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Discovering the place of the Future Human Being through the angels of the Kabbalah Tree of Life4/7/2024 Discovering the place of the Future Human Being through the angels of the Kabbalah Tree of Life, a morning workshop on Saturday 8 June 2024 with Rev. Michaël MerleReported by John-Peter Gernaat This workshop was planned for the ten days between Ascension and Whitsun when it would have been possible to engage in a discussion on each day around a particular sefirot of the Tree of Life and its angel. In this morning workshop it was the essence of the information that was shared.
This subject was an opportunity to look at the angelic world and certain of the angels as well as to consider a picture of the relationship between the heavens and the earth. We approached this picture at hand of the Kabbalah Tree of Life. The Kabbalah Tree of Life is brought to us from an esoteric Jewish tradition. This tradition began in the fourteenth century and flourished in the fifteenth century but has its roots in a much older Jewish esoteric tradition that has no written records. The Tree of Life has ten sefirots which are emanations of the divine. These emanations are a quality of the divine that appears but has not yet manifested. There is an order of the sefirots from sefirot 1 at the top to sefirot 10 at the bottom. The Gospel reading that accompanied this time (John 3: 1-12) informs us that nothing ascends to the heavens that has not first descended to the earth. The idea of an ascension to the heavens is a theme that arises when we consider the angels of the sefirots. In the Kabbalistic tradition each angel is associated with an angel who cares for the emanation of that sefirot. This angel is responsible for ensuring that the emanation can manifest in time, one can say. Firstly, we considered the emanations, then the angels associated with the emanations and finally what we could learn once we knew more about these angels. The angels are named in the Kabbalistic tradition. We discovered them also at hand of what some have come to be called in the Christian tradition. (The full article will appear here later in July.) Learning to Love – an exploration of the conversation with Christ in Sacramental Consultation3/7/2024 Resurrection: Learning to Love – an exploration of the conversation with Christ in Sacramental Consultation by Rev. Michaël MerleReport by John-Peter Gernaat The word used in German for Sacramental Consultation gives us the word that in other contexts is ‘confession’. The difficulty with this word in English is that it is intimately tied to the idea of admitting guilt.
The word ‘confession’ appears in the Act of Consecration of the Human Being. We hear about ‘confession’ and about ‘faith’ in the Transubstantiation. We hear“… to those who confess him”, addressing Christ. Later we hear that the Body of Christ will bear the “new confession” on the cross. We hear that living in us is the “new confession” and the “new faith”. Confession is about the ability to make a true declaration; to be able to say what one knows to be true. We heard proclaimed in the Gospel on 9 June 2024 that our relationship to the Father is now in the power of the Spirit and in awareness of the Truth. If one is aware of the truth, one can confess it. Thus, a confession can be entirely positive. When we confess something, we are confessing to the truth on two levels. Firstly, on the level that we face, as we understand it; and, secondly, on a higher reality, where there is a true picture, even when it has not yet been fully realised. We see the situation as it is and as it should be. This insight was brought to us in the Gospel Reading where Jesus speaks with Nicodemus. Jesus says: “Unless you are born again from the heights, you cannot see the Kingdom of God”. If one is born only in the material experience of life one will see the situation only such as it is. One will not realise the potential of being able to lift the reality into a comprehensive, fuller picture of reality. What we see manifesting is always a less than perfect picture of what could be. The potential to transform it is the reason for a sacrament. In the space of a sacrament the reality, such as it is, can be transformed into the reality, such as it should be; as it actually truly is, although it has not yet been realised as such yet. We could therefore call our Sacramental Consultation the Sacrament of Confession. In the Catholic Church this sacrament has other names as well, of which one is the Act of Reconciliation. One wishes to reconcile something in one’s own life. It could be a reconciliation to the Divine, another person or oneself. It is not so important if one has missed the mark (and so not shared in the reward), what is important is to recognise the situation in the context of one’s whole life and to recognise that one is taking steps. It is important to recognise that one is not static. We know that life is about falling short and missing the mark. This is not the core of what one is confessing. It we think that one sacrament will put everything right again or that we need to cleanse ourselves of “all that is wrong with me”, we have missed the point. Thus, we opted in the translation from German to English to use the world ‘Consultation’ and not ‘Confession’. The sacrament is a consultation with oneself, with the priest there as a witness. The priest is the server of the sacrament. The person stands facing the altar. It is a sacrament of consultation with yourself and with the Divine growing in you. The priest stands as witness. The priest speaks the words. There are seven phrases in this sacrament. This means that the sacrament has something to do with a span of time and with a rhythm. In this presentation Michaël considered the most basic rhythm which is the rhythm of a week. He considered each of the sentences in relation to the quality of the days of the week: the quality of Moon and Mars and Mercury and Jupiter and Venus and Saturn and Sun. This is a rhythm and a connection that humanity has carried for centuries. Our measurement of time has remained unchanged since the earliest civilisations and has not been changed by the metric system, because it is fundamental to our experience. This in important in this context because the Sacrament of Consultation has something to do with time. It is a moment of reflection in the timespan of a life. In this reflection one can sense where things have been, where they are and where they are going. In the sacrament there is a different experience of time. In a sacrament one is in the moment of time and not in the passing of time. It is Kairos and not Chonos. This sacrament is possible after Confirmation and we can connect with it before the Act of Consecration of Man. Before Confirmation the child hears the very essence of the Sacrament of Consultation in the Sunday Service. The Sunday Service begins by placing where the child is in context and begins with ‘we’: “We now lift up …” This establishes the community in which child is and their relationship to the Spirit. They are told that they experience the Spirit in life and in work. Thereafter they are told of the Christ and the relationship to the Being of the Christ. Then, the priest addresses the children and tells them something to which the response from the children is to pray. Everything in this is in the Sacrament of Confession. “We learn that we may understand the world, we learn so that we may work in the world. The love of human beings, one to another, enlivens all the work of the human being. Without love human life becomes desolate and empty.” We learn from the Book of Daniel that if one desecrates the heart of the temple the experience is desolation and emptiness. The temple is the self. We desecrate the heart of the temple when we fail to love. “Christ is the teacher of the love of the human being.” All of this is in the Sacramental Consultation. The two outstanding words are ‘learn’ and ‘love’. This is the focus of this sacrament. It is not a focus on what has been, but on what can become. The words of the Sacrament of Consultation cannot be repeated here. Monday is the day of the Moon, and a quality of the Moon is to reflect the light of the Sun. In reflecting we can learn something and we can learn to offer something. We can learn to be like the Moon and reflect something of who we are to the Divine. Tuesday is the day of Mars. The quality is the power of discovering our own will, which like all soul capacities is a gift of God. Wednesday is the day of Mercury. Mercury has a quality of movement which can bring about healing. The flow of movement heals. Through the first three days and statements we establish where we are and through the next four days and statements, we establish the future. In each of the next four sentences the word ‘love’ appears. Thursday is the day of Jupiter which has the quality of making something completely apparent. Friday is the day of Venus, and the greatest quality of Venus is to express love. “No greater love has a human being than to give their live in service to other human beings.” This implies working at it every day. Saturday is the day of Saturn, and we are reminded that we are beings connected to this creative concept that is human, whether in a current incarnation or currently excarnated. We are one community of beings becoming human. We understand that love connects us all. Sunday is the day of the Sun, to resurrection and to culmination. In the sermon, Michaël brought the idea that we each understand, that we are a king; we connect with our own ‘I’-forces. What is important is that we realise that this is the reality for every other human being. We are each king over ourseslves, and only over ourselves. We share the kingly throne and become co-workers, equal to each other, on the throne of the earthly kingdom. We share this throne with everyone else simultaneously. We come to a sense of ourselves at hand of a sense of the other. Without a sense of the other we cannot gain a full sense of ourselves. It is in a sense of being connected to others that we gain a connection to ourselves. This is at the heart of the Sacrament of Consultation, that we connect to ourselves and also connect to others. No one experiences life without it being in connection with other people. There is great power in using the Sacrament of Consultation and using it regularly; hearing the words of the sacrament as one faces the altar, and faces oneself, and faces God. by John-Peter Gernaat The Gospel Study Group completed the chapter-by-chapter study of the Gospel of John in May. In June we considered a few of the main themes of this gospel and why this gospel made it into the canon of scripture.
What is one of the first things one may notice about John’s Gospel from a Christian theological perspective? John does not speak about the breaking of bread and the sharing of wine at the last Supper. In this Gospel Jesus does not say “Take this bread in remembrance of me for it is my body”, “Take this wine for it is my blood”. Instead, John presents a very long discourse that Jesus has with the disciples. Matthew would have been present at this meal and so would Mary, the Mother. Matthew writes a Gospel and Luke writes his Gospel after many discussions with Mary. Mark is a nephew of Simon Peter and wrote his Gospel based on his time spent with his uncle. None of the other Gospel writers includes anything of this long discourse. John does. For John the institution of the Eucharist is carried in the thoughts and revelations of this discourse. John is the only disciple to be present with Jesus in the house of the High Priest and at the foot of the cross. Only in John’s Gospel do we read about the questioning of Simon of John (Simon Peter). John was a witness to events and writes down what he has witnessed. John presents seven signs of Christ and seven “I am” statements of Christ. The events he includes in his Gospel provide a structure for these signs and statements. They are not a chronology of historical or biographical events. These signs and statements were considered in detail during the previous months of this study. John does not present the outer events as they occurred, rather he presents an inner relationship to the outer events. John is the disciple whom Jesus loved. This love that Jesus had was in relationship to the initiation of John. John the Baptist was sent by the Father God as an angel/messenger and was in himself an initiated human being. When he was beheaded, his soul became a guarding to the circle of the disciples. After Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha, was called forth from the tomb by Jesus after four days (one day beyond the period of the ancient temple sleep) the soul of John the Baptist united with Lazarus who had become John as a result of the initiation of death and rebirth. The name John takes on a meaning; it is no longer a name but rather a title of one who is an initiate. The young John who was a disciple of Jesus disappears from the Gospels and it may be assumed that he died. His earthly soul experience is also poured into the disciple whom Jesus loved in a further event of initiation and Lazarus becomes the ‘John’ in the circle of the disciples. The multiple initiations undergone by John provide him with a unique perspective on the events leading up to the crucifixion. He is able to comprehend the meaning of the discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper. John is further initiated on the Island of Patmos when he is taken into the spiritual world. During this spiritual experience he received further initiation as will be discovered when we study the Book of Revelation. After writing the Book of Revelation, John writes his Gospel. This Gospel is therefore the Gospel that holds the deepest mysteries of Christ’s mission on earth and of his preparation of humankind to become the Future Human Being. The Zodiac has long been perceived by human beings as representing aspects of the Divine. Two points in the Zodiac have long been connected with powerful Divine aspects: Leo with the feminine aspect and Taurus with the masculine aspect. At ninety degrees to these is Aquarius the Mighty Lord in whom the Waters of Life flow. These signs were, from the earliest Christian times, connected with the Gospel writers. Leo with Mark; Taurus with Luke, Aquarius with Matthew. Completing the heavenly cross in the Zodiac is Scorpio which was originally experienced as an Eagle before changing to the Scorpion. John is connected with the Eagle. He has a vision for the whole picture in every event. John speaks about the Father, the Son and the Spirit more than any of the other Gospels. We come to understand that Christianity is a religion of life through which there is a future. Christianity presents us the picture that we become co-creators with the Divine in this life. It is not a religion of the human being, being rescued by the Divine or of placating the Divine. It is a religion of responsibility through the Divine seed in us that leads us to creating our future with the Divine. Seeing ourselves in the context of the whole world situation we can consider ourselves extremely fortunate to have the possibility of understanding what is actually manifesting itself in terms of its spiritual background. We are also extremely fortunate to be gifted with the possibility to participate in the renewed sacraments as the battle between light and dark forces intensifies around the world.
The immense depth and inexhaustible fullness of the Act of Consecration of Man and the epistles throughout the year are a continuous source of strength, orientation and sustenance for our thinking souls. We need to continuously strive to deepen our experience and understanding of this gift. It is to this end that the introduction to each Sunday service is held. For this possibility we are greatly indebted to Rudolf Steiner and the whole body of his spiritual scientific work. We are through these gifts able to know what we as individuals can do to have a positive influence on the outcomes of world events. The very existence of the human being as created in the image and likeness of God and as a microcosm of the whole macrocosm continues to not only be challenged and ridiculed, but also threatened. The rapid development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence and the intention to forcefully introduce this into the human constitution has a lot to do with the acceleration of this threat. It has become the task and responsibility of every individual to sustain and deepen their own sense of humanity in its true spiritual context. What is becoming ever more evident is that this sense of our humanity can only be sustained through a living relationship to the spiritual world (and more particularly to the Christ) and through our interest in and relationship with each other. We have a responsibility to bring about meeting hubs and gathering opportunities in which real human interaction and conversation can be nurtured. Only so can we build the social cohesion that we all need and yearn for. Perhaps it is exactly the increasing sense of separation that will make us bring “free communities” into existence – one of our primary tasks. We are in a critical period of history in another sense in that we have celebrated the centenary of many spiritual initiatives which were brought into existence with the help of Rudolf Steiner. As he pointed out at the time the initial impulses would be carried by their founding spiritual beings for 3 times 33⅓ years and thereafter would only continue to grow and flourish if they were taken up by individual human souls who made the impulses their own. We are at that point now and so we each have a responsibility to maintain and nurture what we have been given so that it does not become diluted and lost. This second century of the existence of The Christian Community is a time for re-inventing ourselves individually and collectively. I think that we need to tell a new hopeful and intention-filled story about ourselves which leads us into the kind of future that we wish for ourselves and for the world. The stories we tell about our future and our essence as a community will become our reality in time. We need to never lose sight of the fact that the main impulse of our time is the re-appearance of Christ in the etheric – in the sphere of life – and what we are experiencing globally is the backlash of the dark forces against this great cosmic occurrence and what it means for human souls. To sink into fear is to succumb to the opposition against Christ. The opposite is asked of us – that we consciously align ourselves with Christ forces daily and thereby allow Him to balance the opposing forces against each other in all of us. We are not here to create a bubble of splendid isolation from the reality of what is happening in the world but to “unite with the world’s evolving” – which means to engage with the darkness in the world but in so doing to find Christ within this darkness. To look for and invite the light into the darkness. This is the nature of resurrection forces – they work where death forces manifest. Two aspects of doing this are to accept all of our destiny situations with complete equanimity and to regularly find moments of inner quiet and peace in our day in which we connect with the spiritual world. To whatever extent we manage this we become a place of healing in the world. With this inner equanimity we can face the world with a healing intention. There is still long way to go in building the carrying capacity of our communities. In regard to the growth of the respective community everyone in the community is called upon to play their part in being ‘brand ambassadors’ for what we bring to the world. This is a community matter and not restricted to the priests or those who hold the affairs of the community in trust alone. List of articles
Resurrection: Beyond suffering to a new acceptance and embrace of the challenges of life by Rev. Michaël MerleReport by John-Peter Gernaat This talk considers an aspect of Resurrection: suffering. Suffering is a focus of Passiontide. Suffering is a reality of life. No one can say that they have not experienced suffering. The intensity may differ.
We should remember that when a child moves into youth and is offered the sacrament of Confirmation the young person is reminded to remember the importance of that moment in their lives and to never forget it, “not in sorrow nor in joy”. At that age the young person hears that it is a reality that we experience sorrow in life. It is worth considering what difference Resurrection makes. Resurrection is a principle as well as a real event. It therefore makes all the difference. In this talk it is the principle of Resurrection that will be opened up. We know that it is real and that it has had its effect on the whole of Creation. We are living in the time after the Resurrection. Yet, the Mystery of Easter is outside of time. It happens in the centre point of the great span of time and yet, it transforms all of time. Everything that came before and everything that will come after is transformed by this event. What is the principle of Resurrection? We find it described in the Book of Revelation. John experiences an ever unfolding and opening of pictures and experiences of the whole of Creation and he sees these in the spiritual world at hand of the mighty events that accompany earth reality. He arrives at the vision where God and the people are one. They are with God; they are God’s people. This is an aspiration of humanity through all of time, to be the ‘people of God’. It was an expression that lives in the Jewish tradition, and it is a definition for Christians. The intimacy described in Revelation is the aspiration of human beings, to be with God and God with his people. “And every tear will be wiped away, no more suffering, no more pain, no more death.” This is the condition that the Buddha described as the aspiration of human beings. He described life as suffering, because we become attached to aspects of earthly life. And here, in Revelation, is the picture of the goal described by Buddha, the human community moving beyond suffering. This seems like the end, the goal. But the Book of Revelation has not yet concluded. It continues. The very next sentence is the sentence of Resurrection, it is the idea not of reaching the end of suffering, but of going beyond suffering. “And a voice is heard that says: ‘Behold, I make all things new’”. The goal is not to come to the end of suffering, but to create something new. It is to experience something beyond that which has come to an end. Our goal is not to come to an end, but to start a new beginning. We hear this in John 16. The Spirit of Truth, the Paraclete, the One who advocates on our behalf, the One who speaks for us, and to us and instructs us, and guides us: the Holy Spirit, when he comes he will convince the world:
The Spirit will tell us something of missing the mark of destiny and so not sharing in the reward, as a literal translation of the Hebrew, usually translated as ‘sin’, ‘sinfulness’. This is a separation from what is meant to be because we have failed in our actions, we have fallen short. This is part of the reality of being human on the earth. We need to know that when we miss the mark, it is not the end. There is more to be done. We can continue to aim at hitting the mark, which is our destiny. We therefore need to be instructed about the offence of missing the mark of destiny and not sharing in the reward. If we fail at this, we will fail at the greatest of our efforts which is to put the trust of our spiritual well-being in Christ. When we realise that there is a destiny: meeting the Christ, coming to terms with the Christ-in-us. Once we know this, we need to know under what conditions we will get there. This is the character of wholeness and action that is without blemish, that is pure, that aligns to a true intention of being human. When we fail, we use the expression ‘that’s human’, but it is the experience of being less than human. We use the same expression for being ‘less than human’ and for ‘striving to connect with the higher self in the human’. Yet, we can also see this as that when we fail to be fully human there is something we are being called to that aligns us with the Divine in the human. Let us change the expression: ‘to err is to be a fallen human, but to forgive and to love is to discover the Divine in the human being’. This is our task. We live in the tension between our lower nature and our higher self. The way in which things will end has been determined because they will not end. They are the seed of the new beginning. This is what the spirit instructs us in. This is the great joy that we can experience when we realise that we can move beyond suffering. To understand this three-fold teaching of the spirit we can turn to the eight-fold path of Buddhism. We must firstly understand the condition under which we find ourselves, which is that we live in a world in which we keep missing the mark. This is how we end up suffering. We fall short of what we know is our calling as human beings. When we become conscious, and we realise that we are missing the mark, we become aware that something is missing; it feels misaligned. At this realisation we need to keep going. This is the first path of the eight-fold path which the Buddha described as Right Understanding. We must know that this is the condition under which we find ourselves. We live a life in which we do fail. But that is not the end. There is a great danger in Christianity in thinking that because I failed, Jesus, who succeeded, will do it for me. We have to do it through the power that Christ has made available to us, through the Christ-in-us. Through grace, Christ has made this possible. We must work with this power that is available to us every day. We are no longer ‘children’, we are ‘adults’, in the sense of our development as human beings, and we must do it ourselves. We will find that it is no longer going to be done for us. The Right Understanding is that we must know that we can move beyond suffering. How do we move into the second part of the teaching, the character without blemish? It comes at hand of the next three paths in the eight-fold path which pre-date the eight-fold path. They were a path of Zarathustra (the first incarnation of Zarathustra): Right Thought, Right Word, Right Deed. This is how we live a life of character and action that is without blemish: the Good-Right Thought, the Good-Right Word, the Good-Right Action. Our thinking, our speaking and our gesturing have to be aligned with the Good-Right Intention: the intention to do the Good, to do it as it should be done. The third part of knowing that there is a conclusion comes through the paths of Right Living, Right Effort and Right Mindfulness. We now know that how we live, the effort we put in on a daily basis and the mindfulness that we have to bear. The word ‘mindfulness’ comes to us in the Act of Consecration of Man: we celebrate together and fulfil together the Act of Consecration of the Human Being in mindfulness of Christ’s Deed. It is Christ’s Deed that makes it possible for us to know that we live in the concluded reality. What is this new reality? It is that the end is a step to the new beginning. There is no end. When our livelihood, our effort and our mindfulness are geared in the way of the new reality, we arrive at the eighth path, which is Right Concentration. The Right Concentration to live in the new reality, the reality of a new beginning is the seed. When we have drawn everything together in the last moment, we are fully concentrated, not on what has been and come to pass, but on what is going to happen. Even in the end of something we live in the anticipation of “behold, I make all things new”. We are living in the Resurrection. This is why there is such a concentration in the 14th to 16th chapters of John’s Gospel on ‘joy’. “This is my joy that I give you, so that your joy may be complete.” We live in joy, and joy always comes with a certain anticipation. This is why many people struggle with joy, thinking that it does not last. Joy is experienced in the moment. Therefore, in the next moment we need to have a new joy. It is not that joy lasts forever, but rather that we can experience joyful moments every moment. Every moment is a moment in which we can be filled with the joy of anticipation that in the next moment we can be filled with the joy of Christ. This moment is the end of this joy, but it is not the end of the picture. “I make all things new.” Joy is not meant to be a continuous experience. People look for a bliss that lasts, but joy lasts only if it happens in every moment. Joy is engaging. It does not wash over us; it happens because we swim. If we let it wash over us, we will drown. We must be active in every moment in it. If we are not pushing against the water in every moment, we sink. That is the experience of joy, it requires us to be engaged, in the moment. If we are not, then it does not last. If, in the next moment we are not engaged, there is no joy. It then becomes a moment in which we have slipped back into suffering, rather than through Resurrection going beyond suffering. This does not mean that life is without challenges and difficulty, it certainly is. But the difficulties change when our inner attitude to them changes. It is not easy, it is hard. If it was easy everyone would already have done it, and we would be in the ‘new’ already. It takes effort. We must take it up and live it. We must be mindful at every stage. We must be conscious all the time. If we fall out of consciousness, we are out of it. When we were very young, as small children, we knew what it was to live in the moment. This is an inner attitude that we need to rediscover. As children we did not have to concern ourselves with the next moment, but as adults we know what we have to face. Yet, we can know that we have the ability to face it. We can face every challenge, no matter how difficult they are. Our whole experience of Resurrection and the joy of Resurrection is that it goes beyond that. This is what is so beautiful about the experience of Resurrection. It is not that it has made things new, but that it is always making things new. It is happening in a continuous present, not in the past. In our human experience we do not consider our lives to be without purpose. As human beings we develop a remarkable ability: to communicate beyond the sense-moment. We develop a language, and we develop the ability to record it for future generations through a coded symbology (writing) that allows future generations to read what we have left behind as a result of having been here. What we record does not die with us, it lives on as a new beginning for those who read it in the future. It is in our make-up to do this. It is in us to leave behind a record of our lives so that others, who follow, can read it and recognise the struggles, the sorrows and the joys. Whenever anyone picks up a book the story is always new. It is important that we live, always, in the excitement at what is new in the human story. This is the principle of Resurrection: “I make all things new”. There is only one thing that Resurrection establishes as an absolute reality: that death is no more. Death is not the end of the story. Death has been conquered; nothing dies. There is always a continuation. Death is the mark that there is a new chapter, it is not the end of the book. Even when we get to the amazing realisation in Revelation that there is no more death, there is no more suffering and no more pain, we may think that this is the end point at which we have arrived. We may think that this is when we live forever in the bliss of being with God. But, “I make all things new”. A new journey starts. There is more to do. Our task will not be done when we become what the Christ prefigured – the fully resurrected human being – and what we call in Anthroposophical language Spirit Human. We do not cross the threshold into ‘eternal rest’, we are always in the doing! We may notice that a lot of the Gospel is written in the continuous present tense, because the message contained therein is always now. When we read a translation and it is written in the past tense, it is not how it is written in Koine Greek. There it is written in the continuous present tense. Jesus says to us in the present. It is a story of what is unfolding. The Koine Greek is very difficult to translate without becoming clumsy. John’s Prologue does not read: “In the beginning was the Word”. The verb in koine Greek contains all three tenses simultaneously: “In the was, is, and shall be the Word”. That is the mystery of Resurrection and what takes us beyond suffering. Suffering always ends and becomes a part of the experience of our lives, in the past. It is transformed into the ‘soil’ from which our future arises. Suffering is not the end of the story. We go beyond it in the continuous living experience of joy, of life, of new beginnings, of Resurrection ... going to the Father – a contemplation for Ascension by Rev. Reingard Knausenberger on Sunday 12 May 2024by John-Peter Gernaat In preparation for the Crucifixion, Jesus says to his disciples several times: “I am going to the Father”.
In the Christian festival cycle from Advent through to Passiontide and Good Friday, the gesture is one of Spirit incarnating into physical earthly being, of “coming from the Father”. The Easter shift of resurrection begins a dramatic turnaround. Through the deed of Christ, the Son of the Father, within Jesus, the human being, the whole of humanity is now shifting to ‘grow up into the world of Spirit’, of “going to the Father”. Now we can know where we are going, what our purpose and future is about. We know from The Fifth Gospel by Rudolf Steiner that Jesus experienced a deep sense of despair in the years before his baptism in the Jordan. Wherever he travelled in his adolescent and young adult years, he sensed that human development had reached an end point. There was nothing in the human being that could initiate what was needed for the human being to develop beyond what was already present. There was no hope of a productive future. Then Christ enters into the human organisation of Jesus at the baptism in the river Jordan. Finally, Christ goes through the portal of death in the crucifixion. A new power now becomes available in that the Divine had gone through the human experience. It is the power of resurrection, the ‘Christ in me’, that every human being can connect with during earthly life and take across the threshold of death. After the Resurrection the disciples of Jesus are able to establish a new relationship with the Risen One, and then Christ ascends. A new relationship must be built by the disciples. This relationship is only possible by the disciples expanding their consciousness to remain connected with Christ. There is a completeness in the number ten, of the ten days of Ascension until Whitsun. It is possible to feel how Christ ascends, expanding step by step through the nine Hierarchies to ultimately implant the fruit of his earthly experience and the seed of his experience of death into each successive Hierarchy. On the tenth day Christ is re-united with the Father, every year a bit stronger. Christ expands through the Hierarchies in his going to the Father. We must expand our soul to connect with Christ and the Father-God. This is the important message of Ascension that must not be lost. In the Act of Consecration of Man we experience a progression in how we the address our source of life: it begins as ‘Divine Ground of the World’. Our substance is His substance. All of creation is derived from this Divine source. When, much later we address the ‘Father God,’ it implies that a very intimate relationship has developed, a recognising how we, the human creation, are children of the Divine. When we establish that we are intimately connected with the spiritual world and that it is the source of our life, we can establish the relationship to the Divine Ground of the World as one of ‘father’. But as the creations of the Father, we have a task. The Divine has poured all the resources into us and is now depleted. We cannot expect the Father to continue to make endless resources available to us. We find the resources of the Father now in the realm of nature. This is the past where the resources have been invested so that there can come into existence a being that can develop self-awareness. We can only become self-aware in our meeting with another ‘I’. Christ is the helping guide for human beings to awaken to their ‘I’ and their inherent creative power. When we are in community, we can magnify this power. In the Creed the Divine Ground of the World is described as ‘spiritual-physical’. Jesus Christ, through death, resurrection and Ascension, becomes ‘physical-spiritual’. The Son appears through the development of a new seed that comes about by overcoming death. From the Son of the Father emanates an active quality of enlightened creating will. Thus, all human souls have the potential to become ‘a son’ of the Father. The source of my, and all fellow human beings’, existence is the Father God. When I am one with Christ, I can speak the Lord’s Prayer as a truth, by addressing the Divine Ground of the World as ‘our Father’. Establishing the Foundation for Our Future Becoming: The Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Descent of the New Jerusalem by Rev. Michaël Merle at Whitsun 2024by John-Peter Gernaat At Whitsun we celebrate the descent of the Spirit in what appears like flames above the heads of the apostles. The title of the talk also refers to the descent of the New Jerusalem. We are concerned with what descends from the heavens.
Were we to turn to the Old Testament, one of the clearest images of something descending from heaven is in the Frist Book of Kings when Elijah, the prophet, calls to the heavens and fire descends from the heavens. Elijah is challenged by the priests of Baal. Baal literally means ‘Lord’, he is the lord of the people to whom Elijah has been sent as a prophet. The priests of Baal build an altar and upon this altar they place a heifer as a sacrifice, and they call upon Baal to accept their sacrifice by consuming it with fire. Their earnest prayers and ceremonial appeals are all ignored. Elijah then builds his altar. He does not use the altar of the priests of Baal. Instead, he builds a new altar with twelve stones. This is a picture that prefigures the New Jerusalem which is built with twelve foundation stones. Each of the stones of Elijah’s altar represents one of the twelve tribes of Israel. In the case of the New Jerusalem the foundation stones represent the twelve apostles. The foundation of the New Jerusalem goes beyond the tribes of Israel as the apostles are sent to all the peoples of the world. Elijah digs a trench around his altar that is twice the size of a standard furrow for planting crops. He asks the people who have come to witness the event to wet the altar with water. Three times he asks that the altar to be soaked with water until the trench is also filled with water. He does this to prove that there is no secret fire hidden within the altar. When Elijah prays to YHWH (Yahweh of the Elohim), fire rains down from heaven consuming the offering. A heavenly fire rains down. This story establishes a picture that there is a fire in heaven that can be rained down upon the earth. This story corresponds to the idea of descending the elemental ladder of fire, air, water and earth. In his preparation of the altar Elijah has employed three of the elements: air in the movement of the work, water that he asked to be poured on the altar of offering, and earth in the digging of the trench that he dug around the altar. Only fire is missing, and this comes down from heaven. This is a pure fire, a fire that purifies, and a holy fire. These are elements that link the fire with the Divine. This is part of an understanding of connecting with the essence of the Divine. Then, in the Old Testament, there is the prophet Ezekiel, the prophet of great vision. Along with Daniel, the visions of Ezekiel are a source for the imagery that John can reference in his Revelation. When he says that it is “like a lion”, or “like a bull”, or “a roaring thunder” or “many eyes”, he is making reference to the visions of Ezekiel and Daniel. Ezekiel 40: In the twenty-fifth year of our captivity, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, fourteen years after Jerusalem had been taken, the hand of Yahweh was upon me. In a divine vision he took me away, to the land of Israel; and put me down on a very high mountain, on the south of which there seemed to be built a city. He took me to it; and there, I saw a man who seemed to be made of bronze. He had a flax cord and a measuring rod in his hand, and was standing in the gateway. The man said to me, “Son of man (the human being), look carefully, listen closely, and pay attention to everything I show you, since they brought you here, for me to show it to you. Tell the people of Israel everything that you see.” The house was surrounded with a wall; and the man was holding a measuring rod that was six great cubits. He measured the thickness of this construction—one rod; and its height—one rod. The construction measures one rod by one rod by one rod; it is a cube. In the Book of Kings, the Holy of Holies is described. It is a cube. The idea of a cube being perfection is one by one by one. This is the root for the number 1000. The number 10 represents completion. A perfect completion is therefore 10 by 10 by 10. This is 1000. This 1000 added to any other number completes that number perfectly. Thus, twelve by twelve is the full picture of community. The repetition of a number confirms the number that has been established. Thus, twelve by twelve confirms the number twelve. By adding 1000 the number is completed perfectly. Thus, 144 000 is the full community confirmed and perfectly completed. Nothing falls outside of this number. As the man continues measuring, he measures a complete temple of the future. However, when the angel measures the New Jerusalem there is no longer a temple. God is with His people and therefore communication with God is direct and no temple is needed. Our future becoming is essential. In the descent of the Holy Spirit there is a direction, a direction from the heavens to the earth; this is not accidental. The descent of the Holy Spirit is an input from the heavenly world because the earthly world was dying under our guardianship. When we listen to the Act of Consecration, we hear the proclamation of apostles in the upper room hearing what is like a rushing wind, and then seeing the flames above the heads of the other apostles. The flames are drawn into the apostles and then we hear that the flames stream heavenward. The flame must stream forth from human hearts. This changes the direction. The descent of the Holy Spirit to the human being is also an ascent of the Spirit from the human being back to the heavenly world; what it means to be Spirit-filled on earth. This is what makes the descent of the New Jerusalem interesting. What descends from the heavens is in the form of a human creation. It is a city. It is not a garden. It is co-created. We have participated in the creation of the New Jerusalem through the Spirit streaming from our hearts. We inform the spiritual world and provide the picture that can be created spiritually and descend. It is a marriage between heaven and earth according to the Book of Revelation. This is where we make a difference. The future is shaped here on earth through what we do, here. The city that descends from heaven is a perfect city: it is a cube. It has a wall around it (rather than a trench). It has twelve foundation stones that are silicates. These are the stones that make up the crust of the earth. They are gifts of the zodiac and represent the twelve apostles, but they are from the earth. They represent the apostles because, like the gateways of the New Jerusalem, the apostles open up to the whole world and all the peoples of the world. It is a city without a temple because the Divine lives in the city. The Lamb is at the centre of the city. The people are described as trees of life. They fruit twelve times a year. They fruit in every zodiacal cycle. There is no summer or winter. The season is always summer because the light is central to the city. Therefore, the human being, as the tree of life, fruits all the time and we bear leaves that heal. An angel comes and measures the New Jerusalem. It is the image from the visions of Ezekiel that instruct us in the importance of a measuring rod. We enter into the place that we have co-created as an inner reality. Without the descent of the Holy Spirit there cannot be the descent of the New Jerusalem. It is only through the descent of the Holy Spirit that we have become co-creators in the new creation. The New Jerusalem cannot descend without something first having ascended. Not Christ and his Ascension; his Ascension was necessary for the Holy Spirit to descend. After the descent of the Holy Spirit something of our activity must ascend to the heavens. This is what we are offering when we come to the altar. We are offering ourselves: “Take me” we hear in the ritual. We offer the work that we have undertaken through the Spirit in us on the substance of our being, which is from the Father, back to the Father. This can only be offered if we are involved. It cannot happen without us and places us in a position of great responsibility. We live between the descent of the Holy Spirit and the descent of the New Jerusalem. Only though our work will the New Jerusalem come into being. We are people of Whitsun, no matter how we perceive the world around us. The Spirit is in us, and we have the capacity to engage with the Spirit and do something, which is to let the flame stream forth from the human heart. We need to take responsibility for what is happening in the world through whom we follow. We should support only leaders who work for the good of humanity. Refer to the contemplation in this newsletter to see what our work in human life is. If we all engaged and lived a life of engagement it would make a difference in the world. When we abdicate our responsibility, this essential work will not be done. Without the work the descent of the New Jerusalem is delayed. The descent of the Holy Spirit must become a reality in our ongoing activity. Whitsun/Pentecost is not a past event that we celebrate in memory thereof, it is a reminder of the continuous engagement that we have with this reality of the Spirit in us. by John-Peter Gernaat During May chapters 19 to 21 formed the study of John’s Gospel.
John wrote his Gospel with the purpose of telling humanity that that which was written has been fulfilled. The wait is over. Was the vinegar that was given to Jesus a punishment, or did it serve a purpose? Vinegar shocks the system and could bring Jesus to consciousness of what was happening. When Jesus addresses the mother and the disciple at the foot of the cross, he is not speaking to them by name. Jesus is speaking to them for what they have become. Mary is a community within one person and so is John. (There are articles written that speak to this elsewhere.) Jesus references the relationship between communities. Jesus addresses them as Mother and Son. Mother is the birth giver. The quality of having been born makes one a son. When we receive the Spirit into us, it is the Spirit that gives birth to Christ in us. The Spirit is the birth-giver in us and Christ-in-us is the son. The name I O A is the full community of the human being. I O A NESS is the name of the human being bearing the qualities of a messenger. The community of husband and wife is replaced by the community of mother and son: Adam and Eve to Isis and Horus. The goal of humanity is to be integrated. The human being is to be the initiator and to carry the initiation – mother and son. The words that we hear Jesus speak from the cross: “Behold your mother; behold your son”; “I thirst”; and “It is fulfilled” are unique to John’s Gospel. The blood that flows from a human body makes one thirsty. The water that flows from the side of Jesus is a reference to the water that flowed from the rock in the desert when the people of Israel travelled in the desert for forty years (Exodus 17: 6). The first day of the week as described by John is unique. When Mary Magdalene meets Jesus in the garden, and mistakes him at first for the gardener, the words the Risen One speaks are “do not touch me”. Eight days later – seven days, a complete cycle, and the start of a new cycle – the Risen One says to Thomas “place your finger in the mark of the nails and place your hand in my side”. What happens in these eight days? Jesus says to Mary “… for I have not yet ascended to the Father”. On the evening of the first day while the disciples are in the locked upper room, the Risen One stands among them and breathes on them and says: “Receive Holy Spirit”. John is alert to these two events: that Jesus is ascending to the Father and he is bestowing the Holy Spirit of the disciples. John describes Ascension and Whitsun before the Risen One and the Holy Spirit make these two events outwardly apparent, because John has undergone the initiation of Lazarus. He was the only disciple who could enter into the house of the High Priest with Jesus and could accompany Jesus to the cross. He lies near the breast (heart-forces) of Jesus at the Last Supper. He is aware that the rising from the dead is not a man coming back to life, but rather a resurrection into a new life. When Tomas meets the Risen One a whole new step is possible. Jesus has ascended to the Father and now Thomas can touch him. What is Thomas touching? In one of his lectures, Rudolf Steiner rearranges the lower of the twelve senses and begins with life (wellbeing), followed by movement and balance and then only the sense of touch. He relates the experience of Thomas to the sense of touch. Thomas is coming in touch with what the events mean. Chapter 20 end as if this is the end of the Gospel and then there is chapter 21. Firstly, in verses 15 to 17, the Risen One addresses Simon as “of John”. This has been expanded in many translations to “son of John”, but this is not in the original Greek text. This is indicative of John being a title rather than a name. We can translate the Prologue to John’s Gospel as reading: “There is the human being sent from God, and his name John”. When the Risen One asks Simon whether he loves him, He uses a word that is directional and has purpose. “Simon, of John, have an aim in your affection. Make a commitment.” Simon denied Jesus three times and he must make a new connection with the Risen One. He is very quick to act, jumping out of the boat and rushing ashore, but he must find conviction. In Greek the word sheep means the ones who move forward. The shepherd walks behind the sheep and has the task of ensuring that they are nourished. The human being must continue to move forward and Simon Peter, of John, is given the task to ensure that the human being finds nourishment, spiritual nourishment. |
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