Little Miracles

8 Little Miracles
The following scripture refers to the first public (notice I say public) miracle of Jesus, the turning of water into wine at the marriage of Cana.

John 2:11
 

11This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.

We have spoken of miracles before. I believe in them--I watch for them every day. Recall my statement to ACS when I signed on there:

"I have be honest--I don't really CARE about the whole evolution controversy: my whole life is a stream of little miracles, one after the other, such that it is no problem for me to accept the possibility of creation in a moment of time. In a supernatural world, created by a supernatural God, what DIFFERENCE does it make whether six days is an allegorical expression or a literal expression? The miracle is there regardless of how you think about it, and it defies us to achieve any rational apprehension of it. Faith is the evidence of things not seen, and yet it takes no faith to see the world right there in front of us--right now. Thank you God!"

Furthermore, it must be observed that the insistence of Creationists on the chronology given in the Bible does not take into account the fact that miraculous events involve a slipping through time. With a miracle, we leave time behind, and approach the Throne in a timeless eternal moment. Once again, in an eternal moment, who cares if the earth were created in 6 days or 6 eons? Within the context of a timeless miracle, 6 days and 6 eons are the same.

If a miracle can be said to be the projection of divine power and intelligence into the stream of daily mundane activities, then it may be fairly said that miracles are my stock in trade; all week I guide people into higher dimensions of themselves by helping them assimilate various levels of consciousness into a single heightened level of consciousness. These flights bring the student into contact with miraculous, or at least superhuman feats of concentration and transformation. This is what I mean when I say above, "my whole life is a stream of little miracles, one after the other." They may not be water-into-wine, but they are magical events that can claim as much solemnity and reverence as raising Lazarus.

Now, the attraction I had to the scripture this week had not to do with the Walt Disney side of miracles, but the clause:

"manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him."

The implication here is that miracles are a key to faith; in fact many mainstream, fundamentalist Christians base their faith almost exclusively on the evidence of miracles--whether they happened in historical fact is less important than the mythologizing of the events into spiritual eternity. Belief, then, is participation in the miraculous manifestation of Divine Glory; the question is which comes first, the belief or the miracle? If the belief comes first, the miracle may be thought of as a manifestation of the belief; if the miracle comes first, then faith is merely the evidence of things not seen. It is a question, always, in my mind, why people place so much importance on miracles? Why do they need miracles to believe? I guess most people are not as surrounded by miracles as I am, so a miracle is an unusual and exotic thing; maybe the belief in some impossibly big miracle makes all the other smaller miracles more believable. When Yoda lifts up Luke Skywalker's  space ship out of the swamp with his will, he says that picking up a space ship is no different than picking up a twig--the quality of the miraculous, the intersection of the eternal with the temporal, is the same.


Wikipedia always has some interesting historical trivia to offer; today we will trim it down because we have reviewed some of this before.

"A miracle often denotes an event attributed to divine intervention. Alternatively, it may be an event attributed to a miracle worker, saint, or religious leader. A miracle is sometimes thought of as a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature. Others suggest that God may work with the laws of nature to perform what people perceive as miracles. Theologians say that, with divine providence, God regularly works through created nature yet is free to work without, above, or against it as well.

In casual usage, "miracle" is seen as any event that is statistically unlikely but beneficial, (such as surviving a natural disaster), or simply a "wonderful" occurrence, regardless of likelihood, such as a birth. Other miracles might be: survival of a terminal illness, escaping a life threatening situation or 'beating the odds'. Some coincidences may be perceived to be miracles."

[Sidebar: There are several pregnant phrases in that paragraph:
1. interruption of the laws of nature, and
2. God may work with the laws of nature to perform what people perceive as miracles.

Clearly, we are invited to conceive of nature as one vast miracle, the creation of which, (according to John and his claim that in the beginning the Word was with God), was the first, the single most important a prior miracle of them all. We have discussed this many times, and have come to the conclusion that it is the intersection of the divine with the physical, the Word made flesh, that is the model for all miracles worked between our two worlds since the beginning of time; thus, belief in miracles begins with belief in the very ground upon which we stand. And yet, there is something about miracles, this INTERRUPTION of the laws of nature, that is the attraction to the Disneyland mind set; it is this that seems to inspire belief.

Why do we need miracles to believe in the supernatural? Why do we need God to perform parlor tricks so that checker brains can understand? Well, maybe we don't need miracles, maybe miracles are merely a fact of life the presence of which we have, in general, underestimated rather than overestimated.

Like synchronicities, miracles are all around us waiting to be appreciated; every time life springs anew into the physical plane, we are reminded that every single moment of our lives is imbued with the miraculous; we are merely more or less aware of it, more or less engaged in the process of it.

And process it is--all sequential time orders events into processes which index the change from one physical state to another. The fascinating thing about spiritual practice is that you can witness the free exchange of energies between various planes of existence.

On with Wikipedia:

Explanations for miracles
Supernatural acts
A miracle is a phenomenon not fully explained by known laws of nature, or an act by some supernatural entity or unknown, outside force. Some scientist-theologians suggest that miracles are not violations of the laws of nature but "exploration of a new regime of physical experience".

Criteria for classifying an event as a miracle varies. Often a religious text, such as the Bible or Quran, states that a miracle occurred, and believers accept this as a fact. Many conservative religious believers hold that in the absence of a plausible, parsimonious scientific theory, the best explanation for these events is that they were performed by a supernatural being, and cite this as evidence for the existence of a god or gods. Some adherents of monotheistic religions assert that miracles, if established, are evidence for the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God.

Events planned by God
In rabbinic Judaism, many rabbis mentioned in the Talmud held that the laws of nature were inviolable. The idea of miracles that contravened the laws of nature were hard to accept; however, at the same time they affirmed the truth of the accounts in the Tanakh. Therefore some explained that miracles were in fact natural events that had been set up by God at the beginning of time.

In this view, when the walls of Jericho fell, it was not because God directly brought them down. Rather, God planned that there would be an earthquake (or some such other natural disaster) at that place and time, so that the city would fall to the Israelites. Instances where rabbinic writings say that God made miracles a part of creation include Midrash Genesis Rabbah 5:45; Midrash Exodus Rabbah 21:6; and Ethics of the Fathers/Pirkei Avot 5:6.

Nonliteral interpretations of biblical accounts
Biblical literalism is not rigidly believed by all scholars: Non-literal interpretations of some scripture are held by both classical and modern thinkers. This may include the use of figure of speech, allegory, and exegesis.
In Numbers 22 is the story of Balaam and the talking donkey. Many hold that for miracles such as this, one must either assert the literal truth of this biblical story, or one must then reject the story as false. However, some Jewish commentators (e.g. Saadiah Gaon and Maimonides) hold that stories such as these were never meant to be taken literally in the first place. Rather, these stories should be understood as accounts of a prophetic experience, which are dreams or visions. (Of course, such dreams and visions could themselves be considered miracles.)

Joseph H. Hertz, a 20th century Jewish biblical commentator, writes that these verses "depict the continuance on the subconscious plane of the mental and moral conflict in Balaam's soul; and the dream apparition and the speaking donkey is but a further warning to Balaam against being misled through avarice to violate God's command."

Religious texts
Hebrew Bible
Descriptions of miracles (Hebrew Ness, נס) appear in the Tanakh. Examples include prophets, such as Elijah who performed miracles like the raising of a widow's dead son (1 Kings 17:17–24) and Elisha whose miracles include multiplying the poor widow's jar of oil (2 Kings 4:1–7) and restoring to life the son of the woman of Shunem (2 Kings 4:18–37).

New Testament
The gospels record three sorts of miracles performed by Jesus: exorcisms, cures, and nature wonders. In St John's Gospel the miracles are referred to as "signs" and the emphasis is on God demonstrating his underlying normal activity in remarkable ways. In the New Testament, the greatest miracle is the resurrection of Jesus, the event central to Christian faith.
Jesus explains in the New Testament that miracles are performed by faith in God. "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'move from here to there' and it will move." (Gospel of Matthew 17:20). After Jesus returned to heaven, the book of Acts records the disciples of Jesus praying to God to grant that miracles be done in his name, for the purpose of convincing onlookers that he is alive. (Acts 4:29–31). Other passages mention false prophets who will be able to perform miracles to deceive "if possible, even the elect of Christ" (Matthew 24:24, 2 Thes 2:9, Revelation 13:13).

Qur'an
Miracle in the Qur'an can be defined as a supernatural intervention in the life of human beings. According to this definition, Miracles are present "in a threefold sense: in sacred history, in connection with Muhammad himself and in relation to revelation." The Qur'an does not use the technical Arabic word for miracle (Muʿd̲j̲iza) literally meaning "that by means of which [the Prophet] confounds, overwhelms, his opponents". It rather uses the term 'Ayah' (literally meaning sign). The term Ayah is used in the Qur'an in the above mentioned threefold sense: it refers to the "verses" of the Qur'an (believed to be the divine speech in human language; presented by Muhammad as his chief Miracle); as well as to miracles of it and the signs (particularly those of creation).

To defend the possibility of miracles and God's omnipotence against the encroachment of the independent secondary causes, some medieval Muslim theologians such as Al-Ghazali rejected the idea of cause and effect in essence, but accepted it as something that facilitates humankind's investigation and comprehension of natural processes. They argued that the nature was composed of uniform atoms that were "re-created" at every instant by God. Thus if the soil was to fall, God would have to create and re-create the accident of heaviness for as long as the soil was to fall. For Muslim theologians, the laws of nature were only the customary sequence of apparent causes: customs of God.

The following is taken not from C.S.Lewis's book, Miracles, but from an online analysis of C.S.Lewis's book, Miracles; it is kind of like a Cliff Notes outline of the book. This section is from Chapter 3, and reveals a side of C.S.Lewis we only encounter in his most academic writing, the true philosopher following in the rationalist footsteps of Des Cartes:

“The movement of one unit is incalculable, just as the result of tossing a coin once is incalculable:  the majority movement of a billion units can however be predicted, just as, if you tossed a coin a billion times, you could predict a nearly equal number of heads and tails. 

Now it will be noticed that if this theory is true we have really
admitted something other than Nature.  If the movements of the
individual units are events ‘on their own,’ events which do not
interlock with all other events, then these movements are not part
of Nature.”

The knowledge we have of any information is observation + inference, thus all possible knowledge depends on the validity of reasoning.
i.  our observation demands that we recognize something outside ofourselves
ii.  when we recognize that which is outside of ourselves, then we arereasoning
iii.  “It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be real insight. 

A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court.  For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.  It would have destroyed its own credentials.  It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense.”

            e.  If nature is explainable in terms of the whole system, it must, by definition, imply a cause & effect universe—cause and effect all of the way back to the beginning
            f.  In this view, then, reasoning must be nothing more than “one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time.”
            g.  Thus, mental events are caused by previous mental events and nothing more—“knowledge” plays no role in the progression of these mental events—also mental events came into being in the same evolutionary way that physical events came into being—mental events to the naturalist, then are nothing
more than responses to stimuli.
            h.  Yet, the experience that things are always connected (fire burns you) is only of animal behavior, Reason comes into play when you infer something from the events
            i.  Nature cannot show how one turns sub-rational, animal instinct, into rational thought, thus a break in the chain occurs
            j.  Knowing is more than mere remembering what happened last time, but of inferring that what happened in the past will continue to take place in the future.  Inference, then is determined by genuine knowledge, not by cause and effect.
            k.  Inference and reason are the means by which we know and understand nature and how we explain nature and cannot be explained by nature."

The miracle of music is the brand of eternal moment that I prefer. Music puts me in touch (I SAY TOUCH) with supernatural realities every day. Music is an alchemy of transformation, a process by which abstract ideas appearing, on the mental plane, are given form in the material world. Remember, I didn't always think this--I used to think music REPRESENTED something. I no longer think this; I now know that music is a channel through which divine intelligence manifests itself, and touches us, and moves us.

Who has control of the miracle is an interesting question. I have made a case for the idea that epiphanies, ecstatic or intuitive episodes, or recognitions of a prophetic or synchronistic type, are governable by acts of will--that there are ceremonies, rituals, routines that the individual may enact that will promote the occasion of an epiphanic experience. However, most of what we call miracles, by any standard, come as a complete surprise--hence the intensified glamour of a miraculous event.

Miracles are generally felt to take place at random, not part of a chain of material causality, (possibly because each ascent into the spiritual dimension is experienced as an anomaly); but I suspect that there is large-scale cosmic clock that is keeping time to God's idiosyncratic rhythm. As we just read in the C.S. Lewis quote from above:

"The movement of one unit is incalculable, just as the result of tossing a coin once is incalculable:  the majority movement of a billion units can however be predicted, just as, if you tossed a coin a billion times, you could predict a nearly equal number of heads and tails. 

Now it will be noticed that if this theory is true we have really
admitted something other than Nature.  If the movements of the
individual units are events ‘on their own,’ events which do not
interlock with all other events, then these movements are not part
of Nature.”

In this paragraph, there is made a clear connection between nature and time; there is also the glaring implication that miracles exist outside of time. And yet, if a billion occurrences of heaven coming down reveal some kind of pattern, like great cosmic ocean waves, then it is possible to infer something else about the timetable and relative weights of miraculous events.

Let's look at these big miraculous waves and then consider the principle of fractals, one of the most important contributions, to human knowledge, of the so-called "new science. The idea of fractals simply states that the largest form in a piece of material is echoed down to the smallest sub-atomic level; the smallest part is the same as the larger part, for instance:

a
a a
a a
a a a a a




or, like a big tree seen from 50 feet away looks exactly the same as a small tree seen from 5 feet away.

So, I say, if we look at a big miracle as if it were a big rock thrown into a pond, we can see the rings spreading out in an ever-expanding circle from the center. Do not all these little waves, these echoes of the rock's big wave, share the same source and thus the same form as the the big wave? Certainly, the size and shape of the wave, taken at any two points in time, will be proportionally identical. Therefore, as we have already suggested, if the essential quality of all miracles is the same, then all these little miracles we can experience every day must be identified with that first big miracle, the miracle of creation--the Word made flesh. You cannot rationally go any further than this.

So, when all is said and done, it is a foregone conclusion that if there has ever been a miracle, EVER, it is only reasonable to suppose that smaller miracles may be (and probably are) happening all around us all the time. I believe that paying attention to these little miracles is one of the duties, nay, pleasures (notice how duty and pleasure are linked in the Christian system)--paying attention to these little miracles is one of the intense pleasures of the spiritual path.

Let us pray: Jesus, thank you for revealing your Divine Intelligence to us through miraculous events. Thanks for reaching out and touching us, across the bridge erected on the power of your ultimate sacrifice. Thanks for raising yourself from the dead so that all men could see and believe. Thanks for the wine, too. Amen.

7 Crying in the Wilderness

7 Crying in the Wilderness

Today's sermon is about speaking the truth to the silence of the desert--the barren, unpeopled desert. It also develops a link between the idea of "crying in the desert" with the idea of being "called". Like Jesus says, it is easy to love your friends, but harder to love your enemies; likewise, it is easy to speak the truth in a comfortable, supportive milieu in the city, but it is harder to seriously address a cactus with words of wisdom. Therefore, since the desert is, in principle, a crappy place to be, a place that no one in his right mind would CHOOSE to be, it's a safe bet that, any voices crying in any wilderness, were most likely sent there--sent there for a reason.

I have included a fair sized bundle of auto-biographical stuff, because I am using myself as an example of how each and every one of us is sent to preach the gospel SOMEWHERE SOMEHOW, even if it looks like nowhere.

To begin with the pertinent scriptures, here is:

Isaiah 40:3

"The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,
Prepare ye the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

Matthew 3

" 1In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea,
 2And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
 3For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

Mark 1:3

"The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

Luke 3:3-4
 

"3And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins;
 4As it is written in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

John 1:23

He said, I [am] the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias.

My whole life, the expression, "a voice crying in the wilderness" has held an attraction for me, and I'll tell you why: it's because I always thought of myself as such a voice.

There were two things about the expression that I identified with:

first, there was the idea that I had been given a message from God that no-one but I could deliver to the thirsting ears of mankind--(music can be a living message from God, and I must be pretty cool to have been entrusted with such a message, eh what?--it's all about ME);

and, second,

I liked the desert idea, since I perceived my self-exile (to reaches on the earth ever further and further away from any possibility of professional success) to be somehow noble, or humanitarian-- (how heroically sacrificial of me to persevere, to surge ahead with my prophetic activities, singing my song to the heavens, even though here, on Earth, the bleachers were empty!). Anyway if you're a failure in the desert, who can fault you?

There is a third clause in this scripture that I have not heeded enough, but which I will pay greater attention to in the future: it is the idea of making straight the way of the lord. I'll be honest, I never really thought about what that meant--it always seemed like a poetic construction without much practical life application. In preparing this sermon I have discovered more of the meaning of the phrase "make straight the way of the lord." It refers to the announcing of the coming of the Messiah, and is not unlike any herald of royalty shouts out when the master is due to appear on a crowded city street. "Way for his majesty, make way!" Trumpet call here. These words are supposed get everybody to clear a path for the king--a straight path.

What I take "straight path" to refer to, in this context, is the potency and directness of the cry--emphasize "directness". In other words, if the devotee is sent by God into the desert, to announce the coming of the Christ, that announcement had better be clear as a bell, and completely pristine in its truth content--the straighter the better. This brings us to the music part:

What is this message that every person is sent to preach to the cactus? Everyone has a different message, every one has a different angle of God to express. For me it was a truth encoded into the specialized language of music; there has never been any doubt in my mind that I was burdened with some message, some insight, some unique brand of expression that it was my duty to set forth somewhere, but, although I demanded precision from my self, I was not that clear about WHOSE precision I was expressing. Over the past ten years or so I have become more and more humble on the subject of talents--that is to say I have taken less and less personal credit for my accomplishments, because I have become more and more aware of the guiding hand of Jesus in all my creative endeavors.

It is a common, shallow misconception that art is SELF-expression. If the art is good, it is because it is alive, it infects us with its energy, it moves us with its truth. If art tells the truth, is is speaking the Word. Thus, the best art cannot at all be properly attributed to the artist from whom it came, but must forever be associated with its true source, the Word made flesh.

Every piece has a specific spiritual component--that is, every piece brings down, into the physical, a different articulation of heavenly truth--living truth. Even if nobody hears it, the empty desert will receive it with gladness, because the truth of the tree falling silently in the forest is not the truth of the Word: the Word makes a sound no matter who is there to hear. Thus, my voice in the wilderness was music, resounding through eternity, because it comes from God, and goes back to God. Heaven comes down, and makes a heaven of everything it touches;thus is the desert made heaven by the announcement of the coming.

One of the forces that consigned me to the desert was the fact that I have always been something of a loner. I have never fit in much of anywhere, so, at an early age, it was natural for me to don the disguise of an heroic Steppenwolf, a misunderstood genius, a victim of cruel fate and the insensitivity of the World. I thought about becoming a saint back then, because I thought that sounded romantic. The image of the undiscovered genius fed my feelings of self-pity and my disdain for my fellow man. Thus, I wrote music that was written not for real people, but for some elite class of musical initiates, some happy few who understood the secret code while most did not. Nobody bothered to tell that this elite class does not exist--don't get me started.

Thank God, at a certain point in my life, I began to shed some of my college-trained egotism, and began to see--even though all my grandiose unrealized fantasies of recognition and reward were false, empty, and corrupt--that I actually am a voice crying in the wilderness; I just have always been crying in the wrong wilderness. Or perhaps its was the wrong song?

Anyway, the point is that I was objectifying my audience--I was stuffing them into boxes, making them into types, categories, generalizations--and I was missing the real people. At a certain historical moment I realized this. Well, duh! So, I instantly stopped writing for some falsely imagined audience of perfect vessels for the acceptance of my sacred utterances, and started trying to reach real people out there in my actual world. Heaven came down. Well duh!

Still, while seeking to simplify--to make straight--, I continued to feel the need for high level thinking in my music; this need came from the insistence that things were not so simple as they were to my mother and her band of small-minded Nazarenes. The complexity of the music is, in many cases an ides of the NATURALNESS of the music. It is well understood that a photograph gains in quality with the number of pixels in its image. Thus, the finer the resolution of musical content, the more natural, therefore the more truthful. The problem is to tell the truth while still making it accessible to people; the problem is the problem of parable, the problem of myth. And what better context for myth than the desert? And what better medium of transformation than the "voice"?

The following is from Advent 3 Sermon: John the Monomaniac by Pastor Samuel Schuldheisz

John has nothing to say about himself. He is a voice. Yahweh’s mouth-piece.  It’s not about John; it’s about Jesus. So the prophet Isaiah speaks for him: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”

Christ is the Word.  John is the voice. The advent man, preparing you for the Coming One.  Repent. Make Straight. Jesus is coming.  John fits the definition of what most psychiatrists call a monomaniac – someone with an excessive interest and an irrational obsession with one subject: yes that’s John, a monomaniac about Christ. He’s content simply to announce the coming of the Lamb of God.

This is a long story, and I have had enough long stories for awhile, but the bottom line is this: my life's deepest energies have been spent finding ways to transcend the problem of the abstract in art, to reveal high-level abstract concepts in the process of enlivening flesh and blood vessels, such that every note of musico/mathematical sense is also dignified by the transforming energy of the divine, raising it from a noisy, vainglorious cry of egotistical territoriality, into an incarnation of the Christ Consciousness; thus, music transduces spirit, through the flesh, into human form. It is the humanity of music that is truly spiritual, because it is the human that is illuminated with heavenly light. To be a great artist, it was necessary for me to learn that: it is my own humanity that dignifies my music, not the dignity of art that makes it human. Every piece is an anomaly, every person who hears it is an unique undying soul.

Additionally, it must be noted that it has been more the direct, personal connection between me and other musicians that has enriched my creative output, than it has been the cloistered contemplation of the infinite in my ivory closet. My development as a voice crying in the wilderness (a voice that might be worth walking across the street to hear), has had to include a huge dose of humanizing flesh and blood to bring its origin in spirit through the Earth to Paradise. In other words, the people out here in the wilderness with me, had ears to hear, and hearts to touch, and I didn't need to sing to the bleachers in heaven after all--the folk were right there all the time.

Feelings of envy once crowded my heart, and I felt alone and betrayed by fate. I felt I deserved a bigger audience--I felt my message justified it. I didn't think about how indirectly the big shots in the city touch their devotees. I now know that a man with a message is only effective to the extent that his words fall on fertile--uh--ears. The message of spiritual truth can only be delivered up close and personal. Up close and personal is contrary to the rampant depersonalized character of this information age, and therefore MUST be a good thing. So, although some musicians make occasional contact with an occasional elite audience, I, out here ion the backwoods, make one on one contact with undying souls every day, and my message is always the same.

The following is from a sermon by Martin Luther from his Church Postil, 1520's taken from volume I:114-133 of The Sermons of Martin Luther, published by Baker Book House (Grand Rapids, MI). ]




The Witness and Confession of John the Baptist;
and the Spiritual Meaning of His Witness




I. THE WITNESS AND CONFESSION OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.



1. With many words the Evangelist describes and magnifies the testimony of John. Although it would have been sufficient if he had written of him, "He confessed," he repeats it and says, "He confessed and denied not." This was surely done in order to extol the beautiful constancy of John in a sore trial, when he was tempted to a flagrant denial of the truth. And now consider the particular circumstances.


2. First, there are sent to him not servants or ordinary citizens, but priests and Levites from the highest and noblest class, who were Pharisees, that is to say, the leaders of the people. Surely a distinguished embassy for a common man, who might justly have felt proud of such an honor, for the favor of lords and princes is highly esteemed in this world.


3. Secondly, they sent to him not common people, but citizens of Jerusalem, to wit, the capital, the sanhedrin, and the leaders of the Jewish nation. So it was as if the entire people came and did honor to him. What a wind that was! and how he might have been inflated, had he possessed a vain and worldly heart!


4. Thirdly, they do not offer him a present, nor ordinary glory, but the highest glory of all, the kingdom and all authority, being ready to accept him as the Christ. Surely a mighty and sweet temptation! For, had he not perceived that they wished to regard him as the Christ, he would not have said, "I am not the Christ." And Luke, 3,15-16, also writes that, when everybody thought he was the Christ, John spoke, "I am not he who you think I am, but I am being sent before him."


5. Fourthly, when he would not accept this honor they tried him with another, and were ready to take him for Elijah. For they had a prophecy in the last chapter of the prophet Malachi, where God says: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord; and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."


6. Fifthly, seeing that he would not be Elijah, they go on tempting him and offer him the homage due to an ordinary prophet, for since Malachi they had not had a prophet. John, however, remains firm and unshaken, although tried by the offer of so much honor.


7. Sixthly and lastly, not knowing of any more honors, they left him to choose, as to who or what he wished to be regarded, for they greatly desired to do him homage. But John will have none of this honor, and gives only this for an answer, that he is a voice calling to them and to everybody. This they do not heed. . . .
20. Some think the Jews here asked concerning that prophet of whom Moses writes in Deut. 18, 15: "The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me, etc." But this passage St. Peter in Acts 3, 22 and St. Stephen in Acts 7, 37 apply to Christ himself, which is the correct interpretation. The Jews also certainly held this prophet in equal esteem with Moses, above Elijah, and therefore understood him to be Christ. They asked John whether he was an ordinary prophet, like the others, since he was neither Christ nor Elijah. For they had had no prophet since the days of Malachi, who was the last and concluded the Old Testament with the above mentioned prophecy concerning the coming of Elijah. John therefore is the nearest to and first after Malachi, who in finishing his book points to him. - The Jews then asked whether he was one of the prophets. Christ likewise says of him, Math. 11, 9: "Wherefore went ye out? to see a prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet." And Matthew says in 21, 26, "All hold John as a prophet."

21. Now the question arises, Did John really confess the truth when he denied that he was Elijah or a prophet, whereas Christ himself called him Elijah and more than a prophet? He himself knew that he had come in the spirit and power of Elijah, and that the Scriptures called him Elijah. To say, therefore, that he did not consider himself a prophet because he was more than a prophet, is disgraceful and makes him an empty boaster. The truth of the matter is, that he simply and in a straightforward manner confessed the truth, namely, that he was not that Elijah about whom they asked, nor a prophet. For the prophets commonly led and taught the people, who sought advice and help from them. Such a one John was not and would not be, for the Lord was present, whom they were to follow and adhere to. He did not desire to draw the people to himself, but to lead them to Christ, which was needful before Christ himself came.

A prophet foretells the coming of Christ. John, however, shows him present, which is not a prophet's task. Just so a priest in the bishop's presence would direct the people away from himself to the bishop, saying, "I am not priest; yonder is your priest"; but in the bishop's absence he would rule the people in the place of the bishop.


22. John likewise directs the people away from himself to Christ. And although this is a higher and greater office than that of a prophet, yet it is not so on account of his merit, but on account of the presence of his Master. And in praising John for being more than a prophet, not his worthiness but that of his Master, who is present, is extolled. For it is customary for a servant to receive greater honor and reverence in the absence of his master than in his presence.


23. Even so the rank of a prophet is higher than that of John, although his office is greater and more immediate. For a prophet rules and leads the people, and they adhere to him; but John does no more than direct them away from himself to Christ, the present Master. Therefore, in the simplest and most straightforward manner, he denied being a prophet, although abounding in all the qualities of a prophet. This he did for the sake of the people, in order that they might not accept his testimony as the foretelling of a prophet and expect Christ in other, future times, but that they might recognize him as a forerunner and guide, and follow his guidance to the Lord, who was present. Witness the following words of the text:


"They said therefore unto him, Who art thou? that we, may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself ? He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said Isaiah the prophet."


24. This is the second part of his confession, in which he declares what he is, after having denied that he was Christ, or Elijah, or a prophet. As though he were to say, Your salvation is much too near for a prophet to be required. Do not strain your eyes so far out into the future, for the Lord of all the prophets is himself here, so that no prophet is needed.


The Lord is coming this way, whose forerunner I am; he is treading on my heels. I am not prophesying of him as a seer, but crying as a courier, to make room for him as he walks along. I do not say, as the prophets, "Behold, he is to come"; but I say, "Behold, he is coming, he is here. I am not bringing word about him, but pointing to him with my finger. Did not Isaiah long ago foretell that such a crying to make room for the Lord should go before him? Such I am, and not a prophet. Therefore, step aside and make room, permit the Lord himself to walk among you bodily, and do not look for any more prophecies about him."

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, June 14, 2011 by Chris Banescu

"

Each of us has a calling, a vocation, in life. Some discover their passion in their childhood or teen years and know from early on what they were meant to do. Some find their calling after reaching adulthood and encountering the real world. Some stumble unto their life’s work when faced with life-changing events, personal struggles, or tragedies. Some uncover their life’s passion in their old age, usually after retirement, when a growing awareness of their own mortality imbues them with a renewed sense of urgency and purpose. Tragically, many never find their life’s calling, either due to hardships, fear, or plain laziness; despite knowing what they should do, neither bothering to dedicate the time or energy required to follow their dreams, nor making the sacrifices necessary to fulfill their vocations.

By God’s immeasurable grace I am one of those blessed souls that has discovered his calling in life. I believe my vocation is to be a Voice Crying in the Wilderness, a messenger who strives to open men’s hearts and minds to timeless truths and principles, to help them discover what’s truly important in this life and in eternity. A messenger of the One who created everything in this universe, the laws that govern all matter and morality, the individual atoms and cells that make up my body and the soul that gives it life, and the very reason that allows me to think and write these words.

So it appears, once again that I am making a case for imitating the actions of people in the Bible by way of identifying with them and following their way. Why do I think that doing what people in the bible did is a good thing? Clearly there are some obnoxious fools haunting many a page of the Bible, and, to be sure, haunting many a pages of religious history. Still, if we can tell a hawk from a handsaw, we ought be able to tell a saint from a fool, and we ought to be able to tell which we should emulate. I feel that every accomplishment of men in the Bible is replicable by me--I claim my divine right to aspire to heavenly heights. Furthermore, I feel that the task of crying in the wilderness, of speaking the truth to no one, has more to it than meets the eye--there is a prayer uttered in silence that carries more weight than loud speeches in the vulgar and vulgarizing marketplace. I have come to see this calling as a privilege and a distinction equal or superior to the shallow trumpet calls of Earthly fame. It would be easy to conclude that this attitude is making lemonade out of sour grapes, but I really don't think so. I think that the people who are pissed off about being consigned to the desert, to preach to the dink-sized audiences there, have forgotten that the ears of God are everywhere, and that those ears hear our voices anywhere.

The following is a poem of mine on the subject of grasping.

Hands

Why supplicate with fingers curved above
Our heads, reaching, if not already giv'n in love?
What boon is worth the cost of asking
That is not within the scope of grasping
Hands?

Why weep you, stolid mourners on the highway,
For that which is waiting down below, the mainstay
Of all your trust and hope? A promise made in part
To bolster doubting faith and answer wishes of the heart
Made at the end of shattered dreams and busy plans
To fill our groping, empty hands?

The point here is that, a voice crying in the wilderness may sometimes feel alone, abandoned, betrayed, but, at the end of the day, the support of the Christ will always be there.

The following is a poem, on something of the same subject, by Rabindranath Tagore [trans. from Bengali], found in his

Fruit Gathering

, XXVIII).

Time after time I came to your gate with raised hands, asking for more and yet more.
You gave and gave, now in slow measure, now in sudden excess.
I took some, and some things I let drop; some lay heavy on my hands;
some I made into playthings and broke them when tired;
till the wrecks and the hoard of your gifts grew immense,
hiding you, and the ceaseless expectation wore my heart out.

Take, oh take–has now become my cry.
Shatter all from this beggar’s bowl:
put out this lamp of the importunate watcher:
hold my hands, raise me from the still-gathering heap of your gifts
into the bare infinity of your uncrowded presence.

Let us pray: Jesus, as we contemplate the silent desert, we realize that that silence is filled with the ears of God. Let us enter your presence in silence, and come out singing. Amen.
 

Truth Came by Jesus Christ

Truth Came by Jesus Christ

Last week we contemplated the circular relationships between grace, mercy, truth, and the Word suggested by John 1:14-17:

"14And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
 15John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.
 16And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.
17For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."

Today we will focus on that last bit, the "came by Jesus Christ" bit. We will consider the role of Jesus as the channel of Divine Truth in Its various forms, and how He functions as intercessor between us and the Father. We will list and discuss a number of distinct features of Jesus' incarnate personality that uniquely qualify Him to be our one and only intercessor to God. I say "uniquely" quite purposefully, because one of the cornerstones of Christian dogmatics is the firm FACT that Jesus is the ONLY Son of God. A lot of New Age philosophies include Jesus in a pantheon of great saints, but they disparage the idea that Jesus was the one and only manifestation of the Christ Consciousness; thus, He cannot, therefore, be the ONLY Son of God.

But even among New Agers there is disagreement about the position Jesus occupies in the Heavenly Choir, and there is an interesting story about how one important New Age philosophy became divided over this point. The "Denomination" Theosophy was created in the late 19th century by Madame Blavatsky; Rudolf Steiner was the head of the organization in Germany. There was happy agreement for some years, but Steiner eventually broke off from the main body of Theosophists to form the separate "denomination" Anthroposophy, precisely because the Theosophists would not recognize the unique position (again I emphasize the word "unique) of Jesus in the history of the world.

Of the many wondrous miracles we can contemplate, as we ponder the life and death of Jesus, no small one is how Jesus was deemed by God to be the one and only entity equal to the task of saving this sinful world. On the spiritual side He had the Love and the Light going for Him, and, on the physical side, He had the street smarts of a big-city boy. Not only an over-arching understanding of, but an interpenetrating IDENTIFICATION with, the men walking the earth. Can we even take in a faint glimmer of the glory that attends this magnanimous roar of power and intellect?

First I want to remind you of something I said last week:

"The phrase “I tell you the truth,” appears 79 times in Scripture, 78 times spoken by Jesus."

We may not always understand everything Jesus says to us; He may speak to us in dreams, or in symbols, or in some other elevated language, the sense of which lies just outside our ability to completely apprehend it; He may speak to us in subtle intimations, intuitions, pre-cognitions, and synchronicities--but however He speaks to us, we can always count on the essence of truth that will reside at the core of each and every utterance. We can also count on the flowering increase of power in the meaning, as we ourselves flower under the beneficent influence of heavenly illumination bestowed on us through grace, freely given, gratefully received.

There is something else that we can count on: the unique personality of Jesus-- the ego of Jesus that permeates our own identity and links us to the divine mind. Jesus' humanity provided the crucial connection between Him and the World, which, in turn, connected us to God. As a mediator, the hypostatic union of the human and the divine, in Jesus' dual nature, HAD to include a personality that the human mind could appreciate; as such, this personality had to have the best, the absolute IDEAL, of every possible human attribute. Once again God's choice is staggering to consider.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible gives a short list of some of the many attributes of Divine Grace which were the property of Jesus, but which He came to bestow on us:

"Full of grace and truth; that is, he dwelt among men, and appeared to have a fulness of each of these: for this clause is not to be joined with the glory of the only begotten, as if this was a branch of that; but regards him as incarnate, and in his office, as Mediator; who, as such, was full of "grace"; the Spirit, and the gifts of the Spirit; of all the blessings of grace, of justifying, pardoning, adopting, sanctifying, and persevering grace; of all the promises of grace; of all light, life, strength, comfort, peace, and joy: and also of truth, of all Gospel truths; and as he had the truth, the sum, and substance of all the types and prophecies concerning him in him; and as he fulfilled all his own engagements, and his Father's promises; and as possessed of sincerity towards men, and faithfulness and integrity to God. . ."

But before we get into the nitty gritty of Jesus' intercession for our sins, here is a little general background on the subject of intercession take from Wikipedia:

"Intercession of the saints is a Christian doctrine held by Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and some Anglican churches, that deceased saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary intercede (or pray) for believers, and that it is possible to ask deceased saints for their prayers. The doctrine of requesting intercession from deceased saints can be found in Christian writings from the 3rd century AD. The 4th century Apostles' Creed states belief in the communion of saints.

Biblical basis
Advocates of the doctrine say that Jesus' parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31 indicates the ability of the dead to pray for the living. On the basis of Christ's intercession for believers, who is present at the Right hand of God (Romans 8:34;Hebrews 7:25), it is argued by extension that other people who have died but are alive in Christ may be able to intercede on behalf of the petitioner(John 11:25;Romans 8:38–39). On the basis of other texts (Hebrews 2:11;Hebrews 10:10; 1 Timothy 2:1–5) it is argued that if those living here on earth can intercede on behalf of each other, then those already glorified in Heaven, and even closer "in Christ", are made holy as "one" unified through him (the mediator between God and men – on earth and heaven) by his sacrifice, can certainly intercede for those on earth as well.

Roman Catholic views
Roman Catholic Church doctrine supports intercessory prayer to saints. Intercessory prayer to saints also plays an important role in the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches. Also some Anglo-Catholics believe in saintly intercession. They may point to such Scriptural passages as Tobit 13:12–15, Revelation 5:8, or Revelation 8:3–4, which depict heavenly beings offering the prayers of mortals before God, and in addition to James 5:16 (where all those in heaven can be presumed to be living righteously), which states the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Both those for and against the intercession of saints quote Job 5:1

Intercessory prayer to saintly persons who have not yet been canonized is also practiced, and evidence of miracles produced as a result of such prayer is very commonly produced during the formal process of canonization.

Protestant views
"Scripture does not teach calling on the saints or pleading for help from them. For it sets before us Christ alone as mediator, atoning sacrifice, high priest, and intercessor."—Augsburg Confession, Article XXI.
Many Protestant churches strongly reject all saintly intercession, in accordance with verses like 1 Timothy 2:1–5, which says that Jesus is the sole mediator between God and man, as well as Deuteronomy 18:10-11 NIV, which seems to forbid invoking departed souls. They also point to the fact that there are no examples in the Bible of living humans praying to dead humans — Jesus Christ being the lone exception, because He is believed to be alive and resurrected, and because He is believed to be both human and Divine. The practice was attacked both by the Waldensians of the 12th century, and the various Gnostic Bogomil groups (including the Albigensians). The Calvinists and Zwinglians were particularly zealous in their rejection of saintly intercession.

Anglican views
William Tyndale had been an early opponent of the practice of praying to saints. The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) of the Church of England condemned the "invocation of saints" as "a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God" (Article XXII).

Lutheran views
Traditional Lutheran belief accounts that saints pray for the Church in general, but are not mediators of redemption. Martin Luther, the founder of Lutheranism, approved honouring the saints by saying they are honoured in three ways: firstly by thanking God for examples of His mercy; secondly by using the saints as example for strengthening our faith, and thirdly by imitating their faith and other virtues."

This, from the Theopedia, An Encyclopedia of Christianity, is an article about the issues that led to the Reformation, and the separation of the Lutheran brotherhood from the Catholic church. It turns out that the issue of saintly intercession was one of the dogmatic disagreements that tore the church apart into its numerous protestant denominations:

"Priesthood of all believers
The third great principle of the Reformation was the priesthood of all believers. The Scriptures teach that believers are a “holy priesthood,” 1 Pet. 2:5. All believers are priests before God through our great high priest Jesus Christ. “There is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus,” 1 Tim. 2:5. As believers, we all have direct access to God through Christ, there is no necessity for an earthly mediator. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox concept of the priesthood was seen as having no warrant in Scripture, viewed as a perversion and mis-application of the Old Testament Aaronic or Levitical priesthood which was clearly fulfilled in Christ and done away with by the New Testament.

As a result of these principles, the Reformers rejected the authority of the Pope, the merit of good works, indulgences, the mediation of Mary and the Saints, all but the two sacraments instituted by Christ (Baptism and the Lord’s Supper), the doctrine of transubstantiation,

(The Roman Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine, used in the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist, actually become the literal body and blood of Christ at the “consecration” by the ordained priest.)

the mass as a sacrifice, purgatory, prayers for the dead, confessions to a priest, the use of Latin in the services, and all the paraphernalia that expressed these ideas."

The following quotation from Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary develops the connection between the dual nature of the Word and Grace:

"John the Baptist came to bear witness concerning Jesus. Nothing more fully shows the darkness of men's minds, than that when the Light had appeared, there needed a witness to call attention to it. Christ was the true Light; that great Light which deserves to be called so. By his Spirit and grace he enlightens all that are enlightened to salvation; and those that are not enlightened by him, perish in darkness."

[Sidebar: The use, here, of the word "enlightened" is not accidental. We have noted, many times, the character of Heavenly energy as it descends into the physical dimension through light. We have talked about angels coming in the light. We talked about the spirit of Christmas coming through light. I'm just spit-balling here, but it may be that when the divine Mind descends into the physical, it first manifests itself in Light--light seen as the first form, in a sequence of many modulating forms, before it breaks down into other material forms. Thus, Jesus is the way the truth and the light. It is this heavenly illumination, that we Christians carry around with us, that sets us apart from the rest of the world--a world that has not petitioned for Jesus' protection.]

Back to Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary:

"Christ was in the world when he took our nature upon him, and dwelt among us. The Son of the Highest was here in this lower world. He was in the world, but not of it. He came to save a lost world, because it was a world of his own making. Yet the world knew him not. When he comes as a Judge, the world shall know him. Many say that they are Christ's own, yet do not receive him, because they will not part with their sins, nor have him to reign over them.
All the children of God are born again. This new birth is through the word of God as the means, and by the Spirit of God as the Author.

1st Peter 1:23

"Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever."

By his Divine presence Christ always was in the world. But now that the fulness of time was come, he was, after another manner, God manifested in the flesh. But observe the beams of his Divine glory, which darted through this veil of flesh. Men discover their weaknesses to those most familiar with them, but it was not so with Christ; those most intimate with him saw most of his glory. Although he was in the form of a servant, as to outward circumstances, yet, in respect of graces, his form was like the Son of God His Divine glory appeared in the holiness of his doctrine, and in his miracles. He was full of grace, fully acceptable to his Father, therefore qualified to plead for us; and full of truth, fully aware of the things he was to reveal."

I repeat: "He was full of grace, fully acceptable to his Father, therefore qualified to plead for us; and full of truth, fully aware of the things he was to reveal." This sentence says it all in a nutshell: coming from the Father, Jesus was the Father's gift of mercy to humanity, able both to forgive our lower nature its weaknesses and exalt our lower nature with revelations of eternal truth tailor-made for each specific individual in Creation.

But let's take a moment to think about "how", what is the precise mechanism used by Jesus to mediate for us. The Truth of the Word is transmitted to us through Divine Intercession, but what does that mean, exactly? Prayer is the the accepted technique that mainstream Christianity uses to connect with God, although the distinction between prayer, and the type of meditation many Eastern religions promote, is lost on me; unless it has solely to do with the fact that meditation attempts to open the heart by direct contact with the Word, while prayer gives the Word a name--Jesus. I am sure that many prayers are answered that are not addressed to Jesus by name, but I am equally sure that Jesus gets all His mail, even if it has the wrong address on it.

Indeed, people shouldn't fuss about the different forms that different cultures give to things; the people in those cultures are all attempting to reclaim the divine in themselves, just like we are. Do you really think Jesus would reject the open-hearted devotee because he used the wrong NAME? Anyway, people who thus complain are not taking into account the magnitude of the Christ Consciousness, which includes a vast network of angels who disseminate divine energy like rain. The word "angel" has sometimes been equated with the word "angle"; thus, an angel is an angle of God, a teensy corner of the divine mind that reaches out and down into every made thing. Do you really think that there is a prayer anywhere, breathed in silent privacy, that is unheard? The angels are included in the structure of the Christ Consciousness, so what they hear, He hears. Thus all prayers sent to heaven via a saint or any other celestial entity, eventually go through Jesus. If you think about it that way, the whole issue of the intercession of saints becomes moot.

1 Timothy 2:5

"For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;"

From New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia

"Mediator defined
A mediator is one who brings estranged parties to an amicable agreement. In New Testament theology the term invariably implies that the estranged beings are God and man, and it is appropriated to Christ, the One Mediator. When special friends of God — angels, saints, holy men — plead our cause before God, they mediate "with Christ"; their mediation is only secondary and is better called intercession. Moses, howover, is the proper mediator of the Old Testament (Galatians 3:19-20).

Christ the Mediator
St. Paul writes to Timothy (1 Timothy 2:3-6) . . . "God our Saviour, Who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus: Who gave himself a redemption for all, a testimony in due times." The object of the mediatorship is here pointed out as the salvation of mankind, and the imparting of truth about God. The mediator is named: Christ Jesus; His qualification for the office is implied in His being described as man, and the performance of it is ascribed to His redeeming sacrifice and His testifying to the truth. All this originates in the Divine Will of "God our Saviour, Who will have all men to be saved". Christ's mediatorship, therefore, occupies the central position in the economy of salvation: all human souls are both for time and eternity dependent on Christ Jesus for their whole supernatural life. "Who [God the Father] hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, In whom we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins; Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature . . . all things were created by him and in him. And he is before all and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he may hold the primacy: Because in him, it hath well pleased the Father, that all fulness should dwell; And through him to reconcile all things unto himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on earth, and the things that are in heaven". (Colossians 1:13-20)

Qualifications
The perfection of a mediator is measured by his influence with the parties he has to reconcile, and this power flows from his connection with both: the highest possible perfection would be reached if the mediator were substantially one with both parties. A mother, for instance, is the best mediator between her husband and her son. But the matrimonial union of "two in one flesh", and the union of mother and child are inferior in perfection to the hypostatic union of the Son of God with human nature. Husband, mother, son, are three persons; Jesus Christ, God and man, is only one person, identical with God, identical with man. Moreover, the hypostatic union makes Him the Head of mankind and, therefore, its natural representative. By His human origin Christ is a member of the human family, a partaker of our flesh and blood (Hebrews 2:11-15); by reason of His Divine Personality, He is "the image and likeness of God" to a degree unapproached by either man or angel. The Incarnation establishing between the First-born and His brethren a real kinship or affinity, Christ becomes the Head of the human family, and the human family acquires a claim to participate in the supernatural privileges of their Head, "Because we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones." (Ephesians 5:30). Such was the expressed will of God: "But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent his Son, made of a woman . . . that we might receive the adoption of sons." (Galatians 4:4-5; also Romans 8:29) The man Christ Jesus, therefore, who was designed by God to mediate between Him and mankind, and whose mediatorship was not accidental and delegated, but inherent in His very being, was endowed with all the attributes required in a perfect mediator.

Christ's function as mediator necessarily proceeds from His human nature as principium quo operandi; yet it obtains its mediating efficacy from the Divine nature, i.e. from the dignity of an acting person. Its first object, as commonly stated, is the remission of sin and the granting of grace, whereby the friendship between God and man is restored. This object is attained by the worship of infinite value which is offered to God by and through Christ. Christ, however, is mediator on the side of God as well as on the side of man: He reveals to man Divine truth and Divine commands; He distributes the Divine gifts of grace and rules the world. St. Paul sums up this two-sided mediation in the words: ". . . consider the apostle and high priest of our confession, Jesus" (Heb. iii, I); Jesus is the Apostle sent by God to us, the high priest leading us to God."

Notice, above, the expression "yet it obtains its mediating efficacy from the Divine nature". In other words, the POWER of spirit (to move, to transform, to enlighten, etc.) is embedded in the Christ's divine nature, but the self-limiting INTELLECT, that speaks to our puny brains, comes precisely from the HUMAN personalty (remember the IDEAL HUMAN personality), that Jesus dons, like a raincoat, in order to bring us His truth. The Mind of God jump starts the Mind of Man, and Jesus is the cable.

Christ the Mediator, By Rev. Oliver Hart, Pastor, Hopewell Baptist Church, N. J. The ministers and messengers of the several Baptist churches, met in Association, at Philadelphia, October 22d, 1782.

"Again, Christ, as Mediator, not only kept the law inviolable, but he died the cursed death of the cross, to atone for the sins of his people. Without shedding of blood there could be no remission. And as the blood of slain beasts was insufficient to cleanse from sin, Christ offered his own,
Heb. 9: 12

"Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood, he entered once into the holy place: having obtained eternal redemption for us."

1 John 1:7

"The blood of Jesus Christ,"

(being the blood of the Son of God, hath a divine efficacy, and)

"cleanseth from all sin."

But, not only did Jesus suffer in his body, he endured infinitely greater torture in his soul. His bodily sufferings were indeed great, beyond compare. In this view, he was emphatically "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief," Isa. liii. 3. His wounded, mangled, bruised body, was so changed from what it had been, as to excite astonishment in the beholders. "As many were astonished at thee. His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons [of] men," Isa. lii. 14. So distorted were his limbs, as to extract from him this grievous complaint; "My bones are all out of joint. I may tell all my bones, they look and stare upon me," Psalm xxii. 14-17.

Let imagination paint to faith's view the innocent Jesus, clothed in a robe of mock majesty, enveloped round with invidious foes taunting and jeering at him, spitting on his face, smiting it with their hands, piercing his head with a crown of thorns, plowing furrows, long and deep, on his back, with a whip of wires; driving iron spikes through his hands and feet, nailing them to the cross, and thus suspending him between heaven and earth, exposed naked to the inclement rays of a burning sun, a spectacle to men and angels. Thus behold the agonizing Jesus, and judge whether there were ever any sorrows like unto his sorrows, or pains comparable to those he endured.

But, after all, the sufferings of his soul were infinitely superior to these. These he bore -- those he deprecated. Apprehensions of the divine wrath, which was to fall on his soul, caused his human nature to shrink, and drew from him these mournful accents, "Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father save me from this hour," John xii. 27. And when the vials of wrath began to be poured out upon him, he was in an agony -- sweat great drops of blood, and said, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt," Luke xxii. 44; Matt. xxvi. 38, 39. And when his soul was made an offering for sin, and divine wrath was poured out upon him to the uttermost, he cried out, "My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?" Matt. xxvii. 46.

Thus Jesus, the Mediator, suffered for us men, and for our salvation. Thus he died, commending his spirit into the hands of his heavenly Father, Heb. ii. 10. And that his humiliation might be reduced to the lowest degree, he was laid in the grave, where he continued three days and three nights, but his body "saw no corruption." On the third day he arose from the dead; for it was not in the power of the grave to hold him. Though he had been put to death in the flesh, he was quickened by the Spirit, Heb. iii. 18. ... "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept," 1 Cor. xv. 20. After his resurrection he continued many days on earth, showing himself to his disciples; comforting, encouraging, and confirming them; and then "ascended up on high, leading captivity captive;" when the everlasting doors were opened to receive the King of glory; and the heavenly arches rang with joyful acclamations; shouting, The Redeemer! God the Father manifested his approbation of all that he had done, and the high esteem he had for him as Mediator, by placing him at his right hand, "Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named," Eph. ii, 21. There the Mediator now sits, pleading the value of his merits on behalf of his chosen people; and we may be sure that "he is able to save them to the uttermost, that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them," Heb, vii. 25."

This sermon makes it clear that the unique character of Jesus' self-sacrifice totally validates Jesus' claim to the post of Mediator; a post given in reward for an appropriate sacrifice--for the shedding of higher-quality-than-calf's blood. However, this passage is also fun, because of its colorful language and vivid description of the crucifixion. The ideal character of Jesus's incarnate personality is glorified and exalted by such language as this, the language of tales and legends; and, rightly so, for, as the ideal man, every single thing He did became a myth; and through prayer and supplication, we too can partake of the ideal Man and become mythologized ourselves.


On the subject of myth, I cannot imagine the suffering that Jesus went through--and my inability to imagine it, is what gives it its vast cosmic resonance, is what elevates it to the level of a true myth. The importance, and the near-impossibility of the whole thing makes it more than something that just HAPPENED, it lifts it outside time and makes it become something that ALWAYS HAPPENED. Let's face it, Jesus was not the only guy that was cruelly, shamefully crucified that year; I'll bet he was not even the only INNOCENT man crucified year. What makes His crucifixion such a magnificent act is not the depth of the insult to which He was subjected, but the HEIGHT from which He had to descend. For the Royal King of Creation to lower Himself, of His own accord, to the lowest of the lowest possible ignominies, is an act of humility of such grandiose cosmic proportions, it makes all other human acts pale in significance. We can attach symbolic significance to the sacrifice of a good man in a story, but there is no symbol capable of supporting the weight of the Christ laying Himself down on the cross to spare each and every one of us the just punishment for our sins.

The Grand Miracle, by Johan D. Tangelder, September, 2008, is about the miracle of the virgin birth of Jesus. Its argument is one more justification for the unique authority Jesus claims to intercede for us:

"What difference does it make whether or not we believe in the truth of Christ's miraculous birth? The difference is either despair or hope. Through this great miracle, God has made salvation possible for human beings separated from God by the awful abyss of sin. The Gospel is the movement from God to man. It does not tell the story of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about, man. The Gospel is not about human beings finding God on their own – to be better and better disciples – but God reaching to human beings. We cannot reach God in our own strength. We can do a lot of things, even go to the moon and Mars, but we cannot save ourselves. Salvation is the work of God (John 3:16). No one can attain to eternal life, except through the mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ. (John 14:6). Human death was the result of sin and the triumph of Satan. To overcome sin and death, the Incarnate Son of God lived, suffered, and died on a cross. This is the ultimate testimony to His humanity.

Jesus is also our Immanuel which means, "God with us" (Isa. 7:14). It means that God is not a distant deity who lives in glorious isolation. He is neither cold nor inaccessible. Believing in Christ means to trust Him to know what to do when a problem or a crisis arises. On the one hand, it is encouraging to know that when we turn to Jesus with our problems, He understands us because He is like us. On the other hand, we may rejoice because this Jesus is so much more than we are. He is the sinless Son of God, and thus, with divine power, He can sustain those who trust in Him. We can trust Him to help us when we are in trouble."

From C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity we get yet another justification for Jesus' authority to intercede for us:

“… The second person in God, the Son, became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man – a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular colour, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a Woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.”
The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life, derived from his Mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the divine Son. Thus in one instance humanity had, so to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, ‘killed,’ He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn – poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being this killed – killed every day in a sense – the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the first time we saw a real man. One tin soldier – real tin, just like the rest – had come fully and splendidly alive.”

I repeat, "you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be. . . . For the first time we saw a real man." Thus it is Jesus' humanity, not His divinity, that gives us access to Him, and through Him to the Father.

To remind you of an important point I made last week:

"Thus, we seem to have run full circle: the law, the flesh, the truth, and the deliverance from the flesh--they all come from the Word. We are all participating in a continuously revolving cosmic flow, a revolving door, or, better, a revolving escalator that is constantly moving between, and stopping off at, different floors--different stages on a continuum that extends from the higher to the lower and back again, in a unending circular modulation. Which floor we stop at is a function of some over-arching cosmic rhythm, similar, I'm sure, on a macrocosmic level, to the rhythm involved in the the re-centering epiphanic experience. But regardless of the rhythm, and the level on which we find ourselves at any particular moment, (in the sequential series of time), we must remember that Jacob's vision at Bethel involves angels going up AND down the divine escalator to heaven. Truth is given to us through Grace, as a mercy, a way of dealing with material reality; the Truth is an articulation, a limitation, of the Word; Truth takes the mind-boggling vastness of the Eternal and breaks it down into terms that our human minds can sort of comprehend. In terms of the purpose for Truth, its reason for being, I can think of no more important function than its ability to push us onto the escalator: it is an instruction manual for jumping onto the escalator. Thus, the best Truth is not a single, static, constant entity, like the law, but is, rather, an ever-changing and evolving kaleidoscope of forms; it is shaped by the inconstant, anomalous rhythm of the heart, just like every other aspect of our multi-dimensional existence."

Is it Jesus's Truth or the Truth of Jesus, that opens the doors to heaven? I don't know--I guess it depends on which way you are looking. But I do know that this declension is going to occupy my thought for some time to come: us--truth--the Word--Jesus--God.

Let us pray. Jesus sometimes it seems that the more we try to understand You, the further we get from true understanding. Then we remember to feel your tender embrace, always patient, always ready, and we can sleep, and we can dream. Amen.

Grace and Truth

Grace and Truth

Call to Worship:

"What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."
Francis Bacon

Today's sermon is based on John 1:14-17

"14And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
 15John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.
 16And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.
17For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."

Today we will discuss the law, grace, and truth, though not necessarily in that order. Since we have been dealing for the past several weeks with the "Word", it seems appropriate to begin with truth--expressed by and/or contained within the Word. There are many scriptures dealing with truth--too many to include in a single sermon, or, indeed, in twenty sermons. The phrase “I tell you the truth,” appears 79 times in Scripture, 78 times spoken by Jesus. He is the truth, and he tells the truth, so we can fully trust everything He says, although we may not always understand everything He says. Thus, the question is what is truth, and how must we wait for an answer?

John 17:17 says this:

"Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth."

Clearly, the Word and Truth are equivalent, in some sense, but not in another. Just as, in the beginning, the Word was with God and the Word was God, we have no doubt (Luther certainly has no doubt) that God came first, if anything outside time can be thought of as coming first. Likewise, the Word precedes the Truth, just as at the essence precedes the application. Thus Truth is a quality of the Word; like perfection, it is both constantly aspired to, AND it is ultimately unattainable by the human mind. However, it has a resonance that the devotee trained in spiritual sensitivities can recognize and partially apprehend. Steiner would say we experience the Truth of divine reality with our spiritual organs, as it is imprinted, for instance, on the astral body. This idea harmonizes with the idea that the Truth sanctifies the devotee with its heightened reality; the impact of spiritual energy on our physical bodies exalts the physical body and raises if from mere flesh to true humanity--a transcendent form of material reality; you might say that human reality is spiritual reality in transit. All these ideas are part and parcel to the concept of the Word becoming flesh.

John 3:21 says this:

"But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God."

In this text, we encounter the familiar equation of the "Word" with "Creation"--the power of the True Word manifests divine reality in physical form. Divine Light motivates earthly deeds that radiate Heavenly Truth.

John 16:13 says this:

"Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth: for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak: and He will shew you things to come."

Here Jesus is described as the "Spirit of Truth"; as such He merely Listens to the cosmic vibrations of the Eternal and speaks the Word echoing in the Mind of God. This channeling of the Word into material reality not only conveys reliable truth about the essence of existence, the Eternal now, It prophesies "things to come". As we have mentioned many times, the Truth of Eternity spoken by Jesus comes from outside time, from a place where everything happens at once, where everything has already happened and will always happen. It should then be no surprise that prophecy is part of the package. My personal experience of the counsels of Jesus, that come to me in prayer, includes subtle, and sometimes not so subtle hints about my future. Indeed, lost in the personality of Jesus, I can see vast terrains of sequential time spreading out and away from me in both directions, past and future. This is part of the Truth spoken by the Father, through the Son, to me.

Now, how are Truth and Grace connected?

The Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary provides a wonderful substitution for the word "Grace" which is very meaningful to me:

"Full of grace and truth-So it should read: "He dwelt among us full of grace and truth"; or, in Old Testament phrase, "Mercy and truth," denoting the whole fruit of God's purposes of love towards sinners of mankind, which until now existed only in promise, and the fulfillment at length of that promise in Christ; in one great word, "the SURE MERCIES of David".

Isaiah 55:3;

"Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David."

Acts 13:34;

"And as concerning that he raised him up from the dead, [now] no more to return to corruption, he said on this wise, I will give you the sure mercies of David."
"In His Person all that Grace and Truth which had been floating so long in shadowy forms, and darting into the souls of the poor and needy its broken beams, took everlasting possession of human flesh and filled it full. By this Incarnation of Grace and Truth, the teaching of thousands of years was at once transcended and beggared, and the family of God sprang into Manhood."

The word "Grace" always implies, to me, an indulgence, a free gift; but the term "Mercy" seems to include the idea of deliverance from a horrible fate. Indeed, "deliver us from evil" is one of the key phrases in the Lord's Prayer, and brings with it the hope that we sinners will not get what we deserve.

The expression "sure mercies" is interesting as well; the word "sure" seems to imply some kind of guarantee, a promise. God's covenant with David gives the devotee absolute confidence in his own ultimate redemption, regardless of his current physical state in time. Such a deal.


Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible expands on the idea of mercy, or gifts of the spirit:

"Full of grace and truth; that is, he dwelt among men, and appeared to have a fulness of each of these: for this clause is not to be joined with the glory of the only begotten, as if this was a branch of that; but regards him as incarnate, and in his office, as Mediator; who, as such, was full of "grace"; the Spirit, and the gifts of the Spirit; of all the blessings of grace, of justifying, pardoning, adopting, sanctifying, and persevering grace; of all the promises of grace; of all light, life, strength, comfort, peace, and joy: and also of truth, of all Gospel truths; and as he had the truth, the sum, and substance of all the types and prophecies concerning him in him; and as he fulfilled all his own engagements, and his Father's promises; and as possessed of sincerity towards men, and faithfulness and integrity to God. . ."

From the Geneva Study Bible we get yet another interesting slant on the Incarnate Word:

"This word as does not indicate here a likeness, but rather the truth of the matter, for his meaning is this, that we saw such a glory which suited and was proper for the true and only begotten Son of God, who is Lord and King over all the world.

He was not only a partaker of grace and truth, but was full of the very substance of grace and truth."

I find the expression "substance of grace and truth" to be provocative; how, indeed can spiritual reality obtain "substance" other than by being made flesh? Thus, once again, we encounter an equivalency between the lower and the upper vibratory material of Creation. We have encountered this concept several times in the recent discussions of the Word made flesh.

Deepak Chopra takes the idea even further in his Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul:

"Every spiritual tradition invokes our so-called higher self, the side of human nature that the soul stands for. We recognize ourselves in the love Jesus preached, and in the compassion espoused by Buddha. Every spiritual tradition also makes it clear that our so-called lower nature, identified with sin and ignorance, must be transformed. Unfortunately, the choice is presented in a way that is unhelpful. How can you adopt love when you are told at the same time that your lower nature is sinful? Condemning the lower self is the opposite of love. How can you adopt peace when you are told at the same time to fight against temptation? You wind up being trapped in your divided nature instead of healing it. . . The whole business of making a stark contrast between the lower and higher self is futile to begin with. There is no separate, all good, all wise part of you that you must either win or lose. Life is one flow of awareness."

Thus, Chopra proclaims, in a way, the same equality of the lower and higher aspects of Man's multi-dimensional being we saw in several readings from the past few sermons:

From Andrewes:

"Besides, from the flesh, as from Eve, came the beginning of transgression, longing after the forbidden fruit, refused the Word quite; . . . But there is a kind of necessity to use the term flesh. If He had said man, man might be taken for a person. He took no person, but our nature He took. Flesh is no person but nature only, and so best expresseth it. And if soul, it might have been taken, as if He took not the flesh but mediante anima (by means of the soul); but so He did not but as immediately and as soon the flesh as the soul, in one instant both."

From the Requiem Mass:

"Remember, merciful Jesus,
that I am the cause of thy way:
lest thou lose me in that day."

[Sidebar: I need to provide a little context for this quote. The Requiem text is all about the Day of Judgment; it is kind of like a courtroom drama, where the soul on trial is making a case for his salvation. As he asks for mercy, one of the arguments he makes, in his defense, is the idea that without his sin, Jesus would have no reason for being there at all. Hence, "I am the cause of thy way" means that, without us, Jesus would have no purpose. Thus, once again, the inter-relatedness of the Word and the flesh is suggested.]

And from The Confession of Chalcedon, also known as the Doctrine of the Hypostatic Union or the Two-Nature Doctrine:

"The Definition defines that Christ is 'acknowledged in two natures', which 'come together into one person and hypostasis'. The formal definition of 'two natures' in Christ was understood by the critics of the council at the time, and is understood by many historians and theologians today, to side with western and Antiochene Christology and to diverge from the teaching of Cyril of Alexandria, who always stressed that Christ is 'one'."

This subject always reminds me of the story of the guru who disappeared one day from the ashram; his disciples looked for him for several weeks only to find him, eventually, sitting on a dung heap with a big fat smile on his face. They asked him why he was sitting so contentedly in cow poop, and he replied, "If God is everywhere in all things, why not here as well as anywhere else?"

The following quotation from Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary develops the connection between the dual nature of the Word and Grace:

"John the Baptist came to bear witness concerning Jesus. Nothing more fully shows the darkness of men's minds, than that when the Light had appeared, there needed a witness to call attention to it. Christ was the true Light; that great Light which deserves to be called so. By his Spirit and grace he enlightens all that are enlightened to salvation; and those that are not enlightened by him, perish in darkness.

Christ was in the world when he took our nature upon him, and dwelt among us. The Son of the Highest was here in this lower world. He was in the world, but not of it. He came to save a lost world, because it was a world of his own making. Yet the world knew him not. When he comes as a Judge, the world shall know him. Many say that they are Christ's own, yet do not receive him, because they will not part with their sins, nor have him to reign over them.

All the children of God are born again. This new birth is through the word of God as the means, and by the Spirit of God as the Author.

1st Peter 1:23

"Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever."

By his Divine presence Christ always was in the world. But now that the fulness of time was come, he was, after another manner, God manifested in the flesh. But observe the beams of his Divine glory, which darted through this veil of flesh. Men discover their weaknesses to those most familiar with them, but it was not so with Christ; those most intimate with him saw most of his glory. Although he was in the form of a servant, as to outward circumstances, yet, in respect of graces, his form was like the Son of God His Divine glory appeared in the holiness of his doctrine, and in his miracles. He was full of grace, fully acceptable to his Father, therefore qualified to plead for us; and full of truth, fully aware of the things he was to reveal."

I repeat: "He was full of grace, fully acceptable to his Father, therefore qualified to plead for us; and full of truth, fully aware of the things he was to reveal." This sentence says it all in a nutshell: coming from the Father, Jesus was the Father's gift of mercy to humanity, able both to forgive our lower nature its weaknesses and exalt our lower nature with revelations of eternal truth tailor-made for each specific individual in Creation. Next week we will go deeper into the role of Jesus as the channel of Divine Truth in Its various forms, and how He functions as intercessor between us and the Father.

The following is from The Concepts of Original Sin and Grace
A Lecture By Rudolf Steiner, Munich, 3rd May, 1911.

"Man cannot rise again to the Spiritual by merely talking about the Spirit but only by taking the Spirit into himself in the living, personal form presented to him in the Events of Palestine, in the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus does man rise upwards again under the influence of the Christ Impulse. In no other way can abstract ideals be invested with the force of personality than by allowing the Christ Impulse to permeate the whole of our spiritual life. If on the one side, through guilt incurred before the development of the ego, we have burdened ourselves with what is called Original Sin, if there we have something for which we cannot be held wholly responsible, neither are we ourselves responsible for the fact that it is possible to draw the Christ to ourselves. Our ego plays a part in what we do or endeavour to do in order to come near to Christ, and there we can truly speak of merit.

But the fact that Christ is present, that we are living on a planet where He once dwelt and in times after this actually happened — this is not due to any merit of our own. Therefore what flows from the Living Christ in order to bring us upwards again into the spiritual world, comes from beyond the sphere of the ego and draws us upwards as irresistibly as we incurred guilt without ourselves being guilty. Through Christ's existence on earth we have the strength to rise again into the spiritual world without merit of our own, just as we incurred guilt without sin of our own. Neither fact has to do with the element of personality in which the ego lives, but both are connected with happenings that precede and follow the coming of the ego. Man has evolved from a state of existence when he had only physical body, etheric body and astral body, and he evolves further through transforming his astral body into Manas (Spirit-Self). Just as man has worsened his astral body through incurring Original Sin, so he heals it again through the Christ Impulse. An inflowing power repairs the astral body to the same extent to which it has deteriorated. That is the Atonement, that is what in the true sense is called ‘Grace’. Grace is the concept that is complementary to that of Original Sin. So the Christ Impulse has made it possible for man to become one with Christ, to say with St. Paul: ‘Not I, but Christ in me’, thus giving expression to everything that is designated by the concept of Grace."

This selection draws a connection between the lower nature of the flesh and original sin. Perhaps original sin and the Word are not so far apart. Steiner speaks, above, of the personal form of the Word--the fleshy form, the ego form--and is not the descent of spirit into flesh very much the definition of original sin? In fact Steiner, indicates that it is the ego that is empowered with the ability to apprehend and absorb the Christ Consciousness into itself. The ego is the manifestation of the Christ Consciousness in the flesh, just as Truth is the manifestation of the Word in material reality. There is no material consciousness without the ego--this is what we gained from our expulsion from Paradise. Thus, the source of Man's separation from Paradise and the medium through which he may regain access to Paradise are the exact same entity. Furthermore, the complicated processes of losing and regaining Paradise are all made available to us through the power of Grace to transform the justice of the law into the justice of the heart. Everybody is familiar with the truism, "life is not fair". Many things point to this. However, perhaps in terms of the big picture, life is fair, and more fair than fair.

Continuing on with the subject of truth, I think it is not inappropriate to review the concept of parable as the conveyor of truth. As we have concluded before, the parable allows teensy little bits of literal truth to seep into the corners of the human mind, whose powers of apprehension are too limited to take in the vastness of eternal truth. We have concluded many times that the imagery of parables, with their various levels of meaning, make various levels of truth accessible to devotees of various levels of mental capacity.

In the following excerpts I am attempting to draw a connection between the truth of the parable and the truth of the myth. Remember, in our discussions of the Parable from some weeks ago, we suggested the possibility that the multi-dimensional structure of the Parable is what allows it to speak universally to all the various consciousness levels of the multi-dimensional structure of Man --that every level of meaning to be found in the parables resonates with some different level of consciousness in different men.

Mathew 13:19



"When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart."

Here, Jesus is recapitulating one of the main themes of the parable: that seeds ungerminated in the heart, easily fall prey to the tempter. I think Jesus is saying that: the plain truth spoken in the ear of those not ready to receive it, makes them more vulnerable to Satan's power to twist and corrupt, than when there is just a vague understanding glimmering on the edge of their consciousness. When there is a grain of truth in what we hear, the lies of Satan, snaking around the sense of it, can misdirect it more easily than if we give him nothing to work with. Jesus is telling us to take care what we think, because Satan's towering intellect can insinuate its way into our heads in the most subtle and damning ways. Furthermore, He is telling us that He Himself is being careful not to open His congregation's mind to the whispering seductions of Satan's minions, by feeding it with dimly perceived half truths, which demons can falsify and grotesquely vulgarize. Indeed, it is clear that Jesus does not have a very high opinion of the common man's ability to get what He is saying, and is giving this warning therefore, not from a superior attitude, but, rather, from a quite protective one, shielding the folk, as it were, from too much truth, too soon.

So, let us hasten to remind you that there is no question of whether a parable or a myth is true. We KNOW it is true. The question is, rather, what is the quality of that truth? Which level of Man's multi-dimensional personality does it speak to?


This quotation from the internet article Movies, Myth and Preaching, by Dwight Longenecker, quotes, in turn, Freud, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Joseph Campbell:

"Sigmund Freud wrote, "The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognise them as truth." Joseph Campbell realised that "the old teachers...told the Truth not in obtuse religious jargon, but in the exciting and mysterious language of myth.

[Sidebar: Substitute the word "parable" for "myth", and we are firmly on the same page.]

Myth and Truth
J.R.R.Tolkien--a devout Catholic--understood the power of myth as well. In his biography of Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter relates Tolkien's conversation with C.S.Lewis which led to the great man's conversion.

Lewis had come to believe in God, but could not relate to Jesus' 2,000 year-old death. Lewis shared Tolkien's excitement with myth, and understood how myth interests and involves the audience in a vicarious way. Tolkien asked Lewis why he couldn't transfer his appreciation of sacrifice from the myth to the true story.

"But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through with silver."

"No." said Tolkien "They are not. You call a tree a tree, and you think nothing more of the word, but it was not a tree until you gave it a name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about Truth."

Tolkien went on to explain that although the myths were woven through with error, they also reflected a fragment of the true light as well. The light began to dawn for Lewis: "Then the story of Christ," he said,"is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened."

For Lewis, the myths were testimony of the 'true light that enlightens every man.' (Jn.1.9) They looked forward to the 'true myth' of the gospel. The stories of incarnate gods, annual deaths and risings all echoed forward the story of Christ.

The Old Testament stories with their typology of Christ looked forward in a different way. Here the stories had a symbolic, legendary and mythic quality, but they were locked into history--pointing in a way no pagan myth could--to the myth become fact in Jesus Christ."

Here are some more quotes on the subject of myth by several famous writers:

Ambrose Bierce

"MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later."

George Orwell:

"Myths which are believed in tend to become true."

(Or, truth, that transcends the language and time of its origin, becomes myth.-RFT)

Joseph Campbell:

"The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth."

Bertrand Russell:

"What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."

Thus, the belief in myth is grounded not in the logical mind of the ego, which is always screwing up its facts anyway, but in the instincts of Man's higher self, his higher desires, his intuition of the truth that is more true than the literal truth.

On the subject of LITERAL TRUTH we must return to something we mentioned quite briefly in passing, at the beginning of this sermon, and which has not been referred to since: THE LAW.

Considering Martin Luther's obsession with the pre-eminence of Grace as the primal cosmic power, it is no surprise that he makes the following disparaging comment about the law in his sermon on the Parable of the Sower, found in THE SERMONS OF MARTIN LUTHER, VOL. II., SECTION I. THE NATURE OF THE WORD SPOKEN HERE.




"This Gospel treats of the disciples and the fruits, which the Word of God develops in the world. It does not speak of the law nor of human institutions; but, as Christ himself says, of the Word of God, which he himself the sower preaches, for the law bears no fruit, just as little as do the institutions of men."

It is a clarifying thought that the law bears no fruit. When you put it like that, that law can be seen as some kind of sustaining or stabilizing force whose function is to keep things in balance without actually adding anything to the mix--it takes Grace to do that--it takes the Messiah to do that. While the law is static, inflexible, Grace moves us outside time to a place where the heart can make up its own rules whenever it is moved (I say MOVED) to do so.

John 1:17

"For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."

Another way of saying this might be, "For the law came from Adam, but Mercy came from Jesus." The original sin of flesh came from the creation of Man by the Word, but Man's deliverance from the flesh also came from the Word.


Thus, we seem to have run full circle: the law, the flesh, the truth, and the deliverance from the flesh--they all come from the Word. We are all participating in a continuously revolving cosmic flow, a revolving door, or, better, a revolving escalator that is constantly moving between, and stopping off at, different floors--different stages on a continuum that extends from the higher to the lower and back again, in a unending circular modulation. Which floor we stop at is a function of some over-arching cosmic rhythm, similar, I'm sure, on a macrocosmic level, to the rhythm involved in the the re-centering epiphanic experience. But irregardless of the rhythm, and the level on which we find ourselves at any particular moment, (in the sequential series of time), we must remember that Jacob's vision at Bethel involves angels going up AND down the divine escalator to heaven. Truth is given to us through Grace, as a mercy, a way of dealing with material reality; the Truth is an articulation, a limitation, of the Word; Truth takes the mind-boggling vastness of the Eternal and breaks it down into terms that our human minds can sort of comprehend. In terms of the purpose for Truth, its reason for being, I can think of no more important function than its ability to push us onto the escalator: it is an instruction manual for jumping onto the escalator. Thus, the best Truth is not a single, static, constant entity, like the law, but is, rather, an ever-changing and evolving kaleidoscope of forms; it is shaped by the inconstant, anomalous rhythm of the heart, just like every other aspect of our multi-dimensional existence.

Let us pray: Jesus, open our eyes that we may see glimpses of truth Thou hast for us; open our eyes illumine us, Spirit Divine. Amen.