Saying 51: His disciples said to him, ‘On what day will the repose of the dead come about, and on what day will the new world come?’ He said to them, ‘That which you look outward for has already come, but you do not recognize it.”
I think if I could take one saying from the Gospel of Thomas and transpose it into one of the Synoptic Gospels, it just might be this one right here. Why? Because so many Christians today are still waiting for Jesus to come back and fix everything, or for the rapture, or the second coming, or some Divine intervention when “one day soon” Jesus will suddenly force all of those wonderful promises in the Bible to come true.
What they seem to miss is the fact that the Scriptures never say that Jesus will return and make those things happen. What they do say is that, for those who follow in the path marked out by the Messiah, an inner transformation will take place where they – on their own – will choose to “study war no more” or to “beat their swords into plowshare and their spears into pruning hooks,” and that the transformation of our world will begin on that day.
I wrote my own parable based on this idea in the hopes of making it more obvious to people why this way of thinking totally misses the point of what Jesus taught us.
Here’s my original parable:
“There was a wise man who told the people: “When wisdom comes to you, you will share your bread and your water with everyone who is hungry and thirsty.” The people looked around and saw that no one around them was sharing their food or water. So, they decided to wait and pray for that day when this wisdom would finally come and then everyone who is thirsty would drink and everyone who was hungry would eat. The people sang songs about that day when this wisdom might come. They searched the skies for signs of the coming wisdom. Eventually, those who were thirsty died and those who were hungry wasted away. And the people continued to wait, and sing, and pray.”
The return of Christ has already begun. It started when the Christ became fully incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth; who taught us to recognize the Christ in us that connects everyone and everything around us, so that we can become the next incarnations of Christ in our world, too.
The same Christ that was in Jesus is now in all of us. As we each slowly awaken to the reality of Christ in all of us, we become One with Christ and this makes us One with each other.
We are not waiting for Christ to come because Christ has never left. In fact, Christ promised to never leave us and to never forsake us. Christ abides in us as we abide in Christ.
We are now the very hands and feet of Christ in our world today, even as Jesus was in his day.
So, when Jesus’s disciples ask him in this saying, “On what day will the dead rise again?” his answer is this: “As soon as you realize that you are alive.”
And when they ask him, “On what day will the new world come?” his reply is simply this: “On whatever day you look around you and realize that you are already standing in the new world.”
When we stop waiting for things to change, we can begin to change the things we’ve been waiting for.
While we’ve been waiting for Jesus, Christ has been waiting for us.
We are the ones with the power to change everything.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
No one else can change our world.
Become the change you want to see.
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MEET ME IN NASHVILLE!
If you’re deconstructing your faith and need a safe space to engage others on this journey, you’ve got to find your way to Nashville, June 9-10, 2023 for AWAKEN: Nashville.
Our guides for this event will help us recover from spiritual trauma, escape worm theology, and reimagine our connection with God and others to help us move from deconstruction into reconstruction of faith.
AWAKEN 2023 will feature presentations from:
Dr. Jennifer Bird – Author of Permission Granted: Taking the Bible Into Your Own Hands and the forthcoming Biblical Marriage: I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means.
Karen Shock – Author of Too Much and Not Enough
Laci Bean – TikTok Influencer and Trauma Recovery Coach
Heather Hamilton – Author of Returning to Eden
Eve_Was_Framed – Instagram and TikTok influencer
David Moses Perez – Minister at Spero Dei, Nashville
Keith Giles – Author of the 7-part Jesus Un book series and Sola Mysterium: Celebrating the Beautiful Uncertainty of Everything, and co-host of the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast
Dan Henderson – Author of Confessions of a Recovering Evangelical
Desimber Rose – Author of The Church Can Go To Hell and co-host of the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast
Nat Turney – Author of The Seeds of De(con)struction and co-host of This Is Not Church Podcast
PLUS: MUSICAL GUEST: Jennifer Knapp – Grammy-nominated recording artist
Join us for this weekend focused on healing, restoration and spiritual freedom from toxic faith.
Keith Giles is the best-selling author of the Jesus Un series. He has appeared on CNN, USA Today, BuzzFeed, and John Fugelsang’s “Tell Me Everything.” His latest book, SOLA MYSTERIUM: Celebrating the Beautiful Uncertainty of Everything is available now on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.
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