A Matter of Life and Death (Gospel of Thomas)

This is the eleventh saying in the Gospel of Thomas. Listen to what Jesus said: "This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?"

This is really a collection of sayings. There are four pairs, but they are all connected. The first one is about two heavens. The second one is about life and death. The third is light and darkness. The fourth is about one and two. I will explore them in these segments.

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Transcript

This is the eleventh saying in the Gospel of Thomas. Listen to what Jesus said: "This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?"

This is really a collection of sayings. There are four pairs, but they are all connected. The first one is about two heavens. The second one is about life and death. The third is light and darkness. The fourth is about one and two. I will explore them in these segments.

Jesus said, "This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away.” This wording sounds strange to people familiar with the biblical concept of three heavens, because only two are mentioned here. The first heaven is what we call the sky, where the birds fly and the clouds float. The second heaven is where the moon, planets and stars are, which we call outer space. The third heaven was thought to be beyond the first two; it is the spiritual realm or the Kingdom of Heaven.

In this saying Jesus says, “This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away.” The simplest understanding, which is usually the correct one, is that “this heaven” is the atmosphere. It will pass away along with the earth. It what Jesus meant when he said in the Gospel of Matthew, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

Then Jesus says, “and the one above it will pass away.” So earth and its atmosphere will pass away. So will all the rest of the universe. He is saying that this dualistic universe will pass away. He does not mention the third heaven as passing away, because it does not. The third heaven represents eternal Reality. 

Well what about what Christians normally think of today as heaven? The place where people go when they die, the celestial theme park with Saint Peter collecting tickets at the gate. He addresses that in the next sentence. This is where it gets controversial.  Jesus immediately says, “The dead are not alive.” 

Now, that can mean a lot of things, but in the context of this conversation about heaven, he is saying that the popular concept of a personal afterlife is not true. The dead are not alive, he says. At least not alive in the sense that people normally imagine heaven as an never-ending extension of our earthly personal existence.  John Lennon sang, “Imagine there’s no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky.” 

Now that is controversial! It was controversial in Jesus’ day and in our day. There is no celestial theme park. That is the ego’s paradise, a fantasy created by the human mind that cannot conceive of the universe without it in it. How egocentric is that! That concept of heaven is a phantasm. Everything will pass away. The heavens and the earth will pass way, and with them all our theological fantasies. 

Jesus continues, “The dead are not alive, and the living will not die.” It sounds like he is talking in riddles here. What does he mean? If there is no personal, individual afterlife, what is he talking about? He is saying that what we truly are – which is not these psychological, physical entities – will not die because they are by nature eternal. Knowing that is spiritual awakening. Those who are awake to their true nature and the true nature of the universe have eternal life and will not die. We will physically die, but not eternally die. 

This is reminiscent of what Jesus says in the Gospel of John.  "He who believes in Me, though he may die, yet shall he live.  And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.” This is badly misinterpreted by traditional Christianity. It is almost always translated “believe in me” but the Greek text does not say that. It literally says “believe into me.” 

It is the same Greek word used in the Easter Story when the risen Christ invites the apostle Thomas to put his hand into his side. I am going to explore that story as we get closer to Easter. To “believe into me” is to enter into me, become one with me. To be in Christ, as Paul calls it. When we become one with the Eternal Christ we do not die. 

We will not die because we are one with the eternal, and the eternal cannot die. Only that which is born dies. The body dies, but we who are alive will not die. That is true of everyone, but the only ones who can take comfort in this reality now are those who know this for themselves. 

Then Jesus adds another saying about life and death. He says, “In the days when you consumed what is dead, you made it what is alive.” This is a very interesting analogy. He is talking about the process of digesting food. Everything that we eat – vegetable or animal – was alive at one point. We pick it or harvest it or kill it and cook it and eat it. When we consume it,  it becomes part of our living body. 

Jesus is using this analogy for the process of spiritual awakening. One day we wake up to realize we are not what we thought we were. That we are alive in a way we never thought we were. From that moment on – like we talked about last episode – there is an ongoing process of digesting this, of integrating this reality into our lives. That is what this saying means.

On to the next pair, which is light and darkness. This saying is in the form of a question. Jesus says, “When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do?” Coming to dwell in the light is another way of saying enlightenment. We get the word enlightenment from the word light.

When a child is born, he/she emerges from a dark womb into the light of this world. In a similar manner we are we born into eternal light. “In him was Life and the life we the light of men,” the prologue of John says. This enlightenment is the real meaning of being born again. 

Jesus’ wording is reminiscent of Plato's’ allegory of the Cave, and this is no accident. Copies of Plato’s Republic were found in the same cache of scrolls at Nag Hammadi where the Gospel of Thomas was found. The church there in Egypt that used and read and buried the Gospel of Thomas because it was banned also used and read and buried Plato’s Republic, which contains the allegory of the Cave.

The Allegory of the Cave says that we are like people who live all our lives chained in a dark cave where we see only shadows. One day a man is freed from his chains and leaves the cave of shadows and goes into the world of light and sees the real world. What does this freed prisoner do? According to Plato he returns to the cave to liberate the ones who are still bound in the world of darkness and shadows. 

Jesus asks in the Gospel of Thomas, “When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do?” It is clear to me that Jesus is saying that we are to do the same thing as the man in Plato’s parable. We return and tell others of liberation and what we have seen. This is exactly what Buddhists say Buddha did. Gotama could have just left the body behind under the bodhi tree and dwelled in Nirvana, but he decided to remain and tell others how to enter nirvana. That is what Jesus did. He told others how to enter the Kingdom of God, and it is what Jesus is encouraging us to do. 

The interesting thing is that Plato says that the prisoners in the Cave of Shadows will not believe the man who returned from the realm of light. He writes that if they think the man is trying to force them to leave the cave, they will kill him. Of course that is exactly what happened to Jesus. Jesus is saying he is the man in Plato’s parable.

The final pair in this eleventh saying is this: “On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?" Here Jesus is talking about how humans got into this sorry situation. “On the day when you were one, you became two.” In other words before we were born we were one. We are born one with the universe and with the Divine. 

But in the years after birth we are taught by our environment and our parents that we are two, that we are separate from and different from others. Christians call this the Fall, but for Christians it is a fall into sin, and somehow got mixed up with sex. It is not so much a fall into sin, it is a falling asleep into darkness. 

The question is ... And this is the question that Jesus ends with: “But when you become two, what will you do?" In other words when you realize that you are in this state of duality and recognize it as such, what will you do? Will you seek oneness – nonduality? Will you seek to leave the cave or will you stay? Will you be one or two? I will leave you to answer Jesus’ question for yourself.