Should any of my words in this article seem disrespectful then I apologise. Although not religious as such, I nevertheless hold Jesus in high esteem as a principal teacher and exemplar of right living and right thinking. I also have admiration for Paul the Apostle, recognising the value of his earlier writings though disagreeing with his idea of Jesus as a sacrifice. (More of this later.) I was brought up as a churchgoer, though it is mainly through the teaching I received from Gladys Franklin, and from Chang, the spirit teacher who sometimes spoke through her, that I came to appreciate a much wider understanding than that of the Church.
Jesus was not God, he was human in exactly the same way as ourselves. In any case, God is not a being but is mind, usable by us as feelings, good or bad. As an analogy, God is like a mixed palette of colours and we are the artists, the creators, taking first one colour then the next to form a pattern on the canvas which is our life. Mind has unfortunately become corrupted over the years. This is seen in the auras of people and the aura about the earth as darker, muddier colours. Part of our responsibility in reincarnation is to help rid the atmosphere of these darker colours.
Jesus was conceived in the normal, natural manner of the earth, Joseph being the father. The mix-up over his divinity arose because he carried the Christ Spirit, which entered his mother three months before his matter body was conceived. The Christ Spirit is a purity of mind which gave him a much enlarged soul. But like us, he had a brain. The brain is our instrument for using mind, for using feelings. It can take in ideas that are good as well as those that are not so good. It is up to us to learn how to discern.
For the most part, Jesus was able to channel the Christ Spirit through his brain, helping him to teach as he did. However, he had grown up knowing the prophecies of the Old Testament, which stated that a Messiah would be born in Israel and suffer death like a sacrificial lamb. He took this upon himself and so allowed the prophecy to come about. He was not aware that all prophecy is alterable.
Today we have learned that prophecy can come from a lower level or from a higher level. The prophecy of the lamb being led to the slaughter was from a lower level, spirits of evil intent desiring the death of a teacher who had the ability to enlighten the masses.
Jesus could have evaded capture. He had already done this more than once, walking invisibly through the midst of those who were trying to kill him. It was his own will to finally surrender himself, not that of God, for God is not an entity with a will to use.
No one at that time, not even Jesus himself, knew there was an alternative. With the utmost bravery he followed the prophecy, thinking it would change people’s minds, even if just to make them realise that all people survive death and need not fear it. Yet religion has indoctrinated us with the belief that it was God’s will he died for our sins, and that he rose again (on Easter Day) only because of who he was. A horrible, violent death, which in appearing to have been condoned by God has been the cause of continuing violence since that time.
Following the death of Jesus, Paul of Tarsus introduced the concept that Jesus was a sacrifice through which the sins of believers could be ‘washed away’. Because of this, he unwittingly created a second way, a false trail – not the first way that Jesus himself taught. The second way seemingly made it easy for people to avoid the results of their actions, and this is the prevalent idea today. This can never happen, because the causes that each of us start will always have a corresponding effect, irrespective of our beliefs.
The first way is that of taking responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and actions, with a view to learning how to love, how to be merciful, how to be pure in heart, how to become a peacemaker. The second way uses Jesus as a whipping boy, made to endure pain on behalf of humanity, in the erroneous belief that our consciousness will be magically cleared of all wrongdoing. It will not be cleared, no matter how convincing the argument given by Paul in his letters. It harks back to the age-old idea of sacrificing the life of an animal or a human to appease and satisfy the vanity of a jealous god.
One of the aims that Gladys Franklin had was to teach people to take Jesus off the cross, because belief in the sacrifice continued to cause him to suffer. This has now happened – the man Jesus no longer feels the effect of people’s minds upon him, though there are many that still lean on his goodness. It therefore falls to us to pick up on the first way, the way of the self, moving beyond the limits of religion to discover our individual spirituality, our own being, our own part in the life force that pervades the universe.