THE DIVINE MISSION
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917.
[81] The
life of Jesus was a perpetual
demonstration of man’s unity with
God. He was the great Engineer of Spirit
who built the first practical road
leading from the world of Sense to the
universe of Ideas. Jesus accomplished
what other pioneers of Spirit had talked
of as a remote possibility. He worked
while others philosophized or slept. His
life was a universal mission; He worked
life’s sum aright for others that
they might learn the principle underlying
the problem of existence, but he never
relieved anyone of the necessity of doing
his own work. Nor did the Great Teacher
free any of his scholars from a single
responsibility.
Jesus proved
his principles by his practices and
established his divinity by his humanity.
He vanquished the evidences of the sense,
refuted hypocritical creed and
Pharisaical laws, and established God as
the only Cause, and Mind as the only
Creator. A spring cannot transcend its
origin, but, through the transcension
of matter, Jesus proved that man
originated in Spirit, thus reconciling
humanity to divinity. Opposites are
irreconcilable, but, by proving the
omnipotence of God, the Christ Principle
establishes the total absence of whatever
seems opposed to the law [82] of Spirit.
Jesus never acknowledged the existence of
evil. He healed the sick and raised the
dead by the simple art of realizing Good
as the only reality. His life was his
greatest rebuke to error. He came to do
the will of his Father, and he spoke the
truth regardless of his audience. His
life was devoted to the perpetual
vanquishment of the so-called codes of
matter by the application of Spiritual
Law.
His
disciples brought the sick and the
sinning to him, and he saw them
whole and free from sin by the
realization of the at-one-ment of
God and man. The more he ignored evil,
the more the disciples of that phantom
strove to rid themselves of his presence.
He was “despised and rejected of
men,” but he prayed for his
persecutors and loved his enemies. He
knew that suffering preceded
purification, that every material pang
was a birth-throe in the travail of
existence, a thraldom from which all must
emerge here or hereafter. Only by the
overcoming of belief in illusion do we
transcend her imaginary realm.
Jesus never
swerved from the path of righteousness,
nor did he ever retrace a single step. He
always seemed more close to the invisible
than to the visible. To him existence was
a crucible in which the precious metal of
his character was being prepared for its
conscious union with Spirit, and he
suffered from the commencement of his
journey until its triumphant close. He
learned through tribulation; for the more
difficult [83] the problem that lay
before him, the stronger became his
faith in himself, to meet every
obstacle as its Master.
The mission
of Jesus was to prove the divinity of
man. The Great Teacher taught by practice
as well as precept. Occasionally he
worked out an example in life’s sum
for a student as a means of illustrating
to his followers the principle he taught,
but he never relieved any from the
necessity of solving a similar problem
alone with the principle of Being. Jesus
raised Lazarus from the dead, but later
Lazarus had to face the problem
alone.
Jesus was a
Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief.
He never spared one of his followers an
experience necessary to his spiritual
development. He knew that experience is
the only reliable way of coming at the
Truth,--the Truth by which he healed the
sick, reformed the sinner, and raised the
dead in substantiation of the principles
he taught. Sorrow for wrongdoing is the
first step towards amendment and the
least difficult. To be effectual our
repentance must be in proportion to our
sin, and the only atonement for evil is
the overcoming of the temptation to sin;
this is accomplished by persistency in
welldoing. The sinner alone can atone for
his sin.
When Jesus
said, “This is my blood which was
shed for you,” he was not speaking
of the red fluid coursing through his
veins. Instead he referred to his life,
the life he was pouring [84] forth into
the world as he went about his
Father’s business. Theology has
sadly misinterpreted the teaching of the
Judean Prince. The tale has been told so
often that the blood of Jesus was shed
for the remission of sins that those
telling it have come to believe it. Yet
it is an interpretation neither
reasonable nor natural. Righteousness
cannot atone for ungodliness. Though a
million men should die to redeem one
sinner, the sacrifice is made in vain.
What affects one, affects all, but the
one who transgresses must pay the debt of
his transgression. To interpret the
divine sacrifice as an atonement for the
sins of transgressors is to turn the
image of the cross into an effigy;
believing that through the suffering of
Jesus the penalty of their sin was
remitted, men have gone on in a cycle of
sinning and of being sorry. What a libel
this teaching is on the mission of Jesus
as well as an insult to the intelligence
of men, for not even God could harmonize
vice and virtue.
Error and
Truth are irreconcilable. Jesus died to
prove that men could transcend existence
and put on divinity without passing
through the transition called death. In
other words, that death is not
necessarily the medium to the end of
resurrection. Jesus died that men might
be raised from the illusion of sense
through spiritual understanding rather
than by death, through science instead of
suffering; but the purpose of his life
was hidden by its interpretation. The
Master knew that a change of environment
does not [85] constitute a change of
mentality. “As the tree falleth so
it lieth,” and no matter where
mortals go they take the enemy of self
with them. “The sense that sinneth,
it shall die” said the patriarchs,
and they saw that it was so. It was a
rigorous dispensation, having for its
only recommendation the prevention of
moral contagion. Then a new light was
diffused, and theology pushed the
pendulum to the other extreme. All men
were saved from the consequence of their
sins by the murder of an innocent man.
All that men had to do was to repent.
Jesus had done the rest. So great is the
mystery of this illusion that to this day
there are those who believe that the
mission of Jesus had no larger meaning
than to save the sinner from the effect
of his sinning. This misinterpretation of
his divine sacrifice was the cross under
whose weight the Nazarene staggered on
the way to Calvary. Jesus lived to the
glory of God and the advancement of
mankind. He gave his life to the service
of humanity.
His
substance he distributed among the poor.
He was the friend of sinners, and in all
his busy life there is no record that he
ever turned away an applicant for his
bounty empty-handed. He wiped the tears
from childish faces and he comforted the
widows and the fatherless in their
affliction. When he was maligned he
opened not his mouth. When malediction
was brought upon his goodness he did not
complain. And what was his earthly
reward? Despised and [86] rejected of
men, he had borne the heat of a sin-sick
world’s heavy burden, and yet this
Prince of the House of Judah “had
not where to lay his head.” In his
last earthly vigil he was alone in a
desert-garden --and yet not alone. All
the demons of sense, all the phantoms of
the brain were there to gibe and torment,
to mock and to scorn the man who was so
soon to lay down his life in behalf of
his friends. Forsaken by all, maligned
and persecuted by those he had helped,
deserted by those whom he had raised from
the dead, yet in spite of all the
testimony of the senses, Jesus never
wavered in his allegiance to the
Invisible Principle that men call God. He
knew that God is All in All, a knowledge
which filled every void in that lonely,
yearning heart. The tears of his agony
fell like dew upon the earth, but Jesus,
seeing with the eyes of the Christ,
looked through the stars and saw the
throne of God, and Good as the only
reality. Sense had been vanquished by
science. The world’s sharpest
weapon had failed, and Jesus, delivered
from the temptation of self-pity, had
overcome evil.
Christ was
crucified by creed. Two thieves were put
to death with him, one on his right hand
the other on his left. The people passing
the scene of the royal murder, reviled
the pain-intoxicated man
saying,--“If Thou be the Son of
God, come down from the cross.” The
priests who envied the righteousness of
the Son of Man, mocked him. “He
saved others, himself he [87] cannot
save.” “He trusted God;
let God deliver him” said
the priests, and the thieves on either
side of the Son of God echoed the insults
of these disguised politicians. But Jesus
opened not his mouth. Suffering dignified
his whole life. His crucifixion was the
climax of the torture that characterized
his career from its inception to its
close. The agony of the crucifixion is
beyond the concept of a less sensitive
soul than was that of the Nazarene, but
the more potent agony, the drop of gall
in the bitter cup which Jesus drained to
its dregs was the fact that his
life’s work had been misunderstood.
The sun was setting on Jesus’
worldly activity. He had been faithful
unto the end. The consciousness partly
liberated from the lacerated body was in
the vestibule where the gold of humanity
is exchanged for the pearl of divinity.
Jesus was unconscious. He spoke in his
delirium, and so great is the power of
habit that, as was his wont when speaking
to his followers, the words of David fell
from his lips. “My God, My God, why
hast Thou forsaken me?” There is a
startling resemblance in the life of
David and that of Jesus. Both men were
gifted with the Spirit without measure.
What could have been more natural than
that Jesus, in the moment of physical
oblivion that precedes the flight of the
Spirit from its corporeal prison, should
reiterate a phrase that fell from the
lips of the one man in [88] history
whose character most resembled that of
his own?
It has been
said that Jesus, coming in the flesh,
partly partook of his mother’s
earthly condition, and that this accounts
for his struggle in Gethsemane and on
Calvary, [Mary Baker Eddy, Science and
Health], at the same time
establishing him as the Mediator between
God and Man. A stream cannot surmount its
source. If the mother of Jesus had been
endowed with less spirituality than her
divine Son she could not have conceived
so perfect a prototype of Spirit as Jesus
proved himself by his life to be. Man in
his spiritual essence is an idea of God,
spiritual and perfect. Corporeality is an
illusion or a mental phenomenon of which
every effect is unreal and ephemeral. In
the realm of Spirit, corporeality is
unknown. In reality pain is an
illusion.
Mortal
existence may be likened to the night of
eternal life, the night with its sleep in
which strange images invade the mind;
dreams with their pleasures and pains,
their joys and sorrows, their loves and
their hates, their bitter losses and
trifling gains, are not real, but they
seem so to the dreamer until he wakes.
The illusion is as true as the
imagination which contains it; therefore
it is literally true that, while Jesus
imaged himself as playing a mortal role,
he “was acquainted with
grief,” he recognized or consented
to suffering. It was necessary that a
guide should do so. Jesus was born of the
Spirit and was the [89] idea of Mind. He
entered the labyrinth of matter as a
surgeon enters into a critical operation,
to kill or to cure the appearance. He was
in the world of sense as a Pilgrim and a
Stranger. If he had ever entertained the
image of a possible separation between
Mind and idea, it would have darkened his
spiritual consciousness and thus
prevented his perfect demonstration. A
defective link would have weakened the
whole chain of his life’s work. The
resurrection of Jesus was the climax
resulting from a perfect life. If he had
not met every problem of existence as its
Master, he would have failed in
life’s final examination. That he
won the prize of high calling is
sufficient proof that he was unhampered
by the illusion of mortal birth.
In the last
analysis everything will be found to have
had its origin in Spirit, and all
humanity will be recognized as the
manifestation of divinity, but while man
continues to wander in a maze of sensual
seeming, he will not prove himself the
heir of Spirit, and, therefore, will
deprive himself of his birthright. Spirit
cannot descend to the myth of matter, and
man cannot ascend to the actuality of
Spirit until he leaves the labyrinth of
sense.
“My
God, My God, why has Thou forsaken
me?” was the reiteration of the
royal prophet’s words, but they
never betrayed a doubt in the mind of
Jesus of his inseparable union with God,
nor were they the evidence of human
weakness. Spirit knows no lack of
strength. Envy instigated [90] the
crucifixion of Jesus. It has incited the
priest to murder lesser disciples of
Truth, for envy is the price of true
superiority.
The cross
was Jesus’ apprehension of the
world’s misinterpretation of his
mission. It will be the cross of all who
attempt to live the Christ life. If the
humanity of Jesus had not transcended
itself and put on divinity before death,
the Saviour could not have returned to
the earth plane after his resurrection.
Love is that Divine compassion which
sacrifices itself for the salvation of
others.
Man becomes
Christ-like in the degree that he
expresses the universality of Love
without limit or partiality. Love is
intelligent in its arrangements; it is
wise in its adaptations. It is generous
in its benefaction and gives according to
needs instead of to merits, for Love
leaveth judgment to God.
Love is
incorruptible. It is the substance of all
that is beautiful, of all that makes
delight, and Love is everywhere. It is in
the air, that “sea of glass like
unto crystal” in which we live and
move. You hear Love’s voice in the
splashing fountains and singing brooks,
aye in the moan of the sea, for Her voice
is “as the sound of many
waters.” You feel Love’s
presence in the shady woods tremulous
with newborn life. You see Love’s
soul in the color of the rose and sense
her spirit in its fragrance. Love is in
the sunshine and in the sanctity of the
gloaming, for Love is God. Jesus Christ
was the universal Lover. Love is
unselfed. You may [91] desert Her and
build a wall of self which is
impenetrable to its rays, but when you
take down the barriers you will find Love
waiting to flood your consciousness, to
claim you for its own. The kingdom of
heaven will be established upon earth
when humanity learns to love. Love is the
universal solvent. The adamant of hate is
dissolved by her quickening rays. Whom
the Lord loveth, He instructs.
Chastisements are proof of God’s
love, and in the shadow of affliction His
presence is found. Nature is Love’s
minister. She never accumulates. She
receives and in return gives a
hundred-fold. The fault is not in nature
that her progeny are unsheltered, unfed.
Her storehouses were never locked until
man turned the key. The law of
compensation is inevitable. As ye sow so
shall ye reap--here or hereafter. If you
sow to the world you shall reap its
whirlwind of lust, “and the world
shall pass away and the lust
thereof,” but if you sow to the
Spirit you will reap life
everlasting.
Be not
deceived; “if you were of the world
it would love its own, but because ye are
not of the world, therefore, the world
hateth you. If they have persecuted me,
they will also persecute you. They shall
put you out of the synagogues, yea, the
time cometh that whosoever killeth you
will think that he doeth God
service.” “But stand fast and
in nothing terrified by your adversaries,
which is to them an evident token of
perdition, but to you of the salvation of
God.”
When the
priests saw Jesus on the cross they [92]
thought they were rid of his selfless
example which was so powerful a rebuke to
their sensuality. The blindness of
bigotry defeats her aim and therefore the
priests did not see that in destroying
the body of Jesus they were aiding him to
complete in triumph the great feat of
spiritual engineering whereby the
liberated prisoners of sense might wing
their way to the realm of Spirit. Neither
did they understand the law by which they
professed to be governed, or they would
have realized that “the wrath of
man is made to praise God.”
The
transcension of existence is to the
righteous man the commencement of the
Spirit’s free life. Jesus’
death on the cross preserved from
oblivion for all time the magnitude of
his life, and magnified the might of his
influence. His resurrection set the seal
of God’s approval on every act of
his existence and proclaimed him the
manifestation of God. Jesus Christ taught
the doctrine of non-resistance, well
knowing that to oppose violence is to
create war which is ruthless murder,
always unwarrantable and never
justifiable. Jesus supplanted violence
with wisdom, and surely wisdom is better
than weapons of war.
It was a
doctrine of the Master that our bank
account should be placed in heaven, in
the bank of Divine Mind, “where
neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and
where thieves do not break through nor
steal”; where the supply is
inexhaustible and the Banker is
incorruptible.
Zeal is the
corner-stone of sects, and zeal not [93]
according to wisdom is savagery. The
Pharisees represented the largest Jewish
sect of Jesus’ time. They feigned
to be what they were not, and they
concealed what they were. They took to
themselves the credit of virtue which
they did not possess, and they concealed
the vices in which they indulged. The
scribes represented the advocates of the
letter of the Law. With characteristic
honesty and with utter disregard of
public opinion Jesus denounced their
practices as hypocritical and warned his
followers to observe and do according to
their law but not after their works. He
taught the Law of Love in
contradistinction to the Mosaic code and
told the priests and Pharisees that the
despised public officials and adulterous
women would enter into the consciousness
of Spirit before they would. It was thus
that he forever severed himself from the
approval of those in high places. Sects
and personal opinions Jesus regarded as
separate and apart from righteousness. He
“knew what was in mortal
man,” and that, when severity of
manners is assumed as a cloak to sensual
indulgence, it is one of the worst
prostitutions of religion. There was no
room in the mind of Christ for creed.
The life of
Jesus was so consumed with fidelity to
his divine mission that he had no time
for ceremony which is, as has been nobly
said,
“Nothing else but place, degree,
and form.
Creating fear and awe in other
men.”
[94] The
Saviour proved that purity was not proof
against calumny. This Man of Whom
“the world was not worthy”
was without spot or blemish. He bore the
seal of God’s approval, and yet he
was denied and vilified. The greatest
proofs of his divinity were accepted as
manifestations of the devil. When Jesus
healed the sick, his opponents
thought he was possessed of a
devil; when he raised the dead, the
priests knew it to be so. And if a
follower of the sinless Christ is found
worthy today to emulate in part the
divine example and set the captives of
sense free, it is not unlikely that he
will drain Christ’s cup to its
dregs.
Envy never
changes her methods, and the followers of
Christ will be baptized with the fire of
calumny, but if, like him, they endure
unto the end, they will be saved.
Martyrs
belong to every century, but perhaps
never in the world’s history was
martyrdom so universally inflicted as in
this age. The present century and the one
just passed will figure in history as the
age of martyrdom. Anyone is a martyr who
sacrifices his life to sustain a cause.
Some are born martyrs; others are made
martyrs by kings and emperors.
“For where the argument of
intellect
Is added unto evil will and
power,
No rampart can the people make against
it.”
Envy killed
the Man-God; she will kill you if you are
found worthy, and “some will say,
how [95] are the dead raised up? And with
what body do they come? Thou mindless
one, that which thou soweth is not made
alive except it die.” It is sown a
natural body; it is raised a spiritual
body, and as we have borne the image of
the earthly we shall also bear the image
of the heavenly.
It is thus
that death is swallowed up in victory.
Martyrs are the progeny of principles,
and fire, sword, and hunger combined
cannot eliminate the influence of
righteousness.
Envy not
infrequently uses creed to “trample
the good and exalt the depraved,”
and the higher one rises on the scale of
the Spirit the more persistent and
insidious becomes the attack of Envy. But
be not weary in well doing, for when the
sunshine of Truth evaporates the mist of
illusion, you will see that your efforts
have not been in vain. Every painful
experience for Christ’s sake is a
flashlight that illumines the realization
of your unity with God. Suffering
precedes purification, and every pang is
a birth-throe in the travail of existence
from which thraldom we must emerge in
order to enter the larger life. The
highest proof that man can give of his
at-one-ment with his Maker is in his love
for humanity. Love is the great destroyer
of all that does not bear the impress of
Christ. Perfection is the most potent
rebuke to impurity whether it be physical
or mental. “And these signs shall
follow them that believe, they shall
heal the sick.” True religion
can never be separated from Spiritual
[96] healing any more than a fruitful
tree can be separated from its latent
quality of productiveness. Jesus insisted
on physical healing by purely spiritual
means, and he did not put a time limit on
the divine command. He healed by
preaching, and, in the proportion to the
approach you make to the Christ standard
of perfection, you will heal the sick,
cast out sin, and bind up the
broken-hearted. Jesus never depended upon
material means. Nor did he use or
recommend the use of drugs. Truth was the
only remedy that he ever
administered.
Man will
continue to sin until he commences to pay
the price of sin. Therefore suffering
because of sinning is essential to the
overcoming of the sinful sense. Prayer
cannot amend sin. “God ordaineth
that the debt be paid” by man
because,
“‘Tis sin alone which doth
disfranchise him,
And render him unlike the Good
Supreme.”
Vices are
like “smoke that vitiates”
the divine rays, and sin must cease
before “our number” will
tally with the Eternal
Proposition.” Sin does violence to
man’s real self and for God to
pardon it would necessitate that Deity
contradict Himself. There are no
contradictions in the Divine Law, and the
only reparation for sin is amendment. The
sooner mortals realize this, the sooner
they will stop the practice of sin and
thus revoke themselves the penalty for
sin. It [97] is by overcoming error that
we prove its nothingness.
God does not
forgive sin; neither does he punish it.
Sin is its own executioner. The sun does
not recognize darkness nor does
Omnipresence recognize nothingness.
Neither are those who are in darkness
conscious of the light, nor is the
dreamer conscious of the nothingness of
the dream until he awakens from its
thraldom. It is in the transcension of
sin that its nothingness is proven, even
as it is the ascension after death to
life. Realities are eternal. Whatever
appears to exist that is not real is
merely a shadow which fades before the
light of intelligence in the fashion that
clouds are dispersed by atmospheric
warmth. Evil is the appearance of
something other than Deity. Strictly
speaking, if anything exists in any form
whatever, even as evil, it could not be
nothingness, for existence is
something. Nothingness, therefore, may be
likened to the effigy of something, and
likewise sin to the effigy of goodness.
Force is constructive energy, but if
force is misdirected, it becomes
destructive energy, proving that,
“Not each impression
Is good, albeit good may be the
wax.”
The
Eucharist is a beautiful symbol, but if,
instead of the blood of the vine to
commemorate [98] the death of Jesus, the
priests had understood the sacrament of
the Last Supper to be the commemoration
of the life of Christ, the Eucharist
would not only be beautiful as an emblem,
but it would be a true figure of the
at-one-ment of the human and the
Divine. It would be the true bread
“which cometh down from
heaven,” and the result on mankind
would be reformative instead of
commemorative.
Jesus
translated his cross into a crown, he
wept, and “weeping ripened that
without which to God we cannot
turn.”
In the gloom
of the tomb Jesus proved that,
“There is no other where
Than in the Mind Divine, wherein is
kindled
The love that turns it, and the power
it rains.”
And this was
the mission of Jesus and is the mission
of all the sons of God,--the
“whereunto ye are
called.”
Next: Faith, Hope and
Love
* * * * ** * * * *
The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
