Advent: The Second Coming In You

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“The Son of God became man that we might become god.”

-Athanasius of Alexandria

In 1945 an Egyptian shepherd discovered what is now known as the Nag Hammadi library, the greatest archaeological discovery in the modern world. Among the books found was the lost Gospel of Thomas, containing the oldest and most authentic sayings of Jesus. 

The Gospel of Thomas is a compilation of 150 teachings attributed to Jesus, half of which appear in various edited forms in the canonical New Testament. Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard Divinity School writes, “The Gospel of Thomas appears to have preserved a more original form of the traditional sayings of Jesus.” These primary sayings reveal a message dedicated to the interior transformation of every human person into their Divine nature. For the historical Jesus, spirituality is primarily about human transformation in this life, not some disembodied salvation in the age to come. Scholar Andrew Harvey points out, “Anyone who reads the Gospel of Thomas with an open mind and awakened heart will realize that what Jesus was trying to create was not an ethical or sociopolitical revolution alone; he was attempting to birth a fully divine human race, a race of beings as radically alive and aware as he was himself.”

And though this might sound heretical to you, when you read these secret sayings contemplatively you realize Jesus is inviting us into the same life, the same path of discovery and awakening he made. It’s what is known in the Eastern Orthodox church as Theosis, or intimate union with God. What Jesus lived into and proceeded to enact was a new life of “kingdom consciousness,” available now to every person willing to uncover their rightful inheritance as children of God. “Being Sons of the Father is to be like Jesus himself, a status one does not attain anew but that one realizes one has always had,” implores antiquities scholar Stevan Davies.

The vast majority of institutional church doctrine has trained us to believe Jesus was unlike us in every way, but according to the original Jesus, this simply isn’t true. In Thomas 3a and 3b, Jesus says, “The Kingdom is within you, and it is outside you. When you understand yourselves, you will be understood. And you will realize you are Sons of the living Father.” Later on, Jesus is even more explicit: “He who will drink from my mouth (accept my teachings) will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.” What if we took the words of Jesus seriously when he said, “He who believes in me will do the works that I do also. And he will do greater works than these.” 

The Jesus that comes to us in the Gospel of Thomas understands an entire new world could be created by human beings who finally live into their Divine image. People like you and I who dare to do the necessary interior work to be empowered and transformed by Divine wisdom. As Saint Teresa of Avila wrote so many years ago, “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.”

This Advent season resist the temptation to passively wait on the coming of Jesus. Christ has come, Christ is here, Christ is alive and waiting to be born in you if you only dared believe it.

Gary Alan Taylor

The Sophia Society & Holy Heretics Podcast