A week later His disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them.
Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said,
“Peace be with you!” Then He said to Thomas,
“Put your finger here; see my hands.
Reach out your hand and put it into My side.
Stop doubting and believe.”
Thomas said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”
– (JN 20:26-28)
What I have come to love most of all about our merry band of commenters here is that you so often help me think things through and come to a deeper understanding. This time around, you have helped me realize that of course Jesus has continued to grow spiritually throughout the past two thousand years! Since we now have been told that Jesus began as a usual human being, that added understanding is common sense. And in the reality without time that is the astral plane, my Thomas tells me that he watched it happen as he came and went at his Brother’s request, taking repeated lifetimes on earth meant primarily to try to protect the Lord’s precious teachings. But that is nearly all he has been willing to tell me.
I forgive my beloved friend. I am coming to see only slowly that he has been keeping some fairly big secrets from me, but those secrets never were his to tell. Perhaps they are not yet mine to tell either, but at some point the Lord’s secrets will belong to humankind since the withholding of them has caused us so much confusion. For me, the central point is Jesus. He must make His Own decisions. He is the most famous, the most amazing person in all of human history, and almost every human being on earth now feels a connection with Him on some level, but still no one actually knows who He is? And despite my Thomas’s two thousand years of secrecy, now that Jesus has decided that He is going to tell His story, Thomas is beginning to open to me. Just a bit.
Almost the first thing that Thomas ever said to me when he first introduced himself through a medium was that we had shared seventeen earth-lifetimes. But he has never been willing to say much more than that. Although apparently we do go far back! In the first of those lifetimes of which I am aware, I was a teenage boy and he was a chieftain and we were early followers of the Lord’s Way who died together in a Roman massacre. In another of those lives, I was a French monk and he was some sort of pamphleteer in around the year twelve hundred. He was allowed to hide in our monastery and write his diatribes, provided that I vetted them. In what I believe was the most recent lifetime we shared, he was Thomas Jefferson, and in his old age I was a law clerk who worked with him on an early version of Liberating Jesus. He was so old at that point that he decided not to publish it. When I was writing My Thomas in 1990 and researching that book at Monticello, they told me they actually had such a manuscript, which fact still amuses me.
I have been asking Thomas what it was like, watching all those victims of Roman Christianity flood into the afterlife over all those years. He tells me that to Jesus they were all His chrished people. They arrived in pain and calling for Him, and He welcomed each of them, and He healed them. But, in the millions? How could He manage that? Thomas says that Jesus just managed it. He had His Council, after all, and the earliest comers helped Him love and heal the later arrivals. Don’t forget what the atmosphere is like in the afterlife. It is nothing but love and light!
Jesus established an afterlife healing center for the victims of the Inquisitions. I had recalled that there was just an Inquisition or two, and it all happened a long time ago, but in fact Roman Christianity was torturing heretics to death off and on for most of a thousand years! And Thomas tells me that at first their astral bodies would mimic their damaged earthly bodies, so helpers pretending to be medical teams would sew back on whatever the torturers had lopped off, heal the victims’ remembered burns, and so on. Jesus found so much joy in righting the worst wrongs of Roman Christianity. He would sit at the bedsides of people who felt that they needed to be in bed, or more usually He would go from group to group in the beautiful healing gardens, just teaching them and loving them. Very soon He would have them singing and dancing the old Hebrew harvest songs together, which of course was what He would have recalled from the last time He was on earth. Thomas says He taught them to pray all over again. Many of them were angry, and He didn’t deny them their right to be angry. He simply taught them to also be grateful. He taught them to pray, “Thank You God for this flower.” “Thank You God for this friend.” The more questions I have been asking Thomas, the more his memories of those times have been coming back to him.
But the crucial work of protecting Jesus’s Gospel teachings was something that the Lord did Himself. The Councilors of The First Council of Nicaea in 325 smugly insisted that they were “inspired by God,” and my Thomas tells me that actually they were right. It was Jesus who was working with those Councilors’ minds as they put together the first Roman Christian Bible. Thomas told me this just last Friday, and I slapped my forehead. Omigod. Of course! I feel like an idiot that I never thought of it myself! It was Jesus Himself who chose the four Canonical Gospels and rejected all the other versions. He allowed them to remove some references to reincarnation, but He made sure that enough remained that we would be able to puzzle it all out later. And everything that they wanted to add to the Gospels was added to the back of each in such a way that later on it could be plucked back out again. So then all that Jesus really had to do was to pay loose attention to what was happening on earth, send my Thomas to the various religious hotspots, and tune His mind back in closely to the Councilors’ minds whenever another church Council was later convened. His precious teachings were always under His divine protection.
It is first now that I even think to wonder what my own role in any of this might have been. Thomas insists to me at once that I have had no role. But I have shared seventeen earth-lifetimes with him? And as I ask the question, I have the answer. Not from Thomas, but from Jesus. The Lord reminds me that in the first Appendix to Liberating Jesus, He outlines how we can recognize and remove what the Councils have added to the Gospels, and we can have again the words that He spoke as He now wants us to have those words. And He calls Liberating Jesus “our book.” I wish I could properly describe His voice.
Thomas tells me that he was so close to Jesus over all that time, and Jesus’s further spiritual growth was so gradual, that he didn’t realize the enormity of what it was that he was witnessing until we began to talk about it here over the past few weeks. And it wasn’t just that Jesus was loving back to spiritual health all the millions of victims of the Inquisitions and the Crusades who needed His comfort and His care. He also was loving and comforting those who had been made to suffer the lifelong terror of never knowing whether perhaps they might have been created by a monstrous God simply so they could populate a hell that of course does not even exist. By far most of the Roman Christians that Jesus has loved into spiritual health over the past seventeen hundred years have been just the billions upon billions of Catholics and Protestants of all those forty-thousand-odd fear-based denominations who have lived and died in Roman Christianity, and unfortunately they were cheated of Jesus’s perfect love-based Way because the Romans had exterminated The Way of Jesus just three hundred years after it began. In welcoming each of them individually, and in loving each of them into spiritual health, Jesus was – inadvertently perhaps, although I am coming to think more and more that He must have known very well what He was doing – Jesus was using Himself to demonstrate the value of His Own Gospel teachings in raising the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind. And what a demonstration it has been!
In that two-thousand-year astral reality without time, my best guess is that Jesus has demonstrated something like the spiritual equivalent of a million years of humankind’s future spiritual evolution.
One of the emails that I accept daily out of plain curiosity is from a fire-and-brimstone traditional pastor who is sure that the End Times are upon us now. Jesus is about to ride in on His white horse and start right in at lopping off heads. Or whatever it is that the Book of Revelation tells us that Jesus is about to do. I must confess that toward the end of my decades of cover-to-cover Bible-reading, I took to skimming the Book of Revelation, just as I took to skimming the Begats. There are only so may Begats and Lakes of Fire that any sane person is able to take in one lifetime. But it is indeed possible that these are the End Times in one way or another, and indeed Jesus is about to return, since He has asked the most unlikely individual that you can possibly imagine to build for Him His Own website. I am giggling a bit, involuntarily, as I type this. Jesus has so completely perfected Himself that He is at once both infinitely powerful God and as sweet as a perfectly cherished child.
Jesus has certainly proven that His method for achieving human spiritual development works! If that was His goal, then He has succeeded. I can recall that when I used to read the Bible, each time I would end the Old Testament with Malachi and start right in with the Gospel book of Matthew, as I would again freshly encounter Jesus it would be like stepping directly from ancient days right into the modern world and beyond. And Jesus is our model now for what all of humankind is going to be in that blessed and far-distant day when we all have long-since abandoned not only wars and rumors of wars, but even the pointless fears that the Roman religion has brought to us, and we have returned with joy to the Way of Jesus, the Way that our beloved Lord has now proven to us is going to be The Way indeed! That bitterly sadistic and all-too-human fire-and-brimstone pastor would not recognize Jesus now.
We will close here with a few eyewitness details from the Gospel of John. When you read today’s frame-verse, you realize that Jesus had already shed His reanimated material body by the time He first encountered His bad-boy disciple, the infamous Doubting Thomas, just a week after His resurrection. By then Jesus had already begun to use an astral body on which He had created mimics of His crucifixion wounds. Which amusing detail purely fascinates me!
Of course, we know from little details given elsewhere, and from the fact that when Jesus first left the tomb He didn’t want His material body to be touched, that it had begun to deteriorate by the time of His resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. So He probably cast aside His material body as early as, say, the following Tuesday. But here, certainly, He could not have entered a locked room and simply appeared there unless He was already operating in astral form. And we know from the fact that mentions of His crucifixion wounds soon cease that He didn’t think it was necessary to keep maintaining them on the astral body that He used for the forty days before His final bodily ascension. But He had to make His point to Doubting Thomas!
I love the fact that the Bible is so amazingly rich in these little first-person observations that it lets you play the detective, even two millennia later. And we will have more to say about that next week.
A week later His disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them.
Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said,
“Peace be with you!” Then He said to Thomas,
“Put your finger here; see my hands.
Reach out your hand and put it into My side.
Stop doubting and believe.”
Thomas said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”
– (JN 20:26-28)