I estimate Jesus only said about 5% of the red letters attributed to him. So is this something he would have said, given my understanding of what his gospel actually was? Or, was it something politicos would have said, given my understanding of politics in those days? Given both, I tend to think this is the product of politics, which involves a fundamental misunderstanding of what salvation actually is and/or what it is for Salvation is for Christ...saved from what mankind makes Christ to be. By mankind I include the material worlds, all they contain, as well the foundational, but faulty concepts, notions, and ideologies about reality that support all these material appearances. The material worlds represent a kind of "anti" Christ, or, alter ego personality populated by sub egos called "mankind". These material worlds, if they exist, are an existential threat to Christ. But if they don't exist, no problem. Technically, Christ is the richest of the rich, nothing and no one richer. By contrast, mankind is poor, even impoverished, no matter how "rich" anyone may seem to be in comparison to others mankind. If Christ were to succumb to man's condition, Christ too would be impoverished, awaiting yet another death on another day. So it's not wealth that is the problem, at least not Christ's wealth. Man's wealth is problematic because it is yet another metric that manufactures inequality. And yet, man's poverty is also a metric which emphasizes inequality. You would not know a rich man from a poor man except by comparison. Side by side they are not the same, they are different, and here is the kicker: they are therefore both special in their own way. The poor man has, by comparison, MORE poverty than the rich man. In this strange way, each person has MORE than any other person, just by being special in his/her own way. The sickest person in the world has MORE (sickness) than the rich man...and so on. This then is the deal with the devil so to speak. Each of us has sold our soul, so to speak, to have MORE than Christ. In keeping his end of the deal, the devil makes each of us special. Technically speaking, I, as man, have MORE than Christ. For example, I have both life (what I call life) and death, whereas Christ only has life. I have faith, imagination AND what I call " knowledge", whereas Christ has only knowledge. In so many ways the devil has granted me MORE than Christ, and MORE than my neighbor, simply by making me SPECIAL (different from everybody else, including Christ). In case you didn't know, Christ, on the other hand, is not special...being equal to the richest of the rich...being king amongst kings...being no different from any being that actually exists. Consequently, if mankind did exist, it would destroy the equality that exists in and among what is Christ. That is, man's special status is an existential threat to equality...and visa versa. In seeking special status, man does seek to GAIN something from his appearance in the material worlds. But even if man were to gain all of the material worlds, he would "lose his soul" so to speak. If man's "soul" is Christ, this is another way of asserting that man AND Christ, cannot coexist. There is nothing in a world built on special status (inequality) which can add to the equal distribution of the wealth of Christ, and if one seeks to find out, one will lose track of (forget) his soul (Christ), rendering the soul as good as dead. This is all reversible by addressing the causes of the symptoms. Man, no matter who, is seeking something...indeed something more. But whatever it is, it is like grabbing for sand. This requires attention. So the cause is a misappropriation of attention. As a rule of thumb, if our attention is not on Christ, we are PAYING, as in "paying attention". Indeed, attention is what we "pay" to gain anything in a world where almost everything is hard to come by. Therefore, to be saved from any kind of manifestation of special status, we must place our attention fully back onto Christ, where it was before time seemed to begin. Our attention might feel like everything we have if you consider just how much bandwidth our thoughts occupy...our precious thoughts and especially our beloved political opinions, and, pretty much everything that lends itself to a sense of "self". So it's quite likely the young "rich" man was advised to unburden himself of anything and everything that was grabbing his attention, and keeping him from giving his entire mind to the attention of Christ. But it's also likely that advise was later politicized by those poor students who surrounded Jesus for the miracles, hoping he would be the Jewish "Messiah" (he wasn't). The richest man is the one who thinks he knows what he does not know. By this definition, even the poorest of the poor can be very rich, in a strange sort of way. However, it is exactly this type of person, who considers his opinions so valuable, which is most unqualified for the kind of salvation offered by Jesus. By this definition, every man is both rich and poor, having extremely poor opinions of what Christ is, and what salvation means. By suggesting someone sell everything he has and follow him, Jesus was giving this young man the best chance he had, at that moment, to achieve the same salvation Jesus was achieving at that moment. The young man needed a teacher, and in Jesus, had someone who, by following closely the advise of spirit (Christ), was able to live hand to mouth, day by day, until the objective was achieved. Nowadays, it would be a lot like joining an ashram to be close to a guru. Some of us need that. But all of us need to focus our attention on Christ, and to the degree that money and possessions interfere with that, we need to learn to let that go. P.S. As a rule of thumb, the more we PAY attention to the material worlds and the dramas that arise out of the inequality produced there, the more impoverished we become relative to our soul (Christ). Like the YouTube algorithm, the material worlds are designed to grab our attention, and hold onto it, potentially forever...except for salvation. So yes, it is technically difficult, and not one man will ever be saved. But by a miracle, Christ might be saved.
The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy. Proverbs 12:22 Decided to listen to this for my Bible reading this morning. The Gospel According to Mark read by David Suchet.
One way that the revelations of God to people as recounted in the Bible are unique is that so many of them occurred to masses of people. This is true of many of the miracles also recorded. Examples are the manifestion of God as a pillar of fire to the Israelites and then later, in Exodus 19, the people heard God speaking with Moses. "The Lord said to Moses, 'I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you.'" Manna was eaten by the whole nation. God's fire falling from heaven in the contest between Elijah and the false prophets was seen by both sides of the conflict. There are many more than just these examples. I'm about halfway through David Suchet's reading of the Gospel According to Mark and it was just as plain as day to me that if people are lying and want to pretend that they have seen God or experienced a miracle, they usually will talk about a private experience, or maybe a few people experiencing something. But nowhere else recorded in history are so many accounts of open miracles or revelations to seen at once by large numbers of people. Jesus performed public miracles. One them was when Jesus took a small amount of bread and fish and multiplied it to make enough to feed thousands of people. These things were believed by the early church because many of the people in those churches were ones who had experienced miracles from Jesus themselves.
Ya, tru dat, like: John 20:1-18 The Empty Tomb 20 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
And THAT happened AFTER the guards all fainted then left their post when they saw the angel that came to roll the stone away from the tomb. 2 There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it.3 His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow.4 The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. Matthew 28:2-4
It never ceases to amaze me just how little most people know what is in that book, especially Christians. What did Jesus say was the only way to go to god?
Have you ever heard about guards standing at a gravesite in the middle of the night after a funeral? I like how this spider (bible and christian spin doctors) spins the story.