58 Realized Insight

LG58

Jesus said:
Happy the person who suffered
and found life

Happy the person who suffered? What should we do with that?

It must also have been a surprisingly strange statement for the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus, shockingly defamatory. Suffering was a punishment from Yahweh on sin, right? Hadn’t Moses been clear about that? In the Deuteronomy Bible Book, he says that Yahweh rules life as a judge. Whoever follows him will be rewarded, whoever does not will be punished. And later Bible books are not unclear that all the calamities that strike the Jewish people time and time again are a justified punishment for disobeying Yahweh. Thus the prophet Ezekiel says on behalf of Yahweh:

I will not spare you nor pity you, but I will repay you for your walk, your abominations will come upon you, and you will know that I am the Lord.

And the prophet Hosea adds, also speaking on behalf of Yahweh:

Samaria has to pay because it has rebelled against his God. They will fall by the sword, their little children will be crushed, their pregnant women will be ripped open.

Jesus leaves this vengeful view and emphatically breaks [with] it. The New Testament tells that he mixes with lepers and other outcasts. With this he shows that nobody is excluded from the charity he calls for. Nobody, really nobody. Every person is a neighbour.

Jesus’ answer to human suffering is not an accusing finger, but mercy without judgment. That is perhaps the most characteristic difference between Jesus and the Old Testament.

This logion fits in with Jesus’ revolutionary new attitude towards suffering, and adds something to it. It shows that the willingness to accept suffering without judgment as part of life, makes you a whole person, “a living” in the symbolism of Gnosis.

In the previous logion we already talked about the illusion of enlightenment. You can form an image of what it is like to be enlightened and then rebuild yourself to fit into that image. Such an illusion about being enlightened can contain the idea that as an enlightened person you will no longer suffer, that you will then be above that. A release from suffering is not the commitment of gnostics. With that thought, with that idealised image of the enlightened, you place yourself outside your own wholeness as a person, outside of life, and, even more so, outside of Source.

Whoever wants to become a whole person, and as a whole person wants to coincide with Source, will have to embrace reality as a whole, with all the trimmings, without reservation.

This is called surrender. Surrender is unconditional.

Because, what is always at stake in the Thomas gospel is wholeness as a person. That wholeness cannot be achieved by amputating oneself in any way whatsoever. Not even by wanting to change reality.

Suffering is an inescapable part of being human. It is the other side of love. For example, we suffer for the loss of a loved one because we love our fellow human beings. Unconditional love can only exist in combination with the unconditional willingness to experience the pain that life sometimes inflicts on us.

Only that surrender will be able to bring man the deepest possible joy of life. If one wants that joy, one must also include suffering. Strangely enough, love and joy of life do not exclude suffering, but on the contrary. The three of them form the depth of reality.

That in order to become a whole person one should embrace reality as a whole is a point of view that often evokes protest. Because it is understood that everything should be okay. That is not at all what is meant here. That you should agree with everything is a mental judgment, not a surrender. Surrender also means letting go of that conception. Only then can you make reality appear to you as it is, in all its infinite diversity, without excluding anything from it.

Then you have found life. Then there is a willingness to be touched in the heart without conditions.

This unconditional willingness to be touched can very well result in a strong inner protest about a certain situation or course of action. You can also experience approval, for example in the form of a happiness experience. Protest and approval of the heart then form the inner guidelines for human action, and not the judgments imposed from outside. Such a protest or a consent from the heart is not a mental judgment. They are the result of emotional openness. Those experiences are the messengers of the soul, see Logion 65.

It’s something you have to deal with, act upon. Those are the assignments that are handed to you by life itself.

In the Christian tradition, suffering has unfortunately fallen under the spell/charm of sin and martyrdom. The suffering of Christ in particular has become dominated by penance.

One can also read the story about the descent of Christ on earth with the willingness to accept suffering in a different way. Not as a historical reality, but as a meaningful myth. Then that story is also about the acceptance of suffering as part of reality. The otherwise so mysterious silence of Jesus in his condemnation to the death on the cross suddenly becomes very meaningful. That silence acquires the meaning of the unconditional surrender to life as a gateway to the resurrection from spiritual death.