Roberta Grimes

Ours to Do

Posted by Roberta Grimes • January 25, 2025 • 8 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality

For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies,
for the love which from our birth over and around us lies;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For the beauty of each hour of the day and of the night,
hill and vale, and tree and flower, sun and moon, and stars of light;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of ear and eye, for the heart’s and mind’s delight,
for the mystic harmony, linking sense to sound and sight;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child,
friends on earth and friends above, for all gentle thoughts and mild;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

When we read Thomas’s answer given last week to our sweet friend Lynnette‘s wonderful question about who Jesus really is, we soon see that answer as what it is in fact. Once it satisfactorily answers Lynnette’s question, it then goes on, and it becomes in fact a gigantic challenge to each of us, does it not? It is Jesus saying to you and to me, “Oh beloved child of God, I achieved the seventh level of reality naturally, not even knowing what I was doing. And from there, I looked back at the earth, and I saw so many people struggling on earth through lifetime after lifetime because they had no idea how to do for themselves what I had so easily done for Myself.” So, from the heart of our Lord Jesus’s pure, holy love for humankind, He begged of the Godhead the gift for us of that one more lifetime for Himself that He wanted to live here only for us. He wanted to come back to earth, my dear ones, just as our Teacher! For all of us living on earth at that time, our life was still what Gautama Buddha had called just an endless “turning on the wheel.” We would come back over and over again, for pointless lifetime after pointless lifetime, never knowing why we kept coming back, so for lifetime after lifetime we made almost no spiritual progress.  So our beloved Elder Brother took upon Himself all the struggles and pains of that additional lifetime that He lived as Jesus, and all and only for His great love for each of us!

Even Jesus’s death on the cross as He was exiting that additional lifetime as Jesus was by His Own choosing, and it was done for us. His original plan that had been made for that lifetime had included His simply slipping away when His earthly teaching work had been completed, and being subsumed once again up into the astral plane. But Jesus had been unsuccessful in persuading the people that He was trying to teach that their lives would be eternal. Because, of course, they all thought they knew better. The custom of the day was to lay out the bodies of the newly-dead in caves to decay down to just their bones; and then when there were only bones left, those bones would be collected into bone-boxes, called ossuaries, which would be labeled with the decedent’s name and stored away. So don’t tell us that we don’t die, Lord Jesus! We love you, sir, but we know better than that! We have watched all those bodies decay down to their bones!  

So Jesus changed His life-plan while He was living here on earth. He decided that instead of just walking away, He would die a very public death on a cross, so everyone would know that He had become stone-cold, flat-out absolutely as dead as a doornail. Then He would reanimate that dead body while it lay there in the cave where it had been laid out to rot away (see e.g. MT 28), so Jesus could reoccupy his own rotting corpse a couple of days later and walk it out of that cave under His own power. “Ta-da! See? I am not dead after all!” Of course, that body was not actually alive again, was it? Not at all. It was already rotting! He used it for just a day or two to prove His point that He Himself was alive! Then He cast His material body aside and used an astral body for the forty days or so before He bodily ascended.

I have written elsewhere about the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium (face-cloth) of Oviedo, in Spain. The modern evidence that these relics are genuine is abundant, and at this point I consider that evidence to be irrefutable. Here is some of what has persuaded me:

• Both relics date to the time of Jesus. The linen of which they are made can be carbon-dated to His lifetime, it is of a weave then in common use, and it still carries pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
• The blood on both relics is male and of type AB. Surprisingly, only about two percent of modern people share Jesus’s blood type.
• The marks on both relics mirror Jesus’s injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they covered the same man, that He was Jewish and He died on the eve of the Sabbath, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report that Jesus suffered.
• The Shroud carries an image which is a photographic negative of a man. That image  appears as smudges on the cloth itself, and the reason for this was not apparent until 1898, when the Shroud was first photographed; whereupon, the clear image of a crucified man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image of that crucified Man.
• No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it does not penetrate the fibers at all. Analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim is said to have happened well after the blood had dried. So… a couple of days later.
• Something amazing to consider. Experts who have examined those scorches and are able to do the calculations now tell us that what would have been required to produce them would have been a tremendous burst of energy from the body after its death that was roughly equivalent to or greater than all the electricity now being produced on earth put together, in a single discharge. This energy would have come not from the physical body, of course, but from Jesus’s astral body, returned after two days to reanimate His corpse.

We can see from closely reading the Gospels that Jesus’s reanimated physical body was not made actually alive again. Two days after it had died on the cross, its blood had coagulated and its flesh was decaying. The Gospels suggest that those who had known Jesus did not readily recognize Him when He appeared wearing his own rotting body. Jesus Himself considered His body to be so fragile that He warned Mary Magdalene not to touch it (see JN 20:16). But Jesus could briefly re-inhabit and re-animate that body to the extent that it could again walk and talk, and that was enough for Him to prove His point: He could demonstrate that He had survived His crucifixion, and therefore we also will survive our own deaths. He also was able to manage to guard and preserve those two pieces of cloth for two thousand years thereafter, with enough evidence on them that He can prove to us now that He did indeed live and teach as Jesus, having been born in Bethlehem from out of the Godhead. Jesus’s story and His teachings as they are preserved for us in the Biblical Gospels are absolutely real, and He can indeed prove the truth of all of it now!

So, there you have the genuine miracle of our eternally risen Jesus. Two thousand years ago God came to earth as a human being, and He lived among us for thirty-three years. Then by His Own choice and as a gift to us all He allowed Himself to be tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a Shroud which still exists as His gift of proof for us to this day, and His body was laid in a tomb. Two days after that He re-animated His dead physical body with an extraordinary burst of energy from His eternally living astral body, and that energy was at least equivalent to all the electricity now being produced on this earth being generated in one amazing blast! He then showed Himself to His disciples to prove to them, and to us, and to all of humankind that human life is indeed eternal, and that none of us ever is going to die.

And my very dear ones, all of this is Jesus’s great gift to each one of us! This much is His gift! All of it was His alone to do, because that was what He was able to do, and only He could have done it for us. it was what, clearly, you and I could never have discovered for ourselves. He did everything that He could do for us, and He gave us all of Himself gladly and in full measure. What Jesus could not do, however, was to force us to understand everything that He was actually teaching, to learn the deeper meanings of all of His words. To put together all the great and glorious truths that could help us to rally and to learn and to actually grow spiritually! No, learning all of what Jesus taught us, and using it to at last grow away from fear and hatred and forever toward ever more perfect love, clearly all of that is still necessary for each of us to do individually. That part still is yours and mine to do. 

Jesus has very well lit the way ahead for us all. He taught us that what we were here to do was to raise our personal vibrations away from fear and hatred and as close as possible to love and joy! Or, as Jesus was fond of putting it, to make the earth more like the kingdom of God. He uses the term “kingdom of God” fourteen times in Mark and thirty-one times in Luke, where He specifically says, “The kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:21). So, how can we more easily make that be true right now, and how can we follow the teachings of Jesus closely enough to raise our own vibrations sufficiently to make this our own last necessary earth-lifetime? These two big steps are crucial:

• We must remove all negativity from our lives. This is not optional, nor is it a “do your best” sort of step, but if you are serious about raising your spiritual vibration, you must from this day forward eliminate every form of even somewhat fear-based or rage-based entertainment, every lazy habit of negative thought or action, and every bit of me-vs.-you or us-vs.-them warlike feeling from your life forevermore. Some adversarial feeling seems harmless to us, especially the political and the sports-type variations, and a lot of that even can feel enjoyable. But it does negative things to our minds emotionally, so all of it has to go! To harbor any of this emotional negativity at all is like carrying a leaden weight around your neck that makes it impossible for you ever to rise.
• Forevermore, we can think only loving thoughts and undertake only loving actions! Working toward our personal spiritual perfection is not a part-time effort. And it is emphatically not for sissies! Jesus says to us, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (MT 5:43-44). And that is that. For the rest of your life. The beautiful instrument that you truly are must play only one high, pure note of love! The love that Jesus requires of us now is not just the pretty sort of “love God and love your fellow man” that we enjoy reading about in Gospel passages like this: “‘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’” (MT 22:37-39). No, the true love of God that Jesus talks about is like sunlight and rain: God gives it equally to us all. And so we also must in God’s image impartially forgive and equally love all people, no matter what they may do to us, and for the same reason that Jesus gives for forgiving those who were even in that moment driving the spikes through His flesh at His crucifixion. He said, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” (LK 23:34).

So Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago to give us the greatest set of spiritual lessons that ever has been given to humankind. He could teach us how to perfectly forgive and love, but what He could not do was to personally force-feed to us how best to apply what He had taught us to our own daily lives in ways that would most efficiently and rapidly elevate our own spiritual vibrations! That part of this process is ours to discover. And then it remains for each of us to do Jesus’s work in our own lives in order to make of this our last necessary earth-lifetime.

 

For Thy church, that evermore lifteth holy hands above,
offering up on every shore her pure sacrifice of love;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For Thyself, best Gift Divine, to the world so freely given,
for that great, great love of Thine, peace on earth, and joy in heaven:
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)