The highest self-disclosure that Jesus makes of Himself is that He is Perfect Everything, giving Perfect Everything, inspiring Perfect Everything, enabling Perfect Everything, and commanding Perfect Everything.
He is the most precious being of all because He is God, the Eternal Christ and the perfect man on the plane of our suffering and need; He is the perfect Word made perfect flesh, the perfect Ideal perfectly realized and manifested. He is the perfect man, perfectly self-offered, resurrected, glorified, and on the throne of God and the universe. He is the perfect beginning of the new heaven and earth.
He is the perfect Body as well as the perfect Soul. In Him the perfect spirit has attained the perfect form and concretion, and (as Whitehead has observed) the whole movement of the Divine Spirit is toward concretion. He is perfect God on the throne of man, and perfect man on the throne of God.
Best of all for us, He is the perfect Lover as well as perfect Love, loving us into loving even our enemies in order to make them His friends and ours, loving the most unlovable, making them lovable and loving.
In Him everything is opportunity; He turns everything to good that is turned over to Him, the seeming worst as well as the certain best. In Him, there is so much Heaven on the way to Heaven that one wonders how Heaven itself can be much better than the going to Heaven. As the happy sister on the way there put it, “When I get to Heaven, if they don’t let me in, I am going to shout all around Heaven telling how good it is to come to Heaven.” It is also true that there is so much hell going to hell that even the most stupid and perverse should have enough of it before getting there and like the Prodigal Son repent and turn Homeward.
Jesus redeems and makes best uses of even the worst past. He more than forgives us; He turns our liabilities into assets and self-made hells into Heaven. No matter how badly we mess life when we turn the messer and the mess over to Him, He unmesses the messer, and makes an asset of the mess.
Moreover, in Him, the redemption of the present also redeems the past. I was permitted to see this over forty years ago. It has helped me personally and it has also helped me to help others immeasurably. Recently I found in The Great Divorce that C. S. Lewis has put the same thought exceptionally well in saying that when we enter into Heaven (here or anywhere) Heaven begins to extend backwards, and that if we choose Heaven in preference to earth, our whole earth experience becomes an adjunct to Heaven. We lose the earth as we put earth first. If we put first the best of all, we get the Best of All and in getting that we get everything. Put first the Kingdom of God, and the kingdoms of this world become ours as well as His. Put the interest of the soul first and the body gets health and redemption and immortality. In Jesus we lose nothing worth keeping and get everything worth having. Moreover, all potentialities of good are brought to perfection through union with Him.
In Him, not only the law and prophecy of the Chosen People are fulfilled, but also all the light everywhere is brought to bright burning. He is the one whom all the seekers are looking for.
He is the One they need who seek to do His works and follow His example without being in union with Him. We start out to follow His example and teachings and when we face a crisis, we find that we need Him to come and reign and guide from within as well as from without. As good as are His teachings, and as precious as is His example, we must have the Teacher and have Him both without and within us. His example and teachings need to be supplemented by Him and His spirit and His presence. We need Him every hour and every minute, as well as His teaching and example, to teach us what to say right now, and what to do right now. For He still tells one man who wants to join Him and His little company to go back home and tell what great things the Lord has done for him. He still tells another man who wants to remain at home for a funeral to let the dead bury the dead and to come with Him who raises the dead, for He conducts resurrections instead of funerals. He still tells a rich young “ruler” that if he would be perfect he should sell all and give it all to the poor and follow Him. He still calls “Peter” and “John” to leave their homes and business (not to sell them) and to follow Him. Later He uses “Peter’s” home for a healing center, and the home of “John” as a haven for His own mother. He still tells His “disciples” to take no purse nor script and no extra change of clothes, for they will be well provided for; at another time He tells them if they have a purse to carry it along.
Moreover, we need to receive the other Comforter, The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth that He went away to receive and to give. He especially commanded His disciples not to go out to do His work until they received the gift of the Holy Spirit which would give them power, certainty and authority (Acts 2:33).
Jesus gives us His own perfect joy and makes our joy full (John 15:11). He gives us His own Spirit and brings ours to perfection. He gives us His own mind and wisdom and makes our own amazing. He gives us His own perfect body and makes ours perfect. If we have humor, gaiety, and laughter, motivated by love, these will not be taken away but heightened.
A New York friend, who ministered in the spirit with unusual joy and laughter, was asked by someone who evidently objected to his levity if he thought Jesus ever laughed. His reply was: “I do not know about that, but He has fixed me up so I can.” When the children of Israel returned from captivity, their mouths were full of songs and singing and laughter (Ps. 126). When a certain man with a sense of humor was conducting an informal forum with a group of students of the Yale Divinity School, one of them said, “Say, is that humor of yours native or does it belong up in the country where you live?” The answer of course is that all of our natural gifts are heightened and none of them taken away. The natural is redeemed and brought to its highest capability by the supernatural, and through the natural the supernatural is given human means for revealing Itself.
In Jesus Christ, dull people become bright and the stupid brilliant. He can take a fisherman and make of him the writer of a Gospel. He can take almost nothing and make it almost everything.
While He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief because He took upon Himself our sorrows and grief, that we may have His joy and Heavenly bliss, nevertheless as John Mott has said, “When the ecclesiastical bloodhounds of Jerusalem were at His heels, He told His disciples to cheer up and willed them His own joy and peace.” Since His resurrection, ascension, and gift of the Holy Spirit, and His taking His place in God’s throne, His joy and bliss are beyond human conception. You cannot be in union with Him without sharing of His joy and bliss. He will yet be known as the Man of Joy.
In Jesus we find the perfect union of the orthodoxy of fact and of the liberal spirit. He is more orthodox than the Orthodox, more up-to-date than the Modernist, more scientific than the Scientist. The special temptation of the custodians of orthodoxy is to say “Lord, Lord,” as a substitute for doing His will. The special temptation of the liberal is to seek to bear the fruit of the heavenly Vine without being in the Vine.
Those who are seeking to do the healing and other works Jesus did and does, without union with Him and His gift of the Holy Spirit, will be far more successful when they receive His gift and receive Him who is already victor over the world, the flesh, the devil, and over every limitation. What has been achieved by Him has been achieved for all and we enter into that achievement to the degree of our fruit-bearing union with Him.
As good as is the idea of Christ and the Kingdom of God within and as necessary as it is to bring forth the Actuality, yet it is not the Actuality. The idea of the wheelbarrow, while necessary for the making of the wheelbarrow, is not the wheelbarrow, and it is the wheelbarrow that is used for hauling purposes. In like manner it is the idea or architectural plan of a bridge that is essential for the making of a bridge, but it is the bridge that is necessary for practical purposes. A still better illustration is that of the Ark. It was the idea of the Ark and the idea of the flood calling for the Ark, that caused and enabled Noah to build the Ark, but it was the Ark and not the idea of the Ark apart from the Ark that saved Noah and all who entered and remained in the Ark.
In like manner it is Jesus Christ himself, the true and everlasting Ark, who brings full and perfect salvation, perfect healing, and perfect triumph over the last enemy, death, as well as the first enemy, sin. With God it is first the idea, next the ideal made Actuality and the Actuality self-offered in the behalf of all, and resurrected and lifted up on His throne with power to give the Holy Spirit to His disciples, and to come within all who will receive Him. And Jesus Christ is that actuality made manifest.
Without the Divine Word, Logos, or Idea, God made nothing that was made; that is true. But it is through the Word made flesh in the form of man that He redeems, and it is by Man, lifted to the throne with power to baptize with the Holy Spirit and to come and reign within, that we are changed into His glorious likeness. All of man’s efforts to save himself apart from repentance, faith, union and marriage with Jesus, are far greater in promise than in achievement and fail us most of all when we are in most need of help. On the other hand, Jesus is at home in a crisis, and has His best chance to do His best when all else has been tried and failed.
In my own experience, when facing what seemed to be approaching death with a bad case of appendicitis, I was enabled to react in love instead of fear. I said to myself, “Mother has had enough trouble and I do not want to add to her trouble by dying, especially with appendicitis, and not having had a doctor, and these very kind people who believe in prayer who have done their loving best for me have also had enough trouble without having me die on their hands.” Quickly I was filled with heavenly love that brought warmth, life and healing. I rose up and walked to the bathroom and have never had any seeming necessity for having my appendix removed. This was over forty years ago.
Jesus anticipated the scientific spirit that insists upon following the Light and the Truth rather than any form of popular opinion. Jesus is more than Scientific. He is utterly true to Truth. He is absolutely genuine. He is the Truth itself, He is Courage itself, He is Love itself. He was all this when the human in Him was subjected to the worst that the demonic in the human could inflict. He brought forth the Perfect at the very gates of hell, and revealed God as Love where He was most needed to be revealed. Therefore God has honored Him and given Him a name and a place above every other name in heaven and on earth. While Jesus is and gives and achieves Perfect Everything in and through us, and we achieve Perfect Everything in and through Him, on the way to the achievement the insistence of the Spirit is that we abide in Him and live in His affection and give His limitless love to all. The more union the more love, and the more love the more union, and the more union and love the more of the glorious liberty and freedom of the Sons of God. It is and always will be union, love and freedom, one and inseparable. In Him and in His way of life as Love, everything is always getting better and better; and out of union with Him everything gets worse and worse. The longer the prodigals remain away from Home, the more hungry, ragged, and desperate they become. He, as God-with-us, is the “Homeland of our spirits, minds, souls, and bodies.”