“Those who have ears, let them hear.” This recurrent phrase is not some elitist irony through which the Teacher alludes to secret tidbits; nor does it reflect an impatience with long explanations. It is an invitation to “have ears,” to develop an organ of subtle perception, a special faculty of attention. We are not yet speaking of the visionary nous of the following verses, but of the contemplative intelligence that arises from endless wonder at all Being, a kind of feeling for the infinite open, without which the unveiling of true being is impossible. For the Real only offers itself to those who take the time needed to hear, those who can endure and listen fully to the silence of the fathomless before it finally begins to speak.
Shema Yisraël—“Listen O Israel!” The same practice that Moses advocated to his distracted, chattering companions is the one transmitted through this teaching of Yeshua:
If the conscious subject has no ears
there will be nothing to hear;
if the eyes are not open
there will be nothing to see;
if the heart or the nous is not awake,
there will be nothing to understand . . .
Matter and its origins will offer them neither obscurity, nor clarity, nor meaning.32
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11 Peter said to him: “Since you have become the interpreter
12 of the elements and the events of the world, tell us:
13 What is the sin of the world?”
14 The Teacher answered:
15 “There is no sin.
16 It is you who make sin exist,
17 when you act according to the habits
18 of your corrupted nature;
19 this is where sin lies.”
Having listened to the Teacher, and having recognized him as the Interpreter (hermeneutes), he who imagines and gives meaning to the elements and events of the world, Peter now questions him, in the language of that period, about “the sin of the world.” The meaning of this term is often very unclear—both in Yeshua’s time and after, there were those who held that human nature itself is tainted with original sin, that matter, the world, and the body are traps from which deliverance is needed. When one sees sin and evil everywhere, the consequences are especially serious when they are seen as being in an “other,” for this other must then be destroyed or killed. Those who have committed such crimes in the name of the Good see themselves not as murderers, but as saviors, ridding the world of sin and evil so as to make it pure again.
All such persecutions, bans, burnings at the stake, and death camps are founded upon the same logic: The rotten apple must be removed from the barrel to rid the whole contents of contamination. All the “rotten” humans who trouble the corridors of power of the “prince of this world” must be liquidated in order to have an uncontaminated society. This is easily extended to whole groups or races of people who embody the evil—otherwise, they will destroy us first. There is nothing new under the sun about this, for the monstrous banality of such thinking is still with us today, just as it was in early Christian times.
These mechanisms tend to repeat themselves, so that when they carry the day, our present seems to be no more than the accumulation of our past. The new teaching has still not been heard. Yet the word of the Teacher here is unmistakably clear in the way it cuts through this question:
“There is no sin.
It is you who make sin exist . . .”
There are of course different levels of interpretation of this. Let us begin with the traditional reading, and see how it opens naturally into a deeper interpretation. It might be summarized as: “There is no sin, only sinners.” Matter, the world, the body, are not sinful in and of themselves—yet it is possible to make bad use of them, and we are all more or less sinners to the degree that we do not know how to adjust or harmonize ourselves with the Real. Instead of experiencing peace, we not only hit the wrong notes, but we create shrill disharmony and war.
Nevertheless, it is clear that matter is not bad, nor is anything that exists in the world—in fact, neither the body nor sexuality are bad or sinful. Echoes of the above passage can even be heard in the writings of Paul—for instance, in this extract from his letter to Titus (1:15): “All is pure to those who are pure. But nothing is pure to those who are contaminated and do not believe.”
The meaning of Paul’s words is this: It is you who have made sin exist.
Thus sin is not inherent in things, nor is it some element of the cosmos, nor of human nature. Yet it is definitely found in the way human nature is translated. It is a disorientation of desire, a kind of overlooking or missing the goal. And here Yeshua’s word rejoins the etymology of the Greek word for sin—hamartia, “to miss the mark.”
Through poor use of our senses, intelligence, and emotions, these faculties have become disoriented—they have lost their orient, that is to say, their attunement with the Being that is at the heart of all the impermanent, transitory phenomena of the world. It is only this dis-orientation that enables us to pervert ourselves, society, and the universal order itself.
As was said in the introduction, the only sin is that which we create with our sickly imagination. It is this imagination—or rather, impoverishment of imagination—that needs to be healed. We are responsible for the world in which we live, for in a deep sense it is we who create it by interpreting it positively or negatively. Our lack of enlightened imagination encloses the world in “being-for-death,”33 and encloses us in an arrested perception of the world. Our sickness is that we continually take our relative perceptions as absolutely real. We mistake our interpretations and readings of reality for Reality itself. This is where illusion, or sin, lies, according to the Teacher:
“It is you who make sin exist,
when you act according to the habits
of your corrupted nature;
this is where sin lies.”
Now, what does it mean, “to act according to the habits of our corrupted nature?” First, it is acting according to modes of thought that have become what common language calls second nature—another nature that has been superimposed upon our true and “innocent” condition, a covering made up of projections, a priori assumptions, and judgments that are more or less inherited from others. We apply these automatically and without the slightest concern for any examination or verification that might help us to find out whether this prism through which we decipher reality is really telling us about Reality, or on the contrary, hiding it from us: “You see the splinter in the eye of your neighbor, but you do not see the log in your own.”34
It is obvious that the word corrupted as used here has no sexual connotation. As in the Bible, corruption is related to the deeper meaning of idolatry: taking as Real that which is merely relative or, as Kierkegaard said, making the relative absolute, and making the absolute relative. In other words, the dramatic “sin” of the contemporary world35 is its relativizing of the absolute, and its absolutizing of the relative. It is hard to imagine a better description of the nature of corruption.
This is a sickness of the intelligence as well as of the heart. It espouses its perceptions as Truth, thereby betraying both Truth and itself. One of the most painful consequences of this short-sightedness, this disorientation of desire, is taking yourself for what you are not, indentifying yourself with an image. This is typically a representation derived (whether positively or negatively) from one that our parents or our peers may have of us. The pathologies that are known nowadays as inflation, megalomania, manic-depressive swings, etc., are but extreme forms of this condition.
It is interesting to note several correspondences between these passages and chapter 7 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. This theme will be explored in more depth later, when we examine the Teacher’s words that urge us not to invent more laws—for where there is no law, there is no sin. As with Paul, “without the law, sin is dead” and corruption is no more. In contrast to this, those who invent laws also make sin exist. Of course laws surely do have a
pedagogical function, and in early stages of spiritual and physical development it would be dangerous to do without them. A baby who eats food that is too solid will become ill (to use a metaphor of which Paul is fond). But for an adult, things are not the same. The Gospel of Mary is addressed to adults who have integrated the law in themselves. For them, the law is no longer a barrier to the movement of life and the inspirations of the Spirit—like the wind, it fills the sails of their truest desires and calls them to the freedom of open spaces. (In Hebrew, to be saved is to “breathe freely.”)
Let us now examine these parallels between Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and the Gospel of Mary. The following table will serve to show the correlation of several themes in Romans with those of Mary 7:11–19, and will also prepare us for the later commentary regarding Mary 9:2–4.
COMMON THEMES ROMANS 7 GOSPEL OF MARY
Corrupt or adulterous union, which falls under the authority of the Law Example of the woman who can no longer be considered an adulteress, because she is free from the Law: “ . . . but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adultress, though she be married to another man.” (Rom 7:2) “ . . . when you act according to the habits of your corrupted nature.” (Mary 7:16–18)
(belonging to the Resurrected One) Wherefore, my brothers, you “too have died to the Law . . . so as to belong to another, to him who has raised from the dead.” (Rom 7:3–4) The disciples are commanded to follow the Son of Man without imposing any new Law.
Liberation from the Law that binds (enslaves) “But now we are delivered from the Law, for we became dead to that which bound us.” (Rom 7:6) “Do not add more laws to those given in the Torah [i.e., in the manner of a Legislator], lest you become bound by them.” (Mary 9:2–4)
Non-existence of sin “For without the Law, sin is dead.” (Rom 7:8) “There is no sin. It is you who make sin exist . . . ” (Mary 7:13–14)
The sequence Law, sin, death “ . . . but when the commandment came, sin came to life, and I died.” (Rom 7:9–10) “This is why you become sick, and why you die.” (Mary 7:21–22)
Two Laws in conflict “In my inmost self, I delight in God’s Law; but in my members I perceive another Law which is at war with . . . the Law of my intelligence, and which holds me captive to the Law of sin . . . ” (Rom 7:22–23) Two commandments: 1) Follow the Son of Man, who dwells within oneself; 2) Shun the Law of the Legislator, which brings enslavement. (Mary 9:2–4; 18:20)
Just as Paul asks that Christians free themselves from the domination of laws (traditional, conscious, and unconscious ones), so as to live through the Spirit of the Resurrection, the Gospel of Mary invites them to live this same freedom by abiding with the One who, in their own inmost being, incarnates all goodness and guides them into the vibrant flow of intimacy with their uncreated Source.
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20 “This is why the Good has come into your midst.
21 It acts together with the elements of your nature
22 so as to reunite it with its roots.”
Lack calls for fullness. Thirst calls for the Source. The Good has come into our midst because the nature of matter involves lack. Humans as we know them are beings who feel a lack of Being. The process of corruption begins with their own identification with this lack. They then confuse themselves with the matter of which their bodies are composed, which ultimately leads to an experience of their own vanity and emptiness. Thus they may finally become open to that which can fill them.
In more traditional religious terms, it is said that sin calls forth the Savior. “Blessed fault of Adam, that gave us such a Redeemer,” says the traditional chant for Easter night—blessed corruption of Adamah (which means “potter’s clay” in Hebrew), whose fault was to identify himself with matter, which then enabled him to experience his nothingness.
It is from this experience of lack that the Call is born, the desire for not-being-for-death. Where could such a strange desire have come from? How could such a madness of waiting for the Unexpected have found its way into our genetic programming? What is it that transforms matter, adamah, a lump of clay, into Adam, the true human being capable of this essence of desire?
Meister Eckhart, a Christian whose metaphysics was very close to the Gospel of Mary, said it more simply: “If you do nothing, truly nothing, God cannot help but come into you.” Unfortunately, in those who are full of themselves, there is no place for the Other. This is why he added, “If you leave, God can enter.”
This means that we must leave the illusion of taking ourselves to be something, some thing, an object that exists in time. We must return to our true being as Subject, living in wonder at its manifestation in those transient objects that it calls its world, its body, its emotions, its personality.
When we leave behind the illusion of belief in a permanent thing, the Good can then come into our midst. In the heart of this finally accepted impermanence shines the presence of this unborn, unmade, uncreated “Nothing that can be found in the All of which It is the cause.” This is the clear light unimpeded by the opacity of all the things with which we are identified. In the midst of the heavy, the light is revealed.
According to the Gospel of Mary, the Teacher came in order to help free us from the ignorance that is identification (corruption). For he is the very countenance, the incarnation, and the practice of this Good.
The Good is the manifestation of the famous triad of the ancient philosophers: goodness, truth, and beauty. The Good in this sense does not have evil as its opposite, for it means the unity of these three, the One that embraces the multiplicity of all qualities through which it is expressed.
What does goodness become when separated from light, consciousness, and truth? A softness that is the gateway to hypocrisy and compromise.
What does truth become when separated from goodness, love, and beauty? A hardness that is the gateway to fanaticism and persecution.
What does beauty become when separated from truth and goodness? Art for art’s sake, an aestheticism that is the gateway to a brilliance that clarifies nothing.
Beyond the realm of opposites, the Good is the One, the doorway to Being. This Being can only manifest in a heart, body, and mind that have been emptied of all illusion, meaning all inflation and presumption; for it cannot fit into the straitjacket that they offer.
“This is why the Good has come into your midst.
It acts together with the elements of your nature
so as to reunite it with its roots.”
The radiance of Presence has come to us, and “we have seen its glory,” or its kavod, as the Hebrews called it—the glory of the Son, “full of grace and truth,” which is also that of the Father, or Source.36
By planting the seeds of his knowledge (the sperma Theou, in Greek) in the elements of our nature, the Teacher restores us to our own true heritage and ushers us back to endless resonance with our uncreated Source, the “Father whom none has ever seen, and none can know,”37 but who is revealed to us through the monogenetic Son, the Good that unites the ancient philosopher’s triad. This invites us to live a life of glory, a life of love and consciousness, just as he did. This reunion with our roots is not a mere event in time, but an ever-renewed relation with the Source engendering us in every instant. It is our ignorance that creates our distance from it, and this distance involves all sorts of sickness and suffering. By an ever-new act of knowledge that is both metanoia (in Greek, passing beyond the known, beyond the mind and memories of which we are composed) and teshuva (Hebrew for the act of return, a turning about of our consciousness from our externalized, objectified being toward our inner Being), we act from the deepest heart of our lack, from the intimate space of our desire of desires. This is the space where we receive the inspiration of the Teacher and his teaching.
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23 Then he continued,
24 “This is why you become sick,
25 and why you die:
26 it is the result of your actions;
27 what you do takes you further away.
28 Those who have ears, let them hear.”
Having spoken of matter and its impermanence, and of attachment and identification with this impermanence, the Teacher now shows the consequences of ignorance and attachment.
Sickness, suffering, and death are the consequences of our acts. There is no one to blame for this, and it is vain to complain and expostulate about the evil nature of matter, the world, and humanity. There is no room here for hatred of the world, for it has been clearly stated that there is no sin, no evil. Evil and sin arise from the blamer in ourselves. It is interesting to note that in their exegesis of Revelation, some of the desert fathers of early Christianity saw the sign of deliverance in this teaching of no blame or accusation of others. “He is dead, the blamer of our brothers,” they said.
This blamer is the shatan (or “obstacle,” in Hebrew), the diabolos (or “divider,” in Greek) in us. When he is dead, and there is no longer a place for him in us, we are free. The slave, the victim, and therefore the blamer of circumstances, is dead in us because it is no longer fed. It is replaced by the Living, symbolized as the Son who takes all responsibility for what happens. We cease to accuse others or ourselves, and instead begin to observe the pattern of causes and effects that have led to this state of sickness, suffering, and death. It is a condition that can be remedied only through a transformation of our own actions, attitudes, and ways of life. The Savior is to be found within, not elsewhere. The source of knowledge enabling us to understand what happens to us is found within. No other person can dictate to any one of us some attitude or course of action that we then must follow blindly.
The Teacher prefers us with our eyes open. He is that intelligence within us that opens our hearts and our eyes to the outside, to that world in which—either for a long time or a short time more—we must live, feel, think, hurt, cry, laugh, and love.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene Page 5