L.J. shares a reflection on this Sunday's Gospel reading from St. Matthew.
Jesus proclaims the Good News, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” As his core message, it is Jesus’ formula for transformation, for becoming a mystic.
Today we experience Jesus’ primary proclamation of the Good News: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” It is his core message and primary reference in his teaching. Even more, this is Jesus’ formula for transformation, for an individual follower of his to become a mystic. Therefore, let us probe the meaning of this line to learn how we might become mystics in the mold of Jesus himself. I think it best to reflect on the line backward. We start with the word “heaven.”
“Ouranos” is a Greek word meaning “heaven,” or “sky,” and it signifies transcendence. The ancients understood God’s being God in terms of the sky. For, the sky is everywhere we look yet beyond our grasp. The sky impinges on us, it is the atmosphere or very breath, but towers above us. If you have ever looked out the window on an airplane midflight, you would know the serenity and clarity of the sky. There is not much up there to fixate on. Sure, there are clouds and even storms but they pass and they are lower to the ground. The heavens, however, always remain above and beyond – untouched by the worst storms and the thickest clouds.
Neither space, nor time, nor existence itself limit God. We are after the God beyond God who is not any particular thing. God is no-thing; God is nothing. This is crucial for us to understand if we want to know God. We cannot know God like we know the things of the world. Just as the heavens or the sky appear non-graspable and every beyond us, God is ever transcendent.
Now, Jesus does not just refer to God’s nothingness or mystery, he announces the “basileia ton ouranon” or “kingdom of heaven.” And this kingdom or basileia is “at hand.” It is here and nearer to us than we could ever have guessed. Jesus is announcing the unimaginable immediacy of God. The kingdom of heaven is our conscious enjoyment of divine unity, a state of spiritual consciousness in which we are one with the Nothing. For, we are already one with God, but we do not enjoy it or know it. This great and glorious good news is that we are inherently one with God. Thus, each one of us is holy mystery at our core. Jesus – newborn and lying in a manger as well as naked, dying on the cross – powerfully reminds us of our essence as one with the divine nothing.
“Metanoete” is Greek for “repent.” We can grasp the true meaning of this word by breaking down the Greek: “metanoete” is composed of two Greek words, “meta” and “nous.” “Meta” means beyond while “nous” means mind. Thus, to repent is to go beyond the mind. Repent, “metanoete” means transcending the mind or going beyond the mind.
Why do we need to transcend the mind? What’s wrong with our minds? We identify with thoughts, feelings, attachments, roles, relationships, work, nationalities, race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. But who are we really? Do these realities exhaust human identity?
To repent is to transcend the mind by not thinking and by faith. It is also to recognize our mental identifications and let them go.
When Jesus says, “Follow me,” he announces the Gospel not only as an experience to enter into but also as a path to grow into. This means the Gospel is a lifelong process as much as an immediate enjoyment of God’s nothingness. This both/and dynamic raises something crucial about Jesus’ formula for becoming a Gospel-based mystic. To repent or to transcend does mean destroying whatever one leaves behind. To transcend is to include what was transcended. We repent by going beyond the mind, beyond thinking. But we do not stop using our minds at all. We transcend the mind’s obsessive habits rooted in thinking, such as addictively hoarding resources or greed, but that does not mean we stop securing resources such as food or clothing. Repentance is holistic.
“Repent” means to transcend the mind while “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” means “the immediacy of the divine nothing” or that God is within. We stop thinking and let ourselves go into the Nothing. This happens in prayer. We repent and enter the kingdom by praying with inner silence and pure faith, which enables us to transcend the mind and enjoy God within. This is the pivotal experience if we want to become mystics in the mold of Jesus.