Jesus the Teacher Within. Laurence Freeman

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      A Christian is essentially a disciple of Jesus. And he is their guru. Good disciples do not feel their guru is in competition with other gurus.

      Tolerance, dialogue and collaboration are the challenges facing Christian disciples today. For the first time since the fourth century institutional Christianity is not bolstered up by a secular power that supports religious exclusivism. Christians are being invited to see themselves as disciples of Jesus in a new relationship to the disciples of masters in other traditions. Realising that Jesus is their personal guru is decisive for freeing Christians from engrained attitudes of imperialism and historical intolerance. They are then freed for dialogue and spiritual partnership with other faiths. The question by which Jesus relates to his disciples therefore also connects him to the spiritual search that is common to humanity.

      Jesus is not seeking disciples to enhance his self-esteem. In fact the gospels tell how he let many opportunities for guru stardom pass him by.²² He saw many of his followers turn away from him because his teaching threatened them by its sheer personal authority. For this or other reasons it may not suit us to think of Jesus as our guru. We may not want a guru at all or we may feel called to another. Jesus does not condemn that decision. But even if this is how we feel about him we can still listen to the silence from which his question arises and touches everyone.

      The word disciple derives from discere, to learn. A disciple is one who acknowledges that he has got something to learn and that his teacher, at least for the present, knows more. There is a paradox involved in acknowledging this. It implies a separation from the person in union with whom we are to learn how to transcend duality. Beyond duality lies the full participatory being of love. So in fact discipleship does transcend itself. The disciple goes beyond the teacher because the teacher goes beyond himself. This paradox–is the essence of the identity of Jesus. It is good for you, Jesus told his companions, that I am going away. Discipline is the way the disciple learns to enter this paradox–the discipline of listening, of silence, of reading with the heart, of meditating without desire.

      When we are unaware of the stages by which relationship unfolds, we risk premature failure in every relationship we make. The first phase of romantic attachment seems like the end of everything. In learning to relate to Jesus, we begin by listening to his question, sitting at his feet. But as we hear his silence we find that we are inside his question, compassionately known by his self-knowledge. The mystical truth of the New Testament is that we are in a union with Jesus that takes us beyond every kind of ego-centred relationship with him. Christian fundamentalism, like all forms of fundamentalism, is arrested development–relationship that gets blocked at an early stage. In union with Jesus the disciple’s individuality, though not destroyed, is transformed. What else does love or death mean? As a second-century Christian writer put it:

       For you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person. ²³

      Deep prayer guides us beyond dualism into union, beyond ideas and images into reality. From the gospels it is clear that Jesus did not want hangers-on or devotees but full disciples or friends. Insight–into our being ‘in Christ’ and of his being ‘in us’, of our sharing the same God and Father with him²⁴–dawns when egotism has given way to self-knowledge nurtured by the grace of relationship with him. We need duality in order to transcend duality. In other words we must work with the ego to transcend the ego. Similarly we need the historical Jesus to reach the Cosmic Christ. And yet we encounter the Jesus of ancient Palestine not as he was then but as he is now. Meeting him now we encounter everything he has ever been and all he will yet be.

      In listening to the question which Jesus puts to humanity we are also hearing a call to self-discovery. Listening to him leads to listening with him to the mystery of existence at its source. This process is what makes the question and person of Jesus so relevant for the modern spiritual seeker. If we are to see Jesus as he is, and not just as our ego imagines him to be, we must learn to listen to his question in the very silence from which he asks it.