Free Yourself of Everything. Wolfgang Kopp
let us keep to the essential point. To most people, these words of Jesus have a negative, antagonistic tone. But to a few, they are soul-stirring pronouncements that change these people's lives by causing a spiritual about-face in which they are torn loose from all that previously gave meaning and purpose to their every endeavor. In their resolve to leave everything behind and follow only the divine call, such individuals raise themselves above the world of phenomena, thus becoming children of the universal being. The only thing that matters to them is the kingdom of God; everything else must be left behind. It is vital that this not be misunderstood to mean that these people come to despise such worthy things as marriage, family, and society. All these have a higher truth, and those living in the fullness of divine being know to cherish these treasures more than anyone since they have penetrated the essence of things and understand the inexpressible mystery of which these things are a sign. The difference is that these people no longer cling to these treasures or anything else, since they are free of identification. In a radical following of Christ, they leave the affairs of this world as they are and are guided only by what calls to them:
Anyone who has not renounced everything cannot be my disciple! [Luke 14:26].
[Therefore] follow me, and let the dead bury their dead! [Matthew 8:22].
THE CHEERFULNESS OF THE SOUL
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel of following Christ consistently, which is incompatible with half measures. Only by diluting and downplaying the Christian truth was it possible to bring it to the level of a comfortable, church-elevating, sunken religion. Strictly speaking, following Christ comfortably is by no means following Christ.
People who believe that following the spiritual way can be likened to setting themselves up in comfortable accommodations are gravely mistaken. But it would be equally wrong if we thought that in following the spiritual way we must creep along with the pallbearer mentality often encountered in the false mysticism of suffering promoted by the church.
"Rejoice always!" (1 Thessalonians 5:16) says Paul, and Teresa of Avila (16th century) notes, "A sad saint is a sorry saint." It was to these sad saints that John Climacus (7th century) spoke:
God does not insist or desire that we should mourn in agony of the heart; rather, it is his wish that out of love for him we should rejoice with laughter in our soul.21
"Joy" is a favorite word of the New Testament because the message that Jesus brings is a joyful revelation able to yank people out of their hopelessness.
Those who understand with their hearts something of the joy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ should no longer find it difficult to laugh. Laughter, as expression of the cheerfulness of the soul, is precisely what comes hardest to those who are still too attached to their small pseudo-self, the ego. With constant efforts to uphold a mask of earnestness as an expression of their piety, these roving caricatures of Christian sentiment are not very inspiring. Those who take their ego and its world so seriously should perhaps pause to ask themselves how it is that angels can fly. "Why can angels fly? Because they take themselves so lightly!"
That medieval mysticism likened sorrow to an inertia of the heart and considered it to be one of the root sins should make us stop and think. Those who refuse to give joy a place in their hearts by fighting off sorrow have become blind and deaf to the truth of divine being. Francis of Assisi (13th century) speaks to this:
When God's servant attempts to preserve the inner and outer cheerfulness of the spirit, which comes from the purity of the heart, he cannot be harmed by demons, for they would say, "When God's servant remains cheerful in fortune and in misfortune, we are unable to find a door through which to enter into him and we cannot harm him." The devil's part is sorrow, but it is up to us to be forever merry and to rejoice in the Lord.22
The Christian sense of humor is not exactly proverbial, and it is often said that the strongest argument against the Christian religion is Christians themselves. "Cheerfulness is the final word of every teaching," Mahayana Buddhism tells us. Still many Christians hold the view that joy should be kept at bay. They consider joy to be wrong or diversionary and prefer to persist in the gloominess of church-going respectability. But it is foolish to attempt to lead a spiritual life by becoming stuck in the narrow-mindedness of a puritanical mentality. The seriousness of the spiritual way can easily lead to a lack of humor and intolerance, so that all you see is "the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye" (Matthew 7:3).
This kind of pseudo-religious mentality becomes increasingly evident, the more the inflated ego in its pretense of respectability concerns itself with external appearances. Jesus once got into an argument with the Pharisees and scribes, and attacked their hypocritical pretense of respectability with the sharpest words:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so, you outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity (Matthew 23: 27-28).
The use of such strong words unmasks the pretense of respectability—of the Pharisees and scribes of today and of all times to come-as sanctimonious hypocrisy. Jesus may have been many things, but one thing he wasn't was—respectable. He represented what he would always represent and what Bernanos called "the great fear of right-thinking people." He was great fear and trouble to those who declared at the time, "He must be gone, away with him," and continue to do so today in that they have disfigured and denigrated his teaching to the point that as an alienating, moralizing theology it is unrecognizable.
Jesus never lived up to the ideal of pseudo-religious clean living. This is evident by what we read in Matthew (11:19):
The son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, "Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of sinners."
The idea of clean living is always paired with a puritanical conscience and spiritual narrowness, and readily appears cloaked as religious earnestness. Just the same, "you will know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16). Where there is no joy, there can be no truth! Great joy has been proclaimed to us, so why we should be down in the dumps? At the beginning of the Gospel it says, "I bring you great joy," and at the end, "They returned to Jerusalem with great joy" (Luke 2:10, 24:52). The Christian church needs to rediscover this great joy, the same great joy that was felt by the disciples when they witnessed the resurrection of the Savior.
But considering that hardened rationalists as well as narrow-minded traditionalists are reluctant to let themselves be roused out of the comfort of their pseudo-religiosity, we will probably have to wait some time for great joy in the church. There is no room for joyful proclamations in a place where people speak only of transgressions and cling to religious dogmas and formulas. "Free yourselves of everything!" Zen tells us, and Jesus says, "The truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). The Tibetan lama Buton wrote in the 14th century:
Cheerfulness of the soul is a means of realizing truth, for in order to come to this realization, the soul, which was restless and confused, must become pure and cheerful.23
In Jesus's words, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God " (Matthew 5:8).
To be pure in heart, we must first empty ourselves inside, and thus free ourselves of all clinging and identification caused by ego-delusion. When we are empty inside, we are in keeping with what Jesus expressed in the oft misunderstood first beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). When we empty ourselves of all that God is not, we will be filled with the superabundance of the Godhead. We will have the fullness of life: "And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit" (Acts 13:52). That is why Paul says, "But the fruit of the Spirit is joy" (Galatians 5:22).
Without the message of joy, the Christian religion is incomprehensible and uncompelling. And "good news" that is not joyfully delivered is suspect in every way and contradicts itself. The early church was only successful in the world because it was a messenger of joy; this changed as the joy was lost and the church ceased to be a witness of joy. In sharp contrast to a joyless and sorrowful Christian mentality are, paradoxically, the encouraging words of Jesus himself (John 14:1, 15:11):