Roberta Grimes

Whose Christianity? (#2)

Posted by Roberta Grimes • April 05, 2025 • 10 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus

Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand.
I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m forlorn!
Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light.
Take my hand, precious Lord. Lead me home.

As my way grows drear, Precious Lord, linger near
When my life is almost gone.
Hear my cry, hear my call! Hold my hand, lest I fall.
Take my hand, precious Lord. Lead me home.
– Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (1932).

My college major was Early Christian History, which at the time was almost but not quite on a par in popularity with Art History at my New England college. Few of us there were majoring in anything useful. We Early Christian History majors would playfully say to one another, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter!” Although that was of course never technically true. Jesus worked as a carpenter only during His pre-teaching phase of earthly life, and it was then, during that very youthful part of His life that Jesus was studying the people around Him so He could ever better know how to teach them once His teaching phase began. Jesus was no longer working as a carpenter as He taught anything that the much-later students in my classes would be studying! And later in my life I have become a stickler for holding to all such fussy facts. We study Jesus in His place and time, or we cannot come to know Him at all. And Jesus was throughout His life always firmly Jewish, and it is important that we never forget that fact. It is crucial that we study Jesus in His time and place and not in ours, with His background and with the knowledge that His times would have given Him, in the highly particular world in which He lived. 

Some modern Christians have largely forgotten that Jesus was born and grew up and He remained a Jew, or else they simply would rather not think about that fact. Jesus was actually a rather well-educated and observant Jew. Even the last, formal meal that He shared with His disciples, the one where He asked them to remember Him whenever they again ate unleavened bread together, and they shared ceremonial wine with one another was a traditional Jewish Passover Seder. We forget that Jesus was never a Christian, and nor did He establish the Christian religion. There was no Christian religion in existence anywhere until the year 312 C.E., when the Roman Emperor Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky, and he heard the spoken Latin words, “In hoc signo vinces,” which meant “In this sign you shall conquer.” It was for that reason that He became a follower of Jesus, since conquest was what Constantine was all about! No, Jesus Himself never was  a Christian, but instead He began what He called The Way, and His Way spread His teachings on love and forgiveness rapidly to many millions of people all around the Mediterranean Sea during those first few hundred years after His death and resurrection.

The plain fact is that the Christian religion actually began as a Roman Emperor’s tool for more effective conquest. Here is another thing that we must not forget! So perhaps it should not surprise us that practicing Christians continue to squabble to this day, and the Christian religion that Constantine began, and that now comes in more than 45,000 different flavors, is even now  prone to further splintering over the tiniest disagreements. Modern Christian clergymen will eagerly create even further divisions over, for example, the role that women should be allowed to play in worship (if any). Some clergymen even will insist that these sorts of worship micro-divisions were happening as far back as Jesus’s day, when of course nothing of the kind is true.

Here is a modern Lutheran pastor who is reading very much too much into a well-known passage of Luke. In Luke 10:38-42, Jesus tells his harried hostess that He won’t prevent her sister from sitting and listening as He teaches, because in doing that the sister has chosen to do what is most important. This passage reads, “³⁸ Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. ³⁹ She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. ⁴⁰ But Martha was distracted with all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, ‘Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me.’ ⁴¹ But the Lord answered and said to her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; ⁴² but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.’” The simple meaning of this Gospel passage in the time and place when and where Jesus spoke it remains  clear to us all! But our modern Lutheran pastor friend has turned those simple words into Jesus weighing in on a matter of very-far-future Christian church politics. Good grief. And he even has put Jesus on what the pastor himself considers to be the wrong side of that very-far-future political issue. This pastor has done all of this, mind you, even though when Jesus actually spoke those Gospel words, the Christian church had not as yet even come close to being invented!

Now, as we said last week, the core Christian religious dogma of substitutionary atonement is not spiritual, it is based in nothing that Jesus taught, and it frankly makes no sense at all. To do away with the whole issue, Jesus assures us right in the Gospel of John that God never judges us (see JN 5:22-23), so since God already forgives all our sins, then God needs no sin-sacrifice. And that false dogma of substitutionary atonement is insulting to God and humiliating to Jesus, for heaven’s sake! So, if the dogma simply has to be in no way true, then why did Jesus die on the cross? I have talked here before about the amazing fact that on April 6, 2022, Thomas, my wonderful spirit guide, took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane. All of us travel out of our material bodies on many nights while our bodies sleep, and since my Thomas is Jesus’s close eternal friend every bit as much as he is my spirit guide for this lifetime, he has duties now to both of us. So Thomas has been dragging me along with him in astral form on most nights of my life whenever he went to visit Jesus. He simply would give me amnesia for all these travels out of my body, so I have had no memory of any of this at all.

But I think that when Jesus so often saw my astral self just sitting there in a clueless lump whenever Thomas would drag me along on his almost-nightly visits, Jesus may have decided that it was only polite for Him to speak with me every once in a while. Especially, you know, after I eventually became a grown-up. And anyway, Jesus was lately coming to want a website, and He and Thomas were talking about that now, and discussing asking my colleague Craig Hogan and me to collaborate in the work of building Jesus a website. So for various reasons, beginning in April of 2022 and for several months, Jesus decided for a time to overrule Thomas’s pretty strong wish that his spirit charge, me, not be allowed to remember my almost nightly visits to the astral plane with him. And for me, that summer of 2022 when I was was working with Jesus was the most extraordinary time of my life.

Right out of the blue and without any warning, on April 6^th three years ago, I found myself sitting on an astral riverbank beneath a sky streaked with gorgeous astral colors never seen on earth, next to a man who at first did not look remotely like Jesus. He looked like a kindly older man, like someone’s benevolent uncle perhaps. His hair was short, and he didn’t have a beard. But his personal energy was one high, strong note, so at once I suspected who He probably was, just as I heard Thomas from my other side tell this man something like, “You can look like Yourself now. Seeing You won’t alarm her.” Although I was already feeling somewhat alarmed. But Jesus was already changing then to look as He chooses to look now, as a slight young man with brown eyes, curly hair, and a short, efficient beard. He began to speak to me softly, and He looked into my eyes as we sat there together on His riverbank and fed His neon many-colored fish with grain that just appeared in our hands. And wow, to be abruptly so close to Him, and to feel his personal energy so close as just one high, intense note, was overwhelming.

Jesus generally looks right into your eyes, softly but intensely, as He speaks with you. He makes you feel as if nothing else matters to Him but you, and just that feels amazing! Usually He asks you questions about yourself and your day, and He really wants to hear your answers. But this time, He just wanted to do the talking. He told me with a kind of soft intensity that He knew that I was curious about His crucifixion, and about why He had let Himself be crucified. He said that I was right and I should be curious, since that had been a negative, violent death, and not in keeping with His original life-plan. He had invisible Archangels around Him always when He lived as Jesus, and their task had been to protect Him from just that sort of ghastly, undignified treatment. The plan that He had made for that lifetime, and that God had approved, had been for Him to teach the world as simply as He could do it how to achieve perfect spiritual wisdom, and then when He had achieved those goals, He would quietly leave and seem to the people around Him to simply disappear.  I should add that of course most astral communication is mental, but when Jesus speaks to me it is always verbal. And Jesus speaks English well, but when you converse with Him this way you can tell that English never has been His first language for an earth-lifetime. Sometimes His word-choice is unusual, and He has a mild, unguessable accent that is almost musical. I love listening to Him when He has the floor and keeps talking!

Jesus said that as the time for Him to leave this earth drew closer, He came to see that there was one big fact that He had simply been unable to teach and make His listeners believe it. He told me that helping humankind to understand that our lives truly are eternal was to have been His most important lesson of all. It was crucially important, even above forgiveness and love! He said something like, “If people continue to think that having their bodies die is the end of their lives, then they will see no point while they live on earth in trying to learn how to grow spiritually and raise their vibrations.” So He had come to earth determined to teach all of humankind that there is no death! But no matter what He had said, and no matter how he had said it, no one ever would believe it. I could see and hear His frustration as He was talking about this, so I tried to help Him cut to the chase.

I sort of mumbled, “Because of the bone-boxes?”

Jesus said, “Yes.”

In Jesus’s day, the custom was to lay out newly-dead bodies in caves that had been carved in the rock for just this purpose. Recent discoveries in the area where Jesus’s tomb is said to have been give us a greater insight into this process. Over just a few years’ time, in that climate those bodies would rot away until only the bones remained. So then after a few years the bones of Great-Uncle Bertie, or whoever it was, would be gathered and put into a bone-box, called an ossuary, which would be marked with the decedent’s name, and all the ossuaries were then stored together. Each cave would soon receive someone else who was newly dead, and so the rotting-away process would go on down through the generations. To be the first one whose body rots in a new cave is of course a privilege of sorts, so it was a mark of Joseph of Arimathea‘s great esteem for Jesus when he gave his own freshly-carved burial cave to be the place where Jesus’s body was laid out following His crucifixion. It was assumed by all that of course Jesus’s body would now rot away in there, because little did anyone imagine….

But, back to what Jesus told me about His reason for allowing Himself to be crucified. He did consider it to be an awful way to die, but it was a very public way, and it would prove to the world that He was in fact dead, while still leaving a usable body that Jesus could reanimate. He was determined to find a way to contradict the ossuary evidence and prove that human life truly is eternal after all! He told me that He had experimented with bringing small dead animals back to life, and that had worked, although the animals had never lived for long. But He thought that if He could publicly kill His body while preserving its usability, and then get inside His dead corpse and jolt it alive again, He would be able to keep it alive. And that would prove to all that death is a mere illusion. I didn’t actually die, and so neither will you.

Jesus told me that He had asked the Godhead for permission to make this change to His life plan. He even told Them why it was so important that He do it, but still They refused to permit it. No! They emphatically did not want a member of the Godhead to suffer such public humiliation, such a demeaning and appalling death. For Jesus to order His guardian Archangels to stand down, and to offer Himself up for torture and crucifixion that way would be beyond the pale. I still remember vividly the look of resolve on Jesus’s face when He told me how reluctant They were to let Him do this! He told me His doing it had been so important to the success of His entire teaching mission on earth that He had thought He could persuade Them. But, what if He had never convinced them?  What then? I very shyly dared to asked Him that question. He was standing up, and His face was then once again transforming to what we call “church Jesus” as He prepared to go and greet another group of newly-arrived Christians. When I asked my question, He looked at me and said, “If They had not approved, I would have done it anyway.”

 When the darkness appears, and the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river, I stand. Guide my feet, hold my hand.
Take my hand, precious Lord! Lead me home.

 Precious Lord, take my hand! Lead me on, let me stand.
I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m forlorn.
Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light!
Take my hand, precious Lord! Lead me home (lead me home).
Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (1932).

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)