I started reading Etienne Gilson's God and Philosophy today and realized how a lot of philosophy goes over my head. Does God exist? What is God? What is existence? What is the nature of being? These are just some of the many questions that the philosopher seeks to answer. But what can I really say about God or existence or the nature of being? I have a hard enough time grasping my own existence let alone that of God or the nature of reality itself. There's nothing I can say that will be of any help to anyone. I could never do the subject justice. But then there's Jesus.
Whenever I find myself stuck on an intellectual problem, I turn back to the story of Jesus, because I really like Jesus. I can relate to Jesus and feel like I understand him. Jesus is a child of God, as we all are in a way; and as the divine archetype, he embodies everything that we share with God. The thing I like most about Jesus, though, is that his message is simple and he teaches it by example: Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind; and love your neighbor as yourself (Mk 12:30-31). As St. Paul says, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:28); and Jesus, out of love, helps all who come to him and ask.
It's not their asking that's important, it's his acting out of love. Jesus makes no distinction in who he helps, even those who were considered unclean and sinful. If they ask, he helps. But he also gets angry at greed, corruption, and the empty and often haughty words of hypocrites, because he saw with piercing clarity that it's the quality of one's heart and intentions that make them clean or unclean, pious or truly sinful. A person who acts out of kindness and love, even if they transgress this law or that, is clean. And one who is truly sorrowful and repentant for a wrongdoing they've committed is infinitely holier than one who refrains from outward acts of sin and harmfulness but has a heart full of anger, hatred, malice, or greed. When criticized for his followers' lack of ritual hand washing before eating, he says to his followers, "Are even you still without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that enters the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled into the latrine? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile" (Mt 15:16-18). Hence he forgives the adulterer and heals the untouchables and eats with those who have unsavory occupations in the eyes of the religious authorities of his day, and he drives the money changers out of the temple with a whip.
The story of Jesus is ultimately the story of how to be closer to God. It's a story in which one person's life shines forth like a light in the darkness and cuts through the Gordian Knot of intellectual paradoxes and religious dogmas to get at the heart of the matter: the best way to get closer to God is through relationships. God is one but is paradoxically expressed as a trinity, three 'persons,' because I think it reflects the relational nature of existence. We relate to God by relating to one another. We love God by loving one another. And we serve God by serving one another. In the gospels, John says that "God is love" (John 4:8), so in a way we can say love is our first principle, and that loving one another is the only philosophical system we really need. Of course, that's easier said than done. It's easier to do in the abstract, but not so easy face to face in a seemingly chaotic and cruel world, where one class or group of people always seems to oppress another. Where things like poverty, illness, addiction, and abuse make some people difficult to love, let alone help or even be around.
Even Jesus faced criticism, abuse, and ultimately even death on the cross following this path; and that reflects our own challenges in choosing to follow his example. It's not always an easy path to follow. But I think Jesus would agree with the sentiment behind Marx's famous line, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it" (Theses on Feuerbach).
