Becoming Christian in 2021

The John 3:16 Test

I’m not sure that I’ve ever called myself a Christian before this year. If I did, I must have been very young at the time. I grew up in a Christian household, and I found many of the stories of the Bible quite intriguing. Especially the story of Yeshua ben Joseph, or Jesus of Nazareth. Here was a person who cured people of crippling diseases, and cast out demons. He resurrected another person from the dead, and even came back from the dead himself. He turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple. And he was a spiritual teacher with a large following. What an interesting figure! Even if it wasn’t for my Christian heritage, I would have been curious. And given how important his story was to my parents, I had to learn and understand: Who was this man?

“Who was Jesus?” was a difficult question for me from the start, and my parents’ faith – and the faith of many of our family friends - was the source of the stumbling block. According to this faith, Jesus was the Son of God, who had come to this world to die for us, in an ultimate act of sacrifice, so that the people of the world could be forgiven (by God) of their sins, so that they could go to heaven after they died, if only they “had faith” and “took Jesus into their heart.” Amazingly enough to me at the time, this narrative seemed to be meant to be taken literally. I call this the “John 3:16” test: You are a Christian if, and only if, you believe this verse from the Gospel of John, chapter 3:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whosoever believes in him shall not die, but have life everlasting.

Believe me, I tried to believe it. But you might as well have asked me to believe that Arthur actually did – in real life – pull the sword Excalibur from the stone. Ultimately, there are two things that bother me about the John 3:16 story. And the first is that something that is clearly meant to be taken in a mythological sense, is so often taken literally. I expect most modern Christians expect it to be taken literally, just as with most Christians throughout history. And this is notable in our modern age, where any kind of non-rational understanding or way of thinking, is de facto considered inferior to the rational, scientific approach. This is unfortunate because there are many other ways of knowing besides rational thought, including mythological knowing. Different ways of knowing have their own strengths and character, and mythological truth is in some sense deeper and more fundamental, because it is closer to the root of our being.

Mythological Truth

These days, we typically take “true” to mean something that is provable, or something that can be shown through a process of rational deduction. There is something missing here, because truth flows through all aspects of being. These days, when someone is happy, we explain this in terms of the functions of the brain, and the functions of the hormones of the body. But we still have the expression, “her heart is true,” and the truth being referred to here has nothing to do with the biology behind her feelings.

In Daoist science, these rational and emotional aspects of our being correspond to two of the three major energy centers of the body, which live in the head and the heart. The third major energy center of the body sits in the belly, and this corresponds to something like instinct, or intuition. This is a deep-seated energy, and is in some sense more fundamental, and deeper to the root of our being, than the heart and head chakras. This belly energy associates more with the basics of life, such as good food and water, good sleep and a warm bed. It also has its truth. This is mythological truth.

Noach

Let’s take the story of Noah’s ark. There was a great flood, covering all the lands. One family had the foresight to build a boat to survive this flood, and took aboard samples of life from a wide variety of species. Many of you know that this story appears in many different cultures and religions. Aside from the Bible, it most famously appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Similar accounts of a great flood appear in Ancient Greece, Sumeria, Aztec and Mayan civilizations, among others. This indicates a deeper truth that transcends cultural boundaries.

What does this mean? Is this a historical record of an actual flood that occurred before - or at the dawn of - our modern understanding of historical record? Perhaps it is just a story to teach us, and help us understand, that there are times where Earth events occur that are outside the bounds of our year-to-year, and generation-to-generation, experience. Isn’t it interesting that the hero of this story is like a crazy modern-day prepper, with gear to survive nuclear fallout, or a long-term, country-wide blackout of the electric grid? They laughed at Noah too, and called him a fool! We can be sure that most crazy preppers are, in some sense, fools, because most of them will never experience the disasters that they spent so much energy preparing for. But what about the time when that disaster actually comes? The difference between one crazy prepper in a thousand, and none at all, could mean the difference between the survival of a people, a culture, a species, and extinction.

It doesn’t matter much if the story of Noah’s Ark is true in some literal sense or not. What matters is that intelligent, thoughtful people will read or hear this story, and gain insight into our world, and the situation humanity finds itself in.

Yeshua

So what would John 3:16 look like when interpreted as mythical? Here’s how I think of it. Human beings have many spiritual struggles, and these can often bring us to a place that is uncomfortable, and far from God. Our burdens can sometimes feel overwhelming, and we feel doomed to live a mundane life, and perhaps never find spiritual peace. And yet, from time to time, there appears a spiritual hero, in the form of a human being, who can help us with these struggles. And not just help us. This source of spiritual light is so bright, that it can swallow up and burn away all our burdens:

Yeshua said,
I have thrown fire upon the world,
and look, I am watching till it blazes.

Gospel of Thomas, saying 10, Meyer translation

Simply connecting to this source will release us. This kind of release is in some sense an ultimate release. Yeshua refers to it as “the Kingdom of Heaven.” Christians often call it “life everlasting,” as John does here. In Buddhism, this kind of ultimate release is called enlightenment, and this kind of spiritual hero is a Bodhisattva.

According to John 3:16, these kinds of messiahs appear because of God’s love for us and the world. A less literal interpretation might be that this is Divine Grace, that the universe is beautiful, and enriched with the divine, and one manifestation of this is in the messiah. How do we jump from God to a divine universe? Because, in a mythological sense, these are the same thing, as described in the introduction of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning, with God. Everything came about through him, and without him not one thing came about. What came about in him was life, and the life was the light of humankind; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it.

Gospel of John, chapter 1, Lattimore translation

To summarize my mythological interpretation here: The divine universe gave us a spiritual leader named Yeshua with a seemingly unending flow of love, and the ability to release our burdens. So much so that we can connect with his spirit, even long after his death. We can set down all our burdens upon it, and find true spiritual peace.

Come to me, all who toil and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11

The first problem with the John 3:16 test is an expectation that we take the verse literally. But it barely even makes sense as a “real world” account. If we take it in a mythical sense, we can find the meaning here to be not only true, but deeply powerful. (Most myths are deeply powerful. That’s part of how they survive through so many generations.)

The second problem with the John 3:16 test comes up even when we take this verse as mythology. And that problem is that surrender is only half the story.

Spiritual Agency

In the myth behind the John 3:16 verse, simple belief, faith, or surrender, opens the doors of heaven to us. It is a passive act of giving yourself over to Yeshua who is God. The problem with this is this is not what Yeshua actually taught. Consider this passage from the Gospel of Thomas:

Yeshua said,
If your leaders tell you, “Look, the kingdom is in heaven,”
then the birds of heaven will precede you.
If they say to you, “It’s in the sea,”
then the fish will precede you.
But the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.
When you know yourselves, then you will be known,
and you will understand that you are children of the living father.
But if you do not know yourselves,
then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.

Gospel of Thomas, saying 3, Meyer translation

Or this passage from Luke:

When he was asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was to come, he answered them and said: The Kingdom of God is not coming in an observable way, nor will they say: Look, it is here; or: There. For see, the Kingdom of God is inside you.

Gospel of Luke, chapter 17, Lattimore translation

In Yeshua’s teachings, heaven is inside of us and all around us. We only need to become aware of it. But how do we become aware of it? Perhaps the faith or surrender of the John 3:16 myth is enough for us to see heaven? If so, then anyone with sufficient faith would be able to find spiritual peace this way. And if they believed it, and were not able to find spiritual peace, the only possible conclusion would be that they don’t actually have faith.

Unfortunately, finding spiritual peace is never quite as easy as this. We need to work on it, and bring many things to our life on a daily basis. We need to love our neighbors. We need to not worry too much about what the future will bring. We need to forgive our brothers and sisters, time and time again. We need to pray, fast, and meditate, and to not be distracted by the temptations of the flesh. If we are to find spiritual peace, then we need to practice this every day, throughout the day.

This is what Yeshua was teaching us. He taught with words, and he taught by example. And the path he taught was very similar to the path to enlightenment taught in Buddhist and Daoist traditions. In short, Yeshua was a Bodhisattva. He was an enlightened human who had found heaven, and gave his life to teaching us how to find heaven too. Even if we choose to accept Yeshua as our Lord, Master, and Teacher, it still falls on us to follow his path, and find heaven for ourselves. And this is agency.

Why I am a Christian

No, I do not take the story of the “Good News” literally. I am not going to heaven when I die because I have “faith in Jesus”. The heaven we seek is here on Earth, flowing through us and everything around us. It is not some place we go to after our literal, bodily death. We have to work and struggle to reach a state of spiritual peace. My salvation is heaven on earth, and that’s for me to find. Likewise, your salvation is heaven on earth, and that is for you to find.

Yeshua was intimate with heaven on earth, and the main purpose of his teachings is to help us find it as well. His spirit was so strong that even now, nearly two thousand years later, we can still reach for it and find it, and lean on him, and release our pain and our passions. He is still here to help us along the Way.

I am a Christian because I want to find spiritual peace in my life, and I know I cannot do it on my own. Perhaps my leaning on Yeshua at this point in my life as a messiah, master, and teacher, is believing in a myth. And yet, this mythological understanding is very powerful and deeply true. Yeshua brings a daily religious practice to my life that brings me peace.