Unpreachable

As a preacher the most frustrating thing about Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God is that it is unpreachable. It cannot be directly communicated. It can only be hinted at obliquely. That is why Jesus didn’t preach sermons. He told stories – a unique type of stories called parables.

The word parable means literally “that which is thrown alongside.” It is something set alongside something else to shed light on it. Like a lamp placed beside a book. Parables both elucidate and hide the truth of the Kingdom of God. Jesus explained it this way when he was asked about his teaching method:

The disciples came and said to Jesus, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13:10-13)

In other words, if you see it, you see it. If you don’t, you don’t. There is not much that a preacher can do to help people see the Kingdom, which is already before their eyes, except to say: “Open your eyes!” That is the source of my frustration as a preacher. That is why the Christian Church very early abandoned the message of Jesus and substituted its own message. The gospel of Jesus became a gospel about Jesus.

Jesus’ original message about the Kingdom of God is just too hard to communicate. Sermons obfuscate rather than elucidate. As many sermons as I have preached in my lifetime, they all miss the point. That is why preachers have settled for talking about things like doctrines, ethics … and politics. Religion is so much easier to proclaim.

Sermons can’t communicate the Kingdom of God. Preachers can’t make people see the Kingdom of Heaven, which is all around us and within us. That takes grace. It is like trying to see your own eyes. You know they are there because you see everything else by them. But without a mirror, you can’t see them.

The only thing a preacher can do is hold up a mirror. But many people cringe at what they see in a mirror. It is too honest. So they turn away and search for some other teaching that is more palatable. And so all the various branches of Christianity are born. What is a preacher to do?

As I sit here on my back porch with God, the Presence of God is clear and unmistakable. As undeniable as the presence of my wife sitting in the wicker chair beside me. In fact God’s Presence is more certain, because my wife gets up and goes into the house to get a glass of iced tea, but the Lord is never absent. God is inescapable.

By the light of God I see everything else. Everything is an expression of God. Everything reflects God. Everything proclaims God. Genesis says that God spoke the cosmos into existence. That means that the cosmos is the Word of God – a Word much clearer and more direct than the Bible, where human words and ideas get in the way.

God is still speaking through this primordial Word. Yet people sit in the presence of this divine teaching and don’t hear it. They are surrounded by divine light and don’t see it. How does a preacher preach to help people see the obvious?

The only way is to teach like Jesus. By throwing down similes and metaphors that point to Truth, to shed light on that which is by nature Light. In the end all a preacher can really say is what Jesus said: “He who has eyes to see, let him see. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

The Gordian Knot of Self

There is a story from ancient Phrygia (a kingdom in what is now Turkey) about a knot that could not be untied. It is called the Gordian Knot, named after a king named Gordias, who originally tied it. He fastened an ox-cart to a post with "several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened." It was believed that whoever could untie the knot would become ruler of all Asia. 

For many years no one could untie the knot. In the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great arrived in town. He tried to untie the knot without success. At this point there are two different versions of the story. In the most famous version, he drew his sword and cut the Gordian knot with a single stroke. In a more ancient form of the story, Alexander loosed the knot by pulling the linchpin from the yoke, exposing the two ends of the rope, which allowed him to untie the knot without having to cut through it.

The human ego (or self or psyche or soul – you choose the label) is a Gordian knot located between God and our True Nature. It interrupts communion between us and God. Only when the knot in this “silver cord” (as Ecclesiastes calls it) is loosed will we find our true home in the Divine.

Jesus likened the process to going through the eye of a needle. When Jesus originally told his parable, it was not a dromedary or camel (the Greek word kamala) going through the eye of a needle, but a kamel, the Aramaic word for rope. Jesus’ native tongue was Aramaic, not the Koine Greek in which the New Testament was written. This parable was Jesus’ version of the Gordian knot.

A rope is too large to fit through the eye of a needle. But if it is unraveled and separated into finer and finer threads, one will eventually come down to a thread small enough to fit through the eye of a needle. In this way the whole rope can pass through the eye.

So with the ego or the self. The apostle Paul uses the Greek word sarx, which unfortunately has been translated into English as “flesh,” to describe this false self, but it is much more than the physical body. The New International Version uses the better phrase “sinful nature.” It is best understood as the false self, as opposed the True Self, which is the Image of God.

This false self must be transcended if we are to enter into the Kingdom of God. Some people slice through the ego with a simple stroke. In a flash of insight the ego is “seen through” as a mirage, nothing more than an illusion. It is not real in itself. It is just a psychological tightening in our human nature, obstructing the communion of our True Self with God. For others the dissolution of the false self involves a long and laborious process of spiritual discipline to unravel the knot until there is nothing left to untie.

In either case the Gordian knot is loosed and the eye of the needle is navigated. Both ends of the silver cord that binds heaven and earth, the human and divine, are seen to be coterminous. As the fourteenth century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart says, “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.” When we see ourselves for what we really are, we will see God for who God really is.