Good Friday

Today is Good Friday, the commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus. To me, the emphasis on the crucifixion misses the point. The real emphasis, to me, ought to be on the resurrection, to which the crucifixion was a prelude.

In Religious Science, we teach that Jesus was not the Great Exception, some kind of special person doing things that were beyond ordinary people like us, but the Great Example, showing us what we can do and what we can be. Jesus himself says, “The things that I have done, ye also shall do and greater than these shall ye do.” He implores us to “be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” Jesus lights the way for us to unfold our own perfection.

Richard Bach’s wonderful Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a metaphysical Christ analogy, tells us the same thing. Jonathan is interested in learning from the Elder Gull, Chiang, how he does instant flight.

The Elder Gull smiled in the moonlight. “You are learning again, Jonathan Seagull,” he said.

“Well, what happens from here? Where are we going? Is there no such place as heaven?’

“No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.”

So to “be with me in Paradise,” as Jesus tells the person being crucified next to him on Calvary, what must we do?

On this Good Friday, ask yourself what crosses you are carrying and how you can lift yourself up out of the tomb to unfold more fully your God-self.

A Course in Miracles tells us that “there is a positive interpretation of the crucifixion that is wholly devoid of fear, and therefore wholly benign in what it teaches, if it is properly understood.”

When considering the crucifixion, then, we must remember what Jesus told us. Jesus went through the crucifixion and the resurrection in order to show us the unreality of death. As Ernest Holmes points out in The Bible in the Light of Religious Science, “God knows nothing about death. If the principle of that which lives is Life, then it cannot know death. To suppose that the principle of Life knows death is to deny the Principle of Life.”

The Bible tells us that “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” According to The Bible in the Light of Religious Science, this means that “we all live unto [God.] The experience of death is but the laying off of an old garment and the donning of a new one. The resurrection body is already formed within us and will be carried along when we pass from this plane.

“The experience of death, or change, is necessary, else we would become so enamored of this life that we would be unwilling to go on to another.”

In Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Jonathan’s prize pupil, Fletcher, is practicing when he hits a granite cliff at almost 200 miles per hour. Bach writes, It was, for him, as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange sky, forgetting, remembering, forgetting, and sad and sorry, terribly sorry. “

Then Jonathan appears next to him. “The trick, Fletcher, is that we are trying to overcome our limitations in order, patiently. We don’t tackle flying through rock until a little later in the program.”

Fletcher is startled. “What are you doing here? Haven’t I…didn’t I…die?”

“Oh, Fletch, come on. Think. If you are talking to me now, then obviously you didn’t die, did you? What you did manage to do was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly.”

In his book Illusions, Bach reminds us that “we are not bodies walking around, we are not atoms and molecules, we are unkillable undestroyable ideas of the Is, no matter how much we believe otherwise…”

I believe that this is the message of the crucifixion and resurrection: we cannot die. Jesus was showing us our own immortality by symbolically dying and overcoming this condition.

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me From rest and sleep, which but that pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

It has been called the Passion, and the current film reawakened in me a question, Why do we call the death of Jesus the “Passion?” Well through the wonders of modern technology (i.e., the internet), I found my answer.

The English word has its roots in the Latin passio, which means, simply, "suffering." Its first recorded use is in early Latin translations of the Bible that appeared in the 2nd century A.D. and that describe the death of Jesus. The Latin word was borrowed prolifically in Old English religious texts, where its meaning remained exclusively theological. It began to develop broader meanings. The first new senses in English referred to martyrdom and physical suffering or affliction, and by the 13th century, passion was being used to refer to any strong emotion.

Today we honor the passing of Jesus of Nazareth. To some he was the messiah, the anointed one. To others he was an irritant, but to me he showed us how to live and then how to die.

He could have just walked out of Jerusalem, and returned to Nazareth, returning to his craft. However, he not only did not leave Jerusalem. It would seem that he was almost baiting the trap. His prayers in the garden, and his foretelling of the denial of Peter, and other things he said at the last supper, indicate that he knew that something was amiss, that he was going to be betrayed by those he held dearest, and that he was going to undergo a trial of immense proportions. Why would he do this? In JLS, Jonathan at the very end left Fletcher, his prize pupil, because he knew that his pupils had become too dependent upon him and it was time for Fletcher to see how he could fare on his own. Jesus, too, had seen that his disciples had become dependent up him. I think he knew that he needed leave, so that his disciples could indeed do “greater things than these.”

Lao Tzu …The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die and has nothing to hold on to: No illusions in his mind, no resistance in his body. He does not think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being He holds nothing back from life, therefore he is ready for his death, As a man is ready for sleep after a good days work.

"Not that He as a man was any better," said Quimby, "but He was the embodiment of a higher Wisdom, more so than any man who has ever lived."[24] This "Truth" or "higher Wisdom" discovered by Jesus was an impersonal mind-principle that we call "the Christ."

As to the importance of this day in traditional Christian Churches,

Charles Fillmore said “Christianity somehow became distorted as the early writers of the Bible attempted to satiate the early Christians who were facing drastic times of torture and death before the lions. Too much was glorified in the crucifixion. All too much was and still is placed on the suffering of Jesus. Let it be designed to allow you the time to reflect. Let it cause us to question our personal motives, inflated egos and the ways in which we custom our life to the ways of the world rather than to the spirit within ourselves. We as human beings were not designed to suffer and there is no one nor tradition which is going to save you from yourself. Suffering was not God ordained. God could not cause such affliction upon Itself and you are the outward manifestation of God. You are the expression of perfect Spirit in all that you are and all that you do. For God to want you to suffer would be for God to call suffering upon Himself, which is an impossibility. “As Ernest Holmes said “man has learned all he can from suffering.”

From the section on immortality in the Science of Mind Hymnal We are born of eternal day and the spiritual sun shall never set upon the glory of the soul for it is the coming forth of God into self expression. We are not going to attain immortality, we are now immortal. Resurrection is the power of life, always present.

This is the great lesson of the master teacher, Jesus, through his death and resurrection, that death is not real. It is the gift of the truth, and the end of the belief in separation and sin. Jesus rose from death to prove that death is not real, that we do not die, and that as I said earlier We are not going to attain immortality at some later date, or some distant time in the future, because WE ARE NOW IMMORTAL.

Jesus went through the crucifixion and the resurrection in order to show us the unreality of death

You have totally missed the point of the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus was not the "Great Example" - He is the Son of God who gave His life as a ransom for many. He died to defeat Death (1 Cor 15), not to show that it was unreal. Tell any grieving widow that her husband of 50 years is not "really" dead. Death entered the world as a result of sin - Adam rebelling against God in the Garden...and the whole Earth was cursed as a result. Only the Perfect Man could pay the penalty demanded by the Fall.

His resurrection alone ought to demonstrate His "otherness" - where did the power come from to return to the living from the dead?

BTW - we remember His death today; knowing full well that Sunday (Resurrection Day) is coming. And we celebrate the defeat of "death" and "sin."

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