 Imagine for a moment that you are one of the poor Jewish farmers, fishermen, or other heavy labourers who have heard about a wandering rabbi who promises Heaven, not to the rich and powerful, but to your kind, society’s humblest. On this day you climb a hill north of the blue inland lake known as the Sea of Galilee.
At the top of the hill Jesus sits with his closest followers, waiting to preach until enough people have gathered. Jesus (known to you in Hebrew as Yeshua, a fairly common name) delivers a sermon, and you are deeply struck, to the heart, in fact. He promises that God loves you, a statement he makes directly, without asking you to follow the duties of your sect or to respect the ancient, complex laws of the prophets. Further, he says that God loves you best. In the world to come, you and your kind will get the richest rewards, everything you have been denied in this world.
The words sound idealistic to the point of lunacy – if God loved you so much, why did he saddle you with cruel Roman conquerors? Why did he allow you to be enslaved and forced to toil until the day you die? The priests in Jerusalem have explained this many times: As the son of Adam, your sins have brought you a wretched existence, full of misery and endless toil. But Jesus doesn’t mention sin. He expands God’s love to unbelievable lengths. Did you really hear him right?
You are the light of the world.
Let your light shine before all men.
He compares you to a city set upon a hill that can’t be hidden because its lights are so bright. You’ve never been told anything remotely like this or ever seen yourself this way.
Don’t judge others, so that you may not be judged. Before you try to take a mote out of your brother’s eye, first remove the log from your own. Do to others what you would have them do to you. This one rule sums up what the law and the prophets taught. Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and the door will open.
How can you explain your reaction to this preacher – jumbled feelings of disbelief and hope, suspicion and an aching need to believe? You wanted to run away before he was finished, denying everything you heard. No sane man could walk the streets and judge not the thieves, pickpockets, and whores on every corner. It was absurd to claim that all you had to do, if you needed bread and clothes, was to ask God for them. And yet how beautifully Jesus wove the spell:
Consider the lilies, how they grow: They neither toil nor spin, but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. Consider the crows, for they neither sow nor reap, they have no storeroom or barn, and yet God feeds them. How much more valuable are you than the birds!
Despite years of hard experience that made a lie of Jesus’s promises, you believed them while you were listening. You kept believing them as you walked back down the hill near sunset, and for a few days afterward they haunted you. Until they faded away.
A Jesus moment
Time hasn’t altered this mixture of hope and puzzlement. I had an experience that centres around one of Jesus’s most baffling teachings: ‘Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also.’ (Luke 6:29) These are words that our Jewish labourer could have heard that day on the hilltop, but time hasn’t altered human nature enough to make this teaching any easier. If I let a bully hit me on one cheek only to turn the other, won’t he beat the stuffing out of me? The same holds good, on a larger scale, for a threat like terrorism: If we allow evildoers to strike us without reprisal, won’t they continue to do so, over and over?
On the surface my experience only vaguely fits this dilemma. Yet it leads to the heart of Christ’s mission. I was in a crowded bookstore promoting a new book when a woman came up to me, saying ‘Can I talk to you? I need three hours.’ She was a compact, forceful person (less politely, a pit bull), but as gently as I could I told her, pointing to the other people crowded around the table, that I didn’t have three hours to spare.
A cloud passed over her face. ‘You have to. I came all the way from Mexico City,’ she said, insisting that she must have three hours alone with me.
The PR person in charge of the event was pulling at my elbow, so I told the woman that if she came back later, I might find a few minutes of personal time for her. She became enraged in front of everyone. She released a stream of invective, sparing no four-letter words, and stalked away, muttering darkly that I was a fraud.
Later that night the incident wouldn’t leave me in peace, so I considered an essential spiritual truth: People mirror back to us the reality of who we are. I sat down and wrote out a list of things I’d noticed about this woman. What had I disliked about her? She was angry, demanding, confrontational, and selfish. Then I called my wife and asked her if I was like that. There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. I was more than a little shaken.
I sat down to face what reality was asking me to face. I found a veneer of annoyance and irritation (after all, wasn’t I the innocent victim? Hadn’t she embarrassed me in front of dozens of people?). Then I called a truce with the negative energies she had stirred up. Vague images of past injuries came to mind, which put me on the right trail. I moved as much of the stagnant energies of hurt as I could.
To put it bluntly, this was a Jesus moment. When he preached, ‘If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other also’ (Luke 6:29), Jesus wasn’t preaching masochism or martyrdom. He was speaking of a quality of consciousness that is known in Sanskrit as Ahimsa. The word is usually translated as ‘harmlessness’ or ‘non-violence,’ and in modern times it became the watchword of Gandhi’s movement of peaceful resistance. Gandhi himself was often seen as Christlike, but Ahimsa has roots in India going back thousands of years.
In the Indian tradition several things are understood about non-violence, and all of them apply to Jesus’s version of turning the other cheek. First, the aim of non-violence is ultimately to bring peace to yourself, to quell your own violence; the enemy outside serves only to mirror the enemy within. Second, your ability to be non-violent depends on a shift in consciousness. Last, if you are successful in changing yourself, reality will mirror the change back to you.
Without these conditions, Ahimsa isn’t spiritual or even effective. If someone full of desire for retaliation turns the other cheek to someone equally enraged, the only thing that will occur is more violence. Playing the part of a saint won’t make a difference. But if a person in God-consciousness turns the other cheek, his enemy will be disarmed. I believe that in the bookstore I experienced a passing moment where that deep truth applied to me. Ahimsa is only one quality that belongs to God-consciousness. In Jesus’s case, his mind contained them all.
From The Third Jesus © 2008 by Deepak Chopra, published in the UK by Rider.
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