Many souls have felt the presence and pull of the cosmic Christ since he departed. His energy reflects beauty in truth, compassionate but strong, and exerts a gravitational field of its own that speaks to people within and without the confines of Christianity.
But the Jesus who symbolizes Christianity, whose image always seems to materialize frozen in moments of torture and death, has cut a provocative and confusing figure. There are many narratives attached to his death but the one heard most often from Christians has been about him being sent here as a blood sacrifice by the very God we’re told to entrust our souls to and it’s inconsistent with Christ’s own teachings about a loving God. The Urantia Book rejects the narrative:
It was man and not God who planned and executed the death of Jesus on the cross. True, the Father refused to interfere with the march of human events on Urantia, but the Father in Paradise did not decree, demand or require the death of his Son as it was carried out on earth. It is a fact that in some manner, sooner or later, Jesus would have had to divest himself of his mortal body, his incarnation in the flesh, but he could have executed such a task in countless ways without dying on a cross between two thieves. All of this was man’s doing, not God’s.
The Urantia Book 186:5:2
The apostles didn’t mean to create confusion with their version of events. They were simply steeped in a culture that revered animal sacrifice as a method of atonement and were 1st century men who had their own reasons for furthering a narrative about a tribal God seeking ransom for sin. There were many things they saw and heard in their experience with Jesus that were over their heads and he had to deal with their inability to grasp his teachings about a loving Father God, too. But this particular storyline has created problems not only in our subsequent understanding of the motives and mission of Jesus but also in our thinking about the motives of God himself. And since this is an evolutionary process, it’s time to reframe it.
The expanded and deepened view of Christ as a divine but finite Creator Son, incarnated to reveal the Father’s loving will in human form, helps alleviate many confusing things about the nature of Jesus, as does the more extensive narrative of his teachings. The crucified form of the Master, which has become such a strong symbol for the religion about him, has historically placed so much emphasis on his death that his life teachings have become obscured. And the baffling mixed message about God’s will in all of this has become a big part of the problem.
We share many of the same limitations now that the apostles did. We might be far enough along for another download of information but are told not to get terribly attached to any of these current conceptual frames as the process of evolutionary growth and revelation will be continual in our soul’s progression going forward.
Given innate limitations, the subject of God’s will has always been hard for us humans. We’ve tended to view it through such a protracted, fear-based lens that we persistently seek to ferret its meaning through murky interpretations of temporal events.
The book helps reframe that, too, by relieving us of outdated 1st century narratives about petty, wrathful deities and teaching us to identify God’s will through a focus on divine values that arise from a unified, loving field. Truth, beauty and goodness are underscored as such values and the will to truth; will to beauty; and will to goodness are not hard to identify and align to, moment by moment, no matter what’s going on. The Master taught that ‘God is love’ so it follows that his will is not about punishing or paying us back for unknowable offenses. Love itself is the unified field and will always occupy the highest value, human or divine.
Free will is one of the primal gifts of the absolute First Source and Center to all manifestations of personality. For the actualizing God of Experience to end up having free will himself, the entire process of actualization must be borne through free will on every level. So, creator waits respectfully on creature will for alignment–and however the creature decides to align or reject those loving values in their own minds will ultimately decide how the reality of the Supreme coheres. It will cohere regardless of any one individual. The choice of the individual devolves down to whether or not they wish to be part of it and contribute to that process.
But what is it, really, to have the magnitude of a Christ move into the density that is us to reveal what it means to align to loving will? The revelators say that while many things seem miraculous to us, the self-limitation and incarnation of a Creator Son is one of the few things that’s truly miraculous to them. So, you’d think, with all of that glorious divinity these Sons would have an easier time delivering a revelation of simple Father Love.
It’s important to remember again that, in the God of Experience, everything is earned. These Creator Sons come into creature experience eager for what it would mean to do just that. Jesus was a person who was always seeking to reveal divine love and demonstrate what it looks and feels like in human experience. Even while his divine nature was becoming recollected to his human mind, he still chose to enter fully into the heart of human experience. But while his divine self could sail as majestically as a kite in that process of revelation, his poor human self could get fiercely whipped around by the tailwinds. It just wasn’t easy.
Because of love, he was a person who had to put off his dreams of teaching for many years while dutifully raising his brothers and sisters after his father’s death at 14, and who would patiently endure his mother’s embarrassing messianic expectations of him—especially in public. In later years he experienced heart-breaking estrangements from his family because they couldn’t understand what he was doing. Why wouldn’t he marry and settle down, or at least choose his brothers as apostles? But he didn’t play into petty scenes with them.
He worked many different jobs. As a carpenter, a boat builder, scribe, translator and even for a season as a caravan conductor. Jesus worked mainly in his adult life as a teacher with the apostles, but if they ran out of funds they’d drop everything and work the nets catching fish, too, until they’d earned enough to keep going. He refused to accept funding from established institutions for his teaching so he could teach the way he needed to without compromise. And it took a lot of human courage to proclaim that God was loving in a culture dependent on divine vengeance to achieve its perceived political destiny.
He was usually grounded in optimism but could still feel bitter frustration at being hounded and followed relentlessly by orthodox authorities. At the time of his death, as a human being, he felt utterly depressed and defeated in his mission. The weight of human loneliness that had always borne down on him for not being able to share who he really was with anyone, or the nature of his problems on earth, was crushing. The crucifixion was a humiliating, excruciating ordeal. He felt personal failure, though he did achieve the divine reach into human love even for the ones that tortured him.
I know that last sentence sounds like a standard trope, but here’s what’s true about how he died. He died like a lot of idealistic people do that get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, by the wrong people. And that means, when regular people go through it in this world, they know he’s been there, too. It may not have been God’s will at all—but it’s still deeply meaningful for people who go through these things to know that their Creator father and brother understands what it is. If they’re aware enough to reflect on his Spirit, they’ll find it present with them going through it, and that’s not a small thing on this planet.
The whole portrayal of the Master in the Urantia Book is one of an aggressive, dynamic and endlessly good person with immense magnetism. It portrays living Creator energy as it moved into the full spectrum of human experience. They say too many of our artists have gotten it wrong and that the temple merchants would never have cowered and dispersed before the kindly, gentle mystic in those paintings. But what did this powerful, complex, dual-natured being most wish to get through to us? Was it a gospel based on the events around his death or an essential teaching about our own relationship to Father Love—inside and out—that he was all the while seeding into experience to show us.