Jesus and the Messiah: The Spark that Separated Clay from Spirit

The moment when the secret of the distinction between “Jesus” and “the Messiah” dawned on my consciousness was not a passing linguistic thought. It was a violent shock to everything I knew, and it brought down every wall of indoctrination I had lived within for so long. In that flash I stopped reading the Qurʾān as a narrative of the tales and legends of the ancients, and began to see it as a great map of existence, revealing the laws that move the life around us. I noticed, with astonishment, that the Qurʾān speaks of this unique being in two voices. Sometimes it calls him “Jesus son of Mary”, and sometimes it gives him the title “the Messiah”. This alternation was no stylistic ornament. It was a precise separation between what is concretised, subject to the necessities of matter and human nature, and what is abstract, connected with the world of the Spirit and raised above the constraints of space-time as we know it. It became clear to me that “Jesus son of Mary” is the most complete human model on this earth: a being who bore humanity’s highest innate signature and was subject to the laws and needs of the earth. He is the servant who walks in the markets and eats food, the face that the earth, in all its density, encountered. “The Messiah”, by contrast, is the spiritual station: the Spirit, the Word and the truth that death, pain and earthly need cannot overcome. He is the light that dwelt in that pure human form, and from him flowed the works of power — giving life and creating — because such signs, or miracles, do not issue from human clay. They issue from a rank of existence directly connected with the code of the World of Command. This discovery reshapes our whole understanding of the human being on his journey towards the truth. From then on, everything in the cosmos seemed to me to have its own “Jesus”, standing for its dense, concretised outward form, and its own “Messiah” hidden within it, standing for its subtle, abstract inner reality. The spark that separated form from spirit in the life of the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, is what taught me to separate my material body from my independent consciousness. I realised how often we are imprisoned by our preoccupation with matter and forget our spiritual ascent. Thanks to this opening, I saw that what “was made to appear so to them” (Q 4:157) concerned the concretised act bound to the body, whereas the abstract spiritual station cannot be killed or crucified. The Messiah reclaimed his complete identity, and through death took up with him the human code of Jesus. From here I set out to affirm that the human journey is a continuous passage from the narrowness of matter to the breadth of the Spirit, from the perishing of forms to the permanence of meanings. This discovery became the firm ground on which an independent consciousness is built, uniting personal experience with universal truth. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved