A FULL MOON

Question - If Jesus was still in a rebellious and active stage at the time of the crucifixion, Does that mean that he had not achieved the total spiritual growth and inner silence of Buddha?

At the time of the crucifixion he had just entered the moon center. But only on that very day! That has to be understood. The Jesus of The Bible is not like Buddha, Mahavira, or Lao Tzu. You cannot conceive of Buddha's going into a temple and beating moneylenders. But Jesus did it.

There were many different activities connected with the great temple of Jerusalem. There was a great moneylending business which exploited the whole country. People would come for an annual gathering and for other gatherings during the year, and obtain money at the temple at a high rate of interest. Then it would be impossible to repay and they would lose everything.

The temple was becoming richer and richer: it was religious imperialism. The whole country was poor and suffering, but so much money would be automatically coming into the temple. Then Jesus entered one day with a whip in his hand. He overturned the moneylenders' boards and began to beat the moneylenders. He created chaos in the temple.

You cannot conceive of Buddha doing this. Impossible! Jesus was the first communist: he was fiery, rebellious. That is why Christianity could give birth to communism. Hinduism could not give birth to it, no other religion could give birth to it; it is impossible. Only Christianity could do it, because with Jesus it has a relevance. The very language he used was totally different. He got so angry at some things that we cannot even believe it. He cursed a fig tree which was not yielding any fruit because he and his disciples were hungry. He destroyed it!

He threatened in a type of language that Buddha could not even utter. For example, he said that those who would not believe in him and the kingdom of God would be thrown into the fires of hell, the eternal fires of hell, and they would not be able to come back. Only the Christian hell is eternal. Every other hell is just a temporary punishment: you go there, you suffer, you come back. But Jesus' hell is eternal.

This looks unjust, absolutely unjust. Whatsoever the sin, eternal punishment cannot be justified. It cannot be! And what are the sins? Bertrand Russell has written a book, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, and one of the reasons he gives is that Jesus seems absurd. Russell says, "If I confess all the sins that I have committed, and all those sins which I have just thought about but never committed, you cannot give me more than five years' imprisonment. But eternal hell?"

Jesus speaks the language of a revolutionary when he talks about eternal, nonending punishment -- revolutionaries always look to the opposite end, to the extreme. You cannot conceive of Buddha's saying it or Mahavira's saying it, but Jesus says that a camel can pass through the eye of a needle sooner than a rich man can enter the kingdom of God. He cannot pass! This is the seed of communism, the basic seed. Jesus was a revolutionary. He was not only concerned with spirituality but with economics, politics -- everything. Had he been only a spiritual man he would not have been crucified, but because he became a danger to the whole social structure, to the status quo, he was crucified.

He was not a revolutionary like Lenin or Mao but still, Mao and Lenin and Marx are inconceivable without there having been a Jesus in history. They belong to the same path as Jesus: the early Jesus, the fiery man -- rebellious, ready to destroy everything -- the Jesus who was crucified.

But Jesus was not simply revolutionary, he was also a spiritual man. He was, somehow, a mixture of Mahavira and Mao. The Mao was crucified and only the Mahavira remained in the end. The day Jesus was crucified was not only the day of his crucifixion, it was the day of his inner transformation also.

When Jesus remained silent after Pilate asked him, "What is truth?" he was behaving like a Zen master. If you look at the previous life of Jesus, if you look at his whole previous life, this silence was not like Jesus at all. What happened? Why did he not speak? Why was he at a loss? He was one of the greatest orators the world has ever produced; we may even say, without hesitation, the greatest. His words were so penetrating. He was a man of words, not a man of silence. Why did he suddenly remain silent?

He was moving toward the cross. Pilate asked him, "What is truth?" Jesus had spent his whole life talking about truth; he was defining only that, that is why Pilate asked him. But he remained silent.

What happened in Jesus' inner world has never been reported because it is difficult to report. Christianity has allowed it to remain submerged because what happened in the inner world of Jesus can only be interpreted in India, nowhere else. Only India knows about the inner changes, the inner transformation that happens.

What happened was this: Jesus is suddenly on the verge of crucifixion. He is about to be crucified and now his whole revolution is meaningless. Everything that he has been saying is futile, everything that he has been living for is coming to an end. Everything is finished. And because death is so near, he must now move within. No time can be lost, not a single moment can be lost. He must come to the end of his journey now, and before he is crucified he must complete the inner journey.

All along he had been on an inner journey. But because he was also entangled with outer problems he could not move to that cool point, the moon point; he remained fiery, hot. But it may be that he did this consciously. Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist who was a great revolutionary and spiritual leader. John the Baptist had waited for Jesus for many years. Then, on the day he initiated Jesus in the River Jordan, he said to Jesus, "Now take over my work and I will disappear. It is enough." And from that day on, he was rarely seen again; he disappeared. In the words of the inner language, he disappeared from the sun point and moved to the moon point; he became silent. He had done his work and had now given the work to someone who would complete it.

On the day of the crucifixion Jesus must have become aware that now his work was finished: "There is no longer any possibility of doing anything more now. I must move within. The opportunity must not be lost." That is why, when Pilate asked him what truth is, he remained silent. Because of this, the miracle happened which has remained an enigma for Christianity. Because of this.

As he was moving to his cooler side, to the moon center, he was crucified. When someone comes to the moon center for the first time, his breathing stops because breathing, too, is an activity of the sun point. Now everything becomes silent; everything is as if dead. They thought he was dead, but he was not. He had simply come to the moon center where breathing stops: no outgoing breath, no ingoing breath -- the gap.

When one remains in the gap, there is such a deep balance that it is a virtual death. But it is not death. The crucifiers, the murderers of Jesus, thought that he was dead so they allowed his disciples to bring the body down. But he was not dead, and when the cave was opened after three days he was not there. The "dead" body had disappeared. After three days, Jesus was seen again by four or five people. But no one would believe them when they went to the villages to say that Jesus was resurrected. No one would believe it.

When he escaped from Jerusalem, Jesus went to Kashmir, where he remained. But then his life was not the life of Jesus but the life of Christ. Jesus was the sun point and Christ the moon point. From then on, he remained totally silent. That is why there is no record of him. He would not talk, he would not deliver any message, he would not preach. He remained in Kashmir, not as a revolutionary but as a master, living in his own silence. A few people traveled to be with him. Those who became aware of his presence in Kashmir, without having had any outward information about it, would travel to him. And really, there were not so few -- maybe only a few in comparison to the world, but there were many.

Christianity is incomplete because it knows only the early, revolutionary Jesus. And because of that, Christianity could give birth to communism. But Jesus himself died as a fully enlightened man -- a full moon.

OSHO