Marcus Borg JESUS AS A JEWISH MYSTIC (Jb 131ff) [emphasis mine. GCS]

In a book that I wrote twenty years ago, my shorthand phrase for Jesus as one who experienced the sacred was "Spirit person." I considered using the term "mystic," but decided not to because of the term's ambiguity in contemporary American usage. For many, "mystic," "mystical," and "mysticism" are at best vague and often have negative connotations, suggesting fuzzy thinking or something that need not be taken seriously. And even when the terms are understood to refer to experiences of the sacred, they often suggest an otherworldly orientation that has little to do with the dailiness of life. Some of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century thought of mystics and mysticism very negatively.²⁹ Overcoming the negative connotations of "mystic" and "mysticism "would be difficult, I thought. But since then, I have begun to speak of Jesus as a Jewish mystic rather than a Jewish Spirit person. I mean the same thing.

   Much depends on how one defines mystics and mysticism. There are narrow and broad definitions. When I speak of Jesus as a Jewish mystic, I am using a broad and traditional definition: mysticism refers to the "experiential knowledge of God." The Latin phrase for this, which I cite to indicate that it is traditional, is cognitio Dei experimentalis.³⁰ A mystic knows God. To expand this broad and basic definition, William James defines mystical experience as a nonordinary state of consciousness marked above all by a sense of union and illumination, of reconnection and seeing anew."

  What is meant by a sense of union, of reconnection, is best understood by contrasting it to our ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness is marked by a sense of separation, a distinction between the self and the rest of reality, commonly called the self-world distinction. This awareness emerges early in our lives in the birth of self-awareness, the sense of being a separate self. In this ordinary everyday consciousness, we experience ourselves as "in here" and the ^,world as "out there." It is the world of the subject-object distinction, so common that it is built into our grammar: I (subject) see you (object). It is the world of the boundaried self, the separate self. It can be a world of deep alienation (as in the title of Sylvia Plath's book of poetry The Bell Jar) or a world of considerable contentment and pleasure. In either case, ordinary consciousness involves this sense of separation.

  In mystical experience, this sense of separation is replaced by a sense of connection with "what is." The experience might be one of encounter, as in visions, or of communion or union, as in "eyes open" and "eyes closed" mystical experiences. In these experiences, the boundaries of the self momentarily grow soft or disappear. What we might call the "dome of the ego," that sense we have of living inside an enclosure, falls away. The dome becomes permeable and porous or may even vanish completely. Rather than experiencing separation, we experience connection. A sense of particularity (that I am a particular self) may remain in the midst of a sense of connection (experiences of "communion), or a sense of particularity may disappear completely (experiences of "union'). But whether or not a sense of particularity remains, these are unitive experiences. Mystical experiences involve a sense of reconnection to what is. This is what happened to Jesus as well as to the other central figures of his tradition.

   The second defining characteristic of mystical experiences according to James is that they involve illumination, a radically new way of seeing. Images of enlightenment-of blindness and seeing, light and darkness-abound in texts that reflect mystical experience. Job's exclamation, "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you" (42.5), is a classic example, as is the line from the familiar hymn "Amazing Grace": "Once I was blind, but now I see" (based on John 9.25). The consequence of Paul's mystical experience on the Damascus road was that "something like scales fell from his eyes" (Acts 9.18). He now saw.

To use another of James's terms, these experiences are noetic. Those who have them experience them as a knowing (which is what noetic means) 3² Though commonly marked by wonder, amazement, joy, and bliss, they are experienced not simply as an emotional state, but as a knowing: one knows something one didn't know before. What is known is not a new bit of information, a new item of knowledge, but "the Real," the sacred, another level of reality, or, to use the most common Western word for what is known, God.

This understanding of mystical experience is the basis for my definition of mystics. Mystics are people who have vivid and typically frequent experiences of the sacred and whose lives are decisively changed as result. Not everybody who has such experiences is a mystic. Some do not integrate the experiences into their lives, whether because of their infrequency or for some other reason. But all mystics have such experiences.

   Mystics have, to use the broad traditional definition, an "experiential knowledge of God." Mystics also know something more; namely, they know the immediacy of access to God. Not immediacy in the sense of "ease," as if access to God is easy, but that God is accessible to experience apart from mediators, that is, apart from institution and tradition. Mystics stand in an unbrokered relationship with God. They do not intrinsically become anti-institution or anti-tradition but they know that no institution or tradition has a monopoly on access to the sacred. For this reason, mystics have often been distrusted and sometimes persecuted by the official representatives of the religious traditions in which they have lived.

   Though some mystics have led cloistered lives with little direct connection to the world, there is nothing intrinsically "otherworldly" about mysticism. Many mystics have become more deeply involved in the life of the world because of their mystical experiences. The most famous activists and reformers in the history of Christianity (and in other religions) have had mystical experiences. The experience of the sacred became the basis of their lives, the ground of their conviction, the source of their insight and courage.

   Mystical experience not only changes the way mystics see. It also empowers, for mystics have experienced a reality, a ground, greater than themselves and the world. Empowerment begets courage and often leads to passionate protest against the way things are and advocacy of another vision of how things can be." For these mystics, the world has a positive value; it is the good creation of God, and not simply to be escaped. Rather, it is filled with the glory of God. It is where we live-but it needs to be changed.

   It is in this sense of the word "mystic" that I see Jesus as a Jewish mystic. What the gospels report about him fits this profile very well. He not only experienced God, but it was the ground of his vocation, activity, and teaching. He spoke and taught from the Spirit, he healed from the Spirit, and he became a passionate advocate of God's passion for justice. Jesus as a Jewish mystic also stood in the tradition of the Jewish Bible with its passion for justice. The God whom he experienced was not a "generic" sacred, but the God of Israel, the God of the law and the prophets.

   Jesus as a Spirit-filled Jewish mystic standing in the tradition of the Jewish prophets is perfectly crystallized in the inaugural scene of Jesus's public activity in Luke's gospel. Inaugural scenes in the gospels are important-each gospel writer uses the opening scene of Jesus's public activity to state what he sees Jesus and his mission to be most centrally about. Jesus's first words portray him as in touch with God: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me ..." The rest of the passage emphatically speaks of a prophetic vocation and task "... to preach good news to the poor. The Spirit of the Lord has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (4.18-19). The language comes from the book of Isaiah (61.1-2; 58.6), thus locating Jesus in the prophetic stream of the Jewish Bible.

   Although Luke's inaugural scene is almost certainly his creation and construction and not a memory of Jesus's first public appearance, it succinctly summarizes what we find in the synoptic gospels.³⁴ From Jesus's vision at his baptism and his visions in the wilderness and continuing onward through his public activity, his life and mission were marked by a deep experiential relationship with the Spirit of God, with the sacred.