Jesus looked about him at the expectation on the faces of the men and women and children. He was no priest, how could he give them what they desired? Looking at them he saw all the pagan peoples that he had met in his travels gathered together into one great corpse made from unwashed bodies and wild faces; a corpse of human suffering overflowing with wickedness and with desperation and disease. He sensed the smell of rotted flesh, of darkness, stagnant, dank – the odour of human degradation. The world whirled around him and in that moment he felt the universal suffering of humanity as if it were his own. It streamed into him like a rush of white fire from all the faces that looked up to him for comfort and he could not take a breath for the immensity of its weight.
‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like my handiwork?’ said the being.
Jesus shouted at it, ‘Who are you? Why do you do this?’
When the people heard his words they seemed to grow afraid, for they sensed an open traffic with evil and began to push and shove to flee from the temple.
But Jesus felt a pain, a dart of poisoned ice; it burst into a thousand lighted candles, each shimmering in the air ahead of his eyes. He was removed then, from that place and the people and the evil being.
In this realm of nothingness, he heard these words:
‘Listen Jesus.’
Aum
Evils hold sway
The ego of man struggles free
And guilt is incurred at the expense of others,
Which is experienced in the daily bread
Wherein the will of the heavens does not rule
Because man has separated himself from your realms,
And forgot your names
You fathers in the heavens!
Jesus recognised this voice! He shouted into the open vaults of the deserted temple, ‘Yes…evil holds sway because men have wanted freedom from the gods but now everything falls into ruin, the world is old, how can the people rise up to remember the gods again?’
The voice said.
‘Watch and wait Jesus, soon comes my Son and He will make the old new again!
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
A warm, love-giving radiance, entered into his heart.
‘I am knowledge and ignorance, I am shame and boldness, I am shameless; I am ashamed, I am strength and I am fear and I am war and peace, I am the truth and the speech that cannot be grasped. I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name; I am the sign of the letter and the designation of the division …I am Bath-Kol, the voice of So-ph-ea, the Wisdom that is All.’
