© 1992 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
from “The Religions of Man”, by Huston Smith
The people in the streets who first heard Jesus’ disciples proclaiming the Good News were as impressed by what they saw as by what they heard. They saw lives that had been transformed — men and women ordinary in every way except for the fact that they seemed to have found the secret of living. They evidenced a tranquility, simplicity, and cheerfulness that their hearers had nowhere else encountered.
Specifically there seemed to be two qualities in which their lives abounded. The first of these was mutual affection. One of the earliest observations about Christians that we have from outsiders was, “See how these Christians love one another.”
Just before his crucifixion, Jesus told his disciples, “My joy I leave with you.” This joy was the second quality that pervaded the lives of the early Christians. Outsiders found this baffling. These Christians were not wealthy or powerful. If anything, they faced more adversity than the average man or woman, yet in the midst of their trials they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that was almost boisterous. Perhaps radiant would be a more exact word, but radiance is hardly the word we would use to characterize the average religious life. The joy of these early Christians was unspeakable — life for them had ceased to be a problem to be solved and had become a glory discerned.
What produced this love and joy in these early Christians? The explanation, in so far as we have been able to gather it from the New Testament records is that three intolerable burdens had been lifted from them. The first of these was fear, even the fear of death. The second was release from guilt. The third was release from the cramping confines of the ego. They knew, in the words of a contemporary poet, “the human curse is to love, sometimes to love well, but never to love well enough.” Now this curse had been dramatically lifted, and in the concept that “it is no longer I that liveth but Christ that liveth in me”, the circle of self was broken, leaving love to flow from its former, self-demanding constraints.
How did the Christians get free of these burdens? And what did a man named Jesus, now gone, have to do with the process that they should credit it as his achievement? The only power that can effect transformations of the order we have described is love.
It remained for our generation to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom must be bombarded from without. So, too, there is locked in every human life, a wealth of love and joy that partakes of God himself, and it too can be released only through external bombardment, in this case the bombardment of love.
If we, too, really felt loved, not abstractly or in principle but vividly and personally, by one who united in himself all power and perfection, the experience could melt our fear, guilt, and self-concern forever. As Kierkegaarde says, “if at every moment, both present and future, it were eternally certain that nothing has happened or can ever happen, not even the most fearful horror invented by the most morbid imagination and translated into fact, which can separate us from God’s love, here would be the reason for joy.”
This love of God is precisely what the first Christians did feel. They became convinced that Jesus was God and they felt directly the force of his love. Once it reached them it could not be stopped. Melting the barriers of fear, guilt, and self, it poured through them as if they were sluice gates, expanding the love they had hitherto felt for others until the difference in degree became a difference in kind and quality which their world called Christian love. The apostle Paul described this love for the very first time in a letter to the Christian community in Corinth:
“Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends…” (1 Cor. 4-8)
So astonishing did the first Christians find this love and the fact that it had actually entered their lives, they had to appeal for help in describing it. Paul, in closing one of the earliest recorded sermons on the Good News, turned back to the words of one of the prophets: “Look at this you scornful souls and lose yourselves in wonder, for in your days I do such a deed that, if men were to tell you this story, you would not believe it.”
“True, a marvelous manifestation of brotherly love and unexampled goodwill did spring up in these early communities of believers… they were filled with joy and they lived such new and unique lives that all men were attracted to their teaching about Jesus.” (UB 194:4.6)