The Master of Nazareth
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.”
Thus spoke one who knew of love! – –
Yet it was another who had lived this love previously in the everlasting elevated teaching of his life…
Of the one we call the greatest of all Men of Love many of his brothers, it is true, had a premonition; yet none of them reached the intensity of his love!
And many have come after him; many are still to appear who truly can be called Men of Love. Nevertheless, despite all the power of their love there was no one, nor can there be one, who could be compared to him – although I speak here of his ‘brothers’ united in spirit!
Yet what was once revealed in each of these his brothers was always the same as what was revealed within him in its total fullness.
And what can still be revealed in the course of time will only be the same in an ever new form of revelation! – –
It is a delusion invented by the human mind to suppose that the figure of the carpenter from Nazareth belongs to the pious myth. The man known to later generations from the depiction which modelled his features centuries after his earthly appearance looked of course different from the fakir-like miracle worker he was turned into at a time when the superstitious minds of east and west fought for his image…
He who truly wishes to investigate the traces of truth must learn to expunge those additions, made by generations bound to the earth, from the picture he has regarded from his early youth as untouchable.
Only then will he meet the Master’s eye lighting up; he will see the countenance of a man –
united with God in the deepest sense of this word – who, still as man to men on earth, brought ‘glad tidings’ from that realm of essential spirit which he called ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’. – – –
If I proclaim others – like myself – to be his ‘brothers’, my words would be misinterpreted if it was thought that I was saying that we would resemble the otherworldly magical picture, signed by the name of this carpenter from Nazareth, that sought to equate him later with the ‘Logos’.
This folly is far from our intentions!
Those who wished to secure his place in the highest heavens through their dubious knacks have only alienated him from everything that is earthly human. He is thereby no longer comprehensible to those he wished to lead upwards to the most elevated heights of the spirit!
No wonder if he ended up a myth for them!
Look friends, I know very well of what I speak when I call the greatest of all Men of Love the exalted ‘brother’!
None of us, regardless of how high the spirit has raised him, will ever embrace the nonsense that he – the speaker – is the ‘First Word’ itself which speaks from him. Therefore it seems to us: an outrageous calumny to believe that he, the greatest Man of Love, fell into such madness…
We wish to show him as he really was when he, like us, bore the travails of the earth – in the way he still today – as the spiritually united brother of his brothers – gives day after day witness of himself to us in his spiritual form, recognisable to us and united with us!
If we who revere him so highly call ourselves his ‘brothers’, this means only that as an earthly man he was one of us. He also remains in spiritual form one of us, even if one wishes the Son of Man who experienced all that is human in himself when he lived on earth, to take, in ancient times full of gross mystery, the form of ‘God’ who had to descend from his divine majesty because the vengeful idol of a small ancient people ostensibly could not control his rage until his own ‘son’ had been brought to him as a sacrifice. – –
We are not speaking of someone we only know from ancient, dark accounts! –
We are united with the one of whom we speak in a way that no earthly unification can ever unite man with man! – – –
We know, even if we could not know it otherwise, through the one of whom we speak, that he once walked upon this earth as a man, in every respect as human as we are; he was only superior to us in the power of his loving fire. Wherefore he could perform the extraordinarily great and exalted wonder of changing the spiritual aura of this earth so that thoseof ‘good will’ can now find their way back to the spirit in love. The way has been cleared as it were, in such a way that a wanderer in deep snow cannot lose it for it has been cleared by one who knows it…
In this way it is truly his very message which reaches you through our words!
If you see on us the mark of man, though we give witness of ourselves as his ‘brothers’, then know that he too, like us, was a real man for whom nothing human remained beyond his experience! –
Nothing human appeared to him too lowly that he did not share it at some time in himself and in his own experience! –
He would not have been who he was if he had not found room within himself for the whole range of everything human to make itself felt within him! –
Truly he was given no power to withdraw from his humanity, had he ever wished to withdraw from it!
Only the fact that in the end he was the victor defines his greatness. Similarly any man wishing to follow him can only give witness of himself as ‘chosen’ if he sees as ‘nothingness’ the folly of the earth which he cannot escape as long as he lives on this earth. He must learn to wrest himself from all ‘guilt of sin’ to raise himself up into the light of redemption, consuming himself in the blaze of that love which in the Master, with whom he can unite only in love, performed the exalted miracle of his life…
Those who hope to find the great ‘Man of Love’ within their innermost – for he is truly that near to all born on earth that he can easily be found – must above all learn to renounce that delusion which would make of the purest man who ever lived on earth the ‘God’ who offered himself to his Father-God as a sacrifice to a frenzied thirst for vengeance. This is a human, all-too-human invention! –
Only then can he hear the exalted Master in himself: – the wise carpenter from Nazareth!
*