If Jesus came with a simple and profoundly powerful message, that the previous view of an angry and vengeful God was wrong, that the most important thing is to transform our hearts and minds towards love and that we can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven now – how would this message be hidden? Why hide it at all?
Well, this message is disruptive. It undermines the pre-existing religious structures. It changes the view of an angry God requiring punishments and sacrifices to one that loves us. It makes it harder to persuade people to go to war if people are told to love their enemies. If everyone did this it could eventually lead to peace. The need for spiritual progression and the path to do so independently of any religious structure was revealed. All this is profoundly unhelpful to the existing power structures at the time. So just suppose you want to hide this message – what would you do?
Step 1 – Link back to the old
Jesus emphasized the importance of not putting new wine (his teachings) in old wine skins (previous teachings) as by doing so both are ruined. He emphasized in John that nobody had seen God the Father (implications for the Old Testament). He said multiple times in Matthew “You have heard it said… but I say to you…” – moving from the worldly laws of the Old Testament to the principles of spiritual transformation in his new teachings.
However, putting new wine in old wine skins is exactly what happened. Instead of starting with Jesus’s oral teachings and running with them, the whole of the Old Testament was imported into Christianity as its backdrop.
Step 2 – Add new teachings after Jesus
If Jesus’s teachings were allowed to run they could gather momentum and transform the world. What was needed is a “new revelation” after Jesus that updated his teachings and claimed be the final word. So along comes Paul. Paul in his letters linked back to the old idea of God (that Jesus was trying to move us away from), adding back in the requirement for sacrifice – this time it was Jesus who was the sacrifice.
The fact that Jesus taught something entirely different from Paul is glossed over – “that was before he died”. You would have thought Jesus might have mentioned the most important parts of his teachings when he was alive and teaching his disciples. Otherwise what was the point?
Step 3 – Hide the spiritual path
Jesus revealed it was necessary for us to do spiritual work to transform ourselves. To those who thought it was enough to cry “Lord, Lord” and claim things in Jesus’s name – his response was “I do not know you”, with the requirement being that we do the will of the Father. Either way, whatever your views on his teachings the spiritual work of transforming yourself towards love and forgiveness is generally a good thing.
So how to hide this as a path? Claim none of it is necessary. In fact, claim that to even think it is necessary is a bad thing. In the Catholic tradition “Salvation” was essentially through being a member of the Catholic Church. In the Protestant tradition salvation was to be through “faith” in Jesus. To even think you need to do spiritual work would undermine this approach to “salvation”.
Summary
So that is how we have gone from a revelation of “This is a new teaching, your previous view of an angry God was not quite right, it is important to do spiritual work toward love” to “The old view still applies, Jesus is now the sacrifice, so you don’t need to do any spiritual work at all”. So in a way reversing Jesus’s message completely.
