HERE AND NOW: LEVELS OF AWARENESS
Today (in about five hours’ time) is the last chance I get for a while to talk about being aware of God’s closeness, though I probably have a couple more posts to do. Today I’m hoping that we get into conversation as well as look at the Bible. But here’s what I plan to cover from the Bible.
The last occasion was on the day Jesus got a celebrity welcome as he arrived in Jerusalem. Some foreign visitors, interested in the Jewish religion had asked to see Jesus It seems pretty clear that Philip and Andrew, both of whom were on Jesus’s team, were pretty impressed with this. But when they told Jesus, he was in reflective mood, thinking about his impending death. Jesus suddenly turns to prayer and says, ‘Father glorify your name’.
John, who was there when it happened, explains what happened next
Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.’ The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.Jesus said, ‘This voice was for your benefit, not mine.’
- Jesus’s communication was finely tuned enough for him to be able to hear God’s voice. But that was not true of anybody else around
- The great majority thought they heard thunder. They were just aware of something that could be experienced in the material world.
- The more spiritually aware, heard the noise and filled in the blanks. While they were pointing in the right direction—they knew there was something out there—they didn’t get the content. They thought an angel had spoken to him. That kind of thing when we have a little bit of knowledge and stretch it to explain everything that happens is called Jackass knowledge.
- Some, including John, actually heard the words.
So where does this story, which has a high percentage of weird, leave us.
- Firstly, even in a culture which was hugely more tuned in to spiritual phenomena, there were some people who didn’t get it at all. The sound was explained by physical events in the physical world.
- Secondly there were a group of people, who used the knowledge they had to fill in the blanks. They didn’t actually hear what was going on but they mad a spiritual experience out of it. I think that’s where most of us spiritual pilgrims exist most of the time.
- The next, privileged, group, heard the words. This must have given them some advance indication of what it would be like to hear God with greater spiritual awareness after the Spirit came. At this point the Spirit had not taken over from Jesus physical presence.
- Only Jesus had a straight spiritual experience. He heard the message without the words.
The question is: ‘How do we move from thunder, to visions of angels, to exceptional words, to a continuing conversation with God, in the person of Jesus, through the Spirit? |
