PAPER 196: Section 1.
Jesus -- The Man
P2090:2, 196:1.1
Jesus' devotion to the Father's will and the service of man was even more
than mortal decision and human determination; it was a wholehearted consecration
of himself to such an unreserved bestowal of love. No matter how great the
fact of the sovereignty of Michael, you must not take the human Jesus away
from men. The Master has ascended on high as a man, as well as God; he belongs
to men; men belong to him. How unfortunate that religion itself should be
so misinterpreted as to take the human Jesus away from struggling mortals!
Let not the discussions of the humanity or the divinity of the Christ obscure
the saving truth that Jesus of Nazareth was a religious man who, by faith,
achieved the knowing and the doing of the will of God; he was the most truly
religious man who has ever lived on Urantia.
P2090:3, 196:1.2
The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus
from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas
of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to
even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service
if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb
of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church
that bears his name, and to all other religions! Surely the Christian fellowship
of believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith and of practices
of living as will enable it to "follow after" the Master in the demonstration
of his real life of religious devotion to the doing of his Father's will and
of consecration to the unselfish service of man. Do professed Christians fear
the exposure of a self-sufficient and
unconsecrated fellowship of social respectability
and selfish economic maladjustment? Does institutional Christianity fear the
possible jeopardy, or even the overthrow, of traditional ecclesiastical authority
if the Jesus of Galilee is reinstated in the minds and souls of mortal men
as the ideal of personal religious living? Indeed, the social readjustments,
the economic transformations, the moral
rejuvenations, and the religious
revisions
of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living
religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus.
P2090:4, 196:1.3
To "follow Jesus" means to personally share his religious faith and to enter
into the spirit of the Master's life of unselfish service for man. One of
the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed,
to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life
purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know
the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
P2090:5, 196:1.4
The common people heard Jesus gladly, and they will again respond to the presentation
of his sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if such truths
shall again be proclaimed to the world. The people heard him gladly because
he was one of them, an unpretentious layman; the world's greatest religious
teacher was indeed a layman.
P2091:1, 196:1.5
It should not be the aim of kingdom believers literally to imitate the outward
life of Jesus in the flesh but rather to share his faith; to trust God as
he trusted God and to believe in men as he believed in men. Jesus never argued
about either the fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of men; he was a living
illustration of the one and a profound demonstration of the other.
P2091:2, 196:1.6
Just as men must progress from the consciousness of the human to the realization
of the divine, so did Jesus ascend from the nature of man to the consciousness
of the nature of God. And the Master made this great ascent from the human
to the divine by the conjoint achievement of the faith of his mortal intellect
and the acts of his indwelling Adjuster. The
fact-realization of the attainment
of totality of divinity (all the while fully conscious of the reality of humanity)
was attended by seven stages of faith consciousness of progressive
divinization.
These stages of progressive self-realization were marked off by the following
extraordinary events in the Master's bestowal experience:
- The arrival of the Thought Adjuster.
- The messenger of Immanuel who appeared to him at Jerusalem when he was about twelve years old.
- The manifestations attendant upon his baptism.
- The experiences on the Mount of Transfiguration.
- The morontia resurrection.
- The spirit ascension.
- The final embrace of the Paradise Father, conferring unlimited sovereignty of his universe.