Learning from an Infant (Gospel of Thomas)

This episode looks at the fourth saying in the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus says, “A person old in days will not hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and the person will live. For many of the first will be last and become a single one.” Anyone who is familiar with the New Testament gospels will hear similarities to the biblical sayings of Jesus that center on children. 

It is well-established that Jesus used children as examples of what it means to be in the Kingdom of Heaven – the Spiritual Realm, the Presence of God. The saying in the Gospel of Thomas adds a couple of details that bring us further into this teaching. Here he clearly teaches nonduality.

This saying in the Gospel of Thomas is Jesus’ equivalent to the famous Zen koan about your original face. “What is your original face before you were born?” Jesus is directing our attention to what Buddhists call the Buddha Nature. What we might call our divine nature or the image of God. He is saying that we all know this original nature. Every child knows this. The spiritual search is rediscovering what we used to know.

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Transcript

Today I look at the fourth saying in the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus says, “A person old in days will not hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and the person will live. For many of the first will be last and become a single one.” Anyone who is familiar with the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – will hear similarities to the biblical sayings of Jesus that center on children. 

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Another passage says, "And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, and said, ‘Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

It is well-established that Jesus used children as examples of what it means to be in the Kingdom of Heaven – the Spiritual Realm, the Presence of God. The saying in the Gospel of Thomas adds a couple of details that bring us further into this teaching. “A person old in days will not hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and the person will live.” 

Jesus says that an old person can learn from an infant. In Hebraic culture wisdom is thought to come with age. Elders are respected for their wisdom. The Book of Proverbs is wisdom that an older person is teaching a younger person.  The Book of Ecclesiastes is by an old man teaching wisdom. In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus reverses this pattern. That is the type of thing we often see Jesus doing, turning conventional wisdom on its head.

Think about this teaching for a moment. An infant seven days old cannot talk. Yet Jesus pictures an old person asking such an infant about the place of life. What type of answer does the old man expect from the infant? What can a child communicate? It is obvious that that a week old infant cannot teach by words. They teach simply by being. So this is a wisdom that is not communicated by words. 

The fact that the child is seven days old is significant. In biblical times a male child was circumcised on the eighth day. It was their ceremonial induction into the human community. In Egypt today - in a ritual that dates back to the time of the Pharaohs - it is on the seventh day that a child's existence is first formally acknowledged to the world.

The first seven days of life are thought to be in a time of transition between pre-life and life, between the divine realm and the human realm. Between the Place of Life – as Jesus refers to it here – or the Father’s House as he calls it in John’s gospel - and the realm of human existence. 

This human life is a place of dying as well as living. I just finished reading a novel entitled Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. One of the central characters is an Iranian artist, who is in the last weeks of dying of breast cancer. She arranges a final exhibit in the Brooklyn Musuem where she lives at the museum until she dies there. People come and talk to her about dying. She entitled it Death Speak. She had a hard time convincing the museum authorities to allow it.  She says at one point, “All of us were dying, I’d remind them. I was just dying faster.”

A seven day old child is just starting earthly life. He or she still knows the place of life that comes before our entrance into this world of dying. The Place of Life is another term for the Kingdom of God. As we age we forget what we were before our birth. By the time we are adults we suffer from full-blown spiritual amnesia. We don’t remember who and what we really are. We think we are these psyches encased in skin bags of meat. We aren’t.

The spiritual life is about remembering what we are – what we were before our birth. That is what the old person has forgotten and can learn from the seven day old child. The little child still knows. But the child does not know she knows and cannot communicate this knowledge of the Place of Life.  This saying in the Gospel of Thomas is Jesus’ equivalent to the famous Zen koan about your original face. “What is your original face before you were born?” 

Jesus is directing our attention to what Buddhists call the Buddha Nature. What we might call our divine nature or the image of God. He is saying that we all know this original nature. Every child knows this. The spiritual search is rediscovering what we used to know. Socrates thought that was the goal of the philosopher. He saw wisdom not as the gaining knowledge, but recovering what we already know deep within us, but have forgotten. 

When we rediscover what the seven day-old child knows, then we will live, according to Jesus. As Jesus phrases it in John’s Gospel, “though he die, yet shall he live.” We physically die. This old face of mine will return to dust because it is made of dust and to dust it shall return. Yet my original face before I was born cannot die and will never die. 

I will go on to the second part of this saying. “For many of the first will be last and become a single one.” Once again this is reminiscent of sayings of Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus said concerning the rich young ruler seeking eternal life. “But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.” In fact the Greek version of the Gospel of Thomas has this two part saying, “For many of the first will be last, and the last will be first.” We find this saying added onto parables of Jesus. It seems to have been one of his favorite teachings. 

In the Gospel of Thomas, the context is a bit different. It seems to be referring to the first as those who consider themselves spiritually wise. Those who consider themselves wise because they are old are to humble themselves and admit that they do not know. Taht a newborn child knows more than they do. Then they will “become a single one.” “For many of the first will be last and become a single one.” 

The Greek version of Thomas says, ““For many of the first will be last, and the last will be first, and they will become one.” Here is duality becoming singularity. One translation of this phrase says, "they will become one and the same." Most translations say, “become a single one.” This single one is the Divine One. This is Jesus clearly teaching nonduality! We become one when we see we have always been one. The seeming multiplicity is in fact one Reality. 

I recently wrote a blog in which I used an illustration from the book Martyr!, which I just mentioned a moment ago. The novel takes place mostly in Indiana, but the author writes a lot about his native Iran. In one section he talks about Safavid explorers, who centuries ago traveled from Isfahan to Europe, visiting France, Italy, and Belgium. In these countries they saw huge mirrors in all the great buildings. There were ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in the palaces and the halls. 

The explorers returned to Persia and told the shah about them. Of course he wanted some for his building projects. He told his diplomats to return to Europe and purchase as many giant mirrors as they could transport. They did so. On the return trip the massive mirrors broke, shattering into a million pieces.  

By the time they arrived back in Isfahan, instead of having great panes of mirror, they presented the shah’s architects with a million tiny pieces of mirror. So they used what they had at hand. Instead of installing huge mirrors, they used the broken pieces to make ornate mosaics, tilework, and prayer niches in mosques and shrines. 

Kaveh Akbar reflects on how the mirror “arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.” 

I see this as a metaphor. There appears to be billions of individuals, all made in the image of God. Billions of people, as well as every other creature and inanimate thing in the world all reflecting the glory of God. That divine One appears to be shattered into billions of fragments, but in reality all is one. There is one mirror reflecting Divine glory. We are this single one mirror. 

This One is what we were before we were born. This is what we are now. When we realize what we used to know - that we are this single One – then we have returned to the Place of Life, the Kingdom of God.