Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.

 Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment, and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Sy Miller (1908-1971) & Jill Jackson, from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Jesus came to earth determined to do what even He must have known was going to be impossible to do without our help. And human beings are deeply tribal by nature, able to trust only a maximum number of one hundred and fifty people at a time as our true familiars. That is called “Dunbar’s Number,” believe it or not. And it may well be that this maximum possible number of familiars that any of us can maintain has always been true of us, since even back as far as our Cro-Magnon days. It has been true since literally time out of mind! Jesus, on the other hand, came to transform us all into one great and perfectly loving kingdom of God on earth. So we might actually call eight billion people “Jesus’s Number”. Jesus wants us to be able to see every other person on earth as our personal soul-brother. He wants us to love and trust all eight billion strangers at once as members of our own great and much-beloved and entirely trusted tribe.

How did Jesus Himself put it? He said when He was asked what was the greatest commandment, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Such simple, and such truly beautiful words!

Jesus called it “bringing the kingdom of God on earth.” In the afterlife we actually do feel as if we are immersed in God’s love, so we might also say of it, “As above, so below”. I used to fret a good deal about what Jesus even meant by the term “the kingdom of God,” and whether perhaps the terms “the kingdom of God” and “the kingdom of heaven” perhaps meant different things. Eventually I concluded, for reasons too convoluted to pause and delineate here, that both terms referred to the highest afterlife levels, the levels just below the Godhead level. I decided that the fact that the Gospel of Matthew generally refers to this level of spiritual perfection as the kingdom of heaven, while the other three Biblical Gospels use the term “the kingdom of God,” only as two different means of expression, or of translation. But both terms mean the same thing.

Yet if Jesus came to bring that sort of universal love to all the earth, we seem even after two thousand years to have made no progress in that direction.  I am sorry to blight your beautiful morning, but here is one of the most disheartening things that I have ever seen.  An American Jew recently passed himself off as Italian and went to the West Bank to interview some of its inhabitants. And the plain ignorance and hatred of Jews on the part of these Muslims living right next to Israel is beyond your worst imaginings.

So, what happens now? Is there anything that you and I can do at this stage to even help at all? It seems to be time for us to say plainly that every religion has been altogether useless in our efforts to bring peace to the world. All that our religions have managed to do has been to make all our problems even worse! And if you didn’t believe this was true before, then be sure to have a listen to those Muslims living in the West Bank in the recording that is linked above.

I didn’t know until the summer of 2022 that Thomas, my beloved spirit guide, is Jesus’s close eternal friend, and that Thomas takes me along when he visits with Jesus in the third level of the astral plane on nearly every night of my life while my body sleeps. Thomas is my spirit guide, so he is not supposed to leave me alone during my lifetime on earth. He also is a source of friendship and support for Jesus, so his solution is simply to give me amnesia about all these nightly jaunts that we share. However, I was supposed to be working on building a website for Jesus in 2022, so very briefly there was a reason for me to be remembering these evenings when I was hanging out with Thomas and Jesus in the middle of the night. Which was why my summer of 2022 was so extraordinary. On many nights, I would go to sleep at eight o’clock or so, which is usual for me, since I normally wake up at midnight and I do my best writing between midnight and three or four in the morning. But often during that summer, I would come to awareness soon after my physical eyes closed; and amazingly, Thomas and I would be there with Jesus on His astral riverbank! It was then that I got to ask Jesus so many questions. And one question that I asked Him that summer was whether He really had come to earth intending to abolish all religions. I did not yet fully comprehend, even so recently as two years ago, how abhorrent to Jesus religions really are. Let me set this amazing scene for you:

I came to awareness sitting beside Jesus where we often sat to talk together during that summer. We were sitting on His riverbank on the third level of the astral plane, with our astral feet in the living water that feels like silk, and feeding His neon-colored fish with grain that simply would appear in our hands. He has a flock of pet deer, too, and they were grazing in a field behind us. Jesus always would tamp down His personal energy by a lot for me so I could sit beside Him that way, but still, there was a little warm buzz from Him that I could feel. And on the third astral level, there is a diffuse light with no sun, and a many-colored sky that makes the atmosphere feel something like a perpetual sunset. There is a lovely scent that isn’t quite like flowers, and a feeling of love that is always around you.

As Jesus and I sat there, tossing bits of grain to the fish, I said respectfully and rather shyly, “My Lord, is it really true that when You came to earth, one of Your reasons for coming was to abolish religions? To help people relate to God more directly?”

As He often did, Jesus read my mind, and He took His answer from my own mind. After a moment He said, “Little One, you know it to be true.”

He said that gently. He was smiling a little. He knows how much his presence overwhelms me.

A year ago, I wrote a blog post that summarized what Jesus is quoted in the Biblical Gospels as saying about religions. I cannot now improve upon what I said there, so please consider that post to be incorporated here.

We tend to think of Jesus as having taught only or mostly Jews, but that was really not the case. As He began His earthly ministry, He moved out of Nazareth and away from the more narrowly Jewish culture into which He had been born, into “Galilee of the Gentiles,” to fulfill Isaiah’s prophesy (see MT 4:15). And it was there that He first began to call His disciples. The excerpt from the Book of Matthew quoted below describes those early days in Galilee:

¹⁷ From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Reform your mind, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” ¹⁸Now as Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon who was called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. ¹⁹ And He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” ²⁰ Immediately they left their nets and followed Him. ²¹ Going on from there He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and He called them. ²² Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him. ²³ Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people. ²⁴ The news about Him spread throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, those suffering with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them. ²⁵ Large crowds followed Him from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan (MT 4:17-25).

And as Jesus collected His first disciples, He continued to teach about the kingdom of heaven wherever He went, to the crowds of hundreds, and then of thousands of people who followed Him everywhere. For example, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (MT 13:31–32).

This sounds almost like a throwaway story, but it is an important teaching! Pliny the Elder, a botanist and a contemporary of Jesus, wrote two things about the mustard plant: It is medicinal, but Pliny warned against growing it because it tends to take over the entire garden. So those would have been the images on which Jesus was building. He taught that the kingdom of God is good for us – it is grows from a tiny seed, and it is healing, transformative, and life-giving – and once we espouse and cultivate it, the kingdom of God will grow rapidly in the world. Jesus talks about loving everyone and turning the other cheek, doing to others as we would have them do unto us, and living a simple and gentle life. He said that once we are perfectly living these lives filled with love that He prescribes, we can bring the kingdom of God on earth. He intended the old world to soon be over. 

So then, why is the old world not over by now? What happened? I think the answer to that question is a simple one. The kingdom of God on earth is internal. It is something that each of us must individually allow and accept to grow within us. And until each of us, individually, is ready to do that, it cannot arrive. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

Every time that each of us prays as Jesus taught us to pray, and each time that we mean those words as we say them, we begin to make the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth even possible! As you will recall, Jesus taught us to pray: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed (or holy) be Your name.¹⁰ ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (MT 6:9-10). As you have said those words, have you ever said them consciously, thoughtfully, with meaning, with yielding, and actually thinking with full awareness about what you were saying, and what it deeply means? I myself never had, until Thomas first made me realize the amazing importance of each of those words!

The people to whom Jesus first taught The Lord’s Prayer did not know that this earthly reality is created by and composed of what we each experience as Consciousness. In fact, nothing else but what you and I experience as Consciousness actually exists. And there is in fact just one Consciousness, which all eight billion of us who are now on earth share. So as each of us raises our own Consciousness vibratory rate away from fear and hatred and toward ever more perfect love, we also will minutely raise the vibratory rate of everyone else on earth. Which means that as more and more of us raise the vibration of the Consciousness within us to the level of God’s pure and perfect love, oh yes indeed, we will easily help every other person on earth to raise his or her own spiritual vibratory rate as well. So then we can at last all together easily bring the kingdom of God on earth!  

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be!
With God as our Father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony. 

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment, now.
With ev’ry step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment, and live each moment in peace eternally!
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Sy Miller (1908-1971) & Jill Jackson, from “Let There be Peace on Earth” (1955)

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way!
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!

Oh yes, I can make it now, the pain is gone.
All of the bad feelings have disappeared.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
Look all around, there’s nothing but blue skies.
Look straight ahead, there’s nothing but blue skies!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972).

The blog post that we gave to you last week was a labor of love for my beloved Thomas. Perhaps it was that for Jesus as well, although He lives His eternal life more privately. To be frank, I didn’t realize when my spirit guide asked me to search on “sin” in Biblegateway.com, the online searchable Bible, precisely what I was going to find that Jesus had said about sin during His entire earthly ministry. My memory had been, however, just what you saw from us last week, so when I did my search, I found no surprises. Jesus did indeed amazingly trivialize even the very concept of sin while He was here among us and teaching on earth.

Jesus did to sin pretty much what John Fitzgerald Kennedy did to fedora hats in 1960. During the whole first half of the twentieth century, and even during all of the Great Depression, no respectable man in the Western world would consider himself to be fully dressed without a suit and tie, an overcoat, and one of those stylish fedora hats! But JFK was elected President in 1960, and he didn’t like to mess up his hair, so I don’t think that he ever once in his life was willing to wear a fedora hat, not even to his Inauguration. So then within months after JFK’s election to the American Presidency, fedoras immediately and completely and forever no longer mattered at all.  

Jesus’s trivialization of the concept of sin was not quite so extreme as what JFK did to the concept of fedora hats, but it was close. Jesus simply reduced sin to its proper readily forgivable place, which is very far below God’s love in importance. And therefore, Jesus made the breaking of human religious rules to be now only minor and trivial, and quite readily instantly forgivable. But even that was a tremendous and a downright shocking step for Jesus to take in the first-century Hebrew world! I think it is hard now really for us to fully appreciate just how alarming Jesus’s teachings were to those who first heard them.

Those teachings must have hit people more or less the way the nineteen-sixties hit the world of the Fifties, only perhaps even more so. I was there in the Sixties. I remember it well! The nineteen-sixties were a wonderful time to be young, and if you are younger than maybe seventy years old now, I can only tell you that you missed something big. Oh yes, it also was awful in its way, what with the Vietnam War and the draft and the sense that whatever the previous culture had been, it was gone like a shot and it would never come back. But to be young at a sudden cultural hinge-point, and to realize that what you are witnessing is huge, also is a wonderful and glorious feeling, provided that the cultural hinge happens peacefully. As Jesus said, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing!” (LK 12:49)

Yes indeed, Jesus came to earth to kindle a major cultural and spiritual hinge, a cleansing fire of great modernization. When Jesus was on earth, He was the very model of a nineteen-sixties radical, a brilliant young man impatient with all the old ideas and all the old ways, and full of new ideas that were so extreme that they made you gape in amazement. I knew some radical young men in the Sixties. One of them was even my boyfriend. And they rather reminded me of Jesus, so on fire as they were with their big new ideas, and impatient as they were to transform the world. What they were peddling in the Sixties was a blend of socialism and communism, and I listened, but they were too extreme for me! I did try pot, although I never inhaled. And when my boyfriend urged me to come with him to California and join the Revolution, although I did love him, that was a bridge too far. I do think, though, that two thousand years ago, sitting on that hillside and hearing the extremely radical words of the Sermon on the Mount for the first time from the radical young man that Jesus was, even as un-radical as I was when I was young, I think that perhaps I would have gone for His particular brand of Big New Ideas.

A lot of people went for Jesus’s Big New Ideas! What He was preaching was a deep freedom of mind that was brand-new in the ancient world. It was freedom from all religious fears and constraints, and the notion of replacing it all with a radical forgiveness and love from God that was beyond anything that anyone ever had heretofore imagined. When Jesus was asked by a clergyman who was trying to test Him what was the foremost commandment, He didn’t name any of the hundreds of religious rules in the Hebrews’ religious rulebook, the Talmud. Instead He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

Wow, so that’s it? That really is all? Jesus does away with every one of those old rigid busybody religious rules, and He tells us that God truly does perfectly love and forgive us, without our having to pay attention to any of the rest of that religious nonsense? The only law now is that we must love God, and also we must love our fellow man? It was hard at first for people to believe that they really could be hearing Jesus right. And then Jesus performed miracles, and He died on the cross, and He rose from the dead to prove that our lives really will be eternal, and bit by bit His Word and His message began to catch fire and spread among men. And His Apostles patiently reinforced His words. So that really is It, then? For real? You mean it? Okay! Then I’m in! It is no wonder at all that with Jesus’s Apostles teaching as itinerant preachers, Jesus’s new Way spread so rapidly in the centuries after His death and resurrection, all the way around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. Jesus’s Way had millions of devoted followers by the time the Roman armies set out to crush all aspects of His new movement but the one that Constantine decided eventually to make his own. And that one, of course, Constantine felt that He could use as a fear-based means of control. Constantine affirmed the central teaching of the strain that he preferred, which was that Jesus had died on the cross as a sin-offering. Then Constantine held the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to formalize his new Christian religion, and to create its Bible that was based on the Hebrew Law and the Prophets, where he included Jesus’s teachings as well.

This notion of Jesus as a Sixties-era radical is not only mine. Others also have seen the resemblance, but I never realized how perfect it is until a commenter to our post last week suggested that the Sixties-era song “I Can See Clearly Now” might make a good frame-verse. And then one of the classes that I am currently teaching happened to be studying Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. There we all were, sitting on that hillside and listening to Jesus, and I thought, Omigod, there it is. Of course! He was creating a cultural hinge! Jesus even said it at the time!  

If it were not for Constantine’s destruction of Jesus’s Way, and his foolish creation of yet one more old-style religion in its place, surely long before now the whole world could have been following Jesus’s radical spiritual movement, which was brand-new two thousand years ago and based solely in God’s pure forgiveness and love!

As it is, however, we have been stuck with Roman Christianity for the past two thousand years. Like all religions, Christianity is fear-based and not love-based, and that is especially true in the case of Catholicism, and indeed also true of nearly all of the forty-two-thousand-odd versions of Christianity that are in existence today.  So as it is presently practiced, Christianity is hopelessly unable to be of much spiritual use to its faithful. Even if any uplifting love-based spiritual practice that was taught by Jesus might have been followed, it would have been weighed down and circumvented by every strictly practicing Christian’s overwhelming religious terrors. Down through the ages, however, there have been Desert Fathers and Mothers, and then monks and nuns, those living apart from the church’s fear-based teachings who have studied only the Lord’s words, and they have modeled after His teachings their very simple lives being lived apart from the world. And as we have said elsewhere, Jesus Himself has spent the past seventeen hundred years on the third astral level, and in devoted, single-minded service to the post-death healing of the hundreds of millions who have been damaged by Roman Christianity.

And meanwhile, as my Thomas is fond of reminding me, Jesus has become generally the most famous, the most popular, and considered the most influential person of all time. This is true, even though Jesus has not lived on earth for more than two thousand years! That is the one useful thing that Constantine’s religion actually has done for us: it has spread the precious name of Jesus in the most favorable possible terms far and wide. And as the religion that bears Jesus’s name but ignores what He taught at last is fading, we who love Jesus and who best understand the teachings that He gave to us as He originally taught them, free and untarnished by Roman Christianity’s fears, can begin at last to follow His true Way. We can make His Way the basis of our own spiritual lives. And then we can teach it to the world.

So, how can we begin at last to learn and to follow the Lord’s Way ourselves? Well, it’s simple, but it does require that you set aside some time each day to be with Jesus in God’s presence on that Judean hill. This must be your time alone with them in spirit. Ideally, it will be half an hour or more as your day is winding down. And do this every day! Habit is the secret to creating transformation.

You might experiment to see what works best for you. Here is what some people who want to immerse themselves in the Lord’s Word so they can better grow spiritually have found works well for them:

• Leave off attendance at any Christian church, if you have not already done that. Even the sight of bare crucifixes can trigger residual feelings of  Christian guilt which are so habitual that you may not even be consciously aware of them.
• Print the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 5-7, in a print-size that is comfortable for you to read, and perhaps laminate it. You might do this with other favorite Gospel speeches by Jesus as well, and keep this reading material beside a comfortable chair in a private corner.
• Welcome both God and Jesus into your mind. It can be best if you have a simple, short prayer to say, such as, “Dear God, dear Jesus, please help me to ever better understand and to ever more perfectly live my life according to these Gospel words…”
• Read quietly aloud anything from a couple of paragraphs to as much as half a page, and really listen while you read. Mark with a paper clip the place where you leave off each day.
• Sit with your eyes closed on that Judean hill and consider with God and with Jesus what you have just read. If other thoughts come, don’t fight them, but simply let them go. If thoughts feel at all negative, use the forgiveness mantra as you ease them from your mind: “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.”
• After a while, you will feel that you have given this exercise enough time for tonight. It may be only ten minutes at first, but soon it will become effortlessly longer until it is as much as forty-five minutes. Slowly open your eyes. Thank God, and thank Jesus for having spent this time with you by saying aloud something like, “Thank you, Father! Thank you, Brother Jesus for helping me to better understand your words and helping me use them to better grow spiritually!”

You might eventually add other spiritual practices too, and perhaps some which involve more active sharing with others, as God might call you to do that. Always be listening to God’s voice within. But the certainty of Jesus’s voice on that hill always will be there to guide you.

My dear one, each day is yours to use as you might wish to use it. Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is never promised, but still, we have this precious day. And we have the gift of this moment, which is why we call it “the Present.” So, why not begin a practice now of choosing to share some few minutes of each day that remains of your earthly life with God, and with Jesus? Yes, they are very busy. But as I say at the end of each of my podcasts, you in particular are God’s best-beloved child. And saying that to you each week never was my own idea….

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972)

What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit. O what needless pain we bear.
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

 Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
– Charles Converse (1832-1918) & Joseph Scriven (1819-1886), from “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1865)

The Gospel teachings of Jesus with regard to sin are perfectly clear! And happily, what Jesus said has nothing to do with what Roman Christianity tells us about sin.  Of course, we always can continue to ignore what Jesus plainly said. We can assume that all the Christian churches are right, and Jesus came only to die for the notion that we carry the guilt of Adam’s sin, as well as our own manifold sin-guilt.  And while God insists that you and I must forgive,   of course we cannot expect that God is going to be willing to forgive you and me. Right? So God sent God’s sinless only Son to die in a horrible way to atone to God for your sins and mine. This idea made perfect sense in the Jerusalem of two thousand years ago, when Hebrews were still sacrificing unblemished animals as sin-sacrifices to God in their temples.

But now, of course, we can start to see some pretty big problems with this old Roman Christian teaching. And once we start to see these problems, we really never again can find a way to un-see them:

• Jesus tells us that God never judges us. In the Gospel Book of John, Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Oh. Okay, so then Jesus is our actual judge? Well, not so fast. Jesus also tells us in that same Gospel of John that, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Wow. Okay, so then Jesus assures us that there is no divine judgment at all. Which means that Jesus’s crucifixion must have happened for some reason other than the one that Roman Christianity gives us.
• Or if Jesus’s death did happen as a sacrifice, then Jesus didn’t need to rise from the dead. Jesus made a great point of coming alive again after He was crucified and died, and He showed Himself to people as again alive. If the Roman Christian story about His crucifixion, which was that He died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, had been true, then He only needed to die. His coming alive again adds nothing. Again, this casts doubt on the sacrificial meaning that Roman Christianity gives to Jesus’s crucifixion.

• God requires that you and I love and forgive, so then why does God need to see God’s much-beloved Son sacrificed for Adam’s sin and for our own sins before God can forgive us?? I have never understood this at all! And no minister or priest of whom I have asked this question has been able to explain it to me in a way that has made any kind of sense. Think about it! If you have children, picture your own precious children as a group of adorable toddlers playing on your living room rug. They manage to tip over the coffee table, so all their cups of orange juice make a big mess on the carpet. They are even giggling as they do it. What naughty babies! Now ask yourself which one of your own little children would you most enjoy watching being horribly murdered, just so you can forgive the others for making such a big mess on your living room rug? And if you recoil from that question, then ask yourself how it is possible that you are more loving and more forgiving than God is?

 The plain fact is that you are NOT more loving and more forgiving than God is. And the core dogma of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity, which is the version of Christianity that still in 2024 is practiced by some 2.4 billion people as the world’s most prominent religion, is obviously nonsense! That dogma, which is that Jesus died for our sins, may have made a modicum of sense in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, but clearly it makes no sense at all today. 

What did Jesus Himself say about sin? Well, this is somewhat complicated. First of all, remember these caveats:

• Jesus came to move us past religions, and to teach us to relate to God directly. Doing this was not his primary mission perhaps, but it was important to Him. Every religion is man-made, and all religions are fear-based, so to help us to outgrow our adherence to religions was an important key to Jesus’s teaching us to begin a deeply love-based relationship with God.
• While Jesus was on earth, He was teaching under the watchful eye of clergy who were always testing him. Since He often had to pay at least lip-service to the prevailing religion, He would sometimes trickily twist what He said in some way. We don’t always know what He would have said if He had not labored under this handicap.

• Jesus lived among people who were obsessed with the concept of sin! The Hebrew community into which He was born was ruled by hundreds of religious laws and commandments that governed how they lived, often down to the smallest detail, including even what they ate, what they wore, and how they kept the Sabbath. The fact that transgressing any of these traditions and rituals was considered to be sinful irritated Jesus, when to His mind, God’s law of love was the only real law.

With these caveats in mind, let’s follow Jesus as He goes about His days and catch some of what He says about sin. Jesus seldom expounded directly on any sin just for its own sake.

The Gospel of John, Chapter 8, verses 2-11 is a famous moment when He dealt with sin.

8 ² Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. ³ The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, ⁴ they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. ⁵ Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” ⁶ They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. ⁷ But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” ⁸ Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. ⁹ When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. ¹⁰ Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” ¹¹ She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.”

The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 7, verses 36-50 shows us both that Jesus did have some religious friends, and that He didn’t hesitate to teach them what is really important!

³⁶ Now one of the Pharisees was requesting Him to dine with him, and He entered the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table. ³⁷ And there was a woman in the city who was a sinner, an immoral woman; and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, ³⁸ and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet and anointing them with the perfume. ³⁹ Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is a great sinner.”⁴⁰ And Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied, “Say it, Teacher.” ⁴¹ “A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. ⁴² When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So, which of them will love him more?” ⁴³ Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” ⁴⁴ Turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. ⁴⁵ You gave Me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. ⁴⁶ You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. ⁴⁷ For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” ⁴⁸ Then He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” ⁴⁹ Those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say^]to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” ⁵⁰ And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Here in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9, Verses 1-8, is the sort of thing that happens often in the Biblical Gospels, where Jesus uses His forgiveness of sins as an instrumental part of His healing work.

9 Getting into a boat, Jesus crossed over the sea and came to His own city.² And they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, “Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven.” ³ And some of the scribes said to themselves, “This fellow blasphemes.” ⁴ And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why are you thinking evil in your hearts? ⁵ Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, and walk’? ⁶ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—then He said to the paralytic, “Get up, pick up your bed and go home.” ⁷ And he got up and went home. ⁸ But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men.

And in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 12, Verses 1-8, is one of many examples of Jesus and His disciples easily and often breaking the rigid Sabbath rules.

12 At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. ² But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.” ³ But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, ⁴ how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? ⁵ Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? ⁶ But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. ⁷ But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.⁸ For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”

The four quotations given above are typical of the ways in which Jesus dismissively handles legalistic sins repeatedly, over and over again throughout all four of the Biblical Gospels. Far from seeing the Hebrews’ notion of sin as the strictly punishable disobedience of many rigid rules, the breaking of which can carry as much as a death sentence immediately inflicted, Jesus sees such old-style sins as only easily pardonable stumblings in nearly all cases. Because nearly all kinds of sin are to Him just minimal transgressions against God’s robustly ascendant and all-powerful law of love! Therefore, they all are now readily forgivable in love.

Jesus says of all these sins against human-made laws and rules only, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2). Only learn to forgive, and you will be forgiven!

There are just two sins left which Jesus tells us are unpardonable:  

• “Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; ²⁹ but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29).
• 17 He said to His disciples, “It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come! ² It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Luke 17:1-2).

Thomas and I debated whether that verse in Luke really does denote for Jesus an unpardonable sin. So then Thomas asked Jesus directly, and Jesus has confirmed for us that, yes, He did indeed mean to tell us that the only unpardonable human sin is to lead a child astray.

So there you have it. Jesus gives us in His four Biblical Gospels, and not at all hidden but just seldom read, this easily understood primer in the fact that you can throw away all the religious guilt associated with the false notion that Jesus died for your sins. That whole bogus teaching that God needed Jesus’s death on the cross for your sins came from others. It never came from Jesus! No, God is infinitely more loving and more forgiving than that. God loves you perfectly, and God forgives you completely. Jesus chose to die and then to rise from the dead just to prove to you that there is no death. And oh, my beautiful darling one, God’s most cherished of all God’s precious children, for you this indeed is a glorious new day!

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.

 Oh… Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.

 Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

For my whole life I have struggled to find ways to ever better understand what Jesus meant by all the things that He said two thousand years ago, when He taught on earth. Almost as soon as I was able to read such sophisticated language as is in the Bible, I was attempting to read the four Biblical Gospels in a little copy of just the Gospels that some Mormon missionaries had given to each of the children in my Congregational Church’s Sunday School. And even as a young child, almost every time that I attempted to read Jesus’s Gospel words, I seemed to be finding new shades of meanings in what He was saying there. So to deepen my perspective, by the age of eleven I had graduated to reading the whole Bible through, from Genesis right through Revelation, just a couple of pages every night. I wanted to see what added perspective all the rest of the Bible might add to what Jesus was saying to us in just His four Books. And then of course I went on to major in early Christian history in college.

One of the things that I learned in college was that if I hoped to better understand my treasured Jesus’s deeper thoughts, I would have to deal with some additional complications. For one example, Jesus spoke Aramaic while He was on earth, but His teachings were first written down in Greek some sixty or so years after His resurrection. So that was their first language translation. And later on, of course, would come a second translation from Greek into Latin in the early Middle Ages. Then after additional centuries had passed would come yet more translations, into English and into other modern languages. And with each translation, additional fallible human translators had to make many decisions which might do at least some level of violence to what Jesus originally had said in the lyrical and emotional language that was His original Aramaic. The classic example often used to illustrate this problem is the Greek word “Metanoia”. What Jesus almost certainly first said in Aramaic, which then was translated into Greek as “Metanoia”, was “transform your mind.” But the early Medieval Christian monk who first saw that word “Metanoia” in Greek is known to have translated it into the Latin command that we must “repent”. And that is how the insistence that we all must “repent!” ended up as a command from Jesus throughout the first Latin translations of His spoken words. Even though it surely was nothing that Jesus said, nor was it anything that He ever would have said!

But remember that by the Middle Ages, that monk who was Jesus’s first translator from Greek into Latin was a member of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian religion, which is the Christianity that still prevails in the world today. That monk never knew the genuine Jesus, nor did he have any idea of what the genuine Jesus actually had taught. And the Christian religion of that Medieval monk who first translated the words of Jesus was built not around love, of course, but instead his Christianity was centered on the ancient Hebrew religious idea that Jesus had come to die as a pure sin-sacrifice to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. Jesus had been a sin-sacrifice without blemish. That whole pure sin-sacrifice idea had been a concept central to the religion of the ancient Hebrews, and it was well known to the Apostle Paul. It was familiar as well to the Councilors at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 who had created Constantine’s Christian religion. The monk who did that first Latin translation therefore readily believed that the Jesus he was sure must have founded the Christianity that he devoutly followed later on would of course have ordered us all to “repent”!

But Jesus was not the founder of what eventually became modern Christianity. What Jesus Himself created was “The Way,” which was the beautiful and simple love-based spiritual way of life that He taught to His disciples. The Way that Jesus gave us then grew rapidly for the first two hundred years after His death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea until it had amassed millions of followers as far away as Rome. And our great tragedy as we try to ever more deeply understand and draw closer to the true Jesus now is the unavoidable fact that human history always is written by its winners. The Romans decided that they probably could use The Way, as successful as it had been in gaining followers, but not in its original form. So they ruthlessly persecuted and crushed it, and they nearly wiped it out. By the early 300s, there was almost nothing left of Jesus’s original Way but its scriptures, which still had the name of Jesus attached to them when Constantine resurrected The Way in 312. It then was formalized as Roman Christianity at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. By then, The Way had allowed all sorts of spiritual side-dogmas to develop; and in order for it to be useful to Rome, Constantine’s version of Christianity needed to be transformed from a spiritual movement into a fear-based religion that would make it an efficient means of mass human control. First Nicaea’s new version of Christianity was therefore built around a lesser dogma that had developed within The Way, which was that Jesus’s death on the cross had been a sin-offering required by God to cleanse us of our sins.

Still, the core of Jesus’s teachings when He was on earth had not been focused on sin. And the Councilors who were creating this new religion of Christianity under Constantine’s direction, and were assembling their new religion’s sacred Book, held a sufficient reverence for the teachings of Jesus that fortunately they left nearly all of His teachings just as they had received them, and they put what they added in the course of building their new religion just at the back of each of their chosen four of the many accounts of Jesus’s words that were then in circulation. Thomas tells me that He and some of Jesus’s other followers not then in bodies were influencing the minds of many of the Councilors at First Nicaea, and at the six other first millennium councils. So they were able to shape to a considerable extent what happened at all of those councils, especially with regard to the selection and preservation of those four Biblical Gospels.

The way that the Christian Bible was assembled at First Nicaea with what we now know was spiritual guidance, and then carefully preserved thereafter, ensured that the precious words of Jesus would be largely preserved. Yes, there are some contradictions within the Gospels themselves as to what we are told that Jesus said, but those contradictions come largely from translation issues, from Christian dogma-based contradictions, from some First Nicaean Councilors’ additions, and from the frank fact that as they invented their religion, the Councilors never thought to check to see whether they were going against any of the spoken teachings of Jesus, who was the Prophet that they were claiming as their nominal founder. Here are examples of each of these problems:

• Translation Concerns. Some Biblical translations with the oldest roots still show Jesus calling on us to “Repent,” when what He really said was that we should “Reform our minds.” Modern English translations are generally freer of this kind of distortion resulting from the first translations from Greek into Latin.
• Jesus had to speak circumspectly because He was often speaking directly against the prevailing Hebrew religion, which was then quite powerful. And in fact, Jesus came to free us from all religions. It is important to keep these facts in mind! For example, since the prevailing Hebrew religion when and where Jesus taught was largely focused on sin, and perhaps we might even say that it was obsessed with sin, so Jesus often had to responds to the issue of sin, although in His own teachings, Jesus didn’t focus on sin. Instead, His teachings focus on love and forgiveness. That is a crucial distinction! Jesus is often quite casual about disregarding sins. For example, consider this passage: “At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’” (MT 12:1-8)
• The Councilors Added a Number of Things to the Gospels That They Likely Wished That Jesus Had said. And what they added often directly contradicts what Jesus did say, and what is objectively true! For example, when Jesus asked His disciple, Simon, who Simon thought that Jesus was, the disciple is reported to have said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then reportedly said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (MT 16:16-19). This is obviously one of the First Nicaea Councilors’ additions! Note: “Petros” means “rock” in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic; Jesus never built a “church”; “hades” does not exist, and anyway it would not have “gates”; the kingdom of heaven has no keys; and Jesus could give no human being the power to bind or to loose anything in heaven.
• Some of what the First Nicaean Councilors Left in the Gospels As Having Been Said by Jesus Directly Contradicts the Core Dogma of Their New Christian Religion. This really confused me when I was a child! The most notable of these problems is that the Christian religion as the Romans designed it has Jesus dying as a pure sin-sacrifice. But Jesus tells us right there in the Biblical Gospel of John that neither God nor Jesus ever judges us. Jesus says,  “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23), and “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Therefore, no sin-sacrifice is needed! And if no sin-sacrifice is needed, then Jesus didn’t need to die as a sin-offering, did He? His death and resurrection were, after all, precisely what He tells us that they were, just His own triumphant demonstration of our eternal life.

Then too, of course, there is the plain fact that Jesus never was speaking in a vacuum. His Gospel words always were at least in part dependent on what was going on around Him, who He was addressing, and what the stage of His ministry was at that moment. This point is especially important! Jesus was always sensitive to His listeners, and He spoke very differently, for example, to clergymen, for whom He had little use, or when He spoke to poor widows, or to earnest young seekers, or to His closest disciples and friends. Modern Christians will often carelessly pluck a few of Jesus’s random words from the Gospels and cite them just in sentence-fragments, as if they were definitive proclamations. And if you do that, you might cause your listeners to misunderstand Jesus’s Mind pretty severely!

As the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created seventeen hundred years ago is falling apart around us now, it is fragmenting pretty severely. I recall that when The Fun of Dying was first published in 2010, I was astonished to learn that there were then some ten thousand denominations of Christianity in existence. And now, only fourteen years later, amazingly, there are more than forty-five thousand forms of Christianity extant worldwide, which is simply unbelievable. Yet still, we have our one patient and infinitely loving Jesus waiting for us! Amazingly, there is enough of Him for all of us to share. And Jesus has one clear message preserved for us in one set of four Biblical Gospels, still lovingly protected by Him, by my Thomas, and by the rest of Jesus’s faithful minions not now in earthly bodies. All the struggles of the past two thousand years are nearly altogether over. And Constantine’s Christianity is looking pretty hopeless to most of us at this point. So Jesus does ask one thing of us now. He hopes that we who love Him will try to begin to come together now, and resume The Way of Jesus again, my dear ones, if we possibly can?

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day by day by day…
– Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)