JESUS : THE LAST GREAT INITIATE - Chapter five

[Guest guest]

Enjoy !

 

With Love

from nicole

--------

 

JESUS : THE LAST GREAT INITIATE

 

Chapter 5

 

Struggle with the Pharisees _ Flight to Caesarea _ The Transfiguration

 

This Galilean springtime, during which the dawn of the Kingdom of

Heaven seemed to rise upon the attentive multitudes lasted two years.

Now, however, the sky darkened, sinister flashes appeared,

forerunners of catastrophe. The storm burst upon the small family at

Galilee like one of those tempests which sweep the lake of

Gennesareth, and in their wild fury engulf the fishermen's frail

barques.

 

Jesus was in no way surprised at the consternation and terror of his

disciples, he fully expected it. It was impossible that his preaching

and increasing popularity should not stir the religious authorities

and himself. On the contrary, from this conflict alone could light

flash forth.

 

At the time of Jesus the Pharisees formed a compact body of six

thousand men. Their name Perishin means " separate "

or " distinguished " . Of a lofty and often heroic though narrow and

haughty patriotism, they represented the party of national

restoration; their existence only dated from the Maccabees. They

acknowledged both an oral and a written tradition. They believed in

angels,…..a future life and resurrection, but the glimpses of

esoterism which came to them from Persia they buried beneath the

darkness of a gross material interpretation. Strict observers of the

law, though quite opposed to the spirit of the prophets who placed

religion in the love of God and of men, they made piety consist of

rites and ceremonies, fasts and public penance.

On great occasions they were to be seen in the open streets, their

faces covered with soot, praying aloud with contrite mien, and

ostentatiously distributing alms. In contradistinction to all this

they lived in luxury, eagerly intriguing after authority and power.

None the less were the chiefs of the democratic party. They were

composed of families whose pretension it was to have exercised

priesthood by hereditary right ever since the time of David. Extreme

in their conservatism they rejected oral tradition, accepted nothing

but the letter of the law, and denied the existence of the soul and a

future life. They ridiculed alike the stormy practices of the

Pharisees and their extravagant beliefs. For them, religion consisted

entirely in sacerdotal ceremonies. Under the Seleucides they had

deprived the pontificate of power, as they were in complete accord

with the pagans, and were even imbued with Greek sophistry and

refined Epicuris. Under the Maccabees the Pharisees had been rejected

from the pontificate, though, under Herode and the Romans, they had

apparently regained this position. The Sadducees were stern and hard-

hearted as men, and lovers of good cheer as priests, possessed of one

faith, that of their own superiority, and f one idea, the

determination to maintain the power tradition had handed down to them.

 

In such a religion what could Jesus find, Jesus the initiate,

inheritor of the prophets, the Seer of Engaddi, seeking in social

order the image of the divine, in which justice reigns over life,

science over justice, and love and wisdom over all three ?

 

…….. In the temple, instead of supreme science and initiation, he

found materialistic and agnostic ignorance, playing on religion as on

a power-giving instrument, in other words, priestly imposture…. In

schools and synagogues, instead of the bread of life, and the dew

from heaven falling upon men's hearts, he saw an interested morality

under the veneer of formal worship, i.e. hypocrisy …. Far above,

enthroned in a nimbus of glory, sat almighty Ceasar, the apotheosis

of evil and the deification of matter, the sole god of the then

world, only possible master of the Sadducees and Pharisees, whether

they wished it so or not. In adopting the idea from Persian esoterism

as did the prophets, was Jesus wrong in naming this reign the

dominion of Satan or Ahrimanes, i.e. the rule of matter over spirit,

in place of which he wished to substitute that of spirit over

matter ? Like all great reformers, he attacked not men, who as

exceptions, might be excellent, but doctrines and institutions which

mould the majority of mankind. The challenge must be delivered, and

war declared against the existing powers.

 

The struggle began in the synagogues of Galilee and continued beneath

the porticoes of the temple at Jerusalem, to which Jesus made

lenghthened visits, preaching and replying to his opponents. In this

as throughout his whole career, he acted with that mixture of

prudence and boldness, meditative reserve and impetuous action, which

characterised his wonderfully well-balanced nature. He did not take

the offensive against his opponents, but waited and replied to their

attack, which never tarried, for, from the very beginning of his

ministry, the Pharisees had been jealous of him by reason of his

popularity and his haling of the sick. They quickly suspected him to

their most dangerous enemy. Accosting him with that mocking urbanity,

that cunning malevolence, veiled beneath a mask of hypocritical

gentleness, in which they were past-masters, in their role as learned

doctors and men of importance and authority, they asked what reasons

he had for having dealings with publicans and sinners ? Why did his

disciples dare to pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath day ? Such

conduct constituted a grave violation of their regulations. With a

magnanimous gentleness, Jesus replied in words at once tender and

courteous. He tried on them his gospel of love, spoke of the love of

God, who rejoices more over one repentant sinner than over many just

persons. He related to them the parables of the lost sheep and the

prodigal son. In embarrassed astonishment they held their peace.

Uniting again, they returned t the charge, reproaching him for

healing the sick on the Sabbath day. " Hypocrites! " replied Jesus, a

flash of indignation illumining his eyes, " do not you on the Sabbath

day remove the chain from your own oxen's neck and lead them away to

the watering trough ? May not therefore the daughter of Abraham be

delivered this same day from the chains of Satan? " No longer knowing

what to reply, the Pharisees accused him of casting out the devils in

the name of Beelzebub. With quite as much wit as logical acumen,

Jesus replied that the devil does not cast himself out, adding that

sin against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but not sin against the

Holy Ghost, signifying thereby that he attached slight importance to

insults against himself personally, but that a denial of the Good and

the True, when once established, constitutes intellectual perversity,

the supreme vice and an irremediable evil. This was a declaration of

war. He was called Blasphemer ! Agent of Belzebub! Which accusations

he answered by the expression : Hypocrites! Generation of vipers!

From this time the struggle continually increased in bitterness.

Jesus gave evidence of a close incisive logic, his words lashed like

whips and pierced like arrows. He had changed tactics,; instead of

defending himself, he attacked and replied to charges by other

charges more vigorous still, showing no pity for hypocrisy, the one

vice at the root of all others. " Why transgress ye the law of God by

reason of your traditions ? God recommended, Honour thy father and

thy mother: you dispense with honouring parents, if, as alternative,

money flows into the temple.

 

With your lips you serve Isaiah, but your devotion is devoid of

heart " .

 

Jesus ever kept perfect control over himself, though the enthusiasm

and greatness of the struggle daily increased. The more he was

attacked, the more emphatically dd he proclaim himself as the

Messiah. He began to utter threats against the temple, to foretell

the misfortunes that Israel would undergo, to appeal to the heathen,

and to say that the Lord would send other labourers into the

vineyard. Thereupon the Pharisees of Jerusalem became anxious. Seeing

they could neither impose silence on him nor find any effective

retort, they too changed tactics. Their idea now was to ensnare him,

so they sent deputations whose object it was to induce him to utter

heretical sayings which would warrant the Sanhedrim in laying hands

on him as a blasphemer, in the name of the law of Moses, or the Roman

governor in condemning him as a rebel. Hence the insidious question

concerning the woman taken in adultery, and the coin stamped with

Caesar's image. Ever penetrating the designs of his enemies, Jesus

with profound psychology and skilful strategy, disarmed them by his

replies. Finding it impossible to effect their object by these means,

the Pharisees attempted to intimidate him by annoying him at every

turn. Worked upon and excited by them, the majority of the people

began to turn away from Jesus when they saw that he was not restoring

the kingdom of Israel. Everywhere, even in the smallest of hamlets,

he met suspicious and wily countenances, spies, and treacherous

emissaries to track and dishearten him. Some came and said to

him, " Depart from here, for Herod (Antipas) is bent on killing thee " .

He replied proudly, " Go tell that fox; it cannot be that a prophet

dies out of Jerusalem! " Nevertheless, he was often obliged to cross

the sea of Tiberias and take refuge on the eastern bank in order to

escape these snares.

 

Nowhere was he now free from danger. MMeanwhile John the Baptist was

put to death by order of Antipas in the fortress of Makerous. It is

said that Hannibal, on seeing the head of his brother Hasdrubal,

killed by the Romans, exclaimed : " Now I recognise the fate of

Carthage " . Jesus could recognise his own fate in the death of his

precursor. He had had no doubt of this ever since his vision at

Engaddi; had begun his work, knowing the inevitable end, and yet this

news, when brought by the sorrow-stricken disciples of the prophet of

the wilderness, struck Jesus as a death-warning. He exclaimed : " They

did not recognise hi, but have done with him as they wished, thus

shall the Son of Man suffer at their hands " .

 

The twelve were troubled and anxious; Jesus was hesitating on his

pathway. He did not wish to let himself be taken, but rather, once

his work finished, to offer himself of his own free will, and die as

a prophet at the hour he himself should choose. Already hunted down

during the whole of the past year, accustomed to escape from the

enemy by making marches and counter-marches, disheartened with the

people, whose apathy, after days of enthusiasm, he was keenly

conscious of, Jesus determined once more to escape with his

disciples. Reaching the summit of a mountain, he turned round to cast

one final lingering look on his beloved lake, on whose banks he had

wished the dawn of the Kingdom of Heaven to shine. His eyes wandered

over those towns lying by the waterside, or rising tier upon tier

along the mountainside , half buried in their verdant oases, and now

glittering with white beneath the golden veil of twilight; those

beloved towns in which he had sown the words of life, and which now

abandoned him. A presentiment of the future came over him. With

prophetic vision he saw this splendid country changed into a

wilderness beneath the vengeful hand of Ishmael, and those words,

devoid of anger, though full of sorrow and bitterness, fell from his

lips : " Woe unto thee, Ceernaum; woe unto thee, Chorazim; woe unto

thee Bethsaida ! " Then turning towards the heathen world, accompanied

by his disciples, he took the path leading along the Jordan valley

from Gadara to Caesarea Philippi.

 

Sad and long was the route of the fugitive band across the mighty

plain of reeds and the marshes of the upper Jordan under the burning

Syrian sun. The nights were passed beneath the tents of shepherds, or

with such Essenes as were living in the small hamlets of this

abandoned country . The anxious disciples proceeded with downcast

eyes; the Master, filled with sorrow, remained plunged in silent

meditation. He was reflecting on the impossibility of the triumph of

his doctrine by preaching to the people, and on the unremitting

plottings of his enemies. The final struggle was becoming imminent,

he had reached a terrible difficulty; how was he to escape ? On the

other hand, his thoughts dwelt with anxiety on his spiritual family

now scattered abroad, and especially on the twelve apostles , who in

faith and trust, had left everything _ family , profession, and

fortune _ to follow him, and who, in spite of all, would soon be

heartbroken and deceived in their mighty hope of a triumphant

Messiah. Could he leave them to themselves ? Had the truth

sufficiently penetrated their souls ? Would they believe in him, and

in his doctrine, at all events ? Did they know who he was ? Dominated

by this thought, he one day asked them : " Whom say men that I, the

Son of Man, am ? They replied, " Some say that thou art John the

Baptist , some Elias, and others Jeremias, or one of the prophets " .

Then Jesus said unto them, " But whom say ye that I am ? " Simon Peter

answered and said, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God " .

 

In the mouth of Peter, and the thought of Jesus, these words have not

the signification the Church at a later date wished to give

them : " Thou art the Elect of Israel announced by the prophets " . In

the Hindu, the Egyptian and the Greek initiation, the term " Son of

God " signified " a consciousness identified with divine truth, a will

capable of manifesting it " . According to the prophets, this Messiah

must be the greatest of these manifestations. He would be the Son of

Man, i.e. the Elect of earthly Humanity; the Son of God, i.e. the

Envoy of heavenly Humanity, and as such, having in himself the Father

or Spirit, who, by Humanity, reigns over the universe.

 

At this affirmation of the faith of the apostles Jesus felt an

immense joy. So his disciples had understood him; he would live in

them, and the bond between heaven and earth would be re-established.

Jesus said to Peter, " Happy art thou, Simon, son of Jonas, for flesh

and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in

heaven " . By this reply Jesus gives Peter to understand that he

considers him as an initiate, as he himself was, and also possessed

of a deep insight into truth. This is the true, the only revelation

this is " the stone on which the Christ wishes to build his Church,

and against which the gates of hell shall not prevail " . Jesus relies

on the Apostle Peter, only in so far as he shall have this intuition.

A moment later, on the apostle reverting to the ordinary, fear

stricken Peter, the Master treats him in quite a different fashion.

Jesus had announced to his disciples that he was about to be put to

death at Jerusalem, and Peter protested with the words, " Be it far

from thee, Lord, this shall not be unto thee! " But Jesus, as though

seeing a temptation of the flesh in this impulse of sympathy,

attempting to shake his mighty solution, turned sharply round to the

apostle and said, " Get thee behind me, Satan, thou art an offence

unto me, for thou savourest no the things that be of God, but those

that be of men (Matt. Xvi. 21-23). And the Master's imperious gesture

seemed to say, " Forward through the desert! " Intimidated by his

solemn voice and stern look, the apostles bowed their heads in

silence, and resumed their journey over the stone hills of the

Gaulonitide. This flight, by which Jesus, brought his disciples out

of Israel , resembled a march towards the problem of his Messianic

destiny, the key to which he was seeking.

 

They reached the gates of Cesarea. That town, which had become pagan

since the time of Antiochus the Great, was sheltered within a verdant

oasis near Jordan's source, at the foot of Hermon's snowy peaks. It

had its amphitheatre, and was resplendent with costly palaces and

Grecian temples. Jesus crossed it, and continued to the spot at which

the Jordan n a clear bubbling stream issues from a mountain cavern,

like the stream of life springing from the profound bosom of nature.

There was erected a small temple dedicated to Pan; and in the grotto,

on the banks of the stream, numerous columns, marble nymphs, and

pagan divinities.

 

The Jews held in horror these tokens of idolatrous worship, Jesus

contemplated them with an indulgent smile. In them he recognised the

imperfect effigies of the divine beauty, whose radiant models he bore

within his own soul. He had not come to utter maledictions against

paganism, but to transform it; not to scatter anathema on earth and

its mysterious powers, but to point out to it the way to heaven. His

heart was large enough, and his doctrine sufficiently vast, to

embrace all people, and to say to men of every religion : " Raise your

heads, and learn that you all have one same Father " . And yet, there

he was at the extreme limit of Israel, hunted like a wild beast,

stifled between two peoples who rejected him alike. In front , the

heathen who did not yet understand him, and on whom his words fell

powerless; behind the Jews, a people which stoned its prophets, and

stopped its ears, so as not to hear its Messiah; whilst all the time

the Pharisees and Sadducees were watching their prey. What superhuman

courage, what unprecedented power of action would be needed to crush

all these obstacles, to penetrate beyond heathen idolatry and Jewish

harshness right to the heart of that suffering humanity he loved with

every fibre of his being, and induce it to listen to his resurrection

message ! Then suddenly his mind went back to bygone times,

descending once again the stream of the Jordan, Israel's sacred

river, passing from the temple of Pan to that of Jerusalem, measuring

the distance which separated ancient paganism from the universal

prophetic thought, and regaining its source, as an eagle its nest,

returned from the anguish of Caesarea to the vision of Engaddi! And

now, from the depths of the Dead sea, he sees this terrible phantom

of the cross once more spring forth! …. Had the hour of the great

sacrifice at length come ? Jesus like all men, possessed two

consciousnesses; the earthly one lulled him with illusions,

saying : " Who knows ? " Perhaps I shall escape this destiny " . The

other, the divine one, repeated implacably : " The path of victory

passes through the gate of anguish " . Must he choose this latter

voice ?

 

At all important epochs in his life we see Jesus withdraw to the

mountain to pray. Had not the Vedic sage said, " Prayer upholds heaven

and rules the Gods " ? Jesus knew his greatest of all forces. Usually

he admitted of no companion in this mountain solitude when he

descended into the inmost elements of his being. This time, however,

he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, James and John,

to spend the night on the summit of a lofty mountain. Legend states

this to have been Mount Tabor. There, between the Master and three of

the greatest initiates among the disciples, the mysterious scene

related in the Gospels under the name of the Transfiguration, took

place ! According to Matthew, the apostles saw he master's form,

luminous and apparently diaphanous, appear in the transparent

twilight of the Eastern night. His face shone like the sun, and his

garments became brilliant as the light; at his side appeared two

figures, which they took for those of Moses and Elijah. As,

trembling, they emerged from their strange prostration, which seemed

to them at once a profounder sleep and a more intense waking state,

they saw the Master alone by their side, restoring them to full

consciousness by his touch. The transfigured Christ they had

contemplated in this dream was never effaced from their memory (Matt.

Xvii. 1-8).

 

But what had Jesus himself seen and passed through during that night

which preceded the most decisive act of his prophetic career ? A

gradual effacing of earthly things, beneath the ardour of prayer, a

rapturous ascent from sphere to sphere. He seemed by degrees to be

returning along the depths of his consciousness into some previous

existence, an altogether spiritual and divine one. Far in the

distance were suns, worlds, earths, vortices of suffering

incarnations; now he was conscious of one homogeneous atmosphere, one

fluid substance, one intelligent light. Within this radiance legions

of celestial beings form a moving vault, a firmament of ethereal

bodies, white as snow, whence beam forth gentle flashes of light.

 

On the shining cloud where he is standing six men in priestly robes,

and mighty of stature, raise aloft, with joined hands, a dazzling

Chalice. These are the six Messiahs, who have already appeared on

earth; the seventh is himself, and this Cup signifies the Sacrifice

he must undergo, by incarnating himself on earth in his turn. Beneath

the cloud is heard the roar of thunder; there yawns a black abyss;

the circle of generations, the pit of life and death, the terrestrial

hell.

 

The Sons of God with suppliant gesture raise the Cup, the very

firmament of heaven is silent, as Jesus, in token of assent, extends

his arms in the form of a cross as though he wished to embrace the

whole universe. Then the sons of God bow down their faces to earth, a

band of female angels, with outspread wings and downcast eyes, carry

off the incandescent Chalice towards the vault of light. The hosanna

resounds, with ineffably melodious strains, throughout the heavens…..

But he, without even listening to it, plunges into the pit….

 

This is what had taken place long ago among the Essenes, in the bosom

of the Father, where the mysterious rites of Eternal Love are

celebrated and the revolutions of the constellations pass, light as

waves. This is what he had sworn to accomplish, this is the reason of

his birth and the purpose of his past struggles. And now, once more

this mighty oath bound him down at the end of his task.

 

Terrible oath, dreaded chalice! Still, it must be drained to the

dregs. After all this rapturous bliss he awoke in the depths of the

pit, on the brink of martyrdom. No further doubt was possible; the

time was at hand. Heaven had spoken and Earth cried aloud for help.

 

Retracing his steps, Jesus once again descended the valley of the

Jordan, and proceeded by slow stages along the road to Jerusalem.