THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 60 -
On the nature of love.
Only now Roklus decided to follow Raphael to Me and to bravely take the thirty steps on. But since I was still sitting with Cyrenius at the table as earlier, and discussing with him some governmental measures and Raphael led Roklus in the direction towards Cyrenius, he (Roklus) said after they have taken some twenty steps, "Yes, now you are leading me to the supreme governor again with whom I previously decided everything?! Cyrenius, now only too well-known to me, cannot be the sought Nazarene?"
2
Raphael says, "Of course not; but the very chaste-looking man who is sitting close on his right is! You know Him now and can now make your way to Him already!"
3
Roklus says, "That would be easy "only some ten steps more and I would stand right by him! But what should I say then, how should I address him?"
4
Raphael says, "But with your Intellect, with your knowledge and experience you still find yourself in a whirlpool of confusion?! In the end this is becoming a little unclear even to me! Go over there and say: Lord and Master, here before You stands a person hungry and thirsty, satisfy his soul! And then you will immediately receive a suitable answer!"
5
Roklus did this with much inner fear, and I turned with a serious but friendly expression to him and said, "Friend, from Tyre and Sidon to Caesarea Philippi and from there to here is obviously nearer than from here to south-east Asia, where the Sihinites [Chinese] of the Orient have built a powerful wall far above India's highest mountains! You sought the truth there "and then again, not the truth; for even if you had found the truth there, nonetheless you would not have recognized the truth! But if you had recognized it, it would not have been pleasant for you; for if the truth is not united with love, it resembles the sunlight in the north. It illuminates the Earth, but since it is light without warmth, it does not animate the ground and everything is paralyzed as if in death!
6
A judge seeks also the full truth according to the law. The criminal is forced into an admission of the full truth with all means, and witnesses are placed under the strictest oath. In the end the full truth comes out; but for whose benefit is that useful? That is also a truth without love, it is a light without warmth, and is aimed at killing! And behold, you also sought and for the most part found such a truth "certainly not for your inner revival, but instead for the death of your spirit, which is love in the heart of every man.
7
But because your spirit was oppressed by the mass of rigid and material truths as if to death, you had to necessarily lose every trace of existence of a god, since God is also only pure love in His primordial essence and can only be understood through love!
8
You knew indeed, guessing very dimly, that love is the basic element of all beings and things; but what love is, you did not know and nor could you know, because your feelings and the sense of your soul have never been touched by it.
9
Your knowledge of the essence of love resembled what you have from the essence of the stars. They shine, but their light creates no warmth, and you cannot possibly learn through your understanding whether their light comes from a fire as well.
10
But with the sun you feel its warmth and judge that the same must be a fire, and that must be an incalculably powerful one, because it is able to warm the Earth so very significantly from an incredibly great distance not quite unknown to you.
11
You claim the sheerest opposite about the moon, because you have never felt any warmth from this star. You did not claim anything at all about the other stars, since you have never felt anything else from their influence but their sparse light.
12
But because in your capacity to perceive you have received so little from the stars that seem so small to you, you have also never been challenged in any region of your life to consider what the stars might be, and whether their light is a fire or not, or whether they are bodies or simply are some heatless and weightless points of light.
13
But in order to develop an idea of something, one must necessarily begin to think about the same. But in order to be able to think about an issue with a certain enthusiasm, it must be considered to be of some worth; the value however always depends on the love that one has for the issue."