Sri Ramana Maharshi
I am - The First Name of God
(First
published in The Mountain Path, 1992, pp. 26-35 and pp. 126-42.)
In
the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad there is a verse that describes how, at the
beginning of the universe, the Self became aware of itself as 'I':
In
the beginning this [universe] was the Self alone… He [the Self] reflected and
saw nothing but the Self. He first said, 'I am He'. Therefore He came to be
known by the name aham ['I'].
'I' thus became the first name of God. Bhagavan corroborated the sentiments
expressed in this verse when he told a devotee, 'The one, infinite, unbroken
whole [plenum] became aware of itself as ''I''. This is its original
name. All other names, for example Om, are later growths.'
On another occasion Bhagavan, commenting on this famous verse from the Upanishads,
explained how, due to a felicitous combination of letters, the name aham
not only denoted the subjective nature of God but also implied that it
encompassed and constituted all of the manifest universe:
The
talk then turned to the name of God and Bhagavan said, 'Talking of all mantras,
the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says 'aham' [I] is the first
name of God. The first letter in Sanskrit is 'A' and the last letter 'Ha'
and 'aha' thus includes everything from beginning to end. The word ayam
means 'that which exists', Self-shining and Self-evident. Ayam, atma
and aham all refer to the same thing.
The
name aham merely indicates that God experiences himself subjectively as
'I'. When one adds the word 'am' to the name there is the further implication
that God is, that God is being itself. Bhagavan expounded on this idea in Guru
Vachaka Kovai and then went on to say that 'I am' is not merely the first
name of God, it is also the most appropriate:
Since
along with 'I', the aforementioned first name [mentioned in the previous
verse], 'am' always shines as the light of reality, 'I am' is also the name.
Among the many thousands of names of God, no name suits God, who abides in the
Heart, devoid of thought, so aptly as 'I' or 'I am'. Of all the known names of
God, 'I', 'I' alone will resound triumphantly when the ego is destroyed, rising
as the silent supreme word [mauna para vak] in the Heart-space of those
whose attention is Selfward-facing.
The word 'Heart', which appears twice in this passage, was often used by
Bhagavan as a synonym for the Self. In Tamil the identity between the terms
'Heart' and 'I am' is clearly evident since the single word ullam can
mean either 'am' or 'the Heart'. In Arunachala Pancharatnam, for
example, Bhagavan wrote, 'Since you shine as ''I'' in the Heart, your name
itself is Heart'. This can be expanded to mean, 'Since you shine as ''I'' in
the ''I am'', which is the Heart, your name itself [I am] is the Heart'.
Bhagavan often cited the Bible, and in particular the statement 'I am that I
am', to support his contention that God's real nature was 'I am'. Since this
quotation and other similar biblical texts are regarded as a divine revelation
of truth by both the Jewish and Christian religions, I intend in this article
to examine them in some detail in order to point out what the Jewish and
Christian religions made of these statements and to show how their
interpretations differed from those put forward by Bhagavan.
The following extract from Talks is a good place to start:
'I
am' is the name of God. Of all the definitions of God, none is so well put as
the biblical statement 'I am that I am' in Exodus chapter three. There are
other statements such as brahmavaiham [Brahman am I], aham
brahmasmi [I am Brahman] and soham [I am He]. But none is
so direct as Jehovah [which means] 'I am'.
The biblical quote comes from an Old Testament story that tells of an encounter
between God and Moses. God, manifesting Himself as a voice, introduces Himself
by saying, 'I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac
and the God of Jacob' (Exodus 3:6). God appointed Moses to represent the
Israelites, who were then living as slaves in Egypt, in the court of the
Egyptian Pharaoh. He wanted Moses to plead their case with the Pharaoh, the
ruler of Egypt, and to lead them out of captivity. Moses asked for more
information:
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3.13
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Then
Moses said to God: 'If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ''The
God of your fathers has sent me to you,'' and they ask, ''What is his name?''
what shall I say to them?
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3.14
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God
said to Moses, 'I am that I am'. And he said, 'Say this to the people of
Israel, ''I am has sent me to you''.
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3.15
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'…
this is my name for ever and ever and thus I am to be remembered throughout
all generations.'
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This revelation of the divine name 'I am' was an immensely significant moment
in the history of Judaism, but to understand why, one needs to look closely at
the Jewish attitude towards names and the naming of objects.
According to the Jews of the biblical period, to have no name meant to have no
existence in reality, for when one's name is taken away from one, one ceases,
quite literally, to exist. The giving of a name, therefore, is not merely an
act of identification; it actually brings into existence the object named and
summarises verbally its inherent properties. In Genesis, the first book of the
Bible, God gives reality to His creation by naming its components: He names the
day 'day', the night 'night', the sea 'sea', and so on (Genesis 1:3-10). Only
by doing so can He bring them into a real and permanent existence. For the same
reason He commanded Adam to give a name to each of the animals (Genesis 2:20).
As for the name of God Himself, He had been called by several names prior to
His famous declaration 'I am that I am': 'El' and Elohim', meaning 'God', and
'Shaddai', meaning 'Almighty'. But these names were not revealed by God
Himself, they were merely convenient designations attributed to Him by a people
who were as yet ignorant of His true name. When God finally revealed His name
to be 'I am', He became more of a living reality to the Jews, and more
accessible to them. A Roman Catholic biblical scholar explains why:
Israelite
thought in the biblical era lacked the discursive reasoning developed by Greek
philosophy and was incapable of general and abstract speculation. In Hebrew 'to
know God' is to encounter a personal reality; and a person is not known unless
his name is known… To know the name is to know the reality named. Hence,
knowledge of God is disclosed in His name.
This intimate relationship between a name and the person who owns it can be
clearly seen in many biblical stories, for the names in the Old Testament are
not given out accidentally: the name of each character reveals and signifies
the essence, the chief personality trait or the most memorable action done by
the person so named. If a person in the Old Testament transformed his character
or was inspired or motivated by God to begin a new way of life, God Himself
sometimes changed the person's name so that the new name accurately reflected
the changed situation. Jacob, for example, tricked his blind father into giving
him a blessing that should have rightly gone to his brother (Genesis 27:6). The
word Jacob literally means 'a cheat'. Later he wrestled with an angel of God
and fought so tenaciously, not giving up even after dislocating a hip, that he
forced the angel to give him a blessing (Genesis 32:28). The blessing was a
change of name and consequently a change of character and essence. No longer
would he be called Jacob, meaning 'cheat'. He was transformed into Israel,
meaning 'God strove' or 'one who strove with God'. One could cite numerous
other examples but two will suffice. When Abram, meaning 'High Father', made
his covenant with God, and God then promised him that he would found the Jewish
race, He Himself ordered Abram to change his name to Abraham, which means
'Father of a multitude'. Abraham's wife, Sarah, was originally called Sarai,
which means 'mockery'. She was the one who had laughed at God when He had
promised that she would conceive a son, even though she was ninety years old.
When the son arrived and God promised Abraham that among his descendants would
be several kings, He ordered Abraham to change his wife's name to Sarah,
meaning princess, since she would be the cofounder of this royal line.
Set against this background one can now easily imagine the significance of God
revealing for the first time what His real name was. He had been asked before
but prior to this moment He had declined to give an answer. In the eyes of the
Jews, by declaring Himself to be 'I am' God was not merely giving Himself a
convenient designation or title, He was revealing to humanity for the first
time His real nature, His real essence and His real identity.
The phrase 'I am that I am', in which God first reveals Himself to be 'I am',
is one of the most famous statements in the Bible and it has consequently
attracted a lot of critical attention. It is clear that God is making a very
important and fundamental statement about Himself, but there has been wide
disagreement among biblical scholars about its true significance. Bhagavan put
his own interpretation on the phrase, as can be seen from the following
quotation, but it is not one which would appeal to many biblical
scholars:
The
essence of mind is only awareness or consciousness. When the ego, however,
dominates it, it functions as the reasoning, thinking or sensing faculty. The
cosmic mind, being not limited by the ego, has nothing separate from itself and
is therefore only aware. That is what the Bible means by 'I am that I am'.
The differing opinions among theologians on the meaning and significance of 'I
am that I am' have primarily arisen because no one can be really sure what the
original Hebrew meant. Everyone agrees that the original phrase 'ehyeh aser
ehyeh' is derived form an archaic Hebrew form of the verb 'to be', but
there the agreement ends. One school of thought maintains that since in Hebrew
the present and future tenses are identical, ehyeh might mean either 'I
am' or 'I will be'. One variation of this theory has God say 'I am what I will
be', meaning, 'What I am now is what I will always be'. Others have postulated
that ehyeh is not 'I am' but 'I cause to be'. Thus, instead of saying,
'I am that I am' God is saying, in effect, 'I cause to be whatever comes into
being', or something similar. This explanation has found much favour among the
Christian theologians who prefer to see God as a creator rather than as pure
being.
There is yet another theory which does not depend on grammatical niceties. In
the ancient semitic world - we are here talking about more than 3,000 years ago
- it was widely believed that anyone who knew a name had power over the being
so titled. According to this theory, when Moses asked God for His name, God
declined by giving the evasive answer 'I am what I am'. Proponents of this
theory maintained that if He had revealed His true name, whatever it might be,
it would have given Moses some power or hold over Him, and that would have been
unacceptable because it would have diminished His transcendental
omnipotence.
In modern times such a theory sounds amusing rather than plausible, but it
cannot be denied that in the Old Testament era names were zealously guarded for
precisely the reasons given in the preceding paragraph. After Jacob had
wrestled with the angel in the story I have already told, he asked the angel
for his name, but the angel refused to disclose it, possibly fearing that Jacob
might use it to gain some power over him (Genesis 32:29). In another
interesting story, Manoah, the father of Samson, asked another angel of
God:
'What
is your name, for we shall want to know it when your words come true?' The
angel of the Lord said to him, 'How can you ask my name? It is a name of
wonder.' (Judges 13:16-19)
Those who believe that God was merely being evasive when He said 'I am that I
am' are in a minority for most authorities concede that the significance of the
name is contained in the meaning of the word ehyeh, usually translated
as 'I am'.
Though God clearly refers to Himself as 'I am' in Exodus 3:14, and though He
specifically stated in the next verse that this was the name by which He wanted
to be remembered, this was not the name that the Jews subsequently used. They
preferred the name Yahweh, which is the third person singular of the present tense
of the same archaic form of the verb 'to be'. So, instead of referring to Him
as 'I am', the ancient Jews and the compilers of the Old Testament always
called him Yahweh, meaning 'He is' or 'He who is'. 'I am' was too holy a name
for the Jews to use, and even the euphemism 'He who is' was so sacred and holy
to them, it was never spoken by ordinary people. Only the high priest of the
temple was permitted to say it out loud, and even he was only permitted to
utter it once a year on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.
So how did the Jews get round saying the name of Yahweh when they read the
scriptures or spoke of Him? They used two further euphemisms: 'Adonai', meaning
'Lord' or merely 'Shem', which means 'the name'. In the ancient Hebrew script
there were no vowels, only consonants, and so Yahweh was written YHWH. Whenever
the Jews came across this sacred combination of letters, they ignored the
correct pronunciation and instead said 'Adonai' or 'Shem'. This habit
eventually caused, inadvertently, the name Jehovah to come into existence. On
some manuscripts written about a thousand years ago, when vowel sounds had
begun to be added to the consonants, the vowels of the word Adonai were
interspersed between the consonants of YHWH to remind readers to say 'Adonai'
rather than 'Yahweh'. When these manuscripts were translated into English, the
translators, ignorant of this convention coined the word Jehovah, which they
thought was a correct rendering of the word. This is still the most common rendering
of Yahweh in English, even though it is now known to be incorrect. So far as
the Jews are concerned, Jehovah is a meaningless non-word; the real name for
them remains Yahweh, 'He who is'.
Most English translations of the Bible have opted for the euphemism rather than
the real name itself, even though there is no prohibition in Christianity
against pronouncing the divine name as 'Yahweh'. The name YHWH occurs about
6,800 times in the Old Testament and is most commonly rendered in English as LORD,
usually printed in capital letters. Thus, for example, when God speaks in the
preamble to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2), He says, in English, 'I am the
LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt…'.
Though the divine name Yahweh appears thousands of times in the Bible, there is
no evidence that the Jews conceived their God to be immanent being. Theological
speculation of any kind was alien to the ancient Jews and there is no
indication in the Old Testament that they thought of God as a formless
abstraction. Rather, they conceived of Him anthropomorphically, attributing all
kinds of human traits to Him. Nor is there any evidence that the Jews of the
biblical period thought that the aim of life was to attain union with Him, or
partake of His being in any way. YHWH, for the Jews, was a transcendent being
who had to be worshipped, placated, served, and above all, obeyed. He was
separate from His creation, rather than immanent in it, and so far above and
beyond the creatures He had created that, none of them could ever dream of
uniting with Him or even approaching Him. For the Jews, 'knowing God' meant
having a personal relationship with Him in a totally dualistic way.
The only Jews who used God's revelation of Himself as 'I am' to develop both a
theology of God and a spiritual practice through which He might be directly
experienced were groups of mystics who followed a tradition known as Kabbala.
They evolved intricate cosmologies, deriving them from a mystical exegesis of
Old Testament texts, and broke with traditional Judaic thought by proclaiming
that man could approach YHWH and in His presence commune with His beingness.
Kabbalistic practices are many and varied, but two are of particular interest
if one is looking for points of contact between mystical Judaism and the
teachings of Bhagavan. For the Kabbalists, God, the Supreme Being, is Ehyeh,
'I am', and one can approach him directly by invoking the divine name of
Yahweh. In the Book of Zohar, one of the most important Kabbalistic texts,
it is written, 'Blessed is the person who utterly surrenders his soul to the
name of YHWH, to dwell therein and establish therein its throne of glory'.
In one interesting practice, which parallels Hindu sadhanas, Kabbalists
split the name Yahweh into two components and invoke 'Yah' with the incoming
breath and 'weh' with the outgoing breath in an attempt to be continuously
mindful of the reality that the name signifies. There is also a Kabbalistic
walking meditation in which one invokes 'Yahweh' when the right foot touches
the ground and 'Elohim' on the alternating left steps. Yahweh is 'He who is',
God as being, whereas Elohim is the biblical name of God the creator.
Simultaneously one must retain a continuous awareness of 'Eyheh', the 'I
am' from which, in the Kabbalistic tradition, all creation emanates and
manifests. Teachers of Kabbala claim that if this practice is properly pursued,
one enters into a state of communion with God.
Kabbalistic ideas on creation are also derived from their conception of God as
'I am'. In the Jewish tradition creation occurs by the utterance of a single
word. The word is the first of all sounds to be heard in manifest existence,
and thus parallels the Hindu conception of Om. For the Kabbalists this
word is none other than the supreme name of God, 'Eyheh', 'I am'.
According to one of their traditions, every creature utters the divine name 'I
am' on being created and at the time of its dissolution it repeats the same 'I
am' as it is reabsorbed into its maker. This utterance of the divine word 'I
am', according to the Kabbala, gives reality to the created world and sustains
and upholds it. The uttered 'I am' is an emanation of the unutterable 'I am';
it is God Himself moving from the unmanifest to the realm of manifest
being.
An interesting parallel to this idea can be found in Talks with Sri Ramana
Maharshi (talk no. 518) where Bhagavan says 'The Supreme Being is
unmanifest, and the first sign of manifestation is aham sphurana [the
radiation or emanation of ''I''].'
Bhagavan always maintained that the 'I'-thought rises from the Self and then,
quite literally, creates the world it sees and gives it its apparent reality.
And, paralleling the Kabbalistic notion, Bhagavan taught that the world ceases
to exist when the 'I' is reabsorbed back into the Self.
One should not push parallels between Judaism and Bhagavan's teachings too far,
for orthodox Judaism maintains that God is wholly and eternally separate from
the world, whereas Bhagavan taught that the Self is the sole reality, and that
the world is an appearance in it, rather than a creation of it.
For Bhagavan, the world is being in the same way that God Himself is being, for
the two cannot be separated: 'Being absorbed in the reality, the world is also
real. There is only being in Self-realisation, and nothing but being.'
Christian theologians have also taken God's revelation of Himself as 'I am' to
indicate that His fundamental nature is being, but they will not concede that
creation is in any way a manifestation of God's essence. Take, for example, the
following statement by a Catholic theologian:
God
is the fullness of being, that is, subsistent existence and subsistent reality,
not merely as existent being, a real object, but existence itself, reality
itself.
This
statement, which I am sure Bhagavan would endorse, is not by some maverick
interpreter. It comes from a respected theologian and fits comfortably into the
mainstream of Catholic thought on the subject of God as being. However, it
cannot be interpreted to mean that the world partakes of God's reality because
virtually all Christian sects believe that God created the world ex nihilo,
that is to say 'out of nothing'. Matter, say the Christian theologians, is not
a part of Him, nor is it an emanation from or of Him. It is, according to them,
quite literally conjured up out of nothing. Although the world is brought into
existence by Him, Christians will not accept that it partakes in any way of His
essential nature. Views to the contrary are known as pantheism and are
condemned by Christian theologians as being erroneous or even heretical. So,
while Christians are fully prepared to accept that God's revelation of Himself
as 'I am' means that His fundamental nature is being, they are not prepared to
concede that the world partakes of his beingness in any way. In the words of a
Vatican Council: 'As being, one sole absolutely simple immutable substance, God
is to be declared as really and essentially distinct from the world.'
There is another crucial area in which Bhagavan's teaching differ fundamentally
from those of both Judaism and Christianity. Bhagavan taught that 'I am' is not
merely the real name of God, it also the real name and identity of each
supposedly individual person. Extending the notion to its logical conclusion,
Bhagavan maintained that if one could become aware of one's real identity, 'I
am', then one simultaneously experienced the 'I am' that is God and the 'I am'
that is the substratum of the world appearance. The following quotes are
typical and summarise his views on the subject:
It
[I am] is the substratum running through all the three states. Wakefulness
passes off, I am; the dream state passes off, I am; the sleep state passes off,
I am. They repeat themselves and yet I am.
The
egoless 'I am' is not a thought. It is realisation. The meaning or significance
of 'I' is God.
'I
exist' is the only permanent self-evident experience of everyone. Nothing else
is so self-evident [pratyaksha] as 'I am'. What people call
self-evident, viz., the experience they get through the senses, is far from
self-evident. The Self alone is that. Pratyaksha is another name for
Self. So to do self-analysis and be 'I am' is the only thing to do. 'I am' is
reality. 'I am this or that' is unreal. 'I am' is truth, another name for Self.
Perhaps the clearest statement in the Ramanasramam literature on the identity
of the divine name 'I' and the manifest world comes not from Bhagavan himself,
but from Namdev, the 14th century Marathi saint. In his The Philosophy of
the Divine Name, a work that Bhagavan frequently cited and read out with
approval, Namdev explains how the 'I' manifests as the world and how its real
nature can be discovered:
The
Name permeates densely the sky and the lowest regions and the entire universe…
The Name itself is form. There is no distinction between Name and form. God
became manifest and assumed Name and form… there is no mantra beyond the Name.
The Name is Keshava [God] Himself… The all-pervading nature of the Name can
only be understood when one recognises one's 'I'. When one's own name is not
recognised, it is impossible to get the all-pervading Name. When one knows
oneself, then one finds the Name everywhere. To see the Name as separate from
the named creates illusion… Surrender yourself at the feet of the Guru and
learn to know that 'I' myself is that Name. After finding the source of that
'I', merge your individuality in that oneness which is Self-existent and devoid
of all duality.
In most religions of the world, devotees are encouraged to repeat the name of
God in order to experience His grace, His presence or even His real nature. The
religions of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam have conflicting and
irreconcilable metaphysics but there is a surprising degree of agreement among
them on the theory and practice of uttering the divine name. The following
explanation gives a Muslim point of view, but adherents of all the religions
just cited could produce similar expositions from their own traditions:
The
Divine Name, revealed by God Himself, implies a Divine Presence which becomes
operative to the extent that the Name takes possession of the mind of the
person invoking. Man cannot concentrate directly on the Infinite, but by
concentrating on the symbol of the Infinite, he attains the Infinite Himself:
for when the individual subject becomes identified with the Name to the point
where all mental projection is absorbed by the form of the Name, then the
Divine Essence manifests spontaneously, since this sacred form tends to nothing
outside of itself. It has a positive affinity with Its essence wherein Its
limits finally dissolve. Thus it is that union with the Divine Name becomes
union with God Himself.
For Bhagavan the divine name was 'I' or 'I am'. Although, like Namdev, he
generally encouraged his devotees to do self-enquiry and reach God by finding
the source of the 'I', he was prepared to concede that repetition of the divine
name 'I' would lead to the same goal. However, he generally recommended this
path only to those who found self-enquiry too hard:
If
you find the vichara marga [the path of self-enquiry] too hard, you can
go on repeating 'I', 'I', and that will lead you to same goal. There is no harm
in using 'I' as a mantra. It is the first name of God.
A housewife who complained that self-enquiry was too hard and that she had no
time for meditation received a similar answer:
If you can do nothing more, at least continue saying 'I', 'I' to yourself all
the time, as advised in Who Am I?, whatever you may be doing, and
whether you are sitting, standing or walking, 'I' is the name of God. It is the
first and greatest of all mantras.
In another answer Bhagavan explained why this method was so successful:
Question: How does the name ['I'] help realisation?
Answer: The original name is always going on, spontaneously,
without any effort on the part of the individual. The name is aham, 'I'.
When it becomes manifest it manifests as ahamkara - the ego. The oral
repetition of nama leads one to mental repetition which finally resolves
itself into the eternal vibration.
I should like now to return to the Old Testament and elaborate on another
quotation that Bhagavan was fond of citing. In Psalm 46, verse 10, it is
written 'Be still and know that I am God'. Bhagavan appreciated this line so
much that he sometimes said that the statements 'I am that I am' and 'Be still
and know that I am God' contained the whole of Vedanta. In Bhagavan's view the
quotations are very closely related for he taught that 'the experience of ''I
am'' is to ''Be still'''. The two words 'Be still' denote both the method and
the goal for it is through being and through stillness that the 'I am' is
revealed: 'If [the mind] is turned within it becomes still in the course of
time and that I-AM alone prevails. I AM is the whole truth.'
When the term is used in its absolute sense, 'being still' is not mere
quiescence. As Bhagavan makes clear in the next answer, to attain it one must
reach, permanently, the state of pure being in which the separate self has been
destroyed:
Question: How is one to know the Self?
Answer: Knowing the Self means 'Being the Self' … Your duty is to
be and not to be this or that. 'I am that I am' sums up the whole truth. The
method is summed up in 'Be still'. What does stillness mean? It means 'destroy
yourself'. Because any form or shape is a cause of trouble. Give up the notion
that 'I am so and so'.
'Be
still and know that I am God.' Here stillness is total surrender without a
vestige of individuality.
All
that is required to realise the Self is to 'Be still.'
If one paraphrases Psalm 46, verse 10, to bring out more fully the meaning that
Bhagavan attributed to it, it would say, 'Reach the state of pure being and
absolute stillness in which the mind is destroyed and one will then experience
directly that God is ''I am'''.
Bhagavan often stressed that in order to 'Be still and know that I am God' one
must be totally free from thought, even the thought 'I am God'. After citing
this biblical quote he once added, 'To be still is not to think. Know
and not think is the word.'And on another occasion: 'One should not
think ''I am this - I am not that''. To say ''this'' or ''that'' is wrong. They
are also limitations. Only ''I am'' is the truth. Silence is ''I''.'
'Being still', according to Bhagavan, requires no thinking and no assertions.
On the contrary, it requires a complete absence of both. This attitude was
primarily a criticism of the ancient tradition of repeating or thinking 'I am Brahman'
as a means of attaining liberation. In the following quotation Bhagavan
explains how the real meaning of 'I am Brahman' has been ignored or
missed by commentators and practitioners:
It simply means that Brahman exists as 'I' and not 'I am Brahman'.
It is not to be supposed that a man is advised to contemplate 'I am Brahman,
I am Brahman'. Does a man keep on thinking 'I am a man, I am a man'? He
is that, and except when a doubt arises as to whether he is an animal or a
tree, there is no need for him to assert 'I am a man'. Similarly, the Self is
Self. Brahman exists as 'I am' in everything and every being.
At the beginning of this article I explained the
ancient Jewish attitude to names, noting how many biblical names revealed
something about the person or being who possessed the name. God's name, 'I am',
revealed His essential nature; Abraham's his destiny; Jacob's his chief
character trait, and so on. At the dawn of the Christian era the belief that
names gave an insight into a person's character and destiny was still widely
prevalent, so when an angel appeared to Joseph at the beginning of the New
Testament, announcing that his wife would bear a son conceived by the Holy
Spirit, the meaning of the name given by the angel assumed great
significance:
… an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, 'Joseph, son of
David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her
is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus,
for he will save the people from their sins'. (Matthew 1:20-21)
The name Jesus is a Greek translation of the Hebrew
name leschouah, which is itself a contraction of lehoschouah. The longer
version is not euphonious to Jewish ears, so the shorter version is generally
used. The etymology of the longer name produces the meaning, 'Yahweh is
salvation', or 'Yahweh helps'. The former meaning has always been more popular,
and it is alluded to in the passage I have just cited: 'for he will save the
people from their sins.'
Yahweh, it will be remembered, is 'He who is', the name used by the Jews to
denote 'I am', the original divine name revealed by God to Moses in Exodus.
Since Yahweh is merely a euphemism for 'I am', one can say that Jesus' name
also means '''I am'' is salvation', or, more generally, 'The Name of God is
salvation'. Both ideas were to be major themes in early Christian
teachings.
The idea that the Name of God, by itself, could produce salvation, without even
being chanted or remembered by the devotee, was a peculiarly Jewish one. Psalm
54:1, for example, begins with the plea, 'Save me, O God, by your name'. For
the Jews of the biblical period the Name of God is God, not a mere
designation or title. For them, the statements, 'The Name of God is salvation',
'God is salvation', and '''I am'' is salvation' are all saying the same
thing.
When Jesus began his teaching career, He consciously identified Himself with
the Yahweh of the Old Testament by calling Himself, on several occasions, 'I
am', a name and a title that all Jews knew only God could use.
In one of the most famous New Testament stories Jesus walked on the surface of
the Sea of Galilee in order to meet some of His disciples who were fishing
there from a boat. Seeing that the disciples were alarmed by His action, Jesus
called out to them, 'I am; do not be afraid'. In most Bible translations the
sentence is rendered, 'It is I; do not be afraid', but this is not what the
original Greek says. The Greek for 'I am' is ego eimi, and these are the
only two words that appear before the semicolon. The claim to Godhood was not
lost on the disciples. The miraculous feat of walking on the water combined
with Jesus' bold assertion 'I am' caused the disciples to exclaim, 'Truly, you
are the son of God' (Matthew 14:33). The same sentence, 'Ego eimi; do
not be afraid,' also appears in some manuscripts of Luke 24:36. On that
occasion Jesus was appearing to His disciples after His resurrection. Again,
most translators have rendered it as 'It is I' rather than 'I am', but the
post-resurrectional context makes it more likely that He is declaring his
Godhood ('I am') rather than His mere physical presence ('It is I').
There is another verse, found in both Luke's and Mark's Gospels, in which Jesus
uses the words 'ego eimi' in a most interesting way. After predicting
the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the centre of Jewish worship, Jesus
warned John and Andrew of terrible events to come. During the course of His
warning he said, 'Many will come in my name, saying ''I am'', and shall deceive
many'. To proclaim oneself as 'I am' is to announce one's divinity, and such a
claim would be taken by the Jews to be blasphemy. Evidence of how strictly this
injunction was upheld can be found in Mark 14:62-3. In these verses, which give
an account of His trial, Jesus was asked by the Jewish High Priest, 'Are you
the Christ, the son of the blessed?' and He replied, 'I am'. This simple
statement 'I am' was not taken as a mere affirmative answer, but as a claim to
Godhood because the priest angrily exclaimed to the others present, 'You have
heard this blasphemy'. The priest's associates agreed with him that it was
blasphemy, for after this reply they condemned Jesus to be executed (14:64).
So, going back to Jesus' warning to John and Andrew, when He said that many
people would come 'in my name, saying ''I am'',' He was saying that impostors
would appear, claiming to be God Himself, and furthermore claiming that Jesus
had sent them. The juxtaposition of 'I am' and 'my name' is particularly
interesting, for in the context it is possible to say that Jesus Himself is
laying claim to the original divine Name.
The verses I have quoted so far have all come from the synoptic Gospels, the
first three books of the New Testament. The fourth Gospel, John's, has a
different approach to Jesus' life and teaching and gives a far more prominent
place to His affirmations of 'I am'. To understand just how different John's
Gospel is, one only needs to make a brief list of what it contains, and what it
doesn't, and then compare these items with the contents of the other Gospels.
Unlike the other Gospels, there is no account of the birth of Jesus or of His
baptism and temptations; there is no account of the last supper or His
ascension; no healing of people possessed by devils and spirits, a major theme in
the synoptic Gospels; there are no parables whatsoever; and finally, Jesus'
speeches in John are long dignified pronouncements, often a whole chapter long,
rather than the short pithy sayings that typify the synoptic accounts.
John's Gospel was written decades after the other three had been composed, and
innumerable theories have been propounded to explain why its approach and style
are so different from the other Gospels. An early judgement, which has stood
the test of time, was put forward by Saint Clement of Alexandria, who, writing
around AD 230, claimed that 'John, perceiving that what had reference to the
bodily things of Jesus' ministry had been sufficiently related, and encouraged
by friends, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote a spiritual Gospel'. That is
to say, John was more interested in proclaiming what Jesus was then what He
did. He wanted to explain the significance and meaning of Jesus' appearance on
earth, rather than merely chronicling the physical events of His life. It is in
this context that the 'I am' statements in John acquire added
significance.
What are these statements and how are they phrased? Biblical scholars have
distinguished two major categories: (1) simple assertions that He is 'I am',
that is to say, God manifesting through a human body, and (2) more complex
assertions in which He described the nature and function of the 'I am' in a
series of common, everyday metaphors. I will list and discuss the quotations
that fit into the former category first.
1. The woman at the well: Jesus asked for a drink from a Samarian woman who was
pulling water from a well. During the course of a long philosophical
conversation the woman, who had already become convinced of Jesus' greatness,
asked Him whether she should worship God on the mountain where her ancestors
had worshipped, or whether she should go to the Temple at Jerusalem, the place
all Jews went to perform ritual acts of worship.
|
|
4.21
|
Jesus
said to her, 'Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this
mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.
|
|
|
23
|
'But
the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the
Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him.
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||
|
24
|
'God
is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.'
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||
|
25
|
The
woman said to him, 'I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ);
when he comes he will show us all things'.
|
||
|
26
|
Jesus
said to her, '[I] who speak to you, I am'.
|
Here we have a simple but bold declaration by Jesus
that He is both God Himself as 'I am' and the Messiah who has been sent to save
the world.
The exact formulation of this 'I am' statement owes as much to the book of
Isaiah as to Exodus, for in Isaiah God repeatedly identifies Himself as 'I' and
one occasion (52:6) speaks a phrase that is very similar to the one Jesus used.
In 52:5 God takes note of the fact that His name is despised by the Assyrians,
who were then oppressing the Jews, before going on to say: 'Therefore my people
shall know my name; therefore in that day they shall know it is I who speak;
here am I.' (RSV)
Since the word 'am' does not appear in the original Hebrew, the last portion
could be more accurately rendered as '… it is ''I'' who speak; behold, ''I''.'
This is almost identical in sense and implication to Jesus' later words, cited
above: 'I who speak to you, I am.' It should also be noted that 'behold ''I'''
is associated with an earlier part of the sentence in which God says that 'my
people shall know my name'.
The Jews of the biblical period had long been waiting for the Messiah to come.
By using the name 'I am' and by using other phrases by which God identified
Himself in the Old Testament, Jesus was conveying to His audience, many of whom
would have been familiar with these Old Testament texts, that He was their
ancestral God, 'I am', functioning through a human body. The Jews were accustomed
to having God identify Himself as 'I', for Isaiah is liberally sprinkled with
such statements. In 43:11 He says, 'I. I, Yahweh [He who is]; beside me there
is no saviour'. In this and the succeeding two verses there are twenty-nine
words in the original Hebrew. Twelve of them are first-person words such as 'I'
or 'my', and the first-person pronoun repeats itself five times.
Most of the Isaiah 'I' phrases are in the form of 'I am He' rather than simply
'I' or 'I am'. And since 'am' is not present in the original Hebrew, God is
actually saying 'I-He' rather than 'I am He'. This is probably a contraction of
'I, I, Yahweh', a variant that appears in 43:11. Most of these 'I-He' verses
indicate either God's transcendence or His omnipotence:
|
|
|
43:10 I-He:
before me there was no God.
|
|
|
43:11 I,
I, Yahweh; beside me there is no saviour
|
|
|
|
43:13 Yea,
before the day was, I-He.
|
This verse echoes the most famous of all John's 'I am'
quotes. In 8:58, where he has Jesus say 'Before Abraham was, I am,' he is
merely confirming what Yahweh had said in Isaiah 43:13: that before time and
the world began, 'I', the 'I' that is God, existed, untrammelled by creation,
as He who is.
2.
The address to the Pharisees in the temple: In Chapter eight Jesus got
into a long dispute with the Pharisees in the Jerusalem Temple. He responded to
their various complaints and questions from a lofty 'I am not of this world'
position, while twice declaring (vv. 24 and 28) that 'I am' provided a route to
salvation:
|
|
8:19
|
They
said to him therefore, 'Where is your Father?' Jesus answered, 'You know
neither me nor my Father; if you knew me you would know my Father also'.
|
|
|
21
|
'I
am going away and you will seek me and die in your sins; where I am going you
cannot come.'
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||
|
22
|
'Will
he kill himself since he says ''Where I am going you cannot come''?'
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||
|
23
|
He
said to them, 'You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I
am not of this world'.
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||
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24
|
'I
told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins
unless you believe that I am.'
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||
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25
|
They
said to him, 'Who are you?' Jesus said to them, 'Even what I have told you
from the beginning'.
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||
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28
|
So
Jesus said, 'When you have lifted up the Son of Man, you will know that I am,
and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak thus as the Father
taught me'.
|
In this fascinating passage Jesus is not merely saying that He is the 'I am'.
He is saying that belief in Him, that 'I am', is essential for those who do not
want to die in a state of sin. Note also that in verse twenty-eight He states
that it is quite possible to 'know' this 'I am', and that when one knows 'I am'
one will also understand Jesus' state and His statement that, of His own
accord, He could do nothing.
The second half of verse twenty-five, in the original Greek, is very hard to
decipher, and the version I have given comes from the Revised Standard Version
of the Bible. Other versions include:
a)
I declare to you that I am the beginning.
b)
Everything I am saying to you is only a beginning.
c)
Primarily, essentially, I am what I am telling you.
d)
How is that I even speak to you at all?
I am not qualified to offer an opinion as to which of
these is more likely to be correct. I will merely note that versions (a) and
(c) seem to fit in quite well with the theme of Jesus' assertions, both before
and after this verse, that He is the 'I am', and that the 'I am' is the route
to salvation.
3. The betrayal by Judas: In order to convince His disciples that He was
'I am', Jesus told them, after washing their feet prior to the last supper,
that one of them would eventually betray Him: 'I tell you now,' He said,
'before it takes place; that when it does take place you may believe that I
am.' (13:19)
Later, when Judas, the one who betrayed Him, brought the soldiers and priests
to arrest Him, Jesus twice identified Himself as 'I am':
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18:4
|
Jesus
came forward and said to them, 'Whom do you seek?'
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||
|
5
|
They
answered, 'Jesus of Nazareth'. Jesus said to them 'I am… '.
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||
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6
|
When
he said to them 'I am,' they drew back and fell to the ground.
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||
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7
|
Again
he asked, 'Whom do you seek?' and they answered 'Jesus of Nazareth'.
|
||
|
8
|
Jesus
answered, 'I told you that I am'.
|
Most versions of the Bible have Jesus say 'I am he' in
verse five even though the original merely says 'I am' (ego eimi). Many
commentators have noted that the literal answer, 'I am,' gives added
significance to verse six. The soldiers are overawed by this declaration of
Godhood and fall to the ground. An 'I am he' answer, meaning, 'I am Jesus of
Nazareth whom you seek', would not have produced such an extreme
response.
What was the purpose of these repeated identifications? One reason was that
Jesus wanted to establish His credentials as God incarnate, sent to earth to
redeem suffering humanity. 'I have manifested thy name to the men whom thou
gavest me out of the world,' says Jesus to God in John 17:6. That is to say,
the divine Name, 'I am', became incarnate for the sake of those in the world
who needed salvation. It can also be argued that in repeatedly identifying
Himself as 'I am', Jesus wanted to make the Name of God more widely known so
that It could be used, believed in or focused on as a means of experiencing
God:
O
righteous Father, the world has not known thee, but I have known thee; … I made
known to them thy name, and I will make it known, that the love with which thou
hast loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:25-6)
Jesus Himself prayed to God, 'Father glorify thy name'
(John 12:28)
and taught His disciples to revere the Name in their own prayers by saying,
'Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name'. (Matthew 6:9)
The early Christians accepted that the Name of God had great power, and that it
could be used as a means to salvation, but the name they adopted was not the 'I
am' that God and Jesus both revealed. It was Kyrios, a Greek word that means
'Lord' in the sense of being a king. To understand how this came about one
needs to trace the development of the Name through its various mutations.
God originally revealed Himself as 'I am', adding that this was the name by
which He wanted 'to be remembered throughout all generations' (Exodus 3:15). 'I
am' was too holy a name for the Jews to use so they recorded it as Yahweh,
meaning 'He is' or 'He who is' in their written texts. But when they spoke of
God they used a further euphemism, Adonai, which merely means 'Lord' or 'my
Lord' because it was prohibited to say the name of Yahweh out loud. Instead of
using the name Yahweh or 'I am' for God, the authors of the New Testament used
the word Kyrios, meaning 'Lord' because that was the word that the Septuagint,
the already existing Greek translation of the Old Testament, had used as a translation
of Yahweh.
By adopting the word Kyrios, the early Christians were using a term that they
felt conveyed the idea of Jesus' kingship. Psalm 110:1 says, 'Yahweh said to my
Lord, ''Sit at my right hand'''. The early Christians took this 'Lord' to be
Jesus in His risen, ascended state, and they believed that after His ascension
He sat next to God in heaven, exercising, like a king, spiritual dominion over
the world. The word Kyrios was originally only meant to describe the risen
Christ, but slowly, over time, it became the accepted Greek word for the God of
the Old Testament.
By these progressive mutations - 'I am' to Yahweh to Adonai to Kyrios - the
impact and significance of God's original Name, 'I am', was lost. By this
change in vocabulary, He became in the eyes of the early Christians not 'I am'
but a Divine King who received homage from His subjects. When Paul, for
example, wrote to the Phillippians that 'God has highly exalted him [Jesus] and
bestowed on him the name which is above every name,' he was not referring to 'I
am', as he makes clear in the succeeding lines: 'That at the name of Jesus,
every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord [Kyrios].'
(Phillippians 2:9-11) The statement 'Jesus is Kyrios', rather than 'Jesus is
''I am''' became one of the earliest and most widespread affirmations of
Christian belief.
The change from Yahweh to Kyrios was a deliberate and calculated one, and even
Old Testament verses were adapted to conform to the new terminology. When the
author of Acts wrote, 'And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the
Lord [Kyrios] shall be saved,' he was merely changing the vocabulary of an
almost identical Old Testament quote: 'And it shall come to pass that
whomsoever shall call on the name of the Lord [Yahweh] shall be delivered.'
Sometimes, especially in Acts, the name of Jesus Christ alone (that is, not
even Yahweh or Kyrios) is proclaimed as being the ultimate and most powerful
name. It was by calling on this name that the earliest disciples performed
miraculous cures. When Peter saw a lame man begging outside the Beautiful Gate
of the Temple, he told him:
'I
have no silver and gold, but I will give you what I have; in the name of Jesus
Christ of Nazareth, walk.' And he took him by the hand and raised him up; and
immediately his feet and ankles were made strong.' (Acts 3:6-8)
When he was subsequently asked, 'By what power or by what name did you do
this?' he replied:
Be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of
Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by
him this man is standing before you well.
I have noted on
several occasions that the Name had a special significance for the Jews. It was
not merely a title, it was a manifestation of God Himself. The earliest
Christians, who were all brought up in the Jewish tradition, took this
conception, applied it to Jesus, and taught that salvation could be attained
through His Name. When Christianity spread to the non-Jewish world, it
encountered people, countries and whole civilisations that had no tradition of
regarding names in such a holy and powerful way. So, as Christianity spread and
evolved, the early emphasis on the Name became sidelined and was increasingly
replaced by another teaching, which had always been present in and central to the
Church's beliefs: that salvation could be attained merely by accepting that
Jesus was the son of God and that He died in order to save mankind from the
consequences of its sins. Anyone who accepted this became reborn spiritually.
It is worth noting that in the first decades of the Christian era some of the
most popular competing pagan cults were the mystery religions of the Greek
world that generally revolved around the death of a god and the concomitant
idea that his death or sacrifice enabled his devotees to be spiritually reborn.
It was in these surroundings and against this background that the importance of
the crucifixion grew and the significance of the Name of God diminished.
John, who wrote his Gospel around AD 100, must have witnessed these
developments with interest, and perhaps even concern. The synoptic Gospels,
Acts and virtually all the epistles were in existence and were being circulated
prior to the writing of the final Gospel, and it is reasonable to assume,
though it cannot be proved, that John had gone through much of the Christian
literature that preceded him. Many scholars feel that John recorded his own
experiences with Christ not merely to supplement the existing literature, but
to correct some of the mistaken ideas that he felt had sprung up about Christ
and His teachings, and to express what he felt were the real truths of
Christianity in philosophical terms and structures that the Greek civilisation he
lived in would understand. While writing his account, he refuted some of the
unchristian heresies that were being put about by the newly emerging Gnostics;
he played down the importance of John the Baptist, who was beginning to develop
a cult of his own; and on a more positive note he stressed the divinity of
Jesus, His status as the Son of God, the glory of God, and Christ's union with
Him. Only in John does Jesus Himself say that He is the Son of God (10:36) and
it is John alone who records Jesus' famous remark, 'I and the Father are one'.
(10:30) The various 'I am' proclamations I have given are part of this pattern.
They affirm that God has incarnated in the form of His Son, and indicate that
though the Two (Father and Son) are separate as Persons, in essence they are
the same 'I am'.
There are several other occasions in which Jesus alludes to Himself somewhat
indirectly as 'I am'. These are known as the I-am-with-predicate statements,
and they include such famous remarks as, 'I am the way, the truth and the
life,' 'I am the light of the world,' and 'I am the bread of life'. These
statements usually appear in carefully constructed stories that often begin
with a miraculous event or a deep spiritual analogy and end with a majestic 'I
am' pronouncement by Jesus.
Take, for example, the story in which Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 people with
five loaves and two fishes. On the following day He told His disciples, 'Do not
labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life…
I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger and he who believes
in me shall never thirst.' (John 6:27, 35)
The I-am-with-predicate comment gives a spiritual interpretation to the
miracle, affirms Jesus' divine nature as 'I am' while simultaneously
proclaiming that through Him salvation can be attained.
Here are a few more example of similar narratives:
a)
At the beginning of chapter nine Jesus saw a blind man and cured him. Before
doing so He commented, 'As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the
world.' (9:5) The man's blindness was a metaphor for the spiritual blindness
into which the world had been plunged. By giving sight to the man and by saying
'I am the light,' He was indirectly saying that the Son of God, as 'I am',
could banish spiritual darkness. The idea that Jesus is Light is a major and
recurring theme in John. He began his Gospel by saying that Christ, as the Son
of God made manifest, was the 'light of men' come to earth to dispel spiritual
darkness, and the metaphor reappears at regular intervals. In chapter eight,
for example, He announced, 'I am the light of the world; he who follows me will
not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life'. (8:12)
b)
In chapter two Jesus compared Himself to the door that opens into a sheep pen:
'He who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way,
that man is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is the shepherd
of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens; the sheep hear his voice, and he
calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.' (10:1-4) In explaining the
analogy Jesus said, 'I am the door of the sheep … I am the door; if anyone enters
by me he will be saved … I am come that they might have life, and have it
abundantly … I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, as the
Father knows me and I know the Father.' (10:7, 9-11, 14-15) The message of the
repeated 'I ams' in the explanation is that Jesus, 'I am' incarnate, is the
sole route to union with the Father.
The I-am-with-predicate statements are not to be found in the synoptic Gospels,
though there are passages there, called 'the parables of the kingdom', which serve
a similar purpose. 'The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,' says Jesus
in Matthew. 'It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the
greatest of shrubs.' (13:31-2) In other places He compared the kingdom of
heaven to the leaven in dough and to a sower who sows seeds. The
kingdom-of-heaven parables are similes, for they say what heaven is like.
John's 'I am' statements, on the contrary, are metaphors that say what God
really is: 'I am the bread,' 'I am the light,' 'I am the door'.
A
comment by Bhagavan is appropriate here:
The
only permanent thing is Reality, and that is the Self. You say 'I am,' 'I am
going,' 'I am speaking,' 'I am walking,' etc. Hyphenate 'I am' in all of them.
Thus, I-AM. That is the abiding and fundamental Reality. This truth was taught
by God to Moses: 'I am that I am,' 'Be still and know that I-am God' So, 'I-am'
is God.
So, if one follows Bhagavan's advice and hyphenates 'I-am', one comes up with:
'I-am' is the bread that will dispel all hunger; 'I-am' is the light that will
dispel spiritual ignorance; 'I-am' is the door through which one must pass if
one wants to attain union with the Father.
c)
In chapter thirteen Jesus tells His disciples that He is going to leave them
physically and that 'Where I am going you cannot come'. (13:33) Later He said
that He was going to His Father's house, that He would prepare a place for the
disciples there, and that eventually they would join Him. Thomas then asked,
'Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?' Jesus said
to him, 'I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but
by me.' (14:5-6) This phrase, when given the hyphenation treatment suggested by
Bhagavan, ceases to be a statement that the historical Christ is necessary for
all those who want to journey to the 'Father's house', and becomes instead a
non-sectarian announcement which states that abidance in the 'I am', the
reality of God and Jesus, is the route for all those who are seeking union with
the Father.
d)
When Jesus was informed of the death of Lazarus, He went to his house and
brought him back to life. In the same way that the blind man whom Jesus cured symbolised
the darkness that could be overcome by the spiritual light, the raising from
the dead of Lazarus symbolised the resurrection that was available to anyone
who believed in Jesus as 'I am'. 'I am the resurrection and the life,' said
Jesus, shortly before He performed the miracle. 'He who believes in me though
he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never
die'. (11:25-6) 'I-am' is the resurrection. Whoever reaches that state and
abides in it transcends bodily death.
e)
There is one more I-am-with-predicate statement that appears in isolation,
unconnected with a miracle or a prior teaching story:
I
am the real vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Abide in me and I in you.
As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither
can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who
abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me
you can do nothing. (14:1, 3-5)
When Jesus proclaimed Himself to be 'I am' without adding a predicate, He was
signifying His identify with God, the 'I am' who revealed Himself in Exodus.
But when He added a predicate, He was not just announcing His Godhood, He was
giving Himself a role and a function and was demarcating a relationship between
Himself and humanity. He was saying, in effect, that 'I am' is the light that
would illumine man's journey to God, the bread that would sustain him
spiritually, the door through which he must eventually pass to reach the
Father, the vine, uniting him with the Son, on which his spiritual fruition
depends, and the final resurrection which is independent of ordinary bodily
existence.
There is one other interesting characteristic of John's Gospel that is worth
noting. In the synoptic Gospels Jesus performs healing miracles without any
apparent motive other than a compassionate desire to aid the victim. But in
John, the few miracles that are reported are performed to manifest the glory of
God. The first miracle at Cana in Galilee 'manifested his glory' (2:11); He
raised Lazarus from the dead 'for the glory of God so that the Son of Man may
be glorified by means of it' (11:4); and in the story of the blind man I have
already cited, Jesus noted that he had been brought before Him so 'that the
works of God might be made manifest in him'. (9:3) Often the miracles are
accompanied by long teaching discourses that culminate in one of Jesus' famous
'I am' statements. For John, these miracles were not casual, random events, or merely
occasions to show off Jesus' or God's power, they were what he called 'semeia,'
which means 'signs'. They were teaching demonstrations whose primary purpose
was to show ordinary people the glory of God as He manifested His power and
authority through His Son. For those who had the discrimination to understand
the true import of the discourses, there was an additional bonus: Jesus would
give the ultimate 'sign' by saying in various metaphorical ways, 'The ''I am''
whose power you have just witnessed is among you now. Turn to it and salvation
is yours.'
For John, Jesus was the reality of God come down to earth in a human body.
There is a Greek word alethinos, meaning 'real', which he applies to
Jesus on several occasions, sometimes in conjunction with the
I-am-with-predicate statements. Jesus is the 'real light' (1:9), He is the
'real bread from heaven' (6:32), He is the 'real vine' (15:1), and to Him
belongs the 'real judgement' (8:16). Jesus, for John, was the 'I am' made
manifest, the incarnate reality, whose function was to become a human beacon,
shining the 'real light' in a shadowy world whose spiritual darkness would
otherwise prevent man from being able to perceive God. (1:5)
And
we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding to know him
[God] who is real. And we are in him who is real, in his Son Jesus Christ. This
is the real God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourself from idols. (I
John 5:20-1)
Through Jesus Christ, the reality, God as 'I am' can be known. To approach Him
through other forms, other names, is, said John, tantamount to idolatry,
because it sets up for worship an unreal image of God.
I noted earlier that one of the factors that motivated John to write his Gospel
was a desire to write a spiritual and interpretative account, rather than a
merely biographical narrative. His intention was to stress the real teachings
of Jesus and to refute erroneous ideas about Him. When John talks about the
Name of God, he is, like all Jews of his generation, talking about God Himself,
the Yahweh who revealed Himself in Exodus. It must have saddened him to see
Yahweh transmuted into Kyrios, a different concept altogether, and for the
ancient tradition of the Name to wither in the inhospitable soil of the
non-Jewish world. Jesus had declared Himself to be 'I am' a few times in the
synoptic Gospels, but His declarations there did not appear to have had much
significance for the early Christians. It was left to John to resurrect the
tradition. He had Jesus identify Himself as 'I am' more times than in the other
three Gospels combined, and in his I-am-with-predicate statements, none of
which can be found in the synoptic Gospels, he simultaneously identified Jesus
with the Old Testament 'I am' and mapped out a path by which Christians could
approach the Father and become one with Him.
John's efforts did not meet with much ultimate success. Little attention was
paid, either then or subsequently, to his attempt to put Jesus' identification
with 'I am' in the centre of Christian beliefs. Nowadays, if one looks for an
explanation of the 'I am' statements in Bible commentaries, one finds that they
are often ignored or relegated to footnotes and appendices. They tend to be
regarded as a minor puzzle rather than a major revelation.
So far as I am aware, only one Christian group has given pride of place to
Jesus' revelation that He is 'I am', and that is a modern twentieth century
organization, 'The Infinite Way', which was founded by the Christian mystic
Joel Goldsmith. After many years in the Christian Science movement, the inner
'I' revealed itself to him. By abiding in it he came to realise that this inner
'I' was God Himself. This gave him new insights into the nature of Christ's
teachings, particularly those that were revealed in the Gospel of John. He
eventually started his own group, teaching all who came to him that God is
within, shining as the 'I'. More than twenty books appeared under his name,
most of them being edited collections of his teachings. I have selected a few
of his statements on the nature of God as 'I' or 'I am' and given them below.
All of them have been taken from The Mystical 'I', a book that relates the
author's own experience of 'I am' and also gives his explanations of the 'I am'
statements that appear in John's Gospel. Readers will note that his exegesis of
the biblical texts is very similar to my own, and that his teachings on the
nature of 'I' and the means by which it can be experienced are very similar to
those propounded by Ramana Maharshi:
'I stand at the door and knock.' Who is this 'I'
standing at the door? And at what door is this 'I' standing? At what door but
the door of your consciousness? 'I' stand at the door of your consciousness and
knock, but you must open the door and admit Me, for 'I am the bread of
life … I am the way, the truth and the life … I am the resurrection and the
life … I am come that you might have life, and that you might have it more
abundantly.'
The 'I' that is standing at the door of your consciousness and knocking is the
'I' that has come that you might have life more abundant. When you admit that
I' into your consciousness, you have admitted life eternal: the bread of life,
the water of life, and the wine of life. You have admitted into your
consciousness the power of resurrection …
Close your eyes and within yourself, silently, sacredly, secretly and gently
say the word 'I, I'. That 'I' in the midst of you is mighty. That 'I' in the
midst of you is greater than any problem in the outside world. That 'I' in the
midst of you is come that you might have life and have it more abundantly. That
'I' has been with you since 'before Abraham was', waiting your recognition and
your acknowledgement. 'Know ye not ye are the temple of God?
Know ye not that the name of God is 'I' or 'I am', and that you are the temple
of God only when you have admitted 'I' into your consciousness and held it
there secretly, sacredly, gently, peaceably, so that at any moment you can
close your eyes and just remember 'I'? …
When Jesus speaks of the Father within and when Paul speaks of the Christ that
dwells in him they are speaking of the I AM, the very 'I' that you are, the 'I'
that you have just announced, that is in the midst of you.
It may take a month or a year, or ten years before you
can break the crust of personal sense and finally hear that still small voice
within yourself, but when you do it says to you, 'Be still and know that I am
God'. It does not say that Joel or Mary is God. No, no! It does not say that
William or Robert is God, or Mildred. It always says 'I'. And do you know what
else it says? 'Fear not for I am with thee … I will never leave thee nor
forsake thee.' Fear not. Though your sins be scarlet, in the moment of your
recognition of 'I' in the midst of you, you are white as snow.
To be sure that no one misses the way, we caution our
students never to say, even to themselves, 'I am God'. It is not even wise to
voice such a statement as 'I am the son of God'. The ideal way is just to say
'I'. And think what It means. Then in time, as the listening ear is developed,
you will hear the voice say, '''I'' in the midst of you am God. ''I'' who am
closer to you than breathing am God.' When you hear this, you have made contact
with your source.
The unveiled truth in every age has always been the
revelation that 'I' am He: there is no other. There is only one Ego, only one
Selfhood, the AM THAT I AM, that 'I' in the midst of us, the divine Selfhood of
you and me.
Abide in the word 'I'. Let this 'I' abide in you and recognise its identity.
Never let anyone veil It for you again. Keep it sacred and secret.
The minute you have an image of God in your thought,
you are personalizing, and you are expecting that concept to be God, and a
concept cannot be God. Only 'I' can be God, and you cannot have a mental image
of 'I'. That is the one word that defies description. Try as you will, you
cannot make a mental image of 'I'.
Whether you say that God is Omniscience, Omnipotence
and Omnipresence, or that Jesus is Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence,
really makes no difference, because in either case you have set up God and
Jesus as separate and apart from the Self which you are, the 'I' which you are.
When, however, you bring it all down to 'I and the Father are one', and know
that 'I' is Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence, in the oneness you are
infinite in being. In this oneness the 'I' of you is immortality.
One of the most important statements in the New
Testament is the passage, 'I am the way'. The incorrect interpretation of these
few words has kept the world in spiritual darkness for seventeen hundred years
…
Rightly interpreted, the words 'I am the way', mean what they say. The way, the
truth and the life more abundant are to be found in 'I', the 'I' that I am, the
'I' that you are, for you have been told that you and your father are one … It
is in his word 'I' that you find the entire secret of the spiritual message
given to the world by Christ Jesus.
God is not a person … God is not localized as the mind of some one person: God
is being. But God is infinite being; therefore God must be your being and my
being. That is why we can accept 'I' as the name of God because I have the name
'I' and you have the name 'I'. Each of us is 'I' … Each one of us is 'I' and
God is that infinite 'I' in us.
When you know the secret of 'I', you abide in
stillness and let 'I' do its work; not you - 'I', that 'I' that is in the midst
of you. You need no thoughts, since you cannot and need not enlighten God.
The idea that Jesus indirectly taught a sadhana
of concentrating on God as an inner feeling of 'I am' will probably sound
strange and even a little dubious to most Christians. They would, in response,
more than likely point out that Jesus never directly asked his followers to be
aware of God in themselves as 'I am', and add that the only practice he overtly
endorsed was that of bhakti. This, they would probably go on to say is
clearly pointed out in Mark's Gospel:
'Which commandment is the first of all?' [asked a scribe]. Jesus answered, 'The
first is ''Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love
the Lord your God will all your heart and will all your soul and with all your
mind and with all your strength''. The second is this, ''You shall love your
neighbour as yourself''. There is no commandment greater than these.' (Mark
12:28-31)
In giving this answer Jesus was repeating and
embellishing on the great Jewish proclamation of faith and practice that was
originally given to the Israelites by Moses (Deuteronomy 6:4-5):
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4
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Hear
O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord;
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5
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And
you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul
and with all your might.
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The word 'Lord,' mentioned three times in these two verses, is, in the original
Hebrew, Yahweh, the term the Jews used to denote the 'I am' who revealed
Himself to Moses. In addition to this rendering, which I have taken from the
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, three other readings can be regarded as
acceptable translations:
a) Hear O Israel: Yahweh, our God, Yahweh is One.
b)
Hear O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is One.
c)
Hear O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone.
Once one knows that Yahweh denotes God as 'I am', the significance of the
following verse becomes more apparent; 'and you shall love Yahweh, your God,
with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might'. That is to say,
both Moses and Jesus were saying, indirectly, that heart, soul and mind must be
directed exclusively and lovingly towards the 'I am' that is God. Jesus said
that there was no greater commandment than this, and Moses, emphasising the
same point, went on to tell the Israelites:
And these words [Deuteronomy 6:4-5] which I command you this day shall be upon
your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk
of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you
lie down and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand,
and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on
the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)
In fulfilment of this command, orthodox Jews attend
their synagogues wearing phylacteries on their foreheads and hands that contain
copies of these verses from Deuteronomy. They also have copies in special containers
that are attached to their door and gateposts. Some devout Jews even kiss the
container reverently each time they enter and leave as a gesture of respect
towards Yahweh, the one God who revealed Himself to Moses as 'I am'. Verse four
in particular is the greatest and most widespread affirmation of faith for all
Jews. Whatever their mother tongue, and irrespective of what country they live
in, all practising Jews regularly recite verse four in the original biblical
Hebrew.
The sadhana of loving God as He really is, as 'I am,' with all one's
heart, having rejected all other thoughts, is identical to the path of true
devotion as taught by Bhagavan on many occasions:
Question: That is why I am asking you whether God could be worshipped
through the path of love.
Bhagavan: … Love itself is the actual form of God, If by saying, 'I
do not love this, I do not love that,' you reject all things, that which
remains is swarupa, that is, the real form of the Self. That is pure
bliss. Call it pure bliss, God, atma or what you will. That is devotion,
that is realisation, that is everything.
If you thus reject everything, what remains is the Self alone. That is real
love. One who knows the secret of that love finds the world itself full of
universal love.
Jesus instructed his followers that they should not
merely love God with all their heart, they should also love their neighbours as
themselves. Here Bhagavan is saying that this automatically happens when the
first commandment, loving God with all one's heart, is fulfilled. When one
experiences 'Love … the actual form of God', the world itself, including all
possible neighbours, is experienced as one's own Self, and is found to be 'full
of universal love'.
The experience of not forgetting consciousness ['I am'] alone is the state of bhakti,
which is the relationship of unfading real love, because the real knowledge of
Self, which shines in the undivided supreme bliss itself, surges up as the
nature of love. Only if one knows the truth of love, which is the real nature
of Self, will the strong entangled knot of life be untied. Only if one attains
the height of love will liberation be attained. Such is the heart of all
religions. The experience of Self is only love, which is seeing only love,
hearing only love, feeling only love, tasting only love and smelling only love,
which is bliss.
I should not like to give the impression that the
interpretations I have given represent the teachings of any major Church or
denomination I know about. However, much to my surprise, the Pope devoted his
Easter message in 1992 to an explanation of some of 'I am' quotes in the Bible.
I heard it live on the radio in my room at Sri
Ramanasramam and found it to be a stunning example of synchronicity
since I was compiling this article at the time. When I discovered that none of
my local Catholic churches had received a copy, I wrote to the Vatican
directly, expecting to receive the official version of this speech, along with
a covering letter from a minor official. Instead, several months later, I
received a rather charming letter that stated, 'His Holiness has been very busy
lately and regrets the delay in answering your letter. Enclosed is a copy of
his Urbi et Orbi [To the city and to the world] Easter address that you
requested.'
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Although the Pope chose this subject for one of the key speeches in the
Catholic calendar, mainstream Christianity has never taught that God can be
approached by abiding in the inner feeling of 'I am'. Those who have advocated
such practices have only ever been in a small minority, and they have usually
been regarded with deep suspicion by more orthodox members of the Church.
I should like to discuss in the last portion of this article the views and
experiences of one man from this small minority who, though a committed
Christian, found in the Bible's 'I am' statements a major revelation. They
indicated to him both a way to attain union with God and at the same time
provided him with a bridge between Christianity and Vedanta.
Swami Abhishiktananda was a Benedictine monk and priest who spent twenty years
in a French monastery under his original name and title, Father Henri le Saux.
He came to India in the 1940s and soon fell under the spell of Ramana Maharshi.
His experiences at Sri Ramanasramam in 1949 presented him with a
challenge, the resolution of which was to occupy his mind and heart for
twenty-five years:
In its own sphere, the truth of advaita is unassailable. If Christianity
is unable to integrate it in the light of a higher truth, the inference must
follow that advaita includes and surpasses the truth of Christianity,
and that it operates on a higher level than that of Christianity. There is no
escape from this dilemma.
Swami Abhishiktananda came to feel that Christians and
Hindus, divided by differing and contradictory theologies, could only meet on
equal terms in the 'cave of the Heart'. In this 'place' the followers of both
religions could experience the 'I am' of God's real nature: 'Deep in his heart,
the Indian seer heard with rapture the same 'I AM' that Moses heart on Mount
Horeb.'
In my own depth, beyond all perceiving, all thought, all consciousness of
distinction, there is the fundamental intuition of my being, which is so pure
that it cannot be adequately described. It is precisely here that I meet God,
in the mystery at once of my own being and of His … In the last resort, what
can I say of myself except that 'I am'… Just so, all that I can truly say of
God is simply that 'He is'. This is what was revealed to Moses at Horeb, and it
was also realised intuitively by the rishis: 'It is only by saying ''He is''
that one may reach him.' [Katha Upanishad 6:12] He is - nothing more can
be said of Him.
Christianity teaches that God is a Trinity of Father,
Son and Holy Spirit, and that the three will always remain three even in the
final experience of 'I am'. It also teaches that God can never be fully known
in the way that He knows Himself, so knowledge of Him can only ever be partial.
Abhishiktananda initially accepted this idea - he was after all a Catholic
priest - and speculated that the final 'I am' experience for a Christian must
necessarily be a Trinitarian one in which God was not fully known:
The mysterious name which the Lord had revealed was beyond all human
comprehension. The reply 'I am who I am' meant that the Name is permanently withheld
from the merely curious enquirer, but at the same time, for the earnest seeker
who is moved by love, it constitutes a precious invitation to penetrate to the
very heart of the One who essentially is. Yahweh is indeed the name which
reveals God, and at the same time conceals Him.
…
it is a call to the deepest recesses of the human spirit, a call which itself
comes from the secret cave of the heart where alone man is really himself. The
call is the most powerful reminder that the name of God is indeed mysterious,
as the Bible says, that reason alone is incapable of apprehending God, that he
remains essentially the Inaccessible One.
In unveiling for man the secret of God, he [Jesus] reveals the last secret of
man's own being, the secret that his own origin lies deep within God's infinite
love. At the very heart of the dazzling glory of being, he reveals to man the
even greater glory of the love in which Being, 'He-who-is', has within himself
a three-fold communion with himself.
At this stage of his search Abhishiktananda was saying
that the 'I am' that the rishis experienced was not the highest state.
Beyond this, he said, there is the Christian experience of being in which one
knows and experiences God as a Trinity. This conclusion was a natural consequence
of his dilemma, stated earlier, that Christians must integrate advaita
in the 'the light of a higher truth' or concede that the truth of advaita
'surpasses the truth of Christianity'. According to Abhishiktananda, in this
final state of being there is an awareness of the sharing and the intermingling
of the three distinct Persons of the Trinity:
The mystery of the Holy Trinity reveals that Being is essentially a koinonia [a
fellowship or sharing] of love; it is a communion, a reciprocal call to be; it
is being-together, being-with, co-esse [Latin for 'to be with']; its essence is
a coming from and a going to, a giving and receiving.
The book I have taken all these quotes from, Saccidananda,
expounded a view of Christianity that is called 'the theology of fulfilment'.
Simply stated, it is the belief that everyone in the world, at some distant
future date, will become a Christian. It is underpinned by the belief that the
fullest revelation of God can only be had within a Christian framework, and
that while other religions may contain interesting and even holy ideas, the
practical application of them cannot result in the highest knowledge of God
that is available to a Christian. Thus Abhishiktananda could write that a
'Christian jnani' (an oxymoron in my opinion) would have a Trinitarian
experience of 'I am' that would be superior to the 'I am' experiences of Hindu
sages. This attitude enabled him to write, without feeling at all patronising,
'India become Christian would surely feel a quite special attraction to silent
meditation on the name of Yahweh'.
Towards the end of his life Abhishiktananda finally had, as a consequence of a
heart attack that left him temporarily paralysed on a street in Rishikesh, a
full realisation of 'I am' which, judging by his description of it, seemed to
convince him that his previous attempts to fit it into a Trinitarian framework
were presumptuous:
Who can bear the glory of transfiguration, of man's dying as transfigured;
because what Christ is I AM! One can only speak of it after being awoken from
the dead … It was a remarkable spiritual experience … While I was waiting on my
sidewalk, on the frontier of the two worlds, I was magnificently calm, for I
AM, no matter what in the world! I have found the GRAIL!
The finding of the grail was inextricably linked to
losing all the previous concepts he had had about Christ and the Church.
Commenting on this experience, he said, 'So long as we have not accepted the
loss of all concepts, all myths - of Christ, of the Church - nothing can be
done.'From this new experiential standpoint he was able to say, from direct
experience, that it was the 'I', rather than a collection of sectarian
teachings and beliefs, that gave reality to God:
I really believe that the revelation of AHAM ['I'] is perhaps the central point
of the Upanishads. And that is what give access to everything; the
'knowing' which reveals all 'knowing'. God is not known, Jesus is not known,
nothing is known outside this terribly solid AHAM that I am. From that alone
all true teaching gets its value.
In addition to writing several books that attempted to
bridge the gap between Hinduism and Christianity, Abhishiktananda was a regular
contributor to seminars and conferences on the future development of Indian
Christianity. After his great experience he received an invitation to attend a
Muslim gathering in France to give a Christian point of view. In declining the
invitation he revealed how all his old ideas had been swept away and how he no
longer felt able to expound a specifically Christian viewpoint:
The more I go [on], the less able I would be to present Christ in a way which
would still be considered as Christian … For Christ is first an idea which
comes to me from outside. Even more after my 'beyond life/death experience' of
14.7 [.73] I can only aim at awakening people to what 'they are'. Anything
about God or the Word in any religion, which is not based on the deep 'I'
experience, is bound to be simple 'notion', not existential.
Yet I am interested in no Christology at all. I have so little interest in a
Word of God which will awaken man within history … The Word of God comes
from/to my own 'present'; it is that very awakening which is my self-awareness.
What I discover above all in Christ is his 'I AM' … it is that I AM experience
which really matters. Christ Is the very mystery 'that I AM', and in the
experience and existential knowledge all Christology has disintegrated.
Then, confirming that a lifetime's convictions had
been dropped, he went on to explain that the final Christian experience of 'I
am' could not differ from its Hindu equivalent:
What
would be the meaning of a 'Christianity-coloured' awakening? In the process of
awakening all this colouration cannot but disappear … The colouration might
vary according to the audience, but the essential goes beyond. The discovery of
Christ's I AM is the ruin of any Christian theology, for all notions are burned
within the fire of experience … I feel too much, more and more, the blazing
fire of this I AM in which all notions about Christ's personality, ontology,
history etc. have disappeared.
After a lifetime of meditation and research he had
finally conceded that no explanation or experience could impinge on the
fundamental reality, 'I am', which was revealed to Moses by God. Years before
he had predicted that this standpoint would be the inevitable consequence of a
full experience of 'I am'. Perhaps even then he was having doubts about the
theology of fulfilment and its premises that only through Christianity could
the highest experiences be attained:
Doctrines, laws and rituals are only of value as signposts, which point the way
to what is beyond them. One day in the depths of his spirit man cannot fail to
hear the sound of the I am uttered by He-who-is. He will behold the shining of
the Light whose only source is itself, is himself, is the unique Self … What
place is then left for ideas, obligations or acts of worship of any kind
whatever?
When
the Self shines forth, the I that has dared to approach can no longer recognise
its own self or preserve its own identity in the midst of that blinding light.
It has, so to speak, vanished from its own sight. Who is left to be in the
presence of Being itself. The claim of Being is absolute … All the later
developments of the [Jewish] religion - doctrine, laws and worship - are simply
met by the advaitin with the words originally revealed to Moses on Mount
Horeb, 'I am that I am'.
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