And one of the hardest sayings of Jesus was that he spoke in parables so “that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins be forgiven them”. It was a lecture on the perverseness of human blindness; that is spiritual blindness.
It prompts the question who is it who really does see? A theory of consciousness does I believe help to answer that question today. When I first put pen to paper, to describe my spiritual adventure of trying to reconcile the sacred and the secular, the spiritual in this world and the eternal, God with self and with the other, I found I needed such a theory. And there being none is existence, I needed to create one. But Jesus did not need a theory of consciousness; anymore than Alexander the Great needed to read Clausewitz. Their genius was that they both knew without being taught. Alexander knew about War; and Jesus knew about Peace, which was better. In a sense each complemented the other. One sees this if one reads the Sermon on the Mount and takes all its propositions literally; it is utterly inconsistent with the Rule of Law, and a humane, disciplined, well-ordered society, as indeed are many of his parables. But then he had something much more important to impart than did Lord Mansfield, great judge though he was. The chief difference between War and the Rule of Law, is that in War there are no Rules: if you make Rules you lose; whereas in Law there is nothing but rules. Otherwise they have much in common. They both involve fighting; they both involve force; in both it is unwise to insist on unconditional surrender, unless there is no alternative. Both are absolutely necessary for civilized society to survive. But Peace does not involve force; indeed it is its antithesis.
So what was it he sought to achieve? Not, I think, simply to die like a felon on a cross. Prince Egmont, when he realized he had been betrayed by the Duke of Alva, and that death was inevitable, may have walked through the streets head erect, like a soldier, to his execution. But Jesus was not a soldier, and to start with he had not been betrayed by anybody. He set out on his Ministry of his own freewill.
So what was it he hoped to achieve? A young man, probably past the peak of his physical strength, but as fully conscious of his powers of character as he would ever have been, he sought to save the world. But how did he hope to do this? Lots of men have sought to save the world; I expect most of the better Roman Emperors saw it as their vocation; and I expect most of them were right to think it. So there must be many ways of trying to save the world; and probably each generation’s way is different. But if the Gospels are anything like accurate, only Jesus was correct in thinking he had the Divine Writ to do it. In a sense this made his task harder. He could not just be a cipher doing the Will of God; he had to be himself. So he had to do the Will of God, as he conceived it. He had to give an example of how to live; but he could not just give an example of how to be a philosopher, or a theologian, or a healer. He had to attempt to achieve something; he was not condemned to death from the first. If later he set his face towards Jerusalem and death, it was because the path he had chosen led that way. It was the path which he chose; it was not death which he chose. So where did the path lead? Where would the path have led, if he had not been cut short by murder? He called it the Kingdom of Heaven, which he constantly said was “at hand”, if only people had had the wits to grasp it. The perfect society! Was it a realizable dream; or was it fantasy? Probably it does not matter. He was a young man; he must have thought it was realizable, or he would not have attempted to bring it into being. If not realizable in his lifetime, then most certainly in others’. His harsh condemnation of Bethsaida and Capernaum only makes sense if he believed they had rejected a priceless opportunity; not the opportunity of a lifetime, but the opportunity of all creation. And the enthusiasm with which he preached his Gospel must have been infectious. The only thing that would have unnerved him would have been the thought that no-one understood, and no-one would dare to follow his example once he was gone.