The Great Gospel of John
Volume 3
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus near Caesarea Philippi
- Chapter 12 -
Suggestions for the mission.
1
(The Lord) "Remember this! If you come to a place where there are very beautifully-formed and dressed-up people of both sexes, it is best to move on; for there is no business for the Kingdom of God, because there at least half of Sodom and Gomorrah are in force! The punishment of God is never far from such a place; for such flesh linked souls, which for the greatest part have laid all their conscience in the grave of their bodies, are too bound up through and through. And if their beautiful flesh is touched even only very slightly by the evil, rough and still very uneducated natural spirits of the air, such bound up souls can muster no defense and succumb along with their flesh which is much more susceptible and thin-skinned than the flesh of the body of a free soul.
2
Go there and grab a tender town maid firmly by the arm or an any other body part and she will cry with pain; if you go out to the country however to a farmer who besides his work also takes care for his children" souls and his own, there you can grab the hand of the man and those of his children as firmly as you want and shake it and he will let out no great cry of pain or fear!
3
You probably think that such insensitivity comes from heavy work and the hardening through it?! Oh no, I tell you; instead the hardiness is only a consequence of the soul freed from the flesh through self-denial, by which then the correct toughness of the flesh also comes into being.
4
But wherever all concern for the tenderness of the flesh exists and even some schools exist in which the body can be made as tender as possible through all sorts of gymnastics and as smooth through all sorts of ointments and oils, there is no free soul any longer; and if only a slight wind of poison comes over such terribly weak bodies then death reaps its harvest.
5
Then people complain and moan and one half-believing person after the other opens his mouth and says: But what sort of pleasure can God have that He tries to kill the people with all sorts of torture?! Either there is no God, or God is too exalted and no longer cares for the creatures of the Earth, or God is hungry for sacrifices and incense, one has to satisfy Him with rich sacrifices, magical words and incense! Or God has become angry and is taking His revenge now on the harmless weak humanity; one has to do penance in full and cast at least twelve sacrificial goats in the Jordan each year!
6
But then no-one thinks that all this suffering, all sickness, all wars, all price increases, hunger and plague come from the fact that people do everything only for their bodies instead of for their souls and their spirit according to God"s order!
7
Yes, they preach the fear of God to dead souls, in whom (God) the preacher, soul dead himself, no longer believes. Because he only believes in what he gets for preaching and what honor and what reputation a well-studied position as preacher could bring. And so one blind leads the other and a dead man wants to make another dead man alive. The first preaches for his body, and the other obeys the teaching for the sake of his body. But what sort of advantage can there be for an extremely sick soul?
8
I am a savior; how, the dead and the blind people are asking, can this be possible? And I tell you that I do not heal the flesh of people, but instead wherever some soul is still left mixed with the flesh I make the soul free and awaken, as far as possible, the spirit buried in the soul. This immediately strengthens the soul which becomes free, and it is then an easy thing to set the correct order to the afflictions of the flesh in one moment.
9
That is what one calls a miracle healing, while it is only the most ordinary and natural healing of the flesh in the world! What someone has, that he can give; what he does not have, that he cannot give!
10
Whoever has a living soul according to the order of God and a free spirit in it, he can make his brother"s soul free if it is not too embodied, and this helps the sick fleshly body. If the doctor of souls himself has a very sick soul, which is more dead than alive, how could he give someone else"s soul what he is lacking himself?! Think about this!
11
I have now shown you the conditions for becoming my disciples, and the ills of the world down to its truest and deepest foundation. Now do what you want! I neither take you to be my disciples nor do I refuse you to become such. If you want to become my disciples you must first make your souls free and strong, otherwise the discipleship of my teaching will do you no good!"