Jesus was Spiritual but Not Religious
Nonduality has more to do with spirituality than religion. Nonduality is certainly represented in the mystical branch of every religious tradition, but it tends to be relegated to the periphery of the religion. It is sometimes even branded as heresy and persecuted by the religion’s powerbrokers, especially in Western religions. That was the case in Jesus’ day. He was opposed by both the temple priests and the synagogue leaders of his own faith.
Jesus was a disrupter of what we would call today organized religion or the institutional church, especially the type that is in bed with worldly powers. Most western Christians do not see this antireligious theme in the ministry of Jesus and Gospel of John because establishment Christianity is still in bed with economic and political authorities. In America we need look no further than the Religious Right to see how Evangelical Christianity has sold its soul for political influence.
This is not unique to Christianity. It is true of every major religion that is large enough to gain social and political power in any country. It is true of Islam and Judaism and Hinduism and even Buddhism. In the second chapter of the Gospel of John we see Jesus’ attitude toward organized religion demonstrated in an action usually called the Cleansing of the Temple. Jesus takes a whip of cords and physically drives money-changers and sacrifice sellers out of the Jerusalem temple.
The Cleansing of the Temple is found in all four gospels, but it is somewhat different in the Gospel of John. First, in John’s gospel it comes early in Jesus’ ministry, whereas in the other three it comes in the last week of Jesus’ life. In John it is his first public act after the wedding in Cana. It is his first symbolic action in Jerusalem and sets the theme of his ministry. Second, what Jesus says as he drives them out is different. In the first three gospels Jesus says, “My Father’s House shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” He is attacking corruption in religion.
In the Gospel of John he says this: “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a house of business.” This is variously translated a house of trade or a house of merchandise or a marketplace. In the Greek text Jesus is literally calling the temple an emporian, from which we directly get the word emporium. It is a place where business transactions take place. Jesus is his not just talking about corruption. He is talking about making religion into a business.
You can see why Christians today can’t hear this message any longer. It is because many churches have become places of business. Big business in some cases – and I am thinking of megachurches, where pastors are more like CEOs. The pastors of such churches are the ones who like to be court prophets to presidents, although today we call them spiritual advisors. Jesus was crucified by such spiritual advisors. Remember the words of Jesus “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”
But there is more controversy here in Jesus’ words. He is not just condemning the role of business transactions in religion, he is addressing the idea of religion as a system of business transactions between God and humans. If you have been part of traditional Christianity, you know what I am talking about. In the dominant Christian theological systems the relationship between God and humans is pictured as a business transaction. We owe a debt to God which we cannot pay, so Jesus pays it for us.
Or it is pictured as a legal transaction. We see this especially in the writings of Paul. We have broken the law and justice must be meted out. Punishment must be had, otherwise the cosmic order would fall apart, it seems. God can’t just forgive. (Although we are never told why. If God is omnipotent, why can’t God just forgive?) But according to this religious system of thought, he can’t. His need for justice and punishment must be satisfied. So Jesus take the punishment for our sin upon himself and we get off scot-free. We are never told how punishing an innocent person is just or fair, but that is how the story goes. Salvation is a transaction.
Christianity adopted this transactional idea of salvation from Judaism. The temple sacrificial law of the Old Testament is a sin management system based on transactions that atone for sin and restore us to a proper relationship to God. Christianity continued the same idea only making Jesus into the sacrifice that pays our debt or atones for sin.
In Cleansing the Temple, Jesus was doing away with this type of transactional thinking. He was throwing out the whole sacrificial system, and by extension the Christian sacrificial theology. He would not be the first Hebrew prophet to do this.
God says in Jeremiah says: “Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices pleasing to me.”
Isaiah says: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. … Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me…. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them.”
God says in Amos: “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.”
Jesus is repeating this anti-sacrificial theme of the Hebrew prophets got the same response as these prophets got. Jesus opposes dualistic religion conceived as a transaction between God and humans. He was opposed to the temple system, which he prophesied as coming to an end with the destruction of the temple. This came to pass in 70 AD when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. The temple has never been rebuilt and the sacrificial system came to an end. In cleansing the temple, Jesus was symbolically ridding the earth and his own Judaism of such dualistic religion.
In place of temple religion Jesus understands humans as temples of God. God dwells in us. In this story the temple authorities challenge Jesus’ authority to do this bold act. “So the Jews answered and said to Him, ‘What sign do You show to us, since You do these things?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Then the Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?’ But He was speaking of the temple of His body.”
In place of the business of religion complete with fancy buildings and priests and sacrifices, Jesus was proposing a simple spirituality based on the indwelling Spirit of God in the human body. Not just Jesus’ body but our bodies. God is in us, not in buildings of stone. That idea is well attested in the NT. The apostle Paul writes: “Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” This is incarnational nondual spirituality where there is no difference between the human body and God. To find God, we need only look within.
Jesus was spiritual but not religious. Didn’t Jesus go to synagogue? Yes, he did, but the synagogue rulers were against him and he against them. Remember that when he preached in this hometown synagogue in Nazareth, they threw him out of the building and tried to throw him off a cliff. He only went into the synagogue to proclaim his radical alternative to the synagogue. I go to church regularly also. I have spent my whole adult life in churches, but that does not mean I buy into the dualistic distortions of organized religion. I go because that is where I find community and communal worship with fellow human beings.
Didn’t Jesus go to the temple? Yes, he did. But not to offer sacrifices but to teach in the temple courts his alternative gospel of a templeless spirituality, which reminds me a lot of Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity. The message that Jesus proclaimed and lived was not about religion with its buildings and priesthood and sacrifices and laws and doctrines. He proclaimed a spirituality without duality, with no separation between God and humans that needed to be resolved through religious business or legal transactions.
His gospel was about knowing what is in us. The closing verse of this chapter says, “Jesus had no need that anyone should testify of man, for He knew what was in man.” Jesus knew what was in humans. He knew what was in him and in us. He knew and proclaimed that the Kingdom of God is within. God is in us. To know this is to know the gospel of Jesus Christ.