Most Shameful Story

please note: from now on back essay of the Badi' list will be
available at the blog in the "message to:" line of this mailout.

The Most Shameful Story Ever Told; Why the Manifestation Must Suffer

By John Taylor; 26 July, 2005

Our theme for the day comes from our morning reading for today, a
passage from the Persian Bayan (VI, 11). The Bab writes,

"Everyone is eagerly awaiting His appearance, yet since their inner
eyes are not directed towards Him sorrow must needs befall Him." (The
Bab, Selections, 96)

The Bab puts it unambiguously and emphatically: "He must needs
suffer." Where is the justice? Why do the Manifestations have to
suffer when it is our fault? The shame of shutting our inner eyes is
ours, surely. The fault is in us. We overdeveloped our outer eyes and
left the inner eye blind. Why are the Holiest Beings in history forced
to take on our sorrow and regret? I guess in order to understand the
answer to these questions, I will have to open my inner eye myself.
But what does that mean, the inner and outer eye?

We have inner eyes as well as outer eyes, and the Bab earlier on in
this Bayan has established that inner sight is not a purely
intellectual faculty or a product of formal human learning, inasmuch
as every nation in every age has a cadre of learned and accomplished
thinkers. It is axiomatic: the only way truly to know something is
through the One who conceived of it and owns it, God, or rather
through the One He appoints to represent it to us. "True knowledge,"
He says, "... is the knowledge of God, and this is none other than the
recognition of His Manifestation in each Dispensation." (Selections,
89) Suffering, sincerity and reflection are prime requisites for the
inner sight, and here the poor and unknown tend to have a head start
over the advantaged and famous.

Privileged or not, all are equally responsible to turn their inner eye
to the Manifestation, to recognize what we see and to obey it. If we
do not, He suffers more. What? In our reading for this morning the Bab
expands his meaning further, using the historical precedent of the
life of Muhammad,

"In the case of the Apostle of God -- may the blessings of God rest
upon Him -- before the revelation of the Qur'an everyone bore witness
to His piety and noble virtues. Behold Him then after the revelation
of the Qur'an. What outrageous insults were levelled against Him, as
indeed the pen is ashamed to recount." (Id.)

The greatest story ever told, then, is also the most shameful ever
told. Why does the Bab single out Muhammad's story here? After all,
Christianity talks about the shame of Jesus' story too. Take Paul's
expression, to "crucify Christ again." Here is the context in which
Paul originated this strange sounding way of expressing the shame of
human blindness,

"For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have
tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy
Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the
world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto
repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh,
and put him to an open shame. For the earth which drinketh in the rain
that cometh oft upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by
whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God: but that which
beareth thorns and briers is rejected, and is nigh unto cursing; whose
end is to be burned." (Hebrews 6:4-7)

Believers are domesticated plants, expected to grow and bear fruit for
the gardener. If they grow as they please, if they do what comes
naturally they will be fit only for burning. From the gardener's point
of view, burning is the most shameful fate possible for one of his
plants. It must cause any gardener pain to dispose of what he planted
with his own hands, weeded and watered over many weeks. Thus a
superficial, lukewarm Christian is shameful because he causes not
himself but Jesus pain and shame, Whose name he wears and bears. Thus
he re-enacts the crucifixion in his own heart, in the same way that an
unfaithful Muslim shames Muhammad by siding with the idolatrous
Meccans who persecuted Him, and a worldly Jew shames Moses, the Great
Liberator, by going over to the makers of idols in the wilderness. In
every age the most shameful story ever told is retold, over and over.

Yet there is a crucial difference with the advent of Muhammad and now
with the Bab. These two revelations greatly intensify the shame. How
so? Consider how the Bab continues in the Bayan, telling His own
story,

"Likewise behold the Point of the Bayan. His behaviour prior to the
declaration of His mission is clearly evident unto those who knew Him.
Now, following His manifestation, although He hath, up to the present,
revealed no less than five hundred thousand verses on different
subjects, behold what calumnies are uttered, so unseemly that the pen
is stricken with shame at the mention of them." (Selections, 96-7)

Muhammad, then, was the first prophet to have His message written
down, and his frozen text, the Qu'ran or recitation, made him the Seal
of the Prophets, a stamp that gives authenticity and closure to the
verbal messages of the ages before. The fact that he provided written
testimony made the shame worse for His opponents, for they had no
valid excuses for attacking Him.

An enemy of a prophet with a book need only read it for himself if he
doubts to uncover undisputed evidence as to whether the words are of
God. The Gospels, on the other hand, existed only in the heads of the
Apostles for at least a generation after the crucifixion. Therefore
the pain and shame were quicker, more intense and unreasoned for
Muhammad than any Manifestations before Him. And now the Bab, with
even more unmistakable written proofs, arrives as the second
Manifestation with a Book written by Himself.

As the Bab says, His very pen shrinks in shame to tell of the violent
rejection. As mentioned, "Qu'ran" is an Arabic word meaning recitation
or dictation, inspired or memorized words dictated to a secretary;
from a literary point of view this text is challenging, extremely
condensed and abstruse. However "Bayan" the Universal House of Justice
(Messages 1963 to 1986, 735) defines as "exposition, explanation,
lucidity, eloquence, utterance." A Bayan is a turning point in our
collective evolution because it contains many verses "on different
subjects," which I take to mean that it covers a broader range of
human experience, that it not only pronounces but explains and
completes, that it is, in a word, beautiful. With a Bayan as well as a
Qu'ran we have fewer excuses than ever before.

But the final sentence of our selection for this morning is the
kicker. The Bab writes:

"But if all men were to observe the ordinances of God no sadness would
befall that heavenly Tree." (The Bab, Selections, 96-97)

This surely gives a good hint at why a more complete, authoritative,
written testimony increases sadness for its Revelator. The first
reason the Bab gave is because we do not use our inner eye, the second
is because we disobey God's law by rejecting the Manifestation. For as
the Aqdas states right off, it is first to know God and then to obey
Him. Even an authentically written set of laws is still a dead letter
if we do not put it into action.

So to love Him is to do our best to reduce His anguish, to make Him
happy not out of hope of reward or fear of punishment but out of love,
because we see Him whole and follow with total purity and sincerity.

"Believe ye then part of the Book, and deny part? And who committeth a
greater wrong than he who hindereth God's name from being remembered
in his temples, and who hasteth to ruin them? such men cannot enter
them but with fear. Their's is shame in this world, and a severe
torment in the next." (Qur'an 2:75-80, Rodwell, tr)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com