‘The conservative, authoritarian stance, then, invents a patriarchal authority as an idol designed to blot out the unknown father – and the whole process by
which we hunt him in his hiddenness, and only find him as our heart goes
through searing difficulty and changes as a result. Therefore, this stance seeks
not to find the real God, but to be declared ‘right and proper’ by idolatrous
authority. What drives this stance is not only the creation of a false father, but
also the need for justification by him.
The real divine father will not justify us in this manner. He blesses and owns
Christ at the river Jordan, but he also allows Christ to be wholly non justified,
invalidated, and disapproved, by his accusers. We should remember, it was not
the liberals who crucified Christ. They were off some place else, drinking and
carousing, or making money, or whatever the slack and lax did in those days. It
was the conservatives, the authoritarians, the kosher people who were trying so
hard to be ‘right’ in order to please ‘the patriarchal authority’, who killed Christ.
These are Christ’s most dire enemies – because they think they follow him.
When such conservative, authoritarian people are challenged by Christ’s
radical heart truth, they cannot cope with that challenge, given the unchecked
and unredeemed state of their hearts. So, they invalidate the challenger. He’s
not in with the patriarchal authority, and so the substance of what he actually
says, or does, can be dismissed, and entirely ignored, because he has no right
to speak and act as he does.
This is the game played by the accusers of Christ at his trial. The game was
played by the religious authority of the Jews who were kosher. Christ was
regarded by them as non kosher. This outraged them. How dare this man say
all that he said and do all that he did? He didn’t have the blessing of the fathers
of the past. He went beyond the fathers of the past. He selected what he
regarded the core of the past fathers and ignored the rest, making a
differentiation of wheat from chaff in the tradition: but how dare he do that? –
he was innovating, pleasing himself, rewriting religious history and scorning
religious tradition! He was an anarchist with no respect for religious authority!
That his words and deeds had existential ‘heart validity’ was of no interest to
Christ’s accusers. He was insisting on standing on his own turf, and they were
insisting he must stand on their turf. By refusing this, it no longer mattered what
heart actually dwelled in his words and in his deeds. He had no right to speak
or act, except on their turf, the turf of tradition and authority. Just by insisting on
standing on religious turf in a different way, he must be wrong, bad, deluded.
Non-kosher: not capable of being valid.
Christ has rejected this ‘rightness’; he calls it ‘self-righteousness.’ In extremis, it
leads to what St Isaac of Syria called ‘the derangement of zeal.’ He did not
mean that very different zeal, or fervour, of a heart on fire because it is being
burnt in God’s furnace to ashes, but the zealotry and fanaticism that declares
existence a simplistic matter of right and wrong. Whilst there is a difference
between the ‘two hearts’ in all of us, a heart of flesh and a heart of stone, and thus a difference in which heart we pursue, the genuine righteousness has
nothing to do with the self-righteousness of the conservative, authoritarian
stance. In self-righteousness, we prove our standing and prove we are worthy,
by virtue of there being an external standard by which to measure ourself. But
this external standard is, however moral it pretends to be, a humanly
constructed idol, and is not the aim to which God binds the heart seeking him.
The real truth of heart, real integrity, needs a much more subtle, and interior,
yardstick to ‘read’ the heart’s stand and deed, its deep motive and inward
condition.
And the real divine father addresses, engages, and blesses, only that subtle,
inward place so hard to discern, and refuses all external proof. Christ is allowed
to be publicly disinherited, shorn of all support of tradition and denied all mantle
of authority. He is shamed and humiliated, and neither his father, nor he, lifts a
hand to insist on his external rightness. St Peter followed him in this when he
was crucified upside down, but St Paul could not go so far; he insisted on a
degree of proving his credentials, proving his validity, at his trial. But then Paul
is the nous man, and Peter the heart man. Paul could see the heart; Peter
could act from the heart, in all its tragedy and glory. Paul may be the nous of
the church, but Peter is the rock of the church’s heart. His entire life was
making mistake after mistake, yet as soon as he had been foolish or deceived
in heart, acknowledging it and using that ‘wrongness’ to go deeper. By making
errors, even by the ultimate betrayal, he found heart truth. In the end he knew
from his own effort and mourning ‘where Christ was coming from’ in the heart.
He rejected the judgement of the mind for the knowing and seeing of truth in
the heart.
The conclusion is clear. No one who seeks rightness or validation can walk the
way of heart. You can only make yourself ‘right with God’ using the mind: the
intellectual mind that polices behaviour but cannot gaze into the heart to
perceive its impulse.
The search for truth in the heart is different. It is this search that Christ’s whole
teaching addresses.”
Jamie Moran, The Wound of Existence pgs 127-128
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