The Gospel of Truth
The Gospel of Truth is a Gnostic text that was found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945 along with various other ancient writings. The original text was written in Greek somewhere between the year 140 and 180CE ...
(for context, that's only about 40-80 years after the Gospel of John, which was written roughly 30 years after the Gospel of Mark ... so we're talking very close to the timing of the traditional 4 Gospels)
... and is likely a sermon that came from a group of Christians who were known as the "Valentinian Christians". There’s a lot we could say about this group, but the important thing to know is that they were named after their teacher Valentinus who was a theologian in Rome who was deemed to be a heretic by the Orthodox Church Fathers who insisted that their understanding of God and Scripture and Jesus and all the things was the right and true understanding, the only way to understand.
Anyways.
So scholars believe that this "Gospel" is a sermon of sorts that Valentinus himself may have written and although it's super confusing at points and (honestly) makes very little sense to me, there are parts of it that are fascinating and spark all sorts of thoughts in my heart.
For example, there's one section of the sermon subtitled "The Living Book Is Revealed" and in this section the writer says that in our hearts is the "living book of the living, the book that was written in the father's thought and mind and was, since the foundation of all, in his incomprehensible nature."
In other words ...
Dwelling in our hearts.
Written on our hearts.
Buried somewhere in our hearts.
... is the very mind of God, the very thoughts of the Divine, the desires and dreams that the Divine Father or Mother has for all of their creation.
What is that book?
What's written in it?
What's it say?
The writer goes on to say that "Jesus appeared, put on the book, was nailed to a tree, and published the Father's edict on the cross."
Ahh.
Isn't that beautiful? I'm not a scholar and so I can't say for certain that I understand all the implications of these words (I'm just sitting at my kitchen table over coffee pondering all of these things!), but as I sit here this morning and meditate on them and look at them through the lens of the story of Jesus ... it seems to me that the book of God's thoughts has always been written and buried within our hearts, but since we've forgotten them or lost sight of them or whatever, Jesus came and put the book on.
In other words ...
He lived the book for us.
He didn't just tell us what it said, but he showed us what it said.
He lived the chapter on love.
He lived the chapter on grace.
He lived the chapter on inclusion.
He lived the chapter on table building.
He lived the chapter on wall destroying.
... he put skin on the book and then when he was nailed to the cross, his crucifixion was an edict or an announcement of sorts from God proclaiming that in a world that is filled with hate and revenge and all sorts of evils that humans commit against other humans ... there is another way, there is another way to live and be and move through the world, and that other way is love.
Love wins.
... That's the edict, that's the announcement. When faced with unspeakable and unimaginable pain and humiliation and betrayal, Jesus didn't respond the way the world does or the way the world might expect him too.
He didn't fight back.
He didn't call upon the angels to destroy the enemy.
He didn't pronounce curses.
He didn't tell his disciples to draw their swords.
No.
Instead, he pronounced forgiveness with his last breaths ("forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do!") and then 3 days later he got up from the grave - there was so much power in his forgiveness and so much power in his love that 3 days later it pushed the stone away from the tomb and brought him back to life.
Hate didn't win.
Love did.
... And that's the edict, that's the announcement, that's the whole point of the book that the Divine has written on our hearts, the book that Jesus came to read to us with his life - that there is great power in love, enough power to overcome everything and anything the world might toss our way ... even death.
Love wins, always.
I love this narrative of salvation because it's so much different and (I think) so much more life giving than what I was handed growing up, that God was mad at my sin and so he sent Jesus to earth to take my punishment so that by believing in him I can go to heaven instead of hell when I die.
In THAT narrative love wins because it's Jesus' love that saves me from God if and only if I believe the right things about him.
BUT.
In THIS narrative from the Gospel of Truth, Jesus' love awakens a love that has always been buried deep in my own heart and saves me from my own tendency to forget that love ...
To forget how to live.
To forget how to love.
To forget how to forgive.
... my tendency to get so caught up in the ways of the world that I lose sight of who I really am, of who God has created me to be, of how God intends for me to live and move through the world. His life, his response to death, and his eventual resurrection prove to me or announce to me once and for all that love wins, that love trumps hate, that grace beats bitterness, that forgiveness is more powerful than revenge, more powerful than death.
And that, I think, is really Good News.
What kind of thoughts does all of this spark in YOU?
Much love,
Glenn || PATREON / BUY ME A COFFEE