“Separating Jesus from Religion” Ep#26

What happens when you strip away the stained glass and sermons to see the teachings of Jesus through a lens completely free of the religion built around him? In this episode of Spiritual Hot Sauce, Chris Jones explores the provocative journey of a man who rejected Christianity but became one of history’s most profound disciples of its message. Prepare to be challenged as we look at the difference between worshiping the deity of Christ and becoming a disciple of Christ, and following the template that changes the world.

This episode of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  

Transcript

Chris Jones: 0:00

What if you could read the Bible without ever being influenced by religion? How would you read the text? And I mean nothing, nothing from churches or preaching or teaching or even religious ideas in our culture. Think about it. How would we see Jesus? If we could separate Jesus from the religion built around him, would we see Jesus differently? What would change? There's actually someone who did this, and they documented their journey. He saw Jesus completely outside of religious traditions. And the outcome? It might surprise you, and it's definitely going to challenge you. Welcome. I'm Chris Jones. This is where believers and skeptics alike are invited to embark on a journey of faith, philosophy, and life from a different perspective. Whether we are joined by an insightful guest or we just jump into the deep end. This exploration promises to challenge us all. Are we getting it right? This is Spiritual Hot Sauce. Wow, is it cold out right now where I am at? It's one degree outside. Thank God for hot coffee and heat. Anyway, Jul and I are hanging out in the studio right now. Jul is my cat. Her name is Jul, not J-E-W-E-L, but J-U-L, short for Julie Newmar. And if you know what that means, then I'm impressed. Send me an email. Let me know you got it. I hope the weather's better where you're at, and that you're nice and cozy, because this one is challenging. It might even make us a little uncomfortable. It's going to force us to look at what we hold to be religious truths and challenge them in a good way. So let's get challenged. There was this man born in India, and this would have been in the mid to late 1800s. Now I don't know if you know anything about the caste system in India, but this man wasn't born to an upper echelon caste. He was born to just kind of regular folks. And he didn't come from money. He came from a very humble background. And on top of that, he was living with adversity that most of us can't even comprehend. He was a second class citizen in his own country, his own home, because at that time India was under British rule. Now he grew up as a practicing Hindu, and though he never went to church or learned anything about Christianity, he did have experiences with the Christian missionaries, and he didn't like them because he said they were very demeaning and they made fun of him for his religious practices and beliefs. How strange is that that in your own homeland, what is the predominant religion, you're made to feel awkward for it. But that's exactly what happened. Now, while growing up, he heard a poem, Gujarati, Didactic Stanza by Shamal Bhatt. Now the poem is about giving good for evil. It famously states, give a meal for a bowl of water. He said it gripped his mind and his heart when he learned it as a child. He said the precept, return good for evil, became his guiding principle, and that idea would set the stage later in his life for something bigger. Now he left home to go pursue higher education at a college in India, but he was doomed to fail before he even started. His father would die, and it would cause grief and he would be homesick and he would academically struggle and ultimately drop out and go back home. Now later on, he would have a very unique and rare opportunity to go to London, England and study law. Now he completely seized this opportunity, and his family supported him financially, and though this was such an achievement, not only to get around the caste system in his own home country, but to go to London, England, an elite school and study, where even as a British citizen, this was an honor and a privilege. Now his mother wasn't so big on this idea. She was terrified of her son leaving and going to London, England. But reluctantly, she agreed. Now, once he's in London, he's not just immersed in these studies. He's immersed in a whole different culture. It's an alien landscape. It's different ideas, different thoughts, different ideology. And he samples them all. He'll take the book or the writings of the religion or the philosophy or ideology, and he'll read it from front cover to back cover. And once he's done that, he'll go and challenge himself by allowing the experts or the leaders in that thinking to try to transform him or convert him into their way of thinking. Now, any kind of religion or any kind of philosophical thought, including atheism, he challenges himself with this method. Now, he enjoys learning all these different philosophies and religions and these different ways of thinking. And though he finds value in them, there's nothing transformative for him in them. Now he had a friend that was working his way through college by selling Bibles. So he bought a Bible from him because he had to challenge himself with this one too. And he started reading it from front cover to back cover. Now he said the Old Testament was painfully boring, but he was committed. He was going to do this, so he worked his way through it. But as painfully boring as the Old Testament was, he said when he got to the New Testament, he found life. And he said, once he started reading the teachings of Jesus, it came alive for him. And he said, Jesus is one of the greatest teachers in all humanity. And the more he read, the more he immersed himself in it. And the more it spoke to him that it was that transformative. And that he was convinced that this is the way. This is how everyone should be living. It was like taking the poem that had spoken to him as a child and bringing it to fruition. Now, he says that he found his religion. This is it. He is planning on converting. He's going to go meet with these people and expecting fully that he is going to convert and become a Christian. But that's not what happens. Because when he sits down to talk to the leaders of the church, what he finds is how he read it and how they're presenting it are two different things. He would later say that he would be a Christian if it wasn't for the Christians. Now, the major points that he really disagreed with are these things. See, the church believed Jesus' death was for forgiveness of their sins, and therefore you could give your sins to him and he would cover it for you. You were forgiven. He rejected that idea because that idea totally bypasses the commandment of Christ of being discipled and transforming and becoming like him in his commandment of love. Because how they were presenting it is much like how we sometimes see it. That seeing Jesus as God means that God can forgive us for our sins. So therefore, sometimes we use Jesus as an excuse for our sins instead of using Jesus as a template in how we live our life. He didn't like the idea that Jesus is the only Son of God. He's seen all of mankind as sons and daughters of God, and that Jesus was the template in how we are to live our life and how it heals us. It's like I say, there's a difference in the religion that worships the deity of Christ versus becoming a disciple of Christ. He was seeing it as being discipled by the commandment of Christ and his teachings. Now he went to several different church leaders and allowed them to try to convert him. However, he could never get around this point. So he would leave Christianity exactly where he found it. But when he left, he took the Bible and he took Jesus with him. Now, after he graduated, he would go to South Africa to practice law, representing a trading firm. However, when he got there, fully expecting to live the life of a barrister, instead he ran head on right into racism, where all non-whites basically had no rights. So he started unifying people of color together, all different colors and all different nationalities that was non-white. However, he made sure that whatever he led, everyone had to obey this law of love, because this commandment, this teachings of Christ was above everything else in his life. He was a disciple of it. And he says, hate dissolves under the transmission of love. Love is the only remedy for hate. Anger begets anger and hate begets hate. It's like I've said before on this podcast that if someone has been poisoned, you don't give them more poison. You give them the antidote. And the antidote to the poison of hate is love. It's a weird thing, isn't it? It's like if they hit you and they're beating you. If you fight back, they'll point to the moment you hit them and use that as the excuse of their actions. But if you never hit them back, if you never defend yourself in that way, and I'm talking specifically for this situation, that you never choose violence, then eventually they're seeing themselves in the mirror of you. And then when they stand in front of a mirror, they'll say, I can't do this anymore. This is evil. This is wrong. And he says, Because it's not that they're evil people, because they're not. They just don't know any better. And we all have to learn. See, it's not just about refusing to hate them with his actions, but he's refusing to hate them within himself. He is choosing love to love them as himself. And if he loves them as himself, he's not going to choose violence. It's very different. And he calls the movement satyagraha. It's Sanskrit, and it literally translates to truth force. Now he defined it like this: active, nonviolent resistance to evil pursued through self-suffering, compassion, and refusal to cooperate with injustice while clinging to truth with soul force or love force. Now, by unifying everyone through this movement he calls satyagraha, he is able to make changes in South Africa in giving people of color more rights. Now it didn't fix everything, but it was a huge step forward, something they'd never seen before. Now, when he leaves South Africa and goes back home to India almost 20 years later, he receives a large hero's welcome. His nonviolent campaigns against racial discrimination in South Africa had already been widely reported in Indian newspapers. This had helped grow and establish his reputation. Now, after settling in, he took the first year or so just traveling around India observing conditions. Now, after he witnesses everything that's happening, he begins the movement of Satyagraha, and slowly it builds momentum. And more and more different religions, cultures start to surround him and embrace this movement. Now, from the beginning, he's made it quite clear that we will not choose hate in response to hate, and we will not choose violence in response to violence. That we want the British to leave, but we don't want them to leave as enemies, we want them to leave as friends. Remember, he doesn't see them as evil. He just sees them as not knowing any better. Now, as this goes on and on and gets rougher and rougher, and the British use violence, there will be some times that in resistance to it, they respond with violence. But when they do, he stops and says, I'll fast. I'll fast until I die. If you don't stop, this movement will be on its own. And he does. There's even a time where he fasts so long that his kidneys begin to shut down. He is truly dying. But they know they have to have him in order to stay unified in this movement. So peace prevails. And ultimately, they do follow his direction and they do follow his leadership. And the man the world calls Gandhi will watch the British leave, not as enemies, but as friends. Now there's a whole lot of misinformation about Gandhi out there. I mean, I have never seen such a lightning rod of misinformation from different political ideas and factions and religions. It's really unbelievable. All of the information that I've shared with you, his personal beliefs, his ideas on Christ and his faith all comes from his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He describes how he rejects the religion of Christianity, but fully embraces the teachings in Christ. You know, I've said before that Jesus didn't come to start a religion, he came to make disciples. I don't know of another example of a disciple who went on to change the world like Mahatma Gandhi. He said of his lungs that one lung was the Bhagavad Gita and the other lung was the teachings of Christ. See, his religion was a Hindu, but he lived his life like a disciple of Jesus. Now, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Martin Luther King Jr. did not get his ideas of nonviolent love from the Bible as a pastor. He got them from Gandhi. Not that Gandhi replaces the Bible, but Gandhi manifested the teachings of the Bible in a way that religion hadn't. So without Mahatma Gandhi, we probably don't get Martin Luther King Jr. And some of you might say that neither one of these men are perfect. And you would be right, neither one of these men were perfect. But why are we trying to deify them? What we should be doing is be inspired by them and realize that when common men take the commandment of Christ, of love, as a template, they change the world. All of us have the ability to change the world around us. That's why I say we all can become the antidote to the poison. Well, Jul is giving me the nod. It's time for me to get out of here. Listen, if you like the flavor of the sauce, then follow us. Give us a five-star, share us, and if nothing else, email me and say hi. Spiritualhotsauce@gmail.com Thanks, guys. We'll see you next week. Come on, Jul. Jul, come on. Jul

unknown: 15:32

Come on.

Chris Jones: 15:34

Dang cat.