Hilton Head Island, SC – July 24, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 14:15-25; The Gospel of Thomas – Saying 64
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – “’For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’” Luke 14:24; “Dealers and merchants will not enter the place of my Father.” The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 64, v. 12
The Wisdom of Jesus: The Gospel of Thomas
Before The Chapel Without Walls moved to The Cypress to hold our services, I had been preaching a series of occasional sermons called The Wisdom of Jesus. Today’s sermon is another one in that series.
Jesus is many things to many different Christians. He is Christ (or the Messiah), the Son of God, God Incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity, and the Savior of the world, among other titles or concepts. During the time Jesus lived, he was probably perceived by his followers to be few if any of those things, except perhaps the Messiah. But one thing almost everyone would understand Jesus to be was a wisdom teacher. Even those first-century Galilean Jews who rejected him as well as his message would agree that he was undeniably a dispenser of wisdom in the long tradition of wisdom teachers throughout the history of Israel.
There are five books in what we Christians call the Old Testament that are the so-called “Wisdom Books.” They are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. In all five of those books are pithy sayings or aphorisms which are intended to stand on their own. That is, they are not prompted by any particular events; they are just wise observations which the sages who wrote these books wanted to make. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecc. 3:1). “Because you have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your habitation, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent” (Psalm 91:9-10). “How often is the lamp of the wicked put out? That their calamity comes upon them? That God distributes pain in his anger?” (Job 21:17) “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7).
Jesus also proclaimed wisdom sayings like these to his followers. “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored?” (Mt. 5:13) “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:20).
What do these sayings mean? We have to think about that in order to incorporate their meaning into our lives. To absorb wisdom is to become wise, or at least so it is hoped. The word philosophy literally means “the love of wisdom.” The wisdom sayings in the Bible are biblical philosophy in brief, pithy, powerful words.
In 1946 an ancient book was unearthed in Upper Egypt near a town called Nag Hammadi. It was written in ancient Coptic. The Copts were (and still are) Egyptian Christians. We do not have time to go into the many fascinating details about this book, but scholars later determined it to be a Gospel called the Gospel of Thomas. Experts say the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas was translated from an earlier Greek Gospel which was probably written about the same time as the Gospel of Matthew, which is to say, around 70 or 80 CE or so.
However, unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, the Gospel of Thomas has no narrative at all. There is no birth story, no baptism of Jesus, no miracles, no crucifixion, no resurrection, no events of any sort that are reported. Instead the Gospel of Thomas consists only of a fairly long series of unrelated sayings and parables of Jesus. Collectively Thomas is somewhat shorter than the shortest biblical Gospel, but not by a lot.
Listen to a few examples of these sayings. “Jesus said, ‘No prophet is accepted in his own village. A physician never heals those who know him.’” “Jesus said, ‘A city built upon a high mountain (and) fortified cannot fall.’” “Jesus said, ‘If a blind person leads a blind person, both will fall into a pit.’” “Jesus said, ‘Do not worry from morning to evening or from evening to morning what you shall wear.’”
Do those sayings sound familiar? If you are well-versed in the four biblical Gospels, they certainly should. Jesus said almost exactly those same things in various verses of the Synoptic Gospels. And as you earlier heard in our two Gospel readings, the first from Luke and the second from the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus told a parable which is similar in almost every important detail in both Gospels. But Luke made it into the New Testament and Thomas didn’t. Why? Especially if the Gospel of Thomas was written at roughly the same time as the other four Gospels, why was it excluded from the Bible?
I suspect there were four basic reasons why Thomas didn’t make the canonical cut. (“Canon,” incidentally, is a word which essentially means the various books that were approved as being biblical.) The reasons Thomas failed to make it are as follows: 1) Perhaps the Gospel of Thomas was unknown when the New Testament canon was decided. 2) Perhaps Thomas was associated with other rejected Gospels which also were found in Nag Hammadi, and therefore, if it was known in the first century, it too was rejected along with the other so-called “Gnostic Gospels.” (“Gnosis is a Greek word which means “Knowledge.”) 3) Because Thomas has none of the events which authenticated Jesus as the Messiah and Savior to the first-century Christians, and in particular the crucifixion and resurrection, it was never accepted by the New Testament Church as being a sufficiently full presentation of the life and teachings of Jesus. Thomas simply was not acceptable to those who voted the New Testament into existence. Finally, 4), some of the sayings of Jesus in Thomas are so cryptic or so unlike the sayings of Jesus in the four canonical Gospels as to render the entire Gospel of Thomas suspect and even heretical.
Let us look at some of the sayings in the fourth category. “If you bring forth what is within you, that which you have will save you. If you do not have it within you, that which you do not have within you [will] kill you” (Saying 70). What on earth might that mean? Apart from a context in which Jesus might have said it, does it mean anything intelligible? It sounds like something that might come out of Hinduism or Buddhism, but not something from a Jewish-oriented Christianity.
Or listen to this, and if you know what it means, I hope you will tell me. “Those who have come to know the world have discovered the body. But those who have discovered the body, of them the world is not worthy” (Saying 80) Does that say that the body, the flesh, is evil? And does it mean that only “spiritual people” or “mind people” are truly worthy? It sounds like it might mean that, but is that truly what it means? And if that is what it says, it is strongly at odds with almost everything else in the Bible. It is so diffuse, so nebulous, so elliptical! Whoever could understand that saying for a certainty?
Or this: “When you see your likenesses, you are full of joy. But when you (pl.) see your (pl.) images which came into existence before you – they neither die nor become manifest – how much will you bear?” (Saying 84). Who can possibly declare without fear of being contradicted what that means? It is too obscure, too veiled, to mean anything --- isn’t it?
Some of the sayings in Thomas are remarkably similar to sayings in the three Synoptic Gospels in the accepted canon of the New Testament. No one has claimed that the Gospel of Thomas was written by the disciple named Thomas, but whoever wrote it, he obviously had access to some of the same sayings of Jesus as the other Gospel writers. Nevertheless, the differences between Thomas and the Four New Testament Gospels are so different as to cast doubt on the authenticity of the entire Gospel of Thomas, regardless of where and under what circumstances it was found.
And that brings us back to two of the other suppositions which may explain why Thomas was ultimately rejected as being a valid Gospel by the Early Church. It bears the stigma of having been found with other writings which were declared to be heretical Gnostic writings by the second century of the Christian Era. There were Gnostic Gospels of Peter, James, Phillip, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, plus other scriptures about Jesus which did not support claims about Jesus found elsewhere in the New Testament. All these writings must have been declared heretical by the Early Church, but there is no evidence of that having been done. As a result, an ostracized group of would-be Christians may have taken the writings to Egypt, where they were translated into ancient Coptic and buried for safekeeping.
The Gospel of Thomas presents Jesus only as a teacher of wisdom. All four of the canonical Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, also present Jesus as a wisdom teacher. But the three Synoptics hint that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of man, and perhaps also the Son of God. John virtually shouts that Jesus is is the Logos of God, the Word of God, and that he is in some measure God Himself. “I and the Father are one,” John said Jesus said. It is what the Gospel of Thomas didn’t say about Jesus that blackballed Thomas from the Bible, and it is what the Four Gospels did say about Jesus that caused them to be accepted into the approved list of New Testament books by the Early Church.
The word which connotes “the study of Jesus” is the word Christology. As a result of this very important ecclesiastical decision about the Gospel of Thomas and other such Gnostic Gospels, the subsequent focus of Christology has been much more on the deeds and events of Jesus’ life than on his teachings. Thus the birth of Jesus is given great significance in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and his baptism by John the Baptist is highlighted in all three Synoptic Gospels but is absent in John. There are numerous miracles recorded, and the meaning of those miracles receives much interpretation. Much attention is paid to the people with whom Jesus spent his time. And there is almost more devotion to the events of what we call Holy Week than to the rest of the life of Jesus put together. The Palm Sunday processional, the so-called cleansing of the temple, the Last Supper, the arrest and trial of Jesus, the crucifixion, and the resurrection: these things receive enormous attention relative to everything else in Jesus’ life, and they also receive far more attention liturgically and Christologically than do Jesus’ teachings.
But Jesus was a teacher! He was called “Rabbi,” which means Teacher! So why do we discount His wisdom? We do so because it does not authenticate him as Messiah or Son of man or Son of God or Savior or God Incarnate. Truly it doesn’t. With respect solely to his wisdom teachings, Jesus is not essentially different from Job or King David or King Solomon or Koheleth (“The Preacher”). They were sages; Jesus was a sage. That is how their contemporaries perceived the writers of the Old Testament wisdom literature, and that is how many of Jesus’ contemporaries perceived him during his own lifetime.
Christian men and women: listen very carefully. Most Christians accept Jesus as the Messiah, but many do not perceive him to be the Son of God by means of the claims of the virgin birth, nor do they believe him to be divine in any sense of that word. But they are greatly influenced by his wisdom. Every single parable is an example of wisdom teachings. Much of the Sermon on the Mount is wisdom. Many of the quotations of Jesus scattered throughout all four Gospels illustrate the fact that he was a Jewish sage.
If the entire New Testament consisted only of the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, that would be enough to proclaim the essence of the Gospel. It consists of three parables, two short ones and a long one. They are the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the Parable of the Lost Coin, and the Parable of the Two Lost Sons and the Forgiving Father, or as it is universally if somewhat inaccurately known, the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The wisdom of those three parables, and especially the third one, proclaims to the world that God is not a God who removes Himself from us in an antiseptic, hermetically-sealed heaven. Instead He is a God who searches out all of His children whom He believes are lost to Him. And God never gives up on us until He finds us.
But how does God seek us? By means of patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), leaders (Moses, Joshua, David), sages (Job, David, Koheleth), prophets (Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah), and most of all through Jesus of Nazareth, the teller of parables, the dispenser of wisdom, the Messiah, the Crucified and Resurrected One. We cannot know who Jesus is without allowing the influence of his wisdom, the events of his life, and particularly his willingness to face death on a cross and the astonishing claims of what happened beyond that, to enter into our head and heart.
Should the Gospel of Thomas have been included in the New Testament? Probably not. Thomas has nothing about the life of Jesus, and consists only of his teachings. That is an unacceptable deficiency. It is too cryptic, too limited, too “oriental” to come into the Christian scriptures without causing more interpretive problems than we already have. Luther wanted the letter of James removed, and others are highly skeptical of the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation. We have what we have, and almost certainly it is all we shall ever have. But one thing the Gospel of Thomas establishes about Jesus which is beyond dispute: whatever else we think, Jesus was this --- Jesus definitely was a Jewish wisdom teacher. And for that we should forever thank God.