Friday April 7, 2006
[Continuing] Okay.
Maybe the crucifixion wasn’t what it seemed, and wasn’t for the purpose it is understood to have been for.
Jesus didn’t die? Was drugged and recovered, all that? People have said that. I don’t believe it.
No. No, if Jesus were to pretend to die, what would that say about the integrity of the man who above all teachings preached integrity? So, no. We would say this is an example of people trying anything rather than seeing what must break their belief system – in this case, that dead means dead.
Is this Bertram, or whom?
You may take it as Bertram.
Odd response.
The important thing here is to clear your mental air.
Jesus was essentially superhuman. He was – is – a model for what all human will become. He came as model. That is key. He had superhuman abilities and perceptions, and could not have been surprised or betrayed. He had superhuman integrity and could not have pretended or dissembled. He had superhuman connection, and so could go to the point of death – and beyond – and, holding himself together beyond death – reconstitute his body-soul connection in a new and, shall we say, even more superhuman form.
Jesus as perfect model. Remember that.
Do you really think God gets angry? Do you think he approves of inflicting suffering as vengeance? These are infantile ways of imagining God. They are not God.
However, having said that, remember – God does not see things in the way you in time-slices and delayed-consequences see them. Just as a parent working out of greater foresight and wisdom may put requirements on a child that the child is tempted to consider punishments or even vindictive restriction, so God may set you in circumstances that seem “unfair” (what parent has not heard that accusation?) or cruel.
(Yes there are parents who are cruel or unfair. Does this mean God could be? Well, you decide.)
If harsh circumstances will bring about desirable results and we on this side can see it but you on yours cannot, we are quite capable of actions and intentions you will see as ruthless. But are you in the best position to judge? This too is in the Book of Jonah. Take heed.
As a thought-experiment, we propose this:
1) Humanity was straying ever farther from its innate connection with the divine – with “the other side” as you call it. Not that there were none, but that the tendency was away from, rather than toward, closer connection. Hence, the fall of man.
2) Implied in that fall was an increasing deafness to spirit. Hence, spirit was increasingly powerless to overcome the influence of the physical environment that taught that “the world is all there is” regardless what pieties were mouthed.
3) This being so, any demonstration by spirit must come in material form if it were to have any chance of being perceived. The word had to be made flesh, or the blind would continue to refuse to see. Perhaps we should say the deaf might possibly be able to accept that they could see, since they could no longer hear.
4) Hence, a demonstration. How? By lights in the sky? By more strident assertions? By what else in the world but a human life, lived as it can be lived only in perfect connection to spirit?
5) Hence, the life and teachings of Jesus, as earlier the Buddha, and other spiritual teachers. But Jesus’ life was to be the teaching, not merely what he said. Now, it is true that much myth later accreted to his story; that is how the human mind works. That does not invalidate the story, which is of a man of mysterious origins who lived a perfect life, taught others how to live that life (as best they could), was unjustly killed and brought himself back from death, demonstrating that death itself was not what humans thought it.
Jesus demonstrated a life of perfect congruence with spirit, or as it is usually phrased, perfect obedience to the father.
Does this clarify things any?
Does it not! Thank you.