matter.
The supposed discrepancies in the different Gospels may be less important than is often supposed, matters of emphasis or personal style. One of the Gospels states that “….it was getting dark….”, another that “….t was still dark….” maybe a case of glass half empty/ glass half full.
And.. another version for the open-minded based precise data in The Pleiadian Mission by R Winters that based on theyfly.com. Gabriel, a Plejaran informed Joseph and Mary that he would impregnate her so that an advanced spirit form would be brought to Earth via human child, who would die a natural death, The spirit form came from The Andromeda Galaxy, Planet Lasa. The spirit form was of a person who had already had lived billions of lives and no longer needed a human body. This group was termed the Petale Sphere, who are still consulted by the Plejarans, (whom many here share common ancestry and are 8,500 years ahead of us in tech. meds etc.).
After the boys birth, pointed our by the Plejarans, (the Star that stopped and spoke), he was named Jmmannuel. He didn’t die and resurrect, but went on to preach in the Near East, married, had 2 sons, died at over 100 and was buried in Srinigar, today’s India,
In 198AD he l was renamed JC to start a control cult. His main purpose was to pass on The Laws of The Creation, which was not accomplished due to his work being hijacked. BEAM has now passed on these Creational Laws, he too being incarnated for this purpose in the line of the Nokodemion True Prophets, Henoch etc etc.
All well and good Phillip Farruggio, but Christ the man said,
‘Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’
Bravo, Philip! Jesus hung out with the fishermen on the shore of Galilee; and a longshoreman rubs shoulders with a fisherman. “And the Common People defended Him”.
As I wrote in a previous thread, there is a lot of red blooded Revolutionary Socialism in Jesus. “It is easier for a cable to thread through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to push his way through the gates of The Kingdom”.
Hi Vexarb, Merry Christmas to you.. Just a line while the dinner is cooking:
The Jews, long before the time of Jesus, were divided into three sects, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes. it is a common assertion that Jesus spent some of the unrecorded years of his life, between the ages of twelve and thirty, in an Essene community, and that perhaps his parents were house-holding Essenes.
The Essenes of Jesus’ time were said to number about 4,000 throughout Palestine. They were a plain people, from many levels of society, mainly those who had found business or worldliness offensive to the soul and had sold or bestowed their goods and properties and returned to the “simple natural faith of their fathers,” by choosing the life of a devotee. They were not opposed to the world, but to worldliness.
Their freedom from complexity was conducive to long life, and they practiced discipline of the flesh to release the mind and heart from bondage. They are said to have had certain mystic rites not made public, but the larger part of their service was in labour. They held communal prayers before sunrise and observed time for private prayer. They said grace before meals.
Some were doctors or professional people, but working with the hands was particularly commendable, so carpentry and building were favoured. They interpreted holiness as unselfish service to God through helping His children. They adopted orphans and trained them, but these were not required to join their community. Their communities served also as a place of refuge or temporary retreat — an unforgettable experience in that gentle brotherhood of peace.
Their lives were divided between labour and learning. The intellectual level was high, and they were preferred as counsellors and as teachers of the young, even by Roman officials in Palestine. Children taught by these godly men received not only learning, but also a degree of enlightenment, for emphasis was placed upon unfoldment of character. They could be trusted as they were always truthful and incorruptible.
The word “Essene” is supposed to have derived from a Syrian root meaning “physician,” and it is true that the Essenes bent their goal toward the achievement of perfect health, and healing of body, mind and soul.
From the descriptions of Jesus and his life – in the Bible- I think we can deduce that he was most probably an Essene.
Maggie, thanks for that description of the Essene way of Life, it is that of Good people everywhere. Rabbi Yeshuah of Nazareth was such a Good Jew, and he attracted many like him, people who worked in the world but were not worldly. “The best way to sacrifice to God is to cometo him with clean hands and a contrite heart” — Jeremiah. There are other elements, more mystical and mythopoeic elements of humanity, which turned Rabbi Yeshuah the Good Jew from Galilee, into Jesus Christ the universal Messiah; there is more wit, dash and fire in the Biblical Jesus than in the Essenes — but at the core of Christianity is this simple, modest, hands on, working goodness — in the world but not worldly. “The rest is commentary” — Rabbi Hillel of Babylon.
Cable or Camel?
Happy Christmas Everyone.