In addition to ‘Son of Man’ the New Testament uses ‘Christ’ over 500 times, ‘Lord’ 485 times, ‘Son of God’ seventy-five times, ‘Son of David’ seventeen times. These titles were attributed to a man who, to all appearances a politician and religious failure, had died the most shameful death possible under the Roman Empire as a common criminal.
In the encounter with his disciples which is our starting-point here, Jesus neither approves nor rejects what people were saying about him. Instead he speaks about the suffering that lies ahead both for himself and his disciples. Soon after his public ministry began, Jesus probably guessed that he would become a victim of a power-play by the authorities. He was too popular to be ignored and he had no power base of his own to protect him. His family and friends were deeply frightened for his safety4. The gospels agree that he was well aware of the ordeals lying ahead. His socially radical, religiously revolutionary teaching and his preference for silence over self-definition all point to a deep sense of his destiny.
He exposes the high cost by which self-knowledge is achieved. As a teacher more than as a political radical he describes the path by which his disciples will come to know him and themselves. He does not trivialise the cost of discipleship. To know oneself requires unknowing one’s self. Finding involves loss. Seeds grow only through death. To find the light of the true Self there is no way except through the dark tunnel of the way of the cross. Finding demands losing. Life is gained only through death: sometimes even physical death but every day demands the death of the ego’s old illusions, habits, values and beliefs.
And to all he said, ‘If anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, he must leave self behind; day after day he must take up his cross and come with me. Whoever cares for his own safety is lost; but if a man will let himself be lost for my sake, that man is safe. What will a man gain, by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self?’5
To listen is not mere passivity. To listen is to turn towards another, to leave self behind; and that is to love. St. Augustine said that whoever loves Jesus believes in Jesus. The question Jesus asks, and which is so central to Christian faith and identity, does not throw up denominational barriers between Christians and non-Christians as answers can do. Indeed by leading to the universal question, who am I?, his question positions him as one of the universal teachers of humanity and therefore as one in whom human beings can best find their unity with each other.
All religions, it has been said, share three basic elements: a liberating experience of truth, enlightenment or awakening; a tradition that interprets this formative experience; and a set of rituals or systematic symbolism that derive from this.
Christianity like all religions can be understood in this way. But behind and before (and within) Christianity is Jesus. And at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with our humanity is his relational question. Jesus asks us who we say he is. What he tells us about himself does not replace the relationship opened up by the humility of his question. It is essential to Christian faith that we listen to Jesus with such unclouded attention that we lose ourselves. His question, if we listen to it, rather than only answering it, hooks our mind like a koan–a thought that stops thought. It is thus that he becomes, as he called himself, a ‘door’ that leads to self-knowledge.
The gospel of John says that the words of Jesus are ‘spirit and they are life’. His question bears a primal power to awaken the dormant, unrealised part of us and to guide it towards the knowledge of the Self. Through contact with the power of his self-knowledge his question persuades us to ask ‘Who am I?’ Immediately it alerts us to who we are not and who we cannot possibly be. Asking Who am I? demands that we face the uneasy question of Who I am not?
I am not my moods and thoughts, my beliefs or my social roles and status. All of these are powerful aspects of myself. They possess a temporary, partial reality. But they are too arbitrary, too conditioned and too ephemeral to constitute Selfhood. Nor can I identify myself with my sensations, my desires, my fears, my pleasures and my pains. Passing emotional states, however intense, are uncertain foundations for a true sense of identity. This simple truth is the universal truth in the Buddha’s assertion of anatta: the no-selfhood of all things, including the human thing. I may say I am victim, ruler, lover, judge, hunter, artist, priest, father, mother, child, clown or trickster–there are many archetypal roles and combinations. But they don’t answer the important question. Until knowledge of the Self has dawned their impermanence will always lead me back to the same question Who am I?–the essentially religious question.
Self-knowledge, as we will see in Chapter Six, characterises the state of what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. We make sense of the process of discovering the Self with the help of the great religious traditions, their themes and archetypes. Any one person’s journey, of course, may not be restricted to just one religious institution. Many religious themes and symbols span different traditions, uniting them and enriching their dedicated practitioners. Often today, too, these themes and archetypes have a life outside overtly religious contexts. This need not lead to syncretism or confusion. It offers us today a new kind of recognition of the fundamental unity of all paths of human growth and self-transcendence. It expresses the unity of humanity itself, our common origin and destiny. For all our crises, humanity seems to be growing into a new corporate self-awareness today. What seemed recently to be irreconcilable differences and divisions are now, through dialogue, often recognized as parallel paths. It may well be that, at least for some people, the mutual enrichment of differing traditions will be necessary in order to fully understand the subtler stages of the path to true Selfhood.6
One of the stages of self-knowledge which all traditions recognise, although by different terms, is repentance. This is a pre-condition for any spirituality and it involves the purification of one’s way of life. Jesus began his preaching with the call to repentance. Some more negative styles of Christian spirituality in the past interpreted this as a call to fixate upon one’s personal sinfulness and then develop an abiding sense of guilt. The guiltier you felt the more repentant you were. Nothing could be more inconsistent with Jesus’ meaning here. If anything, his call to repentance is a release from the psychological disorder of guilt. He urges repentance, not to instil a fear of punishment but because the kingdom of heaven is imminent. Time is short and we have to get ourselves ready for a long journey. Guilt wastes time, even a lifetime, if it lingers for more than a few seconds it becomes unhealthy. Repentance is nothing to do with guilt. It is all to do with seeing ourselves unclouded by self-deception.
Listening to his question about self-knowledge clarifies the need for repentance precisely because it confronts us with our own emptiness and impermanence. It leads to an open space of the spirit that is uncluttered by institutional and psychological props. Poverty of spirit is another term for it. This naked self-awareness is the stage in us in which the great biblical theme of repentance is enacted.
After John had been arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of God: The time has arrived: the Kingdom of God is upon you. Repent and believe the Gospel.7
Repentance is both more serious and more joyful than fundamentalists and prophets of doom suggest. It drives us to seek a more interior and demanding spiritual practice. It lightens the burden of the past and breaks the shackles of sin. It sets us free for our life’s work. By the light of meditation and the guiding question of Jesus we can see repentance as a liberating, redemptive insight into what we are not. If this experience of emptiness seems at first to be destructive or nihilistic, it is not for long. In fact, it precedes the discovery and full affirmation of who we are.
With repentance there ensues a process of detachment, one by one, from all the interwoven false identities to which we cling with such passion and fearful desperation. Each interweaving is a knot we must untie, a death