Chapter 34: Becoming Immortal

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book II: The Rabbi
Part Five–Messiah
                                      

Jesus regained awareness after what seemed to him like a long period of time. In fact it was really just moments later, as he realized when he looked below him.

Down beneath the swirling clouds and darkness, in the center of a frightened and scurrying crowd of people, were three crosses. He could see his own body, its head hanging down, on the middle cross. Both the cross and the empty, cold body were rocking back and forth from the shaking and trembling of the earth.

He felt cold no longer. He felt nothing physical at all, but he was aware of swirling currents of strong feelings eddying around him in the air. He felt a keen desire to know what was going on; a great sense of sadness and loss; and a high, keening, and pleasurable excitement.

He realized he was dead.

As he rose higher, leaving the crowd and the hilltop behind under a covering bank of dark cloud, two glowing, oval shapes of white light suddenly swung in beside him on either side.

He looked at his own body and saw with a heightening sense of pleasure that it, too, was an oval of white light. It was brighter than the other two.

Together the three of them soared upward, bursting above the storm; and in bright sunlight, they saw the closing moments of a partial eclipse of the sun The rays of sunlight passed through their bodies like a cooling wind through hot, sweat-soaked clothing. They bathed in the shooting sparks of energy. Then they sped on.

Who are you? Jesus asked them.

We are the Messengers, one of them answered. We are taking you to the I AM who is beyond all others.

Silently Jesus felt a great peace and joy bubbling up inside him, overwhelming him and taking all suffering and awareness of earth life away. He bathed in this emotional radiance for what seemed like an eternity as the Messengers continued to lead him on.

Suddenly they came into a great black void lit only by dazzling points of stars, and the slow revolving of nine softly radiant balls reflecting light from a central sun. In the midst of this physical universe with its strange sights, Jesus sensed intense spirit forces of every feeling possible, from the lightest to the strongest, eddying and whirling around him in waves and currents. Ideas, like small seedlings, trees, and giant oaks, sprang up everywhere from ages past and futures yet unknown. Color and sound were windstorms howling around him. In the center of all this, like the eye of a storm, Jesus felt a Presence.

The Presence swallowed him.

In an exquisite pain that was pleasure, he felt his whole self evaporate and shatter in a wordless cry of anguished bliss. He lost all sense of himself and of the Presence being separate. Instead, he simply Was. He knew the darkness that was all light, and the sound that was bottomless and silent. He felt the fury that was Peace and he knew the Uncontained Power that fueled the universe yet was smaller than a speck of dust.

I AM! reverberated through his whole being, and his whole being vibrated with it.

After a time, he began to regain a separate awareness once more. The ecstasy of the mystical I-Am was still with him, as scenes from his life on earth began to appear in his mind. These scenes started long before his life as Jesus. They started with his first life in an earth bod.

He saw himself as Adam, the first of a group of spirit beings to take on fully human form. He felt Adam’s delight in his mate Eve, the female twin of his own real self. Together they lived in perfect awareness of their selves and their powers, complete and full in their constant joy.

Yet, Jesus saw, he and Eve forgot themselves. Gradually they lost sight of their true natures. He saw himself dying a human death, not realizing what he had forgotten until after he was dead and free of his human body once again. He decided, then, to do better next time.

Doing better next time took longer than he realized. Though the amount of time was but the pause of an eyelash in the life of God, by human standards it seemed forever. Jesus saw a long line of nearly thirty incarnations stretching from Adam’s death to the present, with sometimes many hundreds of years between each lifetime.

He saw himself in Egypt, a great leader, helping found the Pyramid of Knowledge, the same Great pyramid in which he had taken his Egyptian mystery rites in his most recent life. In that earlier life, he and others were building the Pyramid as a reservoir of human wisdom shortly after Atlantis had sunk and its people had scattered to Egypt and many lands beyond.

He saw himself as a man named Zand, father of Zoroaster and founder of a great mystical religion in Persia long ago.

He saw himself as Melchizedek, high priest of ancient Jerusalem, who had no mother or father and was neither born nor died, as Israel’s holy books said. As Melchizedek he came as a spirit briefly residing in flesh, not conquering it but simply living in it, in order to teach the Great Way to Jerusalem’s dwellers. He saw himself incarnating again and again in this land, as Joseph son of Jacob Israel; as Joshua who conquered the land when Moses died; and as Enoch, the mysterious scribe and Holy Seer who drew together the first Books of Moses and the Laws, adding to them and making them the scriptures of his people for all times. Within some of these books, he added mysteries and symbols that only the Awakened could understand.

Jesus watched these and many other lifetimes of his pass through his awareness. It had been a long journey, trying to perfect the human body. Darkness and forgetfulness were part of his life, and of the lives of people surrounding him, in each of his incarnations. But in each life they gained a little bit more.

His most recent life as Jesus appeared before him. He saw the not-yet-awakened yet happy time of his childhood, when everyone took care of him so well. He saw his youth and early manhood, a period of deep inner storm and conflict as he gradually realized whom he was. His visits to other countries, and his lessons in gaining inner powers, passed before his mind’s eye as a time of excitement and mounting purpose. Then, the last three years, his work in his homeland surged into his awareness as a time of decisive action, great gains, and painful losses.

And he saw the end of this work: his followers hounded and chased, and one of them, Judas who betrayed him, swinging from a rope the envoy had fitted around his own neck. Jesus realized this had happened just a few hours before his death. He saw Judas crying out in remorse and shame in front of a rocky ledge as the rope tightened. Then, as the life flew out of his dying body toward darkness, Judas’ tortured mind shouted out. “This is payment!” he screamed. He was trying in the worst way possible to offer his own life to his master, long after it could do any good.

Jesus felt all the pain and anguish from Judas’ terror-filled death pass through himself. His own spirit self convulsed once in agony form it, then let it go. He was freed of the last chains that Judas had bound to him by killing himself. Jesus felt cleansed and new.

His awareness took in the whole of the life he had just completed. In a flash of hope he saw that the work of thirty lifetimes could be drawing to a close, if he wanted. In this most recent life, he had reached the perfection for which he had been searching all along. He had, by human means that any person could use in time, come to the edge of conquering any human affliction and illness: he had come to the point of creating the perfect body.

But he had yet to finish it.

He turned his awareness back into the great I-Am that surrounded him, and once more it gently began to engulf him. He spoke with the soft, clean words of thought.

“To you,” he said to the I-Am, “I give all that I have become. I leave the final choice to you, for you are my Father and my Mother. Only you know what is possible and what is best.”

The cloud-like mists of colors and shapes swirled around him in a sudden quickening dance of excitement and energy. It was like floating in the midst of a warm rainbow sea. Out of every particle of every shape and color came a vibrating, resonant reply. “you also know what is possible and best,” the wordless voice told him.

Jesus felt he was bathing and diving through the radiating energy of the voice’s reply.

“You have presumed,” the voice continued, “to become like me, and to teach others to become like me. Your task is almost finished. You are almost immortal. All you need is to lift the smallest finger of effort to have what you want. Yet I will not decide for you. The decision, as it has been for every step of the way, is yours.”

Jesus bowed his head. “But every step of the way,” he answered, “I have needed your help.”

The whole expanse of colors around Jesus radiated vast amusement and pleasure. “I have given it!” the voice answered. “Have I not shown you the smallest workings of the invisible particles of matter itself? Whenever you were ready, I gave you all that you ever needed or wanted. Yet only your own desire and will have made the final choice each time.

“What,” asked the great voice, “is your final choice this time?”

“I would complete my work,” Jesus answered. “I would conquer death and show others that this is possible.”

The great voice hummed with its own power and strength. “Then look below you,” it said.

Jesus looked. As if white clouds were parting and he was on a mountaintop looking down through them, far below him he saw a tomb. Outside it guards were standing watch and the women he had loved on earth were weeping around it. Inside it, for he could see the rooms as if they had no roof of stone over them, he saw his body in the darkness. He realized that hours or days of earthly time had passed since his crucifixion.

He stared at his body lying swathed in linens on its rock shelf. It was a poor, gaunt, pale thing, drained of life and of all feeling. He could sense the damage already done to its physical parts, especially in the head, because it had been without life-giving breath and flowing blood too long.

He greatly desired to return to that body.

With his desire, suddenly a great flash of brilliant purple-white energy enclosed him. It was a sheer agony of pleasure so biting and bright that he felt the whole universe must surely explode with it. He felt like he had become a sun.

The intense energy clung to him, radiated out from him. With the strength of it totally surrounding him, he gradually began floating down toward the little scene of guards, weeping women, and his tomb far below. Slowly he came through the rocky walls of his tomb. He stood before his pale, thin body.

Then, carefully, he began to put himself back into it.

It was cold. He felt like he was being suffocated by a heavy weight as he settled into the lifeless flesh. For a moment he felt a low flash of panic, as if he was burying himself alive. He remembered his lessons in the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and how he had been buried alive there for three days. This memory helped him, here in his real tomb.

He explored the feelings of his body. The old familiar sensations of nerve and skin were still there, and he could make parts of his body twitch. But he knew it was a false life, this limb-twitching, for it was just his willpower handling a cold, lifeless thing. His vital organs were no more alive than a rock.

He exerted his willpower further, sending it into every corner inside his body, and pushing it deeper until he was aware of the myriad small particles of his body stretching everywhere in endless numbers within him.

He set himself on fire.

With the burning energy like the sun’s–purple-white heat he had brought down to the tomb with him–he kindled a blinding-white glow, a blaze of fire, in each of the particles. Hundreds, thousands and more of his body’s particles leaped into golden sun flames as his awareness passed through them and beyond.

Gradually he became aware of intense heat, like being struck by a series of lightning flashes in such quick succession that there was no rest between each searing blow. He could sense that within this heat the old particles of his body were reforming into new ones. He guided them gently, carefully, reconstructing the ways they used to be and making some of them change so that in small ways it would be a better body. But all of it, particle after particle, was not just energized. It was new.

He felt his heart begin to beat.

Quietly, but with a joy that bounded up as an inward cry of fierce exultation, he thanked the Father and Mother God.

His breath came next. His lungs shuddered, stretched, an drew in a sharp gasp of air. They labored heavily to expel the air again, then suddenly they started working smoothly.

Jesus opened his eyes. A smell of burning was in the closed, stuffy air of the dark tomb. He lifted his hands and felt a burial shroud wrapped around his body, resisting him. He unwrapped it by rolling and shifting, feeling the cloth as he did so. His fingers found stiff lines in the normally soft cloth. A powder of some kind rubbed off of it. The smell of burning came from this powder. He suddenly realized the powder was charcoal. The outline of his body was burned into the shroud.

He felt himself carefully with his hands, looking for signs of burning on his flesh. There were none. He remembered how, in India, his teacher Kahjian had told him stories of men and women struck by lightning. Some of them would have their clothes scorched and their herds of goats and everything around them burned to ashes. Yet their bodies, even the hair on their heads, would remain not singed.

He stood up. He stumbled once. His muscles had not been exercised for over two days. He concentrated on his muscles, sending an extra rush of life-giving blood to his limbs. Then he walked to the door of his tomb.

The open doorway, like most others in tombs, was rectangular. It was cut into solid rock a handspan in depth. Beyond it, sealing it tightly from the outer world, was a wall of rock. Jesus lad his hand against the rock. Though the time of day, he knew, was shortly before the rooster’s crow at dawn, the rock was somewhat warm to his touch. It still held some of the heat from the previous day. More than that, though, he discovered the powdery charcoal once more. The heat he had generated in returning to his body had scorched the walls of his tomb.

He concentrated on the slab of stone blocking the door, pushing it out of the way with his awareness. It slowly rolled to his right, rumbling and causing rocky grit and dust to fall before him. Through the dust, everything looked grey.

He stepped outside. He looked first at the tiny-pre-dawn pinpoints of stars overhead, and the thin crescent of the new moon so narrow it was a golden blade set on edge. He felt once more the fierce, exulting joy of life beating in his limbs and flooding through his body. The joy was so great and so powerful that he almost shouted.

He heard a croaking sound, as if some man were in mortal danger. He turned to the sound. There, scattered before him, were several handfuls of warmly dressed Temple guards. Many of them were crouching, and all of them were wide-eyed and staring at him. Not one of them was moving, except the nearest, whose hand was shaking violently.

Jesus realized that Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin had placed these guards around his tomb. He smiled within himself as he sensed why they were present. They were attempting to keep his followers from stealing his dead body, so that no one could later point to the empty tomb and say, “See, he has risen!”

Jesus had no idea what to say to the guards. He could feel their terror so deeply that his own spine began to crawl in fear and his own limbs began trembling. He breathed deeply and easily and made himself relax. Then he took a step toward them.

The nearest guard screeched. He whirled about and fled, and the others ran with him, tumbling over each other as they went.

Jesus turned and walked to a corner of the tomb’s garden where several hyacinth bushes had been planted on a carpet of green grass. The darkness of the night and the grey gloominess of the tomb entrances, cut from bare, sharp rock, made the tombs deathly still. But life was flowing in him. The surge of joy and completeness he felt, for being alive again, was so great he wanted to dance and run across the stones like a little boy.

He sat down instead on the grass. He smelled the hyacinths. Their sweet scent was as fresh and alive to his reawakened senses as the most wonder-filled incense on earth. As dawn slowly crept into the sky, he lost himself in the hyacinth’s fragrance, and their beautiful red and white colors.

Just before the sun came out, he was brought quickly out of his meditations by a startled voice. He looked over to his tomb, a short distance away, from where the sound had come. It was Miriam.

At first he was overjoyed to see her, but he hesitated to rise and greet her. He was afraid of startling her too suddenly in his reawakened body. She was before the mouth of his open tomb, and her hand was before her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fear.

“They have taken him away!” she exclaimed. Then, before he could even blink, she was turning around and running as fast as her long robes, flying out before her legs, would allow her.

He waited patiently. He knew she would be back.

As the sun edged over the horizon, casting long, crooked shadows in this valley of tombs, he saw her returning. With her were John and, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he ran, Peter.

“Look!” she cried as they approached the tomb. Her whole body was trembling. “They have taken him away and we don’t know where they have put his body!”

Jesus’ heart turned over in his breast and began pumping wildly as he felt the waves of their fear and sorrow spread to him. He breathed deeply and slowly to calm himself.

John, faster on foot and younger than Peter, ran ahead of Miriam and Peter and into the tomb itself. A ray of sunlight reflected into the tomb, glowing gold and yellow. John looked around at the scattered death linens, the scorched shroud, and other wrappings, and put his hand to his face as if he were mortally ill.

Peter dashed in after him and, seeing Jesus was missing, he shuddered and groaned.

Jesus shook his head sadly. Feeling their sorrow, he was overwhelmed also by his own. None of the three of them believed what he had told them: that he would rescue his own body from death. How many of his other friends, he wondered, were as skeptical?

Sadly, he watched, unwilling yet in his quietness and solitude to show them the truth, as John and Peter wrapped their garments around them against the chill of the dawn. The two envoys left.

Tears trickled down Jesus’ face as he watched Miriam standing and sobbing before the tomb.

Even as he cried silently with her from his distance, he suddenly felt some great presence approaching his tomb. He looked up and could see nothing, so he used his inner senses. He felt the coming of the two white oval beings who had first met him after he had died. Slowly, brilliant in their shining but now invisible bodies of light, they descended through the air and the tomb’s rock. They came to rest within the tomb. Jesus felt them taking visibility onto themselves. He could not see them with his own eyes, but he knew that Miriam could see them.

He watched as she first noticed the great light pouring out of the dark hole in the rock. She bent and peered in. Her eyes grew wide with surprise. Yet she had already had one great surprise this morning, so she stood firm and watched the figures in white quietly.

One of the figures gently, but with great authority ringing through each of his words, spoke to her. “Woman, what reason do you have for crying?”

Miriam answered without pausing. “They have taken away my lord,” she said, and I don’t know where they have put him.”

The other white figure, whose every line of body and clothing radiated grace and calm, slowly lifted his arm. He pointed through the tomb door to Jesus, sitting in the distance, with such clear command that Miriam at once turned around.

When she did, she saw Jesus sitting quietly in a pool of sunlight at the other end of the garden of the tombs.

He stood up. His heard began beating quickly again. “My lady,” he said softly, his voice carrying to her easily though he was far away. “Are you looking for the dead or the living?”

Miriam began hurry toward him. “Gardener of this valley!” To her he looked very much like a gardener, for his face was ruddy with healthy, and he was dressed in little more than a loincloth. Who but the gardener, living in a little hut nearby, would appear in such a place in little more than a loincloth? And who but a gardener used to working outside in all weather would dare to make himself almost naked on such a chilly morning?

“Sir!” she called, approaching him. “The man who was laid in that open tomb. Please. If you have taken him away, where is he so I may go get him?”

As she hurried closer, he slowly drank in the form of her beautiful limbs and lively grace animating her in spite of her sorrow. In the depths of his deepest being he felt her flaming red hair and her blue eyes awakening his love. He turned all his love and concern out of himself and, as one breaks a dam of logs apart to let waters pour into a dry stream, his love poured out to her.

“Miriam!” he exclaimed.

She blinked once. In that single instant of time her whole world turned around. A few days before, her Jesus had been a then, beaten, and crippled man dirty from being cast on the ground, and muddy from his own sweat and blood mingling with the dirt. Then he had been dead. she had helped prepare the cold, blackly bruised body with its ribs arching out under the blue-tinged flesh. Here, before her now, was a healthy Jesus. His face was flushed with health. The breeze kept ruffling his tawny hair. His voice was clear and deep, and his body was filled out as if he had been eating well for weeks.

She rushed to him, tears welling out from her eyes in joy and disbelief. “Jesus!” she cried out. “Oh, my lord!”

She fell at his feet and would have embraced his legs except that he moved back.

“Wait, Miriam!” he exclaimed, his whole body filled with the urge to touch her and to hold her trembling shoulders. “I cannot touch you yet, for I have not given my body to the Father. The life you see in me is still fragile. I must offer it to God before it is made complete.”

Miriam looked up at him with confused, fearful eyes. “Yet it is really you? Are you really alive?”

Jesus laughed joyfully. “Oh, Miriam! Yes, I am here! Come, rise up, my woman, and look on me!”

Miriam slowly stood and looked up into Jesus’ clear, intent eyes. They stood that way for what seemed to her like hours as his love for her shone out upon her, and his beauty and peace brought tears to her own eyes again and again.

Jesus, as he looked deeply into her, felt that his own heart would burst with joy. As he looked, he felt so totally concentrated on her in love that his own awareness reached out and entered hers. For a moment, in ecstasy, he shared his consciousness with hers. His sight saw out of her eyes, his mind felt her body from the inside, and her thoughts and feelings were his.

Miriam gasped. The same thing was happening to her. For her, less trained in inner powers than he, the surprise and ecstasy were even more overwhelming. She felt herself completely surrendered to him and completely lost in his being. She was mingling with his keen and fiery self of light and perfect joy. She knew that so long as she kept looking in his eyes, this perfect oneness could be theirs. She completely lost her awareness of being a separate self, and she knew that the same thing was happening to him.

Finally, though, her body took over. She blinked once. The oneness wavered. She blinked a second time. With an easy transition, but an indefinable sense of loss, she found herself back in just her own mind, looking through just her own eyes, at him. His smile at her was like the brightness of a thousand suns.

Trembling like a leaf, yet with the echoes of the oneness sending shivers of joy up and down her whole body, she watched him helplessly. She realized that she, too, was smiling.

He spoke. His voice caressed her hair and cheeks like the gentle hand of a small, loving child. “Miriam, he said. “You must go and tell the others.”

Her face fell. She didn’t want to leave him.

“Don’t worry,” he said, keeping her gaze locked with his. “I must ascend bodily to the Father. I will come back and be with all of you before the night is over. Wait for me. Will you? Wherever all of you are gathered, I will come.”

Miriam nodded quickly. Then the urge to touch him was so great in her that she could no longer resist it. She closed her eyes and leaned forward quickly to kiss him.

But her lips met thin air. He was gone.

She opened her eyes, startled, and looked all around her. He wasn’t there. Anxiously she searched further with her eyes, along the skyline where the deep blue of the spring morning was meeting the green of the rocky hills. Finally she saw him, striding away over a high meadow filled with purple flowers. As soon as she saw him, he turned.

He waved to her. “This evening!” he called.

She left the tombs, quietly and in great joy, to tell the others. Their master and friend had returned. he had taught them to celebrate life. Now they could really celebrate it. Soon the whole nation would surely join in.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.