Saying 77 — The Christ Everywhere
Thomas Saying 77's declaration that Christ is both everything and present in the splitting of wood and the lifting of stones is one of the most immanent declarations in any religious text.
Gospel of Thomas Saying 77: 'It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.' This saying presents a radically immanent Christ — not a transcendent savior in a distant heaven but the divine presence in every material act, in every particle of the physical world. Splitting wood and lifting stones — the most ordinary manual labor — become theophanies: the discovery of the divine in the utterly commonplace. This immanent Christology contrasts with the more dualistic tendencies of other Gnostic texts that locate the divine exclusively in the Pleroma above. Thomas Saying 77 suggests that the Gnostic Kingdom is not elsewhere but here — not beyond the material world but within it, as the light that pervades all things.
Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.
Theologian Sallie McFague (The Body of God) argues for a model of God as the body of the universe — immanent in all matter — as the most ecologically appropriate contemporary theology. Thomas Saying 77 anticipates this: the divine is not above or beyond the physical world but present in every act of engagement with it.
Nag Hammadi Library
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- What Gnosticism says about loneliness
The same collection that calls the world a corpse also says: split a piece of wood, and I am there; lift the stone and you find me. That is not an exile's cosmos. Gnosticism never reconciles the two, and a reader has to decide which of them is true on a given day.