First Parish Unitarian UniversalistThe Hidden Gospel of Thomas
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
April 10, 2005
READING
In the opening pages of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Princeton University scholar of early Christian origins Elaine Pagels tells how she was out jogging one Sunday morning and stopped to rest just inside New York City’s Church of the Heavenly Rest. She was all of a sudden moved by the music and prayers, and thought to herself “This is a family that knows how to deal with death.”
Her own family was in just such a situation: her first-born child Mark, at 2 ½ years old, had just two days before been diagnosed with an untreatable, soon-to-be fatal disease. In the coming months, she returned to that church for worship and to a weekday support group, and, in her words, “resolved, over and over, to face whatever awaited us as constructively as possible for Mark, and for the rest of us.” (Beyond Belief, p. 3-5)
As a teen, Pagels joined an evangelical Christian church, but soon left it behind when some Christian friends told her that a close Jewish friend who had died at age 16 wasn’t born again and therefore was going to hell. “I just said, 'That doesn't make any sense to me. I don't believe that. '” ( Princeton Weekly Bulletin, February 9, 2004, on-line). Now, at a time of great personal stress, she found solace and energy in the liturgy and the gathered community of that church.
But, she writes in Beyond Belief, “when people would say to me, ‘Your faith must be of great help to you,’ I would wonder, What do they mean? What is faith? Certainly not simple assent to the set of beliefs that worshipers in that church recited every week (“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…”)—traditional statements that sounded strange to me, like barely intelligible signals from the surface, heard at the bottom of the sea….
Such statements seemed to me then to have little to do with whatever transactions we were making with one another, with ourselves, and—so it was said—with invisible beings. I was acutely aware that we met there driven by need and desire; yet sometimes I dared hope that such communion has the potential to transform us...
[And, as a historian of religion], I wondered when and how being a Christian became virtually synonymous with accepting a certain set of beliefs.” (Beyond Belief, p.5).
“The Church of the Heavenly Rest helped me to realize much that I love about religious tradition, and Christianity in particular—including how powerfully these may affect us, and perhaps even transform us. At the same time, I was also exploring in my academic work the history of Christianity in the light of the [1945]… discoveries [of early Christian texts not found in the Bible], and this research helped clarify what I cannot love: the tendency to identify Christianity with a single, authorized set of beliefs—however these actually vary from church to church—coupled with the conviction that Christian belief alone offers access to God.” (p.29).
SERMON
I’m curious: how many of you have read Dan Brown’s best-seller novel, The Da Vinci Code? A while back, some of you asked for my views on it, so I thought it would make good summer reading last year.
For those who haven’t read it, I found it to be a captivating murder-mystery thriller involving a search for the Holy Grail, intertwined with a conspiratorially presented alternate view of the early Christians and a persuasive condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church. It presents as feminist, but I don’t think it is. And it presents as based on scholarly research, and I don’t think it’s that either, not much.
The DaVinci Code’s alternate view of Christianity includes the obviously controversial, but not new to Dan Brown, idea that Jesus was married, to Mary Magdalene, with whom he became a father, thus joining Jesus’ family tree, the House of David, with Mary’s, purported in the book to be the House of Benjamin, a union covered up in scriptures by describing her as a prostitute. Otherwise, I suppose, the early Christians would have been under even greater attack than they were, because the uniting of the Houses of David and Benjamin in Jesus’ offspring would have been perceived as a threat by both the Romans and High Priests.
Beyond that, though, certain aspects of The DaVinci Code’s alternate view of Christianity fit into the scheme of things more or less accepted by many Unitarian Universalists.
For example, the author would likely agree with us that the religion of Jesus, his own beliefs and teachings, was distorted by what became the religion about him, in the doctrines established by the early Roman Church. Among the most notable of these was the Doctrine of the Trinity, established in 325 AD in Nicaea, which declared heretical our belief that Jesus was human not divine, there being one God not three. The DaVinci Code’s Jesus is surely man, not God. However, I think that Dan Brown is pretty much just advocating for another religion about Jesus. The beliefs and teachings of Jesus that we find so instructive are barely mentioned in the book.
Another aspect of Brown’s alternative view that I think most of us accept is the author’s critique of orthodox church doctrine for its denigration of the female, and of human physicality generally especially sexuality, and pleasure of most any kind, really. However, the main role of females in Brown’s view seems to be to help men achieve spiritual enlightenment, hardly a feminist (or healthy!) point of view!
As one might expect, The DaVinci Code has been denounced by many Christian authors, even Mark Burrows, a liberal professor at Andover Newton Theological School. I wouldn’t go as far as he does in an article published last June condemning the book using words like “bizarre,” “absurd,” and “ridiculous” —after all, the book is only a novel.
On the other hand, I agree with Mark Burrows’ concluding paragraph in which he contrasts the easy religion of the grail according to Dan Brown with the religion of the Biblical Jesus who “stands with the ancient prophets to condemn the misuse of power, the failing of community and the pretension of religion… who calls us to a costly love for the sake of the vulnerable, the oppressed and the marginalized. Jesus,” Burrows says, “summons us to the worship not of [Mary’s] womb or even of [Jesus’] tomb, but of the God of justice who exposes the idolatrous worship of nation and power.” (Christian Century, June 1, 2004; pages 20-23).
Nevertheless, I think The DaVinci Code is useful in that it brings to popular attention the existence of ancient Christian gospels that were not later included in the Christian scriptures, called the Gnostic Gospels. Most of these sources were discovered in 1945. Two Egyptian peasants made an astonishing discovery while digging for fertilizer at the foot of a cliff near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. They uncovered a sealed clay jar containing a hoard of papyrus manuscripts. These fourth-century texts included a wealth of ancient Christian literature, a total of 46 different works in all, almost all of which were previously unknown. These, referred to as the Nag Hammadi texts, and other original writings are offering new perspectives on Christian beginnings.
These ancient texts show that the early Christian communities were more diverse in their beliefs about Jesus and his teachings than the Biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would suggest. Indeed, these texts show that one doesn’t have to take The DaVinci Code as gospel truth in order to question the dogma of, and history told by, the Roman church.
In the same year, 2003, as The DaVinci Code came out, a new book by the Princeton scholar of early Christian origins, Elaine Pagels, was published. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas spent many months on the NY Times bestseller list, no doubt because of the interest in the Gnostic Gospels generated by The DaVinci Code. One of the Gnostic Gospels is the Gospel of Thomas.
Beyond Belief covers some of the same territory as Pagels’ 1979 ground-breaking book The Gnostic Gospels, two years after which she was awarded a MacArthur (so-called Genius) Prize, but the style of the newer book is more compelling, grounded as it is in her own personal history, as you heard in the Reading this morning.
You probably know enough from that Reading about Elaine Pagels that you won’t be surprised to learn that though she is not a Unitarian Universalist, Pagels will be the featured lecturer at this year’s annual General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), in late June in Fort Worth, Texas. Any of you who might be interested in attending this 4000 person gathering of UU’s for workshops, worships and annual meeting, may find information at the UUA.org website or on the Wider UU World bulletin board in the Parish Hall.
So, the Gospel of Thomas, hidden in a clay jar for 1600 years, is one of these Gnostic (which is spelled GNostic) Gospels. Gnostic refers to one who “knows,” one who seeks spiritual insights from experience. Some of the other texts are the Apocalypse of Peter, the Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Secret Book of John, and Secret Book of James.
As you heard from my Reading of portions of the “secret sayings” in the Gospel of Thomas, some are recognizable to any of us who are familiar with Christian scriptures because similar verses are found in the Biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Scholars think there may in fact be a common text among them.
Verse 33, for example: Jesus said, “For no one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, nor does one put it in a hidden place. Rather, one puts it on a lampstand so that all who come and go will see its light.”
But, other portions of the Gospel of Thomas are not familiar and sound odd to my ears. Verse 7, for example: Jesus said, “Blessed is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. Cursed is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion will become human.” ???
Pagels compared the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas with the New Testament Gospel of John, which is so important to Roman Church doctrine, especially the Nicene Creed. She came to a startling conclusion. “I was frankly shocked when it occurred to me that perhaps the Gospel of John was written in response to the kind of teaching you have in Thomas,” she says. “It was a completely new perception, and I was stunned.”
John fervently opposed what the Gospel of Thomas teaches: that all humanity has direct access to God. That God’s light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone. Remember Verse 3 in the Gospel of Thomas:
First, it makes light of the idea that the Kingdom of God is above us. It says, Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside you and outside you.”
Then Verse 3 goes on to declare what I think is very good psychology, “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are poverty.” Thus, knowledge of the divine and self-knowledge—one requires the other.
According to the Gospel of Thomas, when certain disciples pleaded with Jesus to “show us the place where you are, since it is necessary for us to see it,” he does not bother to answer so misguided a question and redirects the disciples away from himself and toward the light hidden in each person. Jesus says, “There is light within a person of light, and it lights up the whole universe. If it does not shine, there is darkness.” Verse 24.
In contrast, according to the Gospel of John in the Christian scriptures, only Jesus Christ has that light (“I am the light of the world,” John’s Jesus says in John 8:12) and the only way to know God is through Jesus, who, John asserts, is God in human form. Pagels thinks that John’s message was chosen for the Christian scriptures because it unified the disparate Christian communities around a single belief, whereas Thomas’ message emphasizes the individual search for God, leaving Christianity open to diverse teachings and, therefore, disunity. Bad for the institutional church!
It seems to me to be an age-old issue, one with which we grapple even in Unitarian Universalism today: the tension between unity and disunity, how to include and hold together people with diverse experiences and theologies.
Yet, I think much was sacrificed when the Gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic texts were hidden in that clay jar near Nag Hammadi, Eqypt. As UU’s, our Fourth Principle, the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” resonates with Thomas’ idea that we each can find the light within ourselves. Furthermore, think of the first of the sources from which we say the living tradition we share draws: “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
Let me close with one more line from the Gospel of Thomas, from Verse 50. Jesus said, “If they ask you, ‘what is the sign of your Father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is movement and rest.’” Not just energy. Not just solace. But both. Movement and rest.
So may it be for us. Amen.