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Sunday, August 26, 2001
"Human reason is antagonistic to Spiritual Truth."
This
week's message is taken from "The Thunder of Silence" by Joel
S. Goldsmith, however, some of the material presented here has been
paraphrased. His words, although not mine, are a reflection of my
own belief regarding the ministry of Jesus.
For hundreds of years before Moses,
the Hebrews had been living in a state of slavery with little or no
opportunity to make advances in education, culture, religion, art, or
the sciences; and under such circumstances it is not surprising that
they were living without any greatly developed moral sense. To
these people, Moses presented a higher way of life, the backbone of
which was the Ten Commandments. If those commandments were obeyed,
a person was considered as fine a type of citizen as could be expected,
and moreover, if in addition to that he also obeyed the dietetic laws
and a few other customs, he merited the title of a good Hebrew. If
the law were disobeyed, all the offender could expect was to be stoned
or excommunicated. Little or no concept of love was embraced in
this teaching. It was strictly a teaching of moral and ethical
laws.
When Jesus came, he taught a way of life which was not primarily
concerned with changing the negative sense of life into the positive,
but with rising above both the negative and the positive into the
spiritual. It should not be forgotten that as a Hebrew rabbi in
the organized Hebrew church, Jesus was authorized to speak and preach
from its platform; nor should it be forgotten that what he preached was
not called Christianity: There was no Christianity.
Moreover, he did not preach to Christians: There were no
Christians. He was a Hebrew rabbi preaching to Hebrews.
Jesus received an illumination which gave him an
entirely new religious teaching, something which heretofore had
been unknown to the Hebrews. He went far beyond the karmic law of
the Old Testament in his teaching of One Power. As he taught this
revelation to the men and women of his day, it made them free of all
ritual and dogma, so free that the church would not tolerate the man or
his teaching. What else but hatred and fear could they feel for
one of their own who turned his back upon some of their long established
and most cherished practices, such as the insistence on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem once a year for the purpose of paying tithes as well as the
observance of other rituals. Jesus' very turning away from these
observances was a silent criticism and condemnation of that in which
they had placed their trust for so long.
Jesus brought to light the truth that spiritual welfare is in no way
related to the rigid observance of any forms or rituals, but has to do
with the state of consciousness developed by the individual. He
preached a new dimension of life, a higher consciousness, which required
dying to old beliefs. He made it clear that new
wine cannot be added to old bottles, that is, that this new
dispensation could not merely be added to the old Hebraic mode of life,
but that the old would have to be exchanged for the new because the two
were contradictory.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus summarizes the difference between
Judaism and his new teaching which was not yet known as Christianity but
as the teaching of a radical and independent-thinking Hebrew rabbi.
This teaching is revealed in the word Grace. The law came by
Moses, "but grace and truth by Jesus
Christ." This grace and truth mean something quite
different than what is meant by the law. And so for three hundred
years after Jesus' ministry, there were people traveling up and down the
Holy Land, crossing over into Rome and Greece, teaching and preaching
not the law as set forth in the Hebrew faith, but a something new, a
something startling, something different called grace and truth which
gradually came to be known as the teaching of Christianity.
The first followers of his teaching were called Jewish
Christians because they were Jews who were
followers of the Christ. In fact, in those early days, only
those who were Hebrews could become Christians. But eventually
Paul and Peter realized that this Christ-teaching was more than just a
different kind of Judaism. It was unique,
something separate and distinct of its own, and gradually it came to
pass that in order to become a Christian, it was not necessary to be a
Hebrew first.
When Christianity became organized, it
adopted the Old Testament teaching of a punishing God, perhaps
in the vain hope that it might frighten people into being good; but as a
matter of fact that very teaching, far from being a deterrent to
evil-doing, is probably responsible for many of the sins committed in
the world today.
[paraphrased
- Joel S. Goldsmith from "The Thunder of Silence"]
We are now in the Year 2001, it is time to reclaim and embrace the Religion
of Jesus. Religious Science is the Religion of Jesus.
We must turn from the belief in two powers, Good and Evil, we must turn
from those who try to convince us that there is a Power apart from God,
and awaken to the truth that God Is All There Is, "there is
none other." In the words of the Radical Rabbi, we must
"know the Truth and the Truth will set us free."
And
So It Is!
Letting Love use me
in Its own Good Way,
Henry Lee
Bates
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