© 2003 Stephen Zendt
© 2003 The Urantia Book Fellowship
“Sometimes the planting of a seed necessitates its death, the death of your fondest hopes, before it can be reborn to bear the fruits of new life and new opportunity.” [UB 48:6.36]
The shape of a mustard seed is like an oblong or a tiny spheroid. It is an enclosed universe of potentiality, waking for the chance to grow. In order for that mustard seed to do what it is capable of doing, it needs nurturing in the soil, the awakening rays of the sun. It must break open to permit new life to sprout. How might this seed-symbol of transformation indicate to us the need for a new attitude as believers and followers of Joshua ben Joseph, Jesus of Nazareth?
For over 2,000 years opinions historical and theological, cultural and political, have battled for authority concerning the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The traditions and superstitions, the powerful miraculous attributions about this most intriguing person have preoccupied millions. Theological opinion concerning this one human being ranges from God incarnate to elaborate hoax. At the outset of the third millennium since his lifetime Jesus, as the risen Christ, has become an object of intense scholarly debate and research, while for many he is the focus of fanatical devotion.
During the final century of the second millennium after Jesus’ birth, a new compilation and restatement of the teachings of Jesus came into existence as part of a new revelation, of cosmic scope with epochal significance, titled The Urantia Book.
Suddenly, the universe made contact with mortals, between the First and Second World Wars. In the pages of this unusual book, the person of Jesus took on a vastly altered significance, and became associated with real universe power and authority, yet oddly free of human religious entanglements.
A key concept in this book’s restatement of Jesus’ teachings is the distinction drawn between the widespread religion about Jesus, called Christianity, and the actual religion which Jesus himself practiced, as a divine and human being, here on this planet.
For students of the Urantia Revelation who have discovered the transformative story of Jesus’ human existence, a deepened appreciation of the significance of his matchless teachings is only the beginning of a lifelong search into meanings and values that truly makes all things new, material as well as spiritual.
But, what of the Good News? What does this Revelation have to tell us about the Gospel, not of Mark, Luke, Paul or John, but of Jesus of Nazareth, himself?
The personality who compiled the teachings of Jesus for us makes this statement at the beginning of Part IV of The Urantia Book:
“Acknowledgment: In carrying out my commission to restate the teachings and retell the doings of Jesus of Nazareth, I have drawn freely upon all sources of record and planetary information. My ruling motive has been to prepare a record which will not only be enlightening to the generation of men now living, but which may also be helpful to all future generations.” [UB 121:8.12]
“I have unhesitatingly appropriated those ideas and concepts, preferably human, which would enable me to create the most effective portraiture of Jesus’ life, and which would qualify me to restate his matchless teachings in the most strikingly helpful and universally uplifting phraseology.” [UB 121:8.14]
Jesus himself summarizes his gospel after his resurrection, in an appearance in Nicodemus’ courtyard in Jerusalem. He states:
“I admonish you ever to remember that your mission among men is to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom—the reality of the fatherhood of God and the truth of the sonship of man. Proclaim the whole truth of the good news, not just a part of the saving gospel. … Sonship with God, by faith, is still the saving truth of the gospel of the kingdom. You are to go forth preaching the love of God and the service of man. That which the world needs most to know is: Men are the sons of God and through faith they can actually realize and daily experience this ennobling truth.” [UB 193:0.4]
After the Pentecost experience, yet another summary is offered from the revelators:
Jesus lived on earth and taught a gospel which redeemed man from the superstition that he was a child of the devil and elevated him to the dignity of a faith son of God. Jesus’ message, as he preached it and lived it in his day, was an effective solvent for man’s spiritual difficulties in that day of its statement. And now that he has personally left the world, he sends in his place his Spirit of Truth, who is designed to live in man and, for each new generation, to restate the Jesus message so that every new group of mortals to appear upon the face of the earth shall have a new and up-to-date version of the gospel, just such personal enlightenment and group guidance as will prove to be an effective solvent for man’s ever-new and varied spiritual difficulties. [UB 194:2.1]
This unique revelatory perspective on the teachings of Jesus helps to plant seeds of urgent and challenging growth for the believer in the rich soil of personal experience. The revelators tell us:
“The Master offered no solutions for the nonreligious problems of his own age nor for any subsequent age. Jesus wished to develop spiritual insight into eternal realities and to stimulate initiative in the originality of living; he concerned himself exclusively with the underlying and permanent spiritual needs of the human race. He revealed a goodness equal to God. He exalted love—truth, beauty, and goodness—as the divine ideal and the eternal reality.” [UB 140:8.31]
The call to perfection within this gospel of Jesus brings us as believers to produce spiritual fruits, as new conceptual patterns in the lives of those of us who embrace this vivifying way of life. Through our personal choice, we begin by removing the old accusations of inherent guilty sinfulness, faithfully learning to accept actual sonship (family of faith) with our loving creator. We develop a true relationship with our God, who guides us toward spiritual transformation, not as a hopeless miscreant, but as a beloved child, unique and valuable in the eternal ages. Salvation becomes the gospel key to eternal life, granting to each of us the knowledge that we are not condemned, but rather cherished as personal beings with Paradise potential.
As clarity increases about Jesus and his gospel, superstition and fear become unnecessary burdens. The traditions and trappings of many olden belief systems begin to melt away in the intense beams of the light of truth. As one grows toward real mortal maturity, the props and scaffolding once used to bolster a feeble faith in God can be taken down and put away for good. We are building the real edifice of soul-growth for eternity Love of the truth and sincerity of purpose lead us every step of the way. Experience as human beings is the only road home.
We learn that God is not a stern dictator and arbiter. Instead, God turns out to he a welcoming, saving, loving, intellectually stimulating, Father. There are rules, but they are methods of becoming more real, more loving, more giving human beings.
We accept the invitation to come home to the center of all things. After all, the creator of all things has issued to each of us the open invitation to join him in Paradise. The joy and peace of God’s universal plan of transformation and ascension is ours to choose.
Just prior to listing the mortal insights of Morontia Mota, an archangel makes the following statement: “Even now you should learn to water the garden of your heart as well as to seek for the dry sands of knowledge. Forms are valueless when lessons are learned. No chick may be had without the shell and no shell is of any worth after the chick is hatched.” [UB 48:6.32]
The creation of new pictures out of old facts, the restatement of parental life in the lives of offspring—these are the artistic triumphs of truth. The shadow of a hair’s turning, premeditated for an untrue purpose, the slightest twisting or perversion of that which is principle—these constitute falseness. But the fetish of factualized truth, fossilized truth, the iron band of so-called unchanging truth, holds one blindly in a closed circle of cold fact. One can be technically right as to fact and everlastingy wrong in the truth. [UB 48:6.33]
Our contemporary culture is in a period of massive upheaval. Philosophy is grappling with chaos and negation. Theology searches for meaning. History is being revised. There have been several recent revolutions in science. And religion has become the motivator for armed conflict between peoples, organized and crystallized religion, that is. Yet, Jesus’ gospel offers us personal peace, once the new and living way has settled into place in personal worship and practice. He warns all who are sincere that a struggle with olden thought forms and idolatry must be undergone. But the rewards are those which deepen and gladden the mind and the heart, while stirring up desires for fellowship and service to believers and seekers everywhere on the planet.
The stages of awakening to the gospel message are personal, but certain broad categories or plateaus might be summed up as:
Jesus, speaking to the apostle Thomas, says:
“Dedicate your life to the great work of showing how the critical material mind of man can triumph over the inertia of intellectual doubting when faced by the demonstration of the manifestation of living truth as it operates in the experience of spirit-born men and women who yield the fruits of the spirit in their lives, and who love one another, even as I have loved you.” [UB 181:2.26]
The revelators comment, elsewhere in the text:
Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him but rather to believe with him, believe in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the heavenly Father. The Master desires that all his followers should fully share his transcendent faith. Jesus most touchingly challenged his followers, not only to believe what he believed, but also to believe as he believed. This is the full significance of his one supreme requirement, “Follow me.” [UB 196:0.13]
The more we delve into the faith, the teachings, and the parables of Jesus, by contrast the greater becomes the need for us to critically evaluate the onslaught of contemporary media and slick propaganda. The hypnotic effect of clever hype in advertising, the materialistic mania fostering selfishness and class warfare, the propaganda of fear and war through outright terror, accentuate the distinct impression that our culture and civilization are in acute suffering from a disease of the mind and soul. Yet the antidote is near at hand, if we will faithfully apply it. As our personal lives become suffused with the “divine virus of love,” the less hold on us do the transient material possessions, the selfish motivations of contemporary western culture, have. As though coming awake from dreaming, we begin to penetrate the many layers of cultural bondage, political presumptions, linguistic manipulative programming, especially evolutionary religious dogmas. As Paul, the apostle, so aptly put it: “Now, we see through a glass darkly, but then, face to face.”
The call from our souls, the inner longings and purposive ideals, startle us awake, at last!
Awakening to the totality, universality, and simplicity of Jesus’ gospel of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Humankind, we see on one hand how far we have to go. But on the other hand, we understand how many rungs up the civilizational/cultural ladder we have climbed. This is more apparent in the twenty centuries since The Master was alive on earth. The quickening, progressive waves of scientific discovery, mechanical invention, intellectual comprehension, political, cultural, and artistic accomplishment have utterly transformed our planet since Jesus’ resurrection.
And yet, we are plagued with wars, with grossly overpopulated cities, epidemic diseases, cultural stagnation, environmental degradation, and crime. The swinging pendulum between the poles of aggressive political hubris and atheistic world-weary despair might leave us dizzy with the sickening sense that our world is spinning out of control. Fear may be a master fraud, but it threatens to take hold when the media-machine predicts disaster and awful death. Our ability to evaluate and discriminate becomes blurry. We long for relief. We demand that God take control.
“Be not discouraged; human evolution is still in progress, and the revelation of God to the world, in and through Jesus, shall not fail” [UB 196:3.33]
Is this not the time to re-acquaint ourselves with the comforting assurances of the Good News? Should we fail to place the Universal Father at the center of history and prophecy, we might dare to overlook the evolutionary sweep of God’s presence, his saving love for all humanity. When we fail to place our faith in the brotherhood of believers in God our Father and God our Mother, in the ultimate triumph of Good, we declare that the Gospel has not moved us to transform our minds, to open to new understanding. We are caught in the cold, closed circle.
Jesus lived with a sublime trust in the Father’s watchcare, knowing the presence of God moment by moment, undiluted by doubts and fears. Jesus’ Gospel of Good News assures each of us that we have a personal relationship with God. Our family becomes the worldwide human race. We learn that God is present in our inmost being. Our prayers and longings are answered.
We increasingly find that we need peaceful moments to associate ourselves with our inner spiritual reality. We discover that trust and love create relationships of sustaining and healing wholeness. We realize our deep hurt and loneliness, as we open injuries and pain to the transformation of the Spirit, overcoming rnindal darkness with the divine light of truth and the affection we feel for one another. The promise to make all things new comes true, for every sincere seeker after God and his trusting, healing LOVE.
“The religion of Jesus fosters the highest type of human civilization in that it creates the highest type of spiritual personality and proclaims the sacredness of that person.” [UB 194:3.7]
“The spiritual forward urge is the most powerful driving force present in this world: the truth-loving believer is the one progressive and aggressive soul on earth.” [UB 194:3.4]
Typically, much strife and contention has accompanied the teachings and the teachers of Jesus’ gospel. Martyrdom, persecution, even criminalization have tended to make modern believers somewhat cautious about falling prey to overly zealous behavior. Even the Golden Rule has been turned upside down, to create a polite refusal to intrude into the privacy of others’ lives.
It is a terrible thing to see real evangelism deteriorate into opinionated argument and condemnation. Zealots create strife and belligerence wherever they go, no matter to which religious movement they attempt to obtain converts. Tact and tolerance and the ability to listen for the cry in another’s soul may win more believers than any show of intellectual skill or forceful debate. Dropping pearls of wisdom effectively into common conversation is an art form in itself. Going on the second-mile-journey may be the source of a miracle for someone in deep need.
A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a world sway of mechanistic naturalism . . . —Religion does need new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings. [UB 195:9.2-4]
Jesus calls us to open up our real potentials, to give of ourselves as we are uniquely able to be useful. The welling-up of feelings brought on by personal spiritual transformation brings us to want to aid in a similar transformation of the entire world, one community at a time.
We do not find Jesus saying merely, “Peace be upon you.” He urgently commands us to love one another, to go into all the world to spread Good News—the glad tidings of our kinship with the God of universes. Evidently, laziness has no place in the religion of Jesus. The working words are, “Go” and “Do,” “Serve” and “Love.”
We are admonished by the revelators:
“. . . Neither democracy nor any other political panacea will take the place of spiritual progress. False religions may represent an evasion of reality, but Jesus in his gospel introduced mortal man to the very entrance upon an eternal reality of spiritual progression.” [UB 195:6.10]
“Freedom or initiative in any realm of existence is directly proportional to the degree of spiritual influence and cosmic-mind control; that is, in human experience, the degree of the actuality of doing ‘the Father’s will’. And so, when you once start out to find God, that is the conclusive proof that God has already found you.” [UB 195:6.16]
“Only when man has become sufficiently disillusioned by the sorrowful disappointments attendant upon the foolish and deceptive pursuits of selfishness, and subsequent to the discovery of the barrenness of formalized religion, will he be disposed to turn wholeheartedly to the gospel of the kingdom, the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.” [UB 195:9.7]
“Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus’ life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel of eternal salvation. And when Jesus becomes thus lifted up, he will draw all men to himself: Jesus’ disciples should be more than conquerors, even overflowing sources of inspiration and enhanced living to all men. Religion is only an exalted hrananism until it is made divine by the discovery of the reality of the presence of God in personal experience.” [UB 195:10.1]
“Ever bear in mind—God and men need each other. They are mutually necessary to the full and final attainment of eternal personality experience in the divine destiny of universe finality.” [UB 195:10.3]
The real gospel of Jesus can be easily apprehended, and even taught, but it must also be lived. Hypocrisy haunts the lives of those who resist the transforming power of personal experience with God, overcoming selfishness through performing loving service to fellow mortals.
In summation, sometime it may dawn on us that we, ourselves, are potential living gospels through our lives as we interact with this world and its cultures. We have an opportunity to become, as it were, an open book. When asked, we teach whatever can be learned. When need is perceived, we become involved. When the time has come to be silent, to listen intently to the inner realms, we humbly give over to God the direction of our thoughts. In group devotions, we seek remembrance and renewal, leading us to true worship.
“The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him as men have not been stirred since the days when they walked about on earth as his companions in the flesh.” [UB 195:10.6]
This simple yet saving and powerful gospel turned the western world upside down. It led to the Renaissance, and even to the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and our modern world.
Perhaps the times of the present will see a planetary upending of the ancient closed circle of traditions and cults in a unique, new opening of human potentials to the healing touch of the Father’s love. We are in the midst of massive unpredictable change. Which way will the planet go? Who knows? Who might stop long enough to “read” us and to know us, if we should become “the people of the open book?”
“In accordance with the truth committed to your hands will the Master of truth require a reckoning … Freely have you received: therefore freely should you give of the truth of heaven, and in the giving will this truth multiply and show forth the increasing light of saving grace, even as you minister it.” [UB 176:3.7-10]
Stephen Zendt has been studying The Urantia Book for thirty years. The past nine years he has been a member of the General Council of the Fellowship and he previously participated in the recording project to put the entire Urantia Book on cassette tapes. Stephen lives in the San Francisco Bay area.