it skewed by clergy and others. In mistaken zeal they cite the passage as evidence of Jesus’ presumed unique sonship and omniscience. We are told by them that he was found in the temple instructing the teachers and the authorities there. But such was not the case at all. Luke says simply that he was both listening to these experts and “asking them questions.” True, we are told they were very surprised at his intelligence and at his answers to questions in the discussion.10 But he wasn’t teaching the teachers, as is so often supposed.
Luke himself gives his readers a hint that the story is symbolical/allegorical by using the formulaic, symbolical number three. Jesus’ parents only notice he is missing and discover him in the temple after three days. In the Ritual of Egypt, Isis, the mother of the sun god Horus, searches for three days to find her son. As was noted in my earlier work, the number three gained its esoteric, symbolic meaning from the observed fact that for three days and two nights each month the moon is not visible from Earth. The moon was thought of symbolically as having congress with the sun at that time and as conceiving the new moon. Consequently, three became a symbol of any potent period of change or renewal. Hence the three days of Christ’s entombment prior to the Resurrection.
But there are some other features deserving comment. What kind of parents, one might ask, would allow their twelve-year-old son, in what purportedly was his very first grown-up visit to an unfamiliar city and territory, such freedom of movement and lack of supervision as to not even notice he was absent for a whole day? The situation is all the more puzzling in that the text says they were actually on the move, returning through the dangerous country around Jerusalem (mainly wilderness or “badlands”), well before they began to search for Jesus in earnest.
Then there is the larger issue of historical credibility raised by the fact that, while Luke tells us Mary mused on her son’s behaviour and treasured all these things in her heart, the subsequent narrative shows that she and his family in general had no idea of who he was really supposed to be. You would think that, having experienced a virgin birth herself and then observed her son’s conduct and learned about his answers in the temple, Mary at least would have been well aware that something very remarkable was going on. Yet—especially in Mark, where on one occasion we are told his family came to get Jesus and take him home, “for, they said, he is beside himself ” (is not well and may come to harm)—in the Gospels the immediate family are not shown as truly believing in him until after the Resurrection. This, of course, fits in completely with Mark’s overall intention of showing that certain prophecies are being fulfilled. It was foretold that the Messiah would be rejected by even his closest friends and kin. Notice that some conservatives like to reason that, if this account were not really historical, the author would have left these negative details out through embarrassment. Why would anyone making up a story put in such a “clanger”? they query. However, they miss the point. As noted, the family’s seemingly obtuse objections actually help make Mark’s case. Only the true Messiah would be treated like that.
Fundamentally, however, the story relates to a deeper truth. What it reveals is that, as the age of responsibility is reached, one’s deeper commitment, to the voice and stirrings of God both within and over all, comes to the fore of consciousness. The individual soul here radically begins its real “business,” that of seeking to know and do the will of “the Father.” “Jesus says to Joseph and Mary: ‘Don’t you realize I must be focused on my Father’s concerns?’” (My translation.) In the ancient wisdom, the “father” was often a symbol of spirit and mind, while the “mother” symbolized the womb out of which spirit was born. But there was no hint of valuing maleness over the feminine. Far from it. Indeed, wisdom, personified—or hypostatized, to use the technical term—as Sophia, was invariably viewed as female. Sophia, or “wisdom” in Greek, is a feminine name. Mother, Latin mater, is the bearer of spirit. This story, then, is about the first solid step on the journey for all of us that ultimately, through much joy and struggling, leads to “home.” There is a point where, however expressed, one decides to do the will of the “Father.” Ego needs to begin to be controlled and made to serve a higher purpose than oneself. The road to spiritual maturity has begun.
Lest anyone expect that this road will be smooth or easy, let me hasten to say that it will require great courage and what the New Testament calls hypomone—tough endurance. The King James Version usually translates this Greek term as “patience,” but this is only accurate in a very antique sense of that word. What it really means is the ability to stay with or under a heavy task or demanding situation. Life, as Scott Peck says in the very first lines of his giant bestseller The Road Less Traveled, “is difficult.” The Buddha said so, the Gospels say so too. But, as I point out in Living Waters, the evolution of the soul is furthered much more by problems, doubts, anxieties—all forms of resistance to the Spirit within—than by purely halcyon days.11
There is a good reason why spiritually motivated people frequently experience “the dark night of the soul.” I have certainly known such episodes of “dryness” in my own life, and can say without hesitation that they have, in retrospect, been times of genuine advance in self-knowledge and eventual victory over some mistaken ambition, pride or other weakness. Looking back at my life, I can see that the roughest terrain encountered has often been the most fruitful land I ploughed. The medieval alchemists tried to find ways of turning lead into gold. Understood esoterically, this was a metaphor for the inner spiritual soul-work involved for every one of us as we struggle by the grace of the God within to transform the leaden dross of all our foibles, all our neuroses and all our empty vanities into the pure gold of Christliness. St. Paul describes this process thus: “And all of us . . . seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image [that of the inner Christ] from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”12 That is what I mean by the concept of spiritual evolution.
As the well-loved hymn by Edwin Hatch puts it so aptly:
Breathe on me breath of God,
Till I am wholly Thine,
Until this earthly part of me
Glows with Thy fire divine.
4 TRANSFORMATIVE STAGES IN THE JESUS STORY
The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
– ST. PAUL, 2 CORINTHIANS 3:6
WE BEGIN HERE with the profound summation of spiritual truth once made by Valentinus, who was the author of The Gospel of Truth, one of the many Gnostic writings found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. He was a Gnostic Christian, later labelled a heretic, who was Egyptian but lived in Rome from approximately 135 to 165 CE(he founded a school there about 140) and had a very large following. He wrote the powerful, life-changing formula: “What liberates us is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.”1 However far from this central theme the discussion may at times lead us, this insight underlies the whole of our exploration from beginning to conclusion.
First, then, there comes an obvious question: If you take the literal/historical route, how long did Jesus’ ministry last? In the schema according to Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, the ministry lasts approximately one year. This is because deeply underlying the entire message is the ancient myth of the solar god in his yearly round. John’s Gospel, however, which is, as we have seen, so unlike the other three in so many ways, seems to follow a three-year cycle. Scholars point out that in it there are at least three different Passover visits to Jerusalem. Since John’s Gospel is the most “spiritual” and the least concerned to give even the appearance of verbatim reportage of a fully human being (in spite of the final chapter, which is an obvious appendix by a later hand), this Gospel can opt for the potent number
