It is true that the greatness of the most sublime historical Mystery in the evolution of the earth – Christ becoming man and connecting Himself with the earth evolution and with man – is still far above the ordinary understanding. We, however, are living in a new time, I would say, in the time, which calls us to expand and deepen this understanding. Christ is the only God, Who has passed through death. This death is a supreme act of self-sacrifice, in order to rescue the correct course of human development, the human I, which needed to be rescued. The greatest proof for the rescuing act of Christ consisted in the fact that His own phantom triumphed by resurrection after His crucifixion, and His disciples saw It. First Mary and after her the other disciples, they saw Him, but this first unique Resurrection was for them, too, both unfamiliar and even incredible, because they saw that spiritual part, which was invisible for the human eyes, but they already had the spiritual vision to see it. That is why men will wonder for a long time to come what really happened and what they could believe in, for they don’t have spiritual understanding and knowledge, but they still rely only on their physical vision and believe only what they see with their physical eyes.
The Resurrection of Christ is actually the birth of a new constituent of the human nature – the imperishable body – which man lost with The Fall and the Mystery of Golgotha provided the path to retrieve it. If we are to understand why Christ’s deed is the most sublime self-sacrifice of such nature, which is beyond comparison, because He is a God, we will have to lift ourselves spiritually in terms of understanding and consciousness, and to grasp the following:
In order to rescue this human phantom, the spiritual invisible part of the physical body, a God had to come down from His incomparable heights and there had also to be a Being like Jesus from Nazareth, born in a divine manner and unique in his nature and purity, in order to provide a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I – not a human I, but a Divine I – Christ’s I. He rose, so that mankind could some day see and understand that this happened through the mighty powers of the spiritual part of the physical body, which before His interference and His sacrifice had been unusable for the purposes of the evolution.
It is sad that most people today only revere and cherish the memory of Christ’s death on Golgotha, which is still grasped only as disgraceful and inexplicable – why that death was necessary and permitted, since He was a God?! The time will come when everybody will know, that exactly with this still unintelligible death on the cross, exactly since that moment things changed for man, permitting him to join again the ascending gradation of his development. Ever since that great moment, man has the possibility to incorporate in himself what is called the “imperishable” body, the body he had lost. Christ redeemed the I of man exactly at the moment when man did not reincarnate as “man”, but managed to preserve only the image and the substance he had before coming down to his physical incarnations. This is what Christ bestowed with His self-sacrifice on Golgotha, a self-sacrifice still too little understood.
I hope that everyone wishing to know these things in details and to make them worthwhile for himself will find a stimulus on these pages and in what I am trying to give here as a brief explanation about something which is so very complex to understand and rationalize. For such a person the best thing will be to find the extraordinary book by Rudolf Steiner “From Jesus to Christ” – this is the source, out of which the aspirant can personally drink.
The whole accessible anthroposophical literature is offered today to modern man, who is interested to know the truth about Christ, and it is only a matter of man’s willingness to raise his consciousness through his mind. For man is so constituted, that even if he has not yet achieved clairvoyance with his spiritual organs, he can still understand through his mind’s power the Mystery of Golgotha and most of the world secrets, which are accessible, but complex to comprehend.
The ever controversial subject of our time, the issue of freedom, over which people argue with abstract thoughts, will remain in the same way misunderstood until we have acquired understanding about the self-sacrifice of Christ. Our freedom will be achieved only when we can realize with understanding through knowledge, that we owe our freedom to Christ.