Joy to the world! The Lord is come.
Let earth receive her King!
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven, and heaven and nature sing!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)

As I woke up last Sunday morning, my Thomas said loudly and clearly in my mind, “Hear O Israel, The Lord Our God is One God.” It was the ancient Hebrew invocation, the beautiful call to prayer of the world’s first true monotheists. After we had spent most of that previous week working through Jesus’s teachings about God and religions for His website, and coming at last to the stunning understanding that Jesus had come to abolish religions altogether; and then after we had spent our nighttime work-time polishing and watching our post on the Trinity go live; and by the time I had finished dressing for our walk on a bright but almost-freezing morning that was unusually cold for Austin:  by then all the bits that our many revelations of the previous week had shaken loose had fallen into place in my mind. Omigod. Now I understood why it was so important that Jesus be born a Jew, and why He had thought it was essential that He concentrate on teaching just the Jews. Now I understood why Jesus considered it to be crucial that in order for His teachings to be properly followed, they were going to need their own website, and why they would have to be taken way back and followed all over again right from the beginning. I thought that at last I understood everything. Joy to the World, indeed!!

Far from having been born to free us from our sins, Jesus had been born to free us altogether from religions. And my sweet Thomas was smiling now. I had been fighting this ultimate conclusion so hard! But I was finally getting it. Religions had been among humankind’s earliest inventions, our necessary comfort in the lonely dark as our fully human minds were developing. But just as we eventually outgrew using stone tools that we had learned to chip to create an edge, so we also finally outgrew the need to relate to God by means of religions. And so Jesus had come at last as God’s emissary to the world’s first true monotheists, to teach them how they could better relate to God individually and internally.

And then on Monday morning it first occurred to me that I had not heard from Jesus in months. Not since September, I thought. Or perhaps not even since August. I was trying to produce the content that we had laid out for His website. But instead, what I was getting from Him through Thomas was different from the teachingsbyjesus.com master plan. It was beautiful, though. I thought it might even be better than our original plan. I was sending it to Craig Hogan, whose design team was putting the website together, and Craig was sufficiently confused by what he was getting that on last Monday afternoon he sent me the website’s prototype again. And when I saw that prototype for the first time since September, I sat and looked at it. We had first begun to talk about this website last spring, when seekreality.com had been our focus, and Jesus had been telling us that He didn’t want His website to go live until next spring. And now I realized what Jesus’s problem might be.

So then on Monday night I had what I told my husband on Tuesday with a giggle had been “a come-to-Jesus meeting” with Jesus. I could laugh about it, because although Thomas wouldn’t let me remember the details of that meeting, I felt relieved to have the sense that it had gone well. I had needed to request a meeting with Jesus, because He never would have called me on the carpet Himself. But it was clear to me as soon as I saw it again that the prototype for the website must have upset Him. And we had to fix this right away!

Discarnate beings are subtly different from us in some ways, and that is true even of Beings at the highest levels. For one thing, they seem to think more literally in relation to earth matters than we do. And there had been a lot of me on that prototype website as its narrator and resident expert, so my first thought was that all of me should be removed. But when I woke up on Tuesday morning with crib notes from our meeting in my mind, I found that none of that had bothered Jesus. No, people would need a person living on earth to relate to, and He considered me to be a good choice. But as I had suspected, Jesus had been very much bothered by that prototype website, and what had bothered Him had been that they had included a large Bible just as casual decor, and also there had been that immensely horrifying word, “Christian.” So then, Jesus had seen what was supposed to be His own website as instead hexed and condemned to become just one more Christian website, and lumped together with everything else on earth that is Christian and only carries His name. So at that point He had mentally turned off on our project altogether.

People think of Jesus as the founder of Christianity, but Jesus the Man has had nothing to do with Christianity. Three hundred years after Jesus’s death, the Romans under Constantine appropriated Jesus’s name and destroyed His then-thriving spiritual movement, and they created from its ashes a religion to be used for their own purposes. Their religion is not Jesus’s religion. Even now, He doesn’t seem to take any proprietary pride in Christianity, although He does dearly love all the Christian people. And now, as the religion wanes, Jesus wants to resurrect His own spiritual movement from before the Roman Emperor Constantine stole it away, which He certainly has a right to do. But He wants to resurrect it from before there ever was a Christianity! And He cannot see why people find it hard to think of Him as just Himself alone, without the Christian religion attached to Him. Even I find that hard to do, so I can see why most people are going to find doing it to be almost impossible.

Thomas has been helping me to create the materials for Jesus’s website. We use the same sort of hybrid channeling process by which we produce these posts each week: I have the hands so I do the research and the writing, but a lot of the time he steps in and adds his thoughts and sometimes he even works the fingers. It makes for a very efficient collaboration. And Thomas knows Jesus a lot better than I do, so when it comes down to drawing some ultimate conclusions, Thomas has to do that. For example, I can see that he is right, and I can see how he gets there, but without his backup I could not alone come right out and say that Jesus was sent by God to abolish the very concept of religions and teach us to relate to God internally. For me alone, that is several bridges too far! In part, because the implications of even saying the words are so tremendous. I mean, it is one thing to separate Jesus from Christianity and tell people that Jesus is independent and we can relate to Jesus independently and that is what He wants from us now. But, God too? Give up on religions altogether, knowing that God is independently real and you can relate to God in your deepest heart at every moment, and God will hear and answer you?   

Jesus did in fact say, however, that we should pray to God directly. Naturally they don’t talk about this much in the churches, but there has never been anyone harder on religions and the clergy than our wonderful and much-beloved Master Jesus. That sweet and gentle soul called the clergy of His day knaves and hypocrites, and He told people simply to pray without them. He said, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:5-6). In fact, Jesus seems for most of His ministry on earth to have taught and prayed outdoors, rather than in any house of worship. Prior to His crucifixion, Jesus took His disciples to pray with Him, again outdoors, in the Garden of Gethsemane.

So really, all that Jesus had needed from me on Monday night was my fresh assurance that for the rest of my earthly life I would work for Him and never for Christianity. When I asked Him if He wanted changes to His prototype website, it turned out that He had thought about it, and He wanted a couple of changes that matched what Thomas and I had already been writing. He also told me – and I thought this was cute – that He wanted His website to look the way His personal website would have looked in the year 28 CE. Otherwise, He told me that all is well and all of our understandings are right.

I don’t know how amazing this feels to you, but I consider it to be news that rocks the world.

We have just now learned that Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago to teach the world’s first true monotheists how to get past the need for religions altogether, and how to relate to God individually and internally. Religions were a temporary and primitive stage of human spiritual development that should have ended two thousand years ago! Perhaps another Omigod might be appropriate here? And we are learning this on Christmas morning? This was also why Jesus was so obsessed with bringing the kingdom of God on earth. This was what all of that was about! The Lord’s Prayer itself makes as its most prominent plea the call for God to reign on earth: “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (MT 6:10). And this is also why Jesus insists that the kingdom of God will be internal. He says, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-22). And as the kingdom of God overspreads the earth, we will at last joyfully stop being cringing creatures controlled by fears instilled in us by Pharisees and Sadducees – or, today, by Calvinist ministers and Catholic priests – and begin to be genuinely spiritual beings who are always in intimate contact with God!

You can clearly see this process beginning in the Gospels. Jesus is, even today, the most charismatic Man you can imagine, and soon crowds were following Him wherever He went. The Gospels tell us that He was “speaking to them about the kingdom of God, and curing those who had need of healing” (see e.g. LK 9:11). He soon began to send out emissaries to preach the kingdom of God, telling them, “Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is served to you; and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’” (LK 10:8-9). Or, “Whatever city you enter and they do not receive you, go out into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your city which clings to our feet we wipe off in protest against you; yet know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’ I say to you, it will be more tolerable on that day for Sodom than for that city’” (LK 10:11).

Following His resurrection, Jesus gave to His disciples what is now called the Great Commission when He said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, …  teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (MT 28:19-20). And so it was very well begun! Jesus’s nascent movement had millions of followers when Constantine destroyed it three hundred years later.

Jesus is indeed our Savior! He came to save this world from ignorance! And a two-thousand-year setback means nothing to Him now. Please, my dear friends, let’s all aid Him in this. We know now that Jesus came to open our hearts to a much deeper relationship with God. And we have just received the greatest gift of our lives.

Joy to the world! The Savior reigns.
Let men their songs employ.
While fields and floods,
Rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy!
Repeat the sounding joy!
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)

‘Til the moon deserts the sky, ‘Til all the seas run dry,
‘Til then I’ll worship You.
‘Til the tropic sun grows cold, ‘Til this young world grows old,
My Darling, I’ll adore You.
You are my reason to live! All I own I would give
Just to have You adore me.
‘Til the rivers flow upstream, ‘Til lovers cease to dream,
‘Til then I’m Yours. Be mine.
– Carl Sigman (1909-2000), from “Till” (1961)

As we mourn a religion that is frankly dying, and is far enough now down the fatal slope that its end seems to be inevitable, it seems suitable for us to pause and to look back briefly, and to wonder. What has gone wrong with Christianity? And how might things have turned out differently if the original Way of Jesus had not been hijacked by the Romans in the year 325, and if instead the Lord’s perfect teachings had been allowed to spread quietly from heart to heart and nation to nation beneath all the radar until they gently took over the world?

I have my own ideas, but my ideas are biased by my sense of betrayal by the religion that for most of my life I have loved so much. So I have been cruising around the internet this week in search of other theories. And I have found no end of theories! One in fact suggests that the internet itself is the problem, and that “Christianity is declining in America. Its root cause is outdated U.S. Internet unaccountability policy that imposes amoralism, a doctrine of not caring about right and wrong.” I guess I would say in response that if the religion is already so weak that the advent of the internet alone has been enough to kill it, then it must already have been pretty far gone!

Perhaps the most prominent theory, though, is some version of our having outgrown the need for religions altogether. As we have become more sophisticated as individuals and as a worldwide community, we have come to see through the excessively simplistic and fear-based dogmas of Christianity, and perhaps of other religions as well. We are at the point of freeing ourselves from being told scary and often internally contradictory fables meant to force us into pews each week. I understand how those fables have betrayed earnest Christians, since I have heard from so many people who have told me how they have felt betrayed. People have been writing to me, and have told me about what they once believed, and how those beliefs no longer feel right to them. Or how their former churches no longer feel welcoming. Or perhaps how something else has gone wrong in their old relationships with Christianity. And what feels to them like a sudden disconnect seems to trouble them very much indeed! The point is that they have not become atheists. And they certainly haven’t given up on Jesus. I don’t think that I have heard from anyone who has suddenly decided that there is no God! But for all of them, it is the religion itself that is no longer making sense. And this disconnect is happening fast.

 It has been estimated that sixteen million American women have left Christianity in just the past decade. Come to think of it, most of the people who have lately emailed me about leaving Christianity have indeed been women. So in recent years, we might say that this death of Christianity in the United States seems to be at least in part a phenomenon of women pulling away from churches where they no longer feel welcome, either because the dogmas feel barbaric – that was what finally chased me away – or because the church-people have become cliquish, snobbish, and self-righteous, which can be one result of horrific church doctrines like Calvinism. So whenever you do these investigations into why religions worldwide are dying, you end up finding good reasons why the process is ongoing, at least in the case of Christianity.

Christianity was clearly born to die of its own false and fear-based dogmas. When you plant a tree you must plant it straight, or eventually it will topple of its own crooked weight.

Our intended topic this week was to wonder what The Jesus Movement could have been like today if the Roman Emperor Constantine never had seized and usurped The Way of Jesus. But first we needed a frame-verse. That is how we start the blogging process each week. First of all, Thomas and I set out to search my mind for a frame-verse to give us some inspiration around our proposed topic, but this time we couldn’t find a hymn that adequately expressed the way that I have come to feel about sweet Master Jesus. So then Thomas found a non-Christian song in my larger mental database of songs and poems, and he suggested it to me with a chuckle because the lyrics sounded silly to him. He thought it was perfect, though, for our topic, what with worship and miracles among the lyrics, and with my promising Jesus that I would live for Him and promising to be His. But I rejected it at once. Good grief! I barely even remembered that song from when I was a teenager. He insisted that it was spot-on, but so what? It was a drippy teenage love song! I went looking for a suitable hymn on the internet. My relationship with Jesus is highly unusual, and the fact that I have a personal relationship with Jesus at all has grown from my spirit guide’s amazing relationship with Jesus, and from the fact that he now sometimes takes me with him when he visits with Jesus. Almost no one trailing a silver cord ever gets to meet with Jesus. And even at that, Thomas won’t let me remember most of our meetings. I only know that they sometimes happen.

And it was just when we started to look for a frame-verse this week that I realized the extent to which I have fallen completely in love with Jesus. Omigod. The word “charismatic” was literally invented to describe how it feels to be around Him. It is no wonder to me that He attracted crowds when He was on earth! Jesus is a people-magnet. And the way that He looks at you, the love that He expresses for you individually just by meeting your eyes is indescribable. It is God’s love, literally. I have never felt so much love from anyone! And yet, He has no ego at all. The one person who really deserves to feel self-important has no ego whatsoever. The more I looked for a hymn to use as a frame-verse, the more that gushy teen love song that Thomas had found and resurrected kept playing in my mind. I would do anything for Jesus. And so would you! Thomas and I have been bickering for years about how long I will be willing to stay on earth. But for Jesus, for God literally who is trying so hard now and so touchingly to maintain His status as a human being, I would live to be a hundred and twenty years old if He wanted that. I will teach the Gospels on earth for Him for so long as I can speak. That song, word for word, is what I would do for Jesus. So, there it is. Our frame-verse this week is a gushy teenage love song to the Lord.

And my rediscovering that song after half a century as I also am revisiting Jesus’s Gospel teachings and writing the scripts for teachingsbyjesus.com is giving me another revelation. Why on earth has Christianity ever even remotely ranked the merely derivative letters of Paul with the precious Gospel words of Jesus? Except for 1Cor 13, which Thomas tells me was channeled from God through Paul, and which you clearly can see was channeled when you view it in context – except for that one letter – all the letters of Paul are merely Gospels commentary! Only Jesus is God. There is no other. He came to earth so God could “look through His eyes” (as Thomas has expressed it to me), and come to better understand people on God’s behalf. So then Jesus could develop the teachings that He spent those three years and more delivering to us. The Lord’s Gospel words are sacred! By comparison, the words in all the rest of the Christian Bible are mere dross.  

And the historical record shows that Jesus did indeed have an amazing effect on those who knew Him personally. His Way spread rapidly during the first three hundred years after His death and resurrection, as far away as Rome and to millions of people in the Mediterranean region before the Romans under Constantine decided that a variant of the Lord’s message could be useful to the Romans as a means of fear-based control. So then they invented at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 what became Christianity. But let us imagine now that instead, Constantine came up with some other means of controlling the masses seventeen hundred years ago. And let us further assume that the teachings of Jesus were preserved in the canonical Gospels by some other means, and they spread peacefully under the radar of the powerful and the brutal – no Inquisitions; no Crusades – to then be passed along and taught over all the world, just as we have them today. What then would the world be like, do you think? Can we even begin to imagine that world now?

 I think that this would be something like the world as it would be today:

• The Jesus Movement. There would of course be no Christian religion. Instead, people would carry a skinny black book – you can read it in an evening! – of the sayings of Jesus alone. And yes, it might be those same four canonical Gospels. People might be reading the other Gospels, too. They don’t add much.
• A Lot Less Fear. Without that fear-based religion, we would never have had the worry of sin, but we would have had instead the certainty of God’s love and forgiveness and God’s kingdom overspreading the earth. Jesus talks about God’s kingdom overspreading the earth at least a hundred times through all four canonical Gospels, and that would have become most of our focus over the past two thousand years. It would have made a gigantic difference!
• History Would Have Unfolded Very Differently. As I have experimented with living history forward with The Jesus Movement for the past two thousand years, I must say that all of history moves very differently. Most Christians don’t understand that Jesus actually abolished the very concept of sin. He did away with the Sabbath as well. He set about freeing us in so many ways that The Jesus Movement soon would bring to light, and He made of loving and serving our neighbor a kind of radical joy that really does upend everything. The first shall be last. The mighty fall away, and the gentle really do inherit the earth.

You can play with it yourself, once you internalize what Jesus actually taught! In no version of world history that I have come up with over the past week do we end up with a continent-wide United States. And we don’t have major wars, although we do get skirmishes, especially during the first thousand years or so, that courageous groups of people step in and talk down. Countries, yes, but they tend to be smaller and governed by consensus. Membership in The Jesus Movement grows and grows, kind of like a Boy and Girl Scouts thing for grown-ups. It becomes something that eventually pretty much everyone wants to do because it makes people happy. It includes a lot of gigantic get-togethers, like Thanksgivings, Christmases, Easters, and beachy backyard holidays all year round that virtually merge together and include a lot of singing and pep talks.

The thing is that leaders don’t seem to develop. People seem to want to do everything by consensus. That takes longer, but with nothing to measure it against, it feels normal. I think that perhaps people have an aversion to leaders except in times of stress, and living by love eases stress and makes people happier. And crime doesn’t entirely disappear, but it mostly does; and then crime becomes something like a socially embarrassing abnormality. Can you imagine a society in which people are choosing to live more varied and always peaceful lives, and by now that choice has been simply normal for at least the past thousand years? Men and women live essentially equal lives, both doing childcare, both supporting the family? Eventually you probably don’t really need either soldiers or police, because when necessary everyone helps to create immediate peace. People don’t go to gatherings just on Sundays, but it’s more a community sort of thing. A lot of spiritual sharing happens in people’s homes as well as in community centers, and in monthly and quarterly events in larger places, and annual events in off-season sports stadiums. There seem to be charismatic people who arise now and then and try to mimic Jesus and get laughed off the stage, and also modest people who are listened to because they give thoughtful discourses on what Jesus taught but they don’t try to replace the historical Jesus. I don’t know. At first, it seemed to be impossible. But the more I think about it, the more I think it really could have happened.          

And my dear blog friends, The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught is just now in print. This book is the companion to the upcoming website, teachingsbyjesus.com, so it is true to what Jesus actually said but if it is first found by evangelicals it is likely to get some poor reviews! Therefore I would love it if you would read it first, and would give it your own thoughtful Amazon review. If you will send me an email through the green contact block on robertagrimes.com, I will send you a review copy in PDF. Thank you!

I don’t know how to love Him. What to do. How to move Him.
I’ve been changed, yes really changed.
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself,
I seem like someone else.
I don’t know how to take this.
I don’t see why He moves me.
He’s a man. He’s just a man.
And I’ve had so many men before.
In very many ways He’s just one more.
Should I bring Him down? Should I scream and shout?
Should I speak of love? Let my feelings out?
I never thought I’d come to this! What’s it all about?
– Andrew Lloyd-Webber & Timothy Miles Bindon Rice, from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)

To read a debate about whether Jesus is God or man, and to see learned people insisting that He has to be only one or the other makes your eyes cross. To see our beloved Father Richard Rohr trying to imagine a future for Christianity, which I love him for attempting to do even though I think he knows the religion has no future makes me sad for him. I grew up in a church in which we were taught that Jesus on earth was “fully God and fully Man,” and that still makes sense to me even now that, amazingly, Jesus has spent the past two thousand years healing all the millions of people damaged by Christianity, and He has thereby grown even vastly more spiritually elevated than He was when He was Jesus on earth, and I have actually met Jesus. I know Him personally. In fact, I don’t know how else you would describe the amazing Being that Jesus has become! His extraordinarily silken and immensely powerful personal energy, and His selflessness and grace are confounding. He is literally God now. That is beyond doubt. And yet, two thousand years past His final incarnation Jesus chooses to present in the astral body of a Man who looks amazingly young and mild. He looks Mediterranean, less than six feet tall, with curly hair and olive skin. He is nearly always barely smiling, as if He has thought of some lovely secret. And when He looks at you, the love in His eyes is indescribable. Not even your own mother ever has loved you the way that Jesus loves you. Fully God and fully Man. My childhood minister, dear Steven Turrell of blessed memory, was so completely right! But Jesus at the same time is so self-effacing that if it were not for the Lord’s amazing personal energy, you wouldn’t even much notice Him now. And that seems to be what He prefers.

Achieving the Godhead level has been easy for Jesus. The Godhead level of our astral reality is at a very high consciousness vibration, and Thomas tells me that Jesus has even surpassed that at this point in His personal spiritual development. But He always has loved people so much, just naturally and confoundingly, in the same way that some of us especially love puppies. Every human being deeply touches His heart, while my Thomas says that He himself mainly sees people’s flaws. Thomas has come to think that perhaps Jesus sees people’s flaws as simply adorable, in the way that some folks might see a puppy’s clumsiness as cute, perhaps; but for whatever reason, Jesus has always been obsessed with loving people. So over thousands of years, my Thomas has watched the being who six thousand years ago was his own little brother continue to grow spiritually from there to become Jesus the Christ, the King of Kings, and elevated spiritually far above all the rest of humankind. For my whole life on earth Thomas has told me no part of this story. But now apparently Jesus wants it to be known, so now Thomas is answering my questions freely and letting me share his answers with you. This is all still new to me, and it feels illicit, but apparently we will be putting much of this information on Jesus’s website. (Good grief.)

This feels like a kind of Catch-22. And in a minute you will see why I call it that. My whole business career has been spent as an attorney and general advisor to closely-held and primarily family-owned businesses. So naturally I have been thinking about what I might advise Jesus to do in this situation, if He ever were to ask for my advice. Of course, I never would offer Him advice unsolicited. But it seems to me that He could do a lower-key and positive version of a Second Coming thing. Why not? He has sufficient power over matter to demonstrate that He is in fact Jesus the Risen Christ, and not just some imposter; and perhaps He could be based at the Vatican for His temporal protection. He might then teach the world from there. He doesn’t have to have just some nobody like me create a website so He can gradually share His teachings with the world. He doesn’t have to start all over again from the beginning!  

So Thomas very briefly indulged my fantasy. Sixth-level beings are very tall and thin when they appear on earth, and they glow. Well, Jesus could create a church-Jesus astral body maybe ten feet tall and glowing. Thomas reminded me that Mikey Morgan once appeared at one of our nightly meetings in an astral body of a snowboarding kid, and he randomly kept switching into a ball of light and then back into a kid again. I said, “Great! Jesus can do that, too!” Thomas tried last Halloween to get Jesus to touch a pumpkin on earth and blow it up just for the fun of it, which suggestion had horrified Jesus. Thomas told me now that blowing up something at the Vatican by touching it with one finger would be a way for Jesus to convince the Pope that He really is Jesus. I said, “Yup! Good plan.” And I also thought that Jesus could materialize something for the Pope, because I bet that He could do that, too. Something holy-looking. Something in gold, perhaps? The Pope would love that!

So then Thomas gave me a frank look. He said, “You really don’t know Jesus at all, do you?”    

“What?”

“Ten-foot-tall church-Jesus? Something in gold? The Vatican?” 

He has to be safe…”

“Putting Jesus in the Vatican would be like putting matter together with anti-matter,” Thomas said, and he actually chuckled to himself. I hate it when he gets smug like that. It means he sees a gotcha in this for me somewhere.

“I do know Jesus! Stop toying with me!”

He said, “My confused little friend, our Brother Jesus is not a Christian. He died on earth three hundred years before the religion was even born, and Christianity teaches nothing that Jesus taught. And He certainly isn’t a Christian now. Not after He has had to love back into health so many hundreds of millions of damaged people! Damaged by the religion! What makes you think He would go anywhere near the Vatican? What makes you think He wants to look like church-Jesus for the Pope? He does it for Christians as they are coming home because He loves them and it makes them happy. But, for the Pope?”   

He was right, of course. What was I thinking? 

“I know you would love to find a way to get out of creating His website because you feel so unworthy of doing it. And of course you are not worthy! There is no one on earth who is worthy now of doing anything for Jesus. But, He cannot do it. And I cannot do it. I have been preparing you for your whole life to do this for Him. You worry that whatever you do will disappoint Him. But it will not disappoint Him. It will delight Him.” Then Thomas added – and here is what I see as the Catch-22 of this situation. “He wants you to see Him as just a man. I think He even tries to see Himself that way. Our Brother has the power to move on the hearts of all the world if He chooses to do that. He could transform the world in a heartbeat of time. But He wants to begin His ministry again from the beginning, and build it from there moving heart by heart, and erasing the false religion in the process. And who are we to tell Him that is the wrong thing to do?”

My God. If Jesus chose to do it, He could end every problem on earth in an instant. Just transform every heart, and then maybe touch The Empire State Building and blow it up to further make His point. Then He might say, “Any questions? Didn’t think so. Now open your Gospels and there are your lessons. Start learning.”

I sighed. I knew what this was going to mean. “So, no Second Coming. And I’ll have to take another lifetime. Maybe two.”

Thomas also sighed.  He said, “We both will.”

This is the whole thing about being Jesus. I have been thinking about it ever since Thomas and I had this conversation. Jesus really is God! He has the power to fix everything on earth in an instant, if He chooses to do that. But if He does choose to do that, then He destroys the value of the earth as a spiritual school, so therefore He never can do that. What He can do is what He first set out to do two thousand years ago. He can again establish His movement to recalibrate humankind toward positive spiritual growth. He first came to earth to study us and figure out how we can best grow spiritually.

And His teachings based on what He learned back then still work amazingly well! I know how well they work, because a dozen years ago I personally tried them, and I was internally transformed within weeks. And that transformation has been permanent. It forms a bright line in my life: I cannot even remember now what I was like before. So if Jesus wanted to do it, He could at once produce a similar transformation in every person on earth! But, then what? Bringing the kingdom of God on earth will be a slow process when we do it in His planned and deliberate way, and intentionally so, since once it is completed, the earth will then become useless as a spiritual school. Except for the fact that, of course, in a reality without time there will then be eons laid down into which people can continue to incarnate for their personal spiritual growth. Jesus had of course thought this all through long before.

But the thing that really astonishes me as I read again the debate linked at the start of this article is that both of the worthies taking part in it seem to be clueless about the primary role of consciousness. That really does confound me, because in fact the primacy of consciousness is central to everything! Since all that exists is consciousness, and since you and I are inextricably part of the one Consciousness that continuously manifests reality, in fact, each one of us is fully God and fully man! Just think it through. Of course, you know that insight is profoundly right, and Jesus is the eternally-living proof. People so desperately want Jesus to be Magic-Man! The Son of God! And NOT precisely one of us. Because then that lets us off the hook, don’t you see? But Jesus’s life story is of a normal man who simply has always loved people more than most of us love people. So over the centuries, and then over the millennia, Jesus has simply loved people so much that He has raised His personal spiritual vibration even above the entire Godhead’s spiritual vibration. So now Jesus is the exemplar for us all. What He has done, so can we do, too!

And Jesus did not only die for us. Dying for us once? That would have been so easy! No, for the past six thousand years, Jesus the eternally living Christ, our sweet and perfectly beloved Brother has been living for us, healing hundreds of millions of damaged Christians and rearing all those aborted children. And now, it is His full intention to teach every last eternal one of us to achieve the same spiritual level that He Himself has achieved. It doesn’t matter to Him a fig how we might see Him. He loves each one of us infinitely, and until the very end of non-time. He sees Himself forever as our Teacher. And that little seventeen-hundred-year interruption in our spiritual lessons that was Christianity has been to Him little more than just a single summer’s day gone by.