by Ram Gian Singh
Jerusalem – about 1975 years ago
You saw Jesus three times, the first, from a distance. He was teaching, addressing a multitude of your fellow Jews, hundreds of whom had crowded around him. This throng had pressed so close that Jesus had to physically retreat to a little fishing boat in order to put some distance between himself and the crush of his followers.
You saw Jesus that day and you kept right on walking.
Remember?
You thought: ‘Oh, another Messiah. Maybe this one will deliver us from the Romans!’ Then you blushed: ‘Yeah, right.’
You kicked a stone in your path. It tumbled, raised a little cloud of dust, and so did your heels. You kept on walking.
The next time you saw him, you did not recognize him at first. You saw a man or what was left of a man. The bones of his back and hips and legs were laid bare by a scourging. Administered by a Roman guard with a whip that had many leather straps in which were embedded metal balls and pieces of sharp bone, the torturous punishment tore his skin off, ripped into his muscles and sinews and shredded him, stroke by stoke, as you watched.
Clearly, he was bleeding to death.
“Another one” you muttered. The Romans had maimed then crucified 30,000 Jewish men in this manner during the last few years alone, and you had personally witnessed this punishment, and the one that followed on the cross, too many times. These things you thought to yourself as you looked down and saw a small, round stone in the dust at your feet. It reminded you of that day by the sea and a chill rose up your spine as you realized it was him, the “Messiah” you’d seen teaching from a fisherman’s boat.
You looked up and realized they’d crowned him with thorns.
You turned away.
Yes, you turned away and you remembered the ridiculous tales you’d heard of him since that day, the tales of the “miracles” he was purported to have performed, healing the lepers, feeding thousands from a few loaves or bread and a bushel or two of fish, and even raising the dead! You recalled the fact that he claimed to forgive sins, too, which only God himself could do. And then there were the claims by many of his followers, your fellow Jews, that this man was in fact was the chosen one, the promised Messiah of your people.
You’d had heard these claims, but you’d never bothered to check into them yourself. Why should you have? You knew the Jewish prophets had promised both that the Messiah and the “end of the world” was coming “soon” over a thousand years ago now! And, perhaps most importantly, the Rabbi’s and Pharisees and leaders of your faith had warned this man Jesus was an impostor . . .
Wouldn’t they know the Son of God if He came?
The Roman guard struck him again and he nearly collapsed from the pain.
“Some Messiah,” you said, glancing contemptuously at him. He turned to you. Your eyes met his. It was as if could see into you. You were afraid.
You were ashamed.
They dragged him off.
For some reason, you followed in his bloody footsteps.
Maybe you went because so many others were going.
Maybe you hoped they’d let him go.
Whatever the reason, you followed and watched as they whipped him onward, he staggering under the weight of his cross, towards a hill called Golgotha, “the place of a skull.” The authorities had reserved this place for the most hellish of public tortures, pain and humiliation, a cruelty that always ended the same way: in death.
The uprights of the well-used crosses stood like tree trunks bare of branches, rooted deeply in the earth. The Romans retrieved his cross bar from a passerby, for he was too weak to bring it all the way up himself. They laid it on the rocky soil. Then theyy laid him down and drove the first nail directly through one of his wrists, crushing the large nerves. The pain of this cruelty was so unfathomable, a new word, rooted in the act itself, had been coined to describe it: ex-cruci-ating, from the cruci-fixion.
He cried out.
They did it again, to the other hand, piercing him now twice.
When they lifted him up, you thought of Moses and how he had been told by God to fashion and affix a metal serpent to a pole and lift it high for all to see, the serpent forming a cross against the pole, a cross . . . like this one. And God had said to Moses that his cross would save all who looked upon it in faith from the plague that they then suffered.
Could it be? Thought you. Could this somehow relate to that?
They nailed his feet now, too, to the upright, parting the bones, crushing the tendons.
Excruciating.
After a while, you heard him pray to God to forgive them.
Never, in the thousands of crucifixions here had that ever happened before.
You stood and watched, and marveled at him for six hours as he was thus hung.
Yes, death thus came slowly on the Roman cross. When it finally did come, it usually came by suffocation. The executed were nailed through the wrists, not the hands, so the flesh would hold, for the weight of their entire bodies hanging down was so strong, it pulled their shoulders from their joints. Then, without the help of their disjointed arms, the crucified would push up from their nailed feet in order to breathe, for the weight and position of their bodies collapsed all the air from their lungs, and each time they needed to inhale, they had to relieve this pressure.
You watched as he tried at first in vain to push himself up again, to take another breath. You watched him struggle and gasp and die a little more.
It was true, some lasted days on the cross, if they’d not been scourged ‘til their flesh hung like ribbons, but a few minutes more of this was all he’d have hanging there this day after what they’d done to him.
You heard him cry out, quoting the ancient Jewish Psalmist, who, and this now seemed astounding to you, wrote centuries before crucifixion was even invented:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
My bones are out of joint . . . They pierced my hands and feet . . .
And you thought: How could this be? You looked at him. Was this not that prophecy fulfilled?
“Who are you?” You shouted up at him.
Then, you saw him slump, and say, with his last breath: It is finished.
“Finished! What is finished?” You shouted up at him. “What!?!”
The whole earth shook. You were knocked off balance and staggered. You stumbled, and fell to your knees. Many did. You turned to see the face of one who could see the Temple as he shouted a report: the veil had been rent asunder. And, inexplicably, it began to grow dark. Then, the Roman Centurion himself shouted: “Truly, this man was the son of God.”
At this, another soldier leapt up and thrust a spear into his side. A woman shrieked. Blood poured from his already still heart.
And now everyone looked to the heavens, for it was as if the sun itself had refused to shine down on this murder.
Panic ensued, but the guards had unfinished business.
Wooooosh! A Roman swung a metal rod and struck the knee of one of the two thieves crucified with him, shattering the man’s leg.
Wooooosh! With this second blow, to the top leg of the two nailed to the upright, shattered the bone at the shin.
Wooooosh! Wooooosh! The second thief, too.
Having been denied the legs with which to push up and gasp a frantic inhale, both men suffocated quickly. It took only minutes, and death was certain. A Roman guard could take no chances, for, if the condemned somehow survived, the guards themselves were put to death.
No. There was no question about it.
Dead.
He was dead.
All three were dead.
It was finished. And, it was if the sun itself had now gone out, day was night. You departed quickly, deeply troubled, your soul sinking.
You passed many women, all of them weeping. One of them, you heard someone say, was his grieving mother . . . Mary.
She, you beheld through tears.
*
A week later, YOU are a Christian.
What?
What has happened?
You have given up your place and status in the Jewish community; you have in fact abandoned your father and mother, your temple and your faith. You have abandoned your whole family and culture and your most cherished religious customs. You no longer offer burnt offerings for the forgiveness of your sins, you no longer pray to God as a single creator, you no longer worship or keep holy the Sabbath on Saturday.
These were the hallmarks of your whole life!
These were the things that made you and your family Jews, one hundred generations of your family! Yet, you have left them all behind?
Because of this, you are an outcast and are actually, physically hunted by the same people who put Jesus to death! Yet, you are ready to be scourged yourself, prepared to suffer the very same death by crucifixion, that excruciating death, because you now believe in Jesus as Christ, as the Messiah of your people and ONE with God the Father.
Are you crazy?
What exactly has happened during the course of these few intervening days to cause this change in you?
What on earth could have happened to cause such a change, given the risks, the costs?
How, having seen all this, personally witnessed his death and humiliation, could you call a man put to death with common thieves, the Son of God?
How could you suddenly, irrevocable believe that this dead, humiliated Jesus was the Messiah of your people?
How? Why?
You saw him alive?
You say you saw him whole and healthy and full of light and spoke with him and ate meals with him and physically touched him, and he taught you and forgave you and preached love and forgiveness to you after they had scourged him, hobbled him, crushed his nerves, pierced his heart and entombed his lifeless, shredded, bloodless body?
No way!
You saw Him overcome His own Death, and you knew He could be none other than the Messiah of your people, the Son of God?
Wow.
Wow!
You say not only you, but hundreds of Jews sat with him as he preached and now thousands of Jews believe as you do now, just weeks after the crucifixion?
Would you do so if you knew it was a lie?
No.
No.
I say: either you and they are crazy and everyone present suffered a mass hallucination each time they saw him or this did happen.
This did happen.
*
What do you think?
If this had happened to you, could you be but a Christian? Wouldn’t you reject your religion, your position in society and even your family and follow Christ?
Well, according to the Gospels and backed up by more evidence than you can even imagine, it did happen to many, many Jews, including the very Apostles who ran away and hid when Jesus was seized, who denie him, watched him whipped and crucified, executed and buried. In fact, it is well documented that within a few short weeks of Christ’s crucifixion, 10,000 Christians were certain he was the Messiah of the Jews and had abandoned their faith, the faith that denied him.
Now, one may die for what one believes to be true, but no one dies for a lie he knows to be a lie, and most of the apostles and hundreds of others in the days and weeks and years and even centuries that followed did die for this truth: those who were there say they saw raised from the dead.
They had the audacity to say, under the pain of death, He was who He said He was . . .
How do we know?
Today, we have historical (as well as Biblical) sources, written testimonies of what happened, of what we have described here, and they are among the most reliable in all antiquity. Some of these have come to be known as the Gospels, not because they were carefully selected by some conspiratorial group of deluded believers. Nor because of Constantine’s desire to use the teachings for political purposes. But, because they were the most well documented and thoroughly verified histories of the actual events taken down with a few short years of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, taken down by eye-witnesses.
Now, having said this, and having helped to bring you to a better experience of what it meant to be a Jew who became a Christian, we have to make a big time leap forward now and ask: wouldn’t it be natural for those Jews of that day to believe that their Jesus was the only form and incarnation of the Christ, literally? After all, he said: ‘I am the way, the truth and the light. No man cometh unto the Father but through me.’
And, what world did they live in, what frame of reference did they have to think he could possible mean these words in any way other than: I, Christ as Jesus the Carpenter (as opposed to as the Spirit and Christ-consciousness eternal that inhabited the body of that carpenter) am the way?
They had none, no other way to understand Him or the “universe of that time” – the world was still thought to be flat, the universe pretty much that flat world and the sun and the visible stars. And we know from the Gospels the ideas and teachings Jesus presented often confused them, they often got them wrong, and much to His great frustration!
Do we also underestimate Him?
Have you ever heard this?
Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the Jewish people whose birth, life and death had been foretold in scores of sacred Jewish prophecies. He said He was the One who could forgive sins and remove the penalty (or karma) associated with offenses against God by taking the punishment, the pain, and the suffering wrought by sin and due the sinner, unto Himself. This, claimed Jesus, He would do by dying, by delivering Himself as an exculpatory sacrifice, on the cross.
Yes, He asserted that He alone would redeem all mankind. And, because Jesus Christ assuredly made these claims, we are confronted with the fact that either Jesus was a liar or He was and is who He said He was and is. And what did He say? He said: “I am the (definite article) Way, the (again definite) Truth and the (yes, again, definite article as in He and only He) Light. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
So, believe it: Jesus is “the” only way to God.
Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior or spend eternity in Hell.
Have you heard this?
Wow!
Maybe you actually believe it?
It’s awfully black and white and narrow, no?
Most importantly, it is the greatest underestimation of Jesus imaginable! It means, for those who believe this that Jesus was and is only capable of showing himself once to the world in one form, that of a Jewish Carpenter from Nazareth!
A suit of clothes.
What happens to the Jesus as eternal Christ-consciousness, the very Word of God, eternal, omniscient and omni-present, One with the Father Jesus if you so confine Him?
Would that Jesus be so confined?
No! That Jesus, that Christ is certainly not going to be put and kept in the little box those who make these claims hope to confine Him to, oh no!
God forbid!
He, eternal Christ-consciousness, The Way, the Word, is not just that body, that physical Jesus, that incarnation as that Sacred Carpenter.
Consider this:
Human beings have existed as homo sapiens, sub species sapiens (modern humans) for just about 200,000 years on earth. Jesus came to this earth as the man from Nazareth about one hundred and ninety-eight thousand years into “our” history. In other words, after 99% of it had already passed! Now, we have to ask: Did He NEVER manifest His eternal presence before that, never, to anyone, anywhere else on planet during the 198,000 prior years of human history here on earth?
If he did come before or has come since, then isn’t it conceivable He didn’t come as the Jewish carpenter those other times, He came in another form, which of course is His right and within His power as the Word of God and which, of course, would make sense. After all, if a Jewish carpenter showed up in India 5,000 before there was a crucifixion to teach the people there and then about God, who would have listened?
No, Jesus is:
a) Probably compassionate enough to have wanted to help us at least once or twice more in our 200,000-year history and . . .
b) Probably smart enough to know that, in order to do so, He’s have to come or reveal Himself as someone the people he came to help could relate to . . . don’t you think?
Maybe?
Just maybe?
Would you rather have Him confined to a single place and time?
If so, you underestimate Christ-consciousness, Christ-spirit, and God.
Consider this: Today, nearly seven BILLION people live on planet earth and scientists estimate that at least (10) galaxies exist in the universe for each and every single one of us! Science also suggests there may be as many as 10 “planet earths” in each of those galaxies, ten planets that might support human life or at least intelligent, sentient beings.
This means one hundred (100) planets (10 galaxies X 10 terrestrial planets per galaxy) with seven billion people each may exist in the universe now, for each of us alive today on earth. And that means it is likely that for EACH of us, there may be as many as one hundred planets with 7 billion people each in the universe right now!
Do the math: That means there could be up to 700,000,000,000 (700 billion) people “out there” in the universe, for each one us, and the next logical question follows: has God consigned all of them to eternal ignorance of Christ?
With all due respect to the people who make the above (italicized) assertion, we ask:
If you believe people can only know Christ the way you know Christ, haven’t you underestimated the eternal Christ, not the carpenter, but the all pervasive Word, the eternal Spirit of omnipresent Christ-consciousness, the One who can create and recreate for Himself any body at will, with any appearance He desires when it serve His purpose?
He did so, according to the Bible!
The Apostles themselves did not recognize the physical form of Jesus at times after the resurrection, according to the Gospels, while other times He was in the physical form of the crucified Christ, wounds and all? Thus: Jesus thus took on more than one physical form and body according to the Gospels!
Did He not also, according to the Gospels, come and go transforming into physical form from spirit right in the midst of them inside a locked room according to the Gospels and Acts, and then de-materializing back inot spirit and disappear, transcending time and space?
If you believe the Gospels, if you believe the Bible, you must also believe this, too!
Thus: Christ is not His suit of clothes!
He cannot be confined to the Jewish Lamb, not by man!
And, so we have to ask:
Did the Word of God, the ever-living, omniscient and omnipresent Jesus as Spirit, never appear anywhere else, as anyone else, to anyone else, ever?
Did HE never, in any other form (spirit or otherwise), visit anywhere or anyone else in His galaxy of 700 Billion worlds, to “love” them, to “guide” them and to “save” them, ever?
Christian saints will tell you they have seen him, and He appears to them as one of their own people! Other spiritual saints have seen Him, too, in a form and by a name they relate to!
If you deny Christ this power, you underestimate him!
If you believe in Jesus as the Word, and not just the man, then you cannot rationally deny Him this power. And, unless you claim to speak for God, you cannot deny the possibility that Christ did and does come and go as He pleases. And if it is likely that this same Word, Jesus, that came to the Jews 2,000 years ago or so, may have ‘come’ in some way or other to someone or others, somewhere or other, maybe even here, maybe even last week or yesterday, Christians must stop underestimating Him and condemning others to Hell for not acknowledging their one brief glimpse of Him incarnate as a Jewish carpenter.
Christ was not the physical body of the Jesus. God-consciousness, the Word immortal and immutable, God the Spirit, used that body, took it on and shed it and picked it up again like a suit of clothes! That is the story of the resurrection!
Christ was and is eternal Spirit.
“He” is the incarnation of the omnipotent, and causal, God-consciousness who once put on the body of Jesus, of the one we crucified. That physical body was but the Temple of the Son of God. God was untouched by that carnage.
Further, Christ, the true knowable Word, came to the Jews of those days in the form they expected and could recognize and even then, with all the prophecies fulfilled, only some of them recognized Him!
A word of CAUTION
Do not make the same mistake some made 1975 years ago made.
Do not fail to recognize Him in places you do not expect Him or in garb or positions foreign to you!
Do not underestimate Jesus as Christ-consciousness eternal and unfathomable.
Do not confuse God with the temple, or the Spirit with its suit of clothes and say to others: If you do not worship the suit of clothes, you do not worship the spirit!
Judge not (for the ways of God are a mystery to man) lest ye shall be judged!
And thus acknowledge this:
Any discussion of the HISTORY of Christ as the Word must be inclusive of ALL Christ traditions if we are to give Jesus as Christ-consciousness and eternal Spirit, His due.
It is here we begin: Yoga for Christians.