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Did Jesus believe in karma and reincarnation?
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According to a report of the 2008 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 74% of all Americans believe in heaven and 59% believe in hell. It appears that this Pew poll and others like it rarely ask Americans if they believe in reincarnation. In Eastern religions, belief in reincarnation is a given. Until the last 30 or 40 years most in the West have rejected it. .jpg)
My first serious exposure to the concept of reincarnation occurred while a seminary student in Berkeley in the early 70’s. Some of my hippie friends were dabbling in Eastern spirituality and believed beyond a doubt that reincarnation was true.
While I always smiled politely--privately I thought that believing in reincarnation was just a bunch of hogwash.
It’s funny how we can change our minds. I find that 35 years later I am a believer. How things change. What seemed like nonsense one day makes perfect sense the next.
If you believe in reincarnation it’s seductive to speculate about past lives. Once in a great while somebody will tell me they know who they were in a previous life—and of course it’s always somebody who was really important. But what good is it in this life if you were the Queen of Sheeba 20 life times ago. Maybe you were a warthog between that life and this one! So what? What are you doing now?
People say, “we only go ‘round once”. But conventional wisdom often runs counter to actual experience.
Finally, it's summer in Chicago. Before we know it, Autumn in all it's glorious beauty will appear only to disappear. Winter, that cold, hard season inevitably returns but only to give way to the promise of Spring--the cycle is unending.
What if nature is itself a grand metaphor for the life of the soul? Nature is not linear but cyclical. It teaches us that just as life cannot be defined by one season or one lifetime—there is something more to life than meets the eye.
Albert Einstein once said, “The only real valuable thing is intuition”.
Intuitively, reincarnation just makes sense to me. Whatever happens to us in this life is not the end of the story but merely one chapter in the epic of the life of a soul. In living through the body over many lifetimes, the soul receives many opportunities to wake up and see its own light—the light which comes from God and is God. I know I need more than one lifetime to fully wake up to the Divine Presence in this world.
There’s no evidence that Jesus believed in reincarnation. Jesus did not say “I am the reincarnation and the life”. But there is evidence Jesus did believe in karma, though he didn’t use that word explicitly. Literally, the ancient Sanskrit word “karma” means actions. Karma is simply the law of cause and effect. If you plant an apple seed, you don't get a mango tree. If you start a war in Iraq don’t expect the middle east to be more peaceful. Karma requires understanding that every deed carries a spiritual seed. If you give hatred to the world, the world you should expect the world to hate you back. If you live your life around material rewards, then don’t expect spiritual rewards.
Karma says sooner or later, what we get out of life is what we give to life. What tempts us is to make judgments about the karma of others—we make a big deal out of the actions of others perhaps saying, “look at the bad karma he’s making—look at the bad karma she’s creating. To judge the karma of others misses the point. We are each responsible for our actions. In this life and the next, no one pays the cost for our actions—but us.
All of which implies it is not God who judges us. We judge ourselves by and with our own actions. What goes around comes around. Sooner or later we sow is what we reap.
Jesus believed in karma he just didn’t use that word. The Golden rule as we know it is a perfect example. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." “You will reap what you sow
Sometimes it seems that we don't reap what we sow. Sometimes we hold out our hand, and get it slapped. There are times when we reach out in compassion and are greeted with a closed fist. But karma is not like instant rice. It takes time to cook.
Karma is simply one thing leading to another, day after day, month after month, year after year. Wherever we find ourselves today it is because one thing, leading to another, has brought us to being who we are, where we are. Bad things happen to us that apparently we have not brought on ourselves. Good things happen to us, and sometimes we can't imagine why. But asking why can only take us so far. I know many people who lives their lives stuck in “why”.
The way to move beyond why is to ask what. This is a spiritual practice readily available to all—turn the why into what. What can I do to plant new seeds here and now—ask not why you are where you are but what you can do here and now.
Karma is the law of cause and effect and reincarnation the promise that life is imbued with new opportunities and this is eternally true. We are always given more chances to live a happier, fuller and more complete life.
Taken literally or metaphorically karma and reincarnation remind us that the last thing that happened to us is just the last thing—it’s never the final thing.
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