Karma
KARMA
Self-Salvation, or Salvation through the Cross?
Galatians 6:14-15
We come now to a question at the heart of our quest for maturity. It is raised in connection with this verse: “If any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1-2). This verse raises the question of the cross. What relationship has the cross to maturity? Does the cross weaken character with an offer of easy forgiveness, as some would say? Or is the cross the very center of maturity, and there is no real maturity without it? That is perhaps the most vital question that can be raised in religion. It divides the religious world in two groups: those who depend on salvation by their own efforts and attainments—a self-salvation, and those who depend for salvation on what has been done for them at a cross—a God-salvation. Really there are no other issues in religion, except marginal ones. This is it!
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Sunday)
Karma and the Cross
Galatians 6:7-9
Karma says that there is no forgiveness; you reap what you sow, somewhere, somehow. The Hindu statement is: “Just as a calf will find its mother among a thousand cows, so your deeds will find you out among a thousand rebirths.” An American who had become a Buddhist said, “My brother, who is a Roman Catholic priest, is praying for my soul, and the joke of it is that I have no soul. I’m just a coming together of past deeds, and when they are dissolved, I dissolve into Nirvana—sunnyavadi—or nothingness.” And then he added, “I do not want a God offering to forgive my sins. I prefer to work them out myself.” He implied that it was more mature to take the way of karma than the offer of redemption.
We must examine this matter carefully; a misstep here means a destiny misstep. The chair of one of my meetings in India, a Hindu member of the Legislative Assembly, said to an audience: “Twenty-six years ago when I was a student in a Christian college, I heard the speaker speak on a subject I’ve never forgotten. For weeks after that address, inside the classroom and outside, the student—and faculty—discussed that address. It was entitled ‘Karma and the Cross.’ He saw that the title brought to a head the religious choice of the whole of the East.”
And this choice is at the basis of our religious life of the West. For this thought of self-salvation through positive thinking and affirmation is an atmosphere both inside and outside much of the church life of today. Now of course there is a truth underlying karma. This is a world of moral law. You do reap what you sow. Christianity affirms that and affirms it strongly: “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Gal 6:7). If you work with the moral universe, you will get results; it will back you, sustain you, further you. But if you work against the moral universe, you get consequences; you’ll be up against it, frustrated. Some people go through life getting results; others get consequences.
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Monday)
His Religion Is Producing Tension
Romans 7:22-25
We have seen that there is a truth in karma, the law of sowing and reaping. There is also a truth in salvation and health through affirmation, through being positive, that is “self-salvation.” Negative attitudes bring negative results. If you affirm disease—the negative of health—you’ll probably have disease. Our lives, like the hands of a dyer, are colored by that with which we work. If the atmosphere of your mind is pessimistic, fearful, and negative, then your body, mind, and spirit will be affected by it. You, as a person, will become negative. . . .
So this positive attitude toward life will give you a shot in the arm. But it is only a shot in the arm, for at its best it is self-salvation. And everything that leaves you preoccupied with yourself, even an exhortation to forget yourself, leaves you in the quagmire of self-centeredness, even if it be a religious self-centeredness. That is the fatal defect of both karma and self-salvation. They both leave you self-centered in their endeavor to improve, to release, and to realize yourself. You are still at the center of your world, hence off-center.
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Tuesday)
Deeds without Desire for Reward
Matthew 6:1-5
We have seen that both karma and self-salvation suffer from a fatal defect; they leave you preoccupied with yourself. Karma tries to get out of the tangle of self-preoccupation by saying that you are to do good deeds without desire for reward—nishphal karma—karma without desire for fruit. This sounds wise and helpful, but actually it is self-defeating. For the very desire to have a desireless action is a desire for desireless action and leaves you struggling with yourself to be freed from yourself, hence more tied to yourself. It attempts to deliver you philosophically and leaves you concentrated on yourself in fact. The attempt to keep yourself from thinking of a certain thing brings that thing back into the focus of attention in the mind. . . . So the emphasis on “action without desire for fruit” results in a self-conscious desire to be freed from desire for fruit. The fruit of the whole thing is a self-centered piety.
The same thing can be said of the movements that claim you have the answers within you; just discover and develop your own divine potentialities, your own perfection. Here is a declaration of principles from a recent international gathering of such a movement: “We affirm the inseparable oneness of God and man, the realization of which come through spiritual intuition, the implications of which is that man can reproduce the Divine perfection in his body, emotions, and in all his external affairs.” Note that “God and man” are “inseparable,” one; no matter what humanity is, has done, or will do, nothing will be able to break that oneness. It is not a moral and spiritual oneness; it is a oneness of essence, an inseparable oneness. If that means anything it is this: since God and you are one in essence, then you are one in action; what you do God does. Then what kind of God is God if God does what we do? God’s character is gone.
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Wednesday)
Inseparably One with God?
Psalm 8:4-6
[What about] those who find all the answers within themselves, asserting their own inseparable oneness with God. . . . The character of God is lost in this viewpoint, for if we are inseparably one with God, then what we do, God does. You cannot say you are metaphysically one and not morally one. . . . But any of us who know ourselves—and others—knows that we when we act, we act and not God. . . . We have tried to make ourselves God, and we have lost God in the process if God is just ourselves writ large. But in the end, our moral nature revolts against such a projection of ourselves. We simply cannot worship the God we project. That God is too much like us.
But this emphasis doesn’t lead you to worship God. You are not to worship God, but to discover and realize God in yourself; you are to discover yourself as God. . . . It leaves you concentrated on yourself to discover and to develop your own essential divinity. . . .
This gives you an initial shot in the arm, a lift, a sense of your worthwhileness. . . .
But it has a fatal defect; it leaves you preoccupied with yourself. You are left with an endeavor to try by various slogans and practices to convince yourself that you are inseparably one with God. You are the center of your attention and that leaves you with a self-conscious piety, a piety that has to act a part, which must keep up its illusion of manifest divinity. That is playacting of a very serious kind.
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Thursday)
Aham Brahm
1 Corinthians 3:18-23
We are considering the self-preoccupation that results when we endeavor to make ourselves inseparably one with God. I was visiting a swami in his Ashram in India. He was supposed to be a jiwan-mukta—one who has attained salvation while alive, one who has realized that he is God—Aham Brahm (“I am God”). But that has laid on him the burden of acting a part, the part of playing God. He showed himself at regular times so that his followers and devotees could take his darsham—literally, “take his presence.” He sat in the meeting that I addressed in a be-pillowed kind of elongated chair, surrounded by flowers and burning incense. He arose . . . about ten minutes after I had begun, interrupted the address, garlanded [me] and the visitors, and returned to his reclining throne. . . . And he received the adoration of his followers, who prostrated themselves before him with folded hands. He was the center of attention for himself and others. You didn’t think of God when you experienced him; you thought of the swami! . . . It was all self-salvation through self-realization by self-attention. And the nemesis was self-attention, and hence self-conscious attention. And it was all so self-defeating.
Into that circle came a Greek woman who had renounced, not the world, but herself, in complete self-surrender to Christ. This self-surrender released her from self-preoccupation and released her to give herself to others in pure, disinterested service. She was a trained masseuse and treated everybody regardless of condition or race or religion, even lepers. She is now treating lepers with her own hands, massaging their sores. She rubs the love of God into everybody, giving a massage and a message at the same time. The swami, seeing the prodigality of her love and service given in self-forgetful humility, said to his followers; “This is the kind of love and service I would like to see produced here.” But it simply could not be.
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Friday)
Know by Intuition or by Incarnation?
Romans 1:22-25
The principles of a movement bent on the realization of its devotees as having “an inseparable oneness with God,” state that “the realization comes through spiritual intuition.” You bypass the revelation of God in Jesus and look within to discover your own divinity . . . by “spiritual intuition.” You are the means of the discovery of your own inseparable oneness with God. This is a modern version of Gnosticism. The Gnostics said they were the superior knowers . . . from the Greek gnosis, to know. You know directly by turning in on yourself; you know by intuition. You do not have to turn to Jesus as the self-disclosure of God in understandable terms. You turn to yourself as the means of your own self-disclosure as God.
This outlook and method may be baptized here and there with Christian terminology to make it palatable to Christians, but it is fundamentally unchristian. It urges that you see God through yourself by intuition and not through Jesus by interpretation. This is self-salvation through self-discovery. The Christian faith is God-salvation through self-surrender to Jesus Christ, who brings God to us. The self is surrendered, not discovered. The basis is changed from self to God. We are then God-centered persons, not self-centered persons. That leaves us on the right center—God.
The temptation of the Garden of Eden was correct: If you eat of this tree of knowledge, “you will be like God” (Gen 3:5). The temptation was to make themselves “as God” through special knowledge. Adam and Eve fell for it and lost paradise, and themselves. Jesus came to restore that paradise through knowledge of himself, by self-surrender. And the moment we do it, our paradise returns. We have lost our lives through self-surrender and have found them again through God-realization. We come through Jesus and find God and ourselves, and everything!
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Saturday)
Drunk with the Wine of Wordiness
1 Corinthians 15:42-44
We are considering whether we are saved by the cross—the self-giving of God, or by intuition—the discovery of ourselves. The quotation given on Wednesday (see above) ended with these words: “the implications of which are that man can reproduce the Divine perfection in his body, emotions, and in all his external affairs.” . . . It talks about God, but centers on people as the center of this perfection and the producers of it. Humanity is deified. God doesn’t come down, as in the incarnation, but people go up through a spiritual intuition. And this perfection is thoroughgoing; it includes the “body,” “emotions,” and “all . . . external affairs.”
This statement is drunk with the wine of its own wordiness. It is the Word become words, and words only. It never becomes flesh. For where do we see the perfection in the body? If the body were perfect it would be deathless. When I saw a French “Mother” who mediated between Arabindo Chose, the Hindu swami, and the outside world, she said to me: “He is trying something different. He is not only making his soul divine, he is making his body divine as well.” But that “divine” body died like the rest of us. . . .
We gain physical perfection, not by asserting the perfection of the body, but by realizing that in Jesus our bodies are made perfect through his resurrection when we are identified by surrender to him. His deathlessness becomes ours!
As to perfection of “emotions,” you don’t find it by asserting the perfection of the emotions, but by loving God “with all your heart”—the emotions—and in loving God we find our emotions come back to us perfected as we perfectly love God. As for “perfection in all our external affairs,” that comes when the kingdom comes, and the kingdom comes when we “receive” it by surrender. We make an external paradise through the Holy Spirit within.
Christian Maturity
(Week 14, Sunday)
Humanity Tries to Restore Fellowship
Micah 6:6-7
We have been considering methods of self-salvation through self-assertions about the self. We now turn to the method of God-salvation through the divine self-sacrifice, the cross.
Humanity, in feeling the estrangement between ourselves and God, has taken various ways to get back into fellowship with God. First, we sacrificed to God to appease God by offering possessions—cattle, sheep, or goats—in sacrifice, sometimes the produce of toil: grain, fruit, or money. Second and higher, we offered to God in sacrifice our righteous deeds, moral endeavors, penances, and piety; in short, our worthiness. Third, and this is the method we have just been considering, we offers to God our wordy assertion of our oneness with God, the claim that there is nothing between God and humanity except our ignorance of our own divinity. This is people bridging the gulf between us and God, made by human sin, by saying there is no sin and hence there is no gulf. These attempts heal everything by self-asserting words about humanity’s divine perfection.
But we cannot get to God, either by offering the sacrifice of the fruit of our work, or by the sacrifice of our works, or by the sacrifice of our words. We can’t get to God by any of these ladders; God must come to us. The Word must become flesh. And that Divine Word must bear our sins in his own body on a tree. That has happened.
We mentioned the truth in the law of karma, the truth that we reap what we sow. This is a universe that is not indifferent to your virtue or your vice. It takes sides. You are free to choose, but you are not free to choose the results or the consequences of your choices. They are in hands not your own. And you do not break these laws written into the nature of things; you break yourself on them. And these laws are color-blind, race-blind, and religionblind. Break them and you get broken.
Christian Maturity
(Week 14, Monday)
The Truth in Karma
Luke 6:37-38
There is an important and an all-embracing truth in karma. We cannot expect to evade the results or the consequences of our moral sowing. Our chickens do come home to roost. Our deeds will boomerang upon us. The result or the consequences register themselves in us automatically. The payoff is in the person. You don’t break these laws; you break yourself upon them. Sin and its punishment are one and the same thing. You don’t have to punish the eye for having sand in it, the body for having a cancer in it. Nor do you have to punish a boy for taking a skunk in bed with him! . . . Sin . . . is trying to do something that simply cannot be done, an attempt to live life against reality.
But while there is a profound truth in karma, as usually interpreted, it is only a half-truth. For the usual interpretation is that the individual who does the sowing does all the reaping. According to the law of karma, it would be unjust for anyone except the sower to get any of the reaping. But the facts indicate otherwise. The father who sows a good life passes on the results of his karma to his family, to his community, to his country, and faintly to the world. Everybody reaps what he sows. However, those who sow a bad life pass on the consequences of that bad life to family, to country, and faintly, to the world. They wish that they alone could reap the consequences of their sowing and did not have to pass on to their children the shame of their deeds.
When Mahatma Gandhi sowed his life in sacrifice for the freedom of India, did he alone reap the results? No, the results of his karma were passed on to millions of people. They reaped freedom from this sowing. The fact that other people reap the results of our sowing opens the door to the vicarious. We can pass on to others through love the results of our sowing. This points us to the cross.
Christian Maturity
(Week 14, Tuesday)