45 Keeping up appearances hurt

LG45

Jesus said:
They do not harvest grapes from thorns
and figs not from thistles,
for they bear no fruit.
A good person brings out of his treasure room
the good.
A bad man brings out of his bad treasure room,
who is his thinking,
the evil forth,
and he says evil things.
Because what his thinking is full of
from it he produces evil.

With logion 39 a new chapter started, as it were. It was said there that the Pharisees had received the keys of knowledge, but they had hidden them, both for themselves and for others. And they no longer knew where. The subsequent logions are about how those keys can be found again.

Logion 40 is about naming. That what matters is beyond all images. Nevertheless you need images to come to the unnameable. The mistake that one can make in this is, however, that one starts to believe in the images, instead of looking for what the images refer to. The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. The map is not the landscape. The cookbook is not the meal.

Logion 41 shows what happens to you if you look beyond the images, or if you get stuck in the images: beyond the images, life itself is, the belief in the images kills.

What attitude should you take in order not to get stuck in the images? “Become passers-by,” says Logion 42. In your memory you make the past an image. Do not look back, otherwise you will become a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife.

The almost ineradicable tendency to chain everything into images, and to hold that true, even applies to the students when they listen to Jesus. They want to understand him, to grasp him intellectually, by catching him in an unchanging image, Logion 43 tells us, and they even want Jesus to provide them with that image. Of course Jesus refuses.

Logion 44 goes straight to the core of gnostics. What you are looking for beyond the images, you must first find that in yourself and then you will also be able to experience it around you. That requires an almost radical allegiance to the compassion of your heart. Infidelity of the compassion of your heart, yes, that is the source of all loss.

This logion, 45, summarizes all of that.

It points to the deceptiveness of images. They seem so true, but they just aren’t.

The fruits of the thistle resembles the fruits of a a fig. Whoever wants to pick these sham figs will be hurt by the thorns. Moreover, these sham grapes will not produce wine, wine as a symbol of the spirit.

The fruits of a thistle have some resemblance to a fig. And this sham also has spines that hurt.

You just have to look around to see what is meant here. Fundamentalism, the belief in unchanging images, always leads to a struggle, for example against alleged apostates, or against so-called heretics who are supposed to be burned at the stake. These are the thorns and thistles of the fundamentalist belief in images that really matter.

Whoever seeks the fruits of a doctrine, the real meaning of the images, will harvest real grapes, pick real figs, the fruits of love.