Testament

Thoughts on reading TESTAMENT by Nino Ricci, which is a re-working of the Jesus story that restores his humanity and separates his true teaching from the pious and church-serving official Gospels.

Here is a human Jesus with moods and foibles and sorrows along with the wisdom of his teaching. Here is a Jesus who is not perfect and does not try to put on a pious perfectionist persona. In other words, this is a Jesus who is not a phony Christian. He is not caught in the trap Eckhart Tolle talks about of trying not to have angers or other feelings that might be considered non-Christian. This is what leads so many pious Christians into denial of their humanity and eventually denial of the humanity of others by holding themselves and everybody else up to a standard of perfection that no human can achieve, not even Jesus.

It also supports my belief that God is not a perfectionist. Perfectionism is a disease of the egoic mind. God does not make his forests into perfectly pruned English gardens and yet there is great beauty there.

The importance of discovering the humanity and fallibility of Jesus is that it allows me to be human and fallible, too. The true teaching of Jesus is acceptance and forgiveness, not human perfection and not hellfire and damnation, which was added later by small-minded clerics and preachers seeking to frighten people into joining their church so they could be “saved” from an imaginary hell.

But this isn’t a fault only found in Christianity. Both Hinduism and Buddhism are based on the concept of human perfectibility and it is basically impossible, as Huston Smith points out, to achieve that kind of perfectibility in this human body.

The ultimate strength of Christianity when it is practiced in the spirit of Jesus is that it does not demand perfection. Jesus simply asks for acceptance and forgiveness and allows people to be human beings.