Right Abstention - Gospel of Thomas

Verse - Right Abstention

He saw a Samaritan carrying a lamb and going to Judea. He said to his disciples, "What does this man want with the lamb?" They said to him, "He will kill it and eat it." He said to them, "He will not eat it while it is alive, but only when he kills it, and it becomes a corpse." They said, "He cannot do otherwise." He said to them, "So it is with you, you seek a place of rest, lest you become a corpse and be eaten."

Comment

But beyond the attitude expressed in this expression, which confirms the assumption that in the circle of Christ's disciples and followers the ethics of respect for life was taken for granted, even in the form of abstaining from eating meat, Christ's words aim at the much more far-reaching abstention from worldly pleasures, at turning away from the incorporation of the corpse of the world.

The words are generally directed against any greedy absorption and desire to possess the material and transitory, which makes people live in constant fear of the disappearance and loss of what they have acquired and does not allow them to find peace and self-reflection. The wise man is different, who does not cling to the meaningful, but, living free of greed, is directed inwards, towards the essential, the incorruptible, and knows about the calm, the silence and the peace of the inner self.

Like him - Christ admonishes all who follow him in the final sentence - you too should seek the place of rest, so that you do not perish with the transitory, become corpses and fall again into the eternal cycle of everything that has come into being, but bring the wheel of becoming and passing away to a standstill and become partakers of eternal life, which does not feed on transitory life.