Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

What was needed was a new heart. But how was the heart to be transformed? Obedience to the Torah was one way; indeed, the purpose of the Torah was to “incline one’s heart toward God.”

Jesus spoke of another way of transformation. Most basically, it was the path of death: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).25

To be humble was not to claim status, but to be internally without possessions, to be empty.30 Self-humbling was thus self-emptying, and the passage may be paraphrased, “Those who empty themselves will be exalted; those who exalt themselves will be emptied, will come to naught.”

Jesus’s ministry began with a ritual of death and rebirth, baptism; strikingly, the Gospels agree that on this occasion Jesus’s identity as “son” was first disclosed. Moreover, the baptism was followed immediately by the temptation in the wilderness, which can be understood as a Spirit person’s initiatory ordeal and encounter with the Spirit world. Jesus himself had “died to the world,” living without possessions, family, or home. Yet he did not make the details of his way normative, but only the basic pattern itself.

Hence also the metaphor of death: dying is very hard and it is difficult to let go of finite centers. Yet it was also the easy way because it was a “letting go,” a cessation of striving. Moreover, it may have been easier for some, namely, the poor and the outcasts. Riches were not a temptation for the poor (except in societies that stress upward mobility); the poor knew that the world offered a scant measure of security. Righteousness was not a temptation for the sinner, social approval not a snare for the outcast. To die to a world in which one was poor, that pronounced one an outcast, was not as difficult as dying to a world in which one was financially secure, socially and religiously esteemed.

The way to purity of heart was not exclusively or even primarily through obedience to the Torah, but the path of dying to the self and the world.

Affirming that purity was a matter of the heart cut the connection between holiness and separation as understood by the other renewal movements. That is, holiness was to be achieved neither by driving the Romans from the land nor by withdrawal from society nor by separation within society. Intensifying the Torah by applying it to purity of heart also destroyed the basis for dividing society into the righteous and the outcast, for “once the norms had been intensified . . . so that they were quite beyond the possibility of fulfillment,” applying to internal disposition as well as behavior, no group could claim that it alone was the “true Israel,” for “all alike were sinners.”36 Jesus’s teaching thereby provided a ground for overcoming the fragmentation of Jewish society.37

Finally, the basic quality of a heart centered in God—compassion—had political implications. Compassion was to be the core value of the people of God as a historical community.

Ritual immersion in water (both in Judaism and other cultures) can have two different meanings. When repeated frequently (as it was among the Essenes), it has the meaning of a washing or purification. When it is a once-only ritual (as it apparently was for John), it may also be a purification, but its primary meaning is as an initiation ritual that symbolizes and confers a new identity. “Once-only” baptism was also known in Judaism; when a Gentile converted to Judaism, he or she was baptized (and if male, circumcised as well). But it is important to remember that John’s baptism was intended for people who were already Jewish.

Apart from these historically suspect references in John and Matthew, there is no reason to think that John believed Jesus to be “the coming one” at an early stage of the ministry. John’s question from prison later in the ministry (“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” in Matt. 11:3 and Luke 7:19, and thus “Q” material) is therefore to be read as the dawning of curiosity or hope, not as the beginning of doubt.

The difference between communion with God and union with God is subtle and perhaps not important. Both are mystical states, and both are known in the Jewish-Christian tradition. In union with God, all sense of separateness (including the awareness of being a separate self) momentarily disappears and one experiences only God; in communion with God, a sense of relationship remains. Communion is typically associated with Western mysticism and union with Eastern mysticism, though the contrast is not as sharp as the typical association suggests. See Peter Berger, ed., The Other Side of God (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1981). For the “polarity” within Judaism, see esp. the essay by Michael Fishbane, “Israel and the Mothers,” 28–47. For communion mysticism in the East, see the most popular form of Hinduism, bhakti.

the specific ethical teaching of Jesus did not consist of generalized morality or universally applicable laws for living, but concerned the specific politico-religious crisis of Israel. What he did say was often so related to the particularities of the Palestinian crisis that it could be used in another milieu only by modification and transformation, a process that by no means needs to be viewed as illegitimate.