When I teach students about the travails of early Christianity, we have to deal early on with what is considered the earliest Christian heresy: Gnosticism. In fact, there was a time during the first and second centuries, it was an open question which would prevail: What we’ve come to call “orthodox Christianity” or Gnosticism. There were often competing congregations in the same towns, preaching a different version of God, and therefore, of Jesus.

It was pretty messy.

It’s entirely conceivable that had Gnosticism won the day, there would be no such thing as Christianity—at least as we know it today.

“What is Gnosticism,” you may be wondering, “and what does it have to do with the feeding of the 5,000 in our Gospel for this morning?”

So glad you asked. Gnosticism is a hybrid of Christianity and Neo-Platonic philosophy, which assumes the material world is evil—that truth can only be found in the spiritual.

The Gnostic myth is that the earth and all material reality was created by the supreme deity, and that humanity is unique in creation because sparks of the divine were trapped in material flesh. The way to achieve salvation, according to Gnosticism, was to release these sparks of divinity from their evil and corrupted human bodies.

But how, you may wonder, does one release one’s inner divinity from the bonds of its fleshly prison?

This release of the divine spark requires a gnosis, which is Greek for knowledge. According to many Gnostics, Jesus proved a wonderful vehicle for this special knowledge, which could set people free from the nasty material world and return their trapped sparks to the source of the divine.

Yeah, I know, that’s the look my students give me too. It’s pretty arcane stuff. But it was extremely popular in the early days of Christianity.

In fact, a form of it is still pretty popular in the church—the idea that what matters is the spiritual, that the flesh is evil, that whatever happens on this fallen mortal coil is always of much less significance than what happens in the spiritual realm, and that what one needs to do to be saved is not to do anything, but to acquire spiritual knowledge (which we might call faith—you know, believing all the right things). Indeed, doing stuff—no matter how well intended—may distract you from your real duty which is to “get right with God”—and to bring as many other non-believers for the ride as you can manage.

Anything that has to do with this world—politics, economics, justice, peaceableness—is by definition a distraction from true spiritual pursuit.

Does that sound familiar?

I got into it with somebody on Twitter a while back. I wrote: “Taking Jesus seriously means challenging oppressive governments and the religious institutions that make them possible.”

Pastor Bob, who describes himself as “a contemplative missionary living a spiritual existence,” responded by saying: “But let’s be clear—Jesus challenged oppressive governments & the religious institutions that make them possible by staying out of politics and unconditionally loving, comforting & healing all peoples hurt and damaged by them. We should be so Christ-like. Love always trumps politics.”

Pastor Bob’s answer struck me at the time (and strikes me still, truth be told) as an apt illustration of Gnosticism—loving people not in any way that reorders the systems that keep people oppressed, but loving them as having a positive feeling toward them in your heart.

Pastor Bob writes: “Jesus challenged oppressive governments and the religious institutions that make them possible by staying out of politics.”

Of course. That sounds to me like saying that the way to change the designated hitter rule is never to go to another baseball game—or the way to get really good at tuba playing is by devoting yourself to macrame-ing owl wall hangings for your less than enthusiastic friends and neighbors.

What I asked him, though, was: “They publicly executed Jesus as a political subversive because of his ‘staying out of politics and unconditionally loving, comforting & healing all peoples hurt and damaged by oppressive governments and the religious institutions that make them possible?’

“No. They killed Jesus because of his politics; not because he was nice.”

Gnosticism says that anything not in the spiritual realm is—if not evil—then at least unsavory.