A Whisper That Would Not Let Go

From the moment I was born, I believe God was tapping on my shoulder.

I did not set out to question the Jesus I inherited. Yet as I listened more deeply, a quiet tension began to surface—one I could no longer ignore: Jesus the evangelist and Jesus the mystic.

This book is my journey into that tension.

For years I have been drawn to the writings of mystics—voices spanning cultures and centuries. When I encounter the mystical genre, I recognize it instantly. Certain sayings attributed to Jesus bear that unmistakable quality. They read like something only a mystic would say.

Other passages, however, seem to speak with a different voice. On one hand, Jesus appears as the mystic, pointing directly to God’s presence within. On the other, he sounds like the evangelist, urging belief in himself as the exclusive way to God.

This contrast has long puzzled me. Was Jesus a mystic or an evangelist? And if both, which voice carries the deeper truth?

When I read, “The kingdom of God is within you,” or “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” I hear the clear resonance of the mystic—words of direct experience, inviting us to turn inward and discover the Divine for ourselves.

Mystics throughout history—from Madame Guyon and Meister Eckhart to Teresa of Ávila and Lao Tzu—speak in this same tone. Their message is not about belief or allegiance but awakening: the discovery of God as immediate presence.

It is this resonance that has always drawn me back to Jesus—not the insistence on doctrines about him.

At the same time, there are sayings that sound less like mystical insight and more like proclamation: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” Here the focus shifts from direct experience to belief, from discovery to devotion.

Through centuries of Christian tradition, the evangelist’s voice has grown loud—building churches, creeds, and institutions. Yet the voice of the mystic still lingers, like a whisper beneath the hymn of orthodoxy.

From early on, I sensed that the Gospels held more than one voice. Sometimes they invited me to believe in Jesus; at other times, to know God for myself. Which invitation was I to follow?

I returned to this question again and again—not as an academic puzzle but as a matter of spiritual survival. For the voice I chose to follow would shape my entire relationship with God.

In time, I realized that it was the mystic’s whisper that would not let me go. It spoke with an authority deeper than doctrine. It was as if Jesus himself were saying: Don’t stop at the words about me. Listen for what I heard. Experience what I experienced.

This whisper did not silence the evangelist’s voice, but it pointed beyond it. It suggested that Jesus’s greatest gift was not a system of belief but a doorway into the living presence of God.

That realization became the seed of the journey you now hold in your hands. It is not the path of a scholar assembling evidence, nor of a preacher defending faith. It is the path of a seeker—one drawn to the mystic’s way while still rooted in the soil of Christian tradition.

As I continued along this path, Jesus became for me not only a figure of history but a presence whispering still—an inner guide urging me to listen, not merely to what has been said about him, but to what he himself truly revealed

 

1:Drawn to the Work of Mystics

“The great mystics tell us that the silence of God is more real than all words, and the whisper of Spirit more powerful than the world’s applause.” — Evelyn Underhill

 How can it be that certain sayings attributed to Jesus can be so uplifting—the soothing voice of the mystic assuring it is the heavenly Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom—while other sayings sound so apocalyptic, the prophet of doom warning his followers to be prepared lest the coming kingdom arrive and catch them unaware and the gates forever shut against them?

Is it possible for one man to be so divided in his worldview?

This is indeed possible, but the more likely explanation lies within the fascinating world of critical scholarship. Scholars who take a critical approach to the Bible assure us that these conflicting viewpoints are not imagined. While they may not be quick to define Jesus as a mystic, they have long recognized a crucial distinction between the historical Jesus and the Gospel writers’ depiction of him—a distinction that helped open the modern search for the man behind the creeds.

Robert Funk traces this modern quest to Hermann Samuel Reimarus, who was among the first to separate what the Gospel writers claimed about Jesus from what Jesus himself may actually have said and taught. In Funk’s view, that distinction—between Jesus as a historical person and the Christ of later creeds—became foundational for critical scholarship (The Five Gospels).

Considered a pioneer in the field of critical scholarship, Reimarus did not view the Gospels as divinely inspired accounts but as human documents subject to the same type of bias and inaccuracy as one would expect from any humanly produced writing. This, of course, flies directly in the face of those who consider the Bible the inerrant word of God.

Throughout this book you will notice that scholarly research inspires in me various perspectives on many topics. In contrast to the mainstream Christian view—which sees only a single portrait of Jesus and his teachings—critical scholars introduce a wide range of differing interpretations. I am not a biblical scholar, but I have learned to take the gifts offered by these highly disciplined minds, weigh them against what I was taught to believe, and arrive at a very different understanding of the nature of Jesus and the Bible. While I cannot credit critical scholars with my present view of Jesus as a mystic, insights gleaned from this multifaceted field have freed my thinking from the narrow parameters of biblical literalism.

I once heard a renowned New Testament scholar say that unless you know Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic, you cannot truly know Jesus. This statement would, of course, exclude most of us from entering that hallowed arena. Lacking those languages, we depend on the experts who know them to offer their valuable insights.

What I would say, however, is this: if you do not know the language of the mystic, you will overlook one of the most important aspects of Jesus. Mystics have spoken in every language, within every culture and religion known to humankind, yet their message is often missed by the most highly trained academics of their time. Jesus challenges Nicodemus by asking how a teacher of Israel could fail to understand what he was saying (John 3:10). Nicodemus, well-versed in Aramaic—the language Jesus spoke—did not understand what Jesus meant.

This difficulty is not unique to Nicodemus. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, psychologist William James describes the same challenge faced by anyone who tries to communicate mystical experience. James observes that mystical experience resists adequate description. It must be directly known rather than transferred through explanation, much like a feeling whose quality cannot be fully conveyed to someone who has never experienced it.

Common to the mystical tradition, we see in many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, ideas that fit nicely into Aldous Huxley’s perennial philosophy. Huxley acknowledged a shared wisdom found in all major religions—a mystical theme emphasizing oneness with the Absolute and liberation from the restrictions imposed by making the body central to our identity. Jesus recognized this larger vision as the Way, the truth that would set one free. The ideas he taught are as powerful and as relevant today as they were to those few who were able to grasp the truth he conveyed.

What Is a Mystic?

Before going further, I think it helpful to clarify what I mean by mystic. Some people are uneasy with the word because of its associations with the occult, mystery schools, or even black magic. But as I use the term, the mystic is one who perceives God—or ultimate reality—not as an anthropomorphic being, an old man in the sky, but as omnipresent Life, Love, Power, and Intelligence centered as the soul of every person. The Interludes you’ll encounter throughout this book explore these characteristics. All people and all things exist in an inseparable state of oneness with God.

In her classic work Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill emphasizes that mysticism is not an opinion, a philosophy, occult knowledge, or religious eccentricity. It is the lived process by which a person establishes a conscious relationship with the Absolute and participates directly in divine reality here and now.

As the reader of a book like this, I assume you are familiar with the art of establishing that conscious relation with the Absolute. Many who have left formal religion for a less confining path of introspective spirituality should not find the term uncomfortable. Because I know precisely what I mean when I use these terms, I am fond of mystic and mysticism. There is nothing foreign or esoteric about them. I hope you, too, can strip away any pre-existing assumptions—any suggestion of mystery or magic—and appreciate how well these words serve our quest for deeper understanding.

Authors Were Evangelists

We are confronted with this problem: though the Gospels serve as our main source of information about Jesus, we do not always know whether the words attributed to him are his, the authors’, or the work of later scribes who either accidentally or intentionally altered the text. Scholars recognize that the Gospel writers were not biographers, historians, or journalists. They were evangelists.

It may come as a surprise to some that these writers were not attempting to present a strictly factual account of Jesus’ life and teachings. Rather, they were setting down orally transmitted stories of a legendary figure whose image evolved to meet the theological needs of the early Jesus movement.

Putting their story into writing created both benefits and problems. On the one hand, it stopped the natural drift of oral tradition and solidified the movement’s teachings. On the other hand, it froze a living tradition into a fixed form, allowing orthodoxy to take root. Beliefs were transformed into official doctrine—embedded in creeds, memorized prayers, and hymns that could be passed from one generation to the next.

For me, this explains the mixed message of Jesus—sometimes speaking of the kingdom as a coming event, other times describing it as a spiritual dimension, a present reality.

Competing Worldviews

As I delved deeper into the idea of Jesus as a mystic, I began to see that the Gospels and the New Testament contain two fundamentally different worldviews.

The first rests on what I call the paradigm of separation, which assumes God and humankind are distinct and distant entities. Though exceptions exist, this is the dominant thread throughout much of scripture. I refer to this as the evangelical genre—a literary voice shaped by hierarchy, obedience, and an externalized view of God.

The second worldview, the paradigm of oneness, understands God and humankind to exist in an inseparable state of unity. This subtler, often overshadowed perspective is the mystical genre. It speaks not of distance but of indwelling presence. In Chapter 3, we will take a closer look at the identifying elements of each.

The Whispering Messiah

What inspired the title The Whispering Messiah?

The Jewish people of Jesus’ time were looking for a God-appointed leader—a savior who would restore what they believed to be the golden age of David, only better. Many modern scholars question whether such an age ever truly existed, but the people of that day believed in it fervently. They hoped for its return as a tangible condition of national sovereignty, one that would overturn Roman domination and cleanse the corruption within the Temple.

The apostles’ movement took this vision much further, recasting the expected messiah into a superhuman, God-like miracle worker who would save humanity from sin. They explained Jesus’ suffering and death through carefully selected Hebrew scriptures—often if not always quoted out of context—to show that his life had been preordained by God. The promise of his imminent return renewed their hope and gave meaning to their loss.

This book’s title grows out of my conviction that Jesus was indeed a messiah, but not the kind imagined by his contemporaries or by the early Christian movement that followed. As we begin to recognize the identifiable artifacts of the mystic’s voice, we encounter a messiah of a very different sort—one who taught that conscious connection with one’s indwelling Source, the Father within, is the first step toward transformation.

This whispering messiah lifted people from fear, freed them from fatalistic notions of predestination, and inspired liberation from the belief that the world must fundamentally change before life can improve. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus invites the weary and heavily burdened to come to him, learn from his gentle way, and discover rest for the soul. His path, he says, is not oppressive but light and life-giving (Matthew 11:28–30).

How, then, do we know who is doing the talking? In simplest terms, when Jesus speaks of the kingdom as a coming event, it is often the evangelist placing words upon his lips. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is presented as warning his followers to stay watchful because they do not know when the master of the house will return—whether evening, midnight, cockcrow, or morning (Mark 13:35).

But when he speaks of the kingdom as a present reality, we can assume that at least an echo of the mystic’s voice has been preserved. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says the kingdom does not arrive with visible signs or appear in a place people can point to. Instead, the kingdom is already present within—or among—the people (Luke 17:20–21).

The reason this messiah speaks softly is that his voice is overshadowed by the thunderous declarations of his evangelical counterpart. The result is the mixed message we have inherited—a chorus in which two melodies intertwine, one outer and one inner. The purpose of this book is to encourage deeper discernment, learning to know which voice is speaking, and to recover the quiet, transforming whisper that reveals the deeper message at the heart of Jesus’ teaching.