V — Reaping Where He Has Sown
The shining message of Grace is that we may share in the fruits of our Elder Brother’s overcoming of all belief in something opposed to the one Power for good. Its glory is that we may enter into the harvest which He planted and brought to fruition, that we may reap where He has sown.
"I and the Father are one.”
Jesus made this claim before He had proved it completely. It was so of Him before His resurrection and ascension, at His most inspired and empowered moments, as when He healed the sick instantaneously, fed the multitudes, and raised the dead. On His ascension, it became so of Him permanently and eternally.
Of course, before He attained it everlastingly, Jesus’ high consciousness at each time of soul elevation was being merged with the race mind . . . even as His less perfect, faltering, sorrowing and reproachful thoughts and feelings were being infused into the universal knowing, when He experienced them; even as your thoughts and feelings and my thoughts and feelings are flowing continually into the universal consciousness stream; even as the soul radiations of all people since "the beginning” have done, and as those of all people through all eternity will do.
The contributions of mankind’s "unfinished” thoughts and feelings to the whole thought atmosphere form a liability that will be wiped out when all men rise, in soul, to accept the asset of the divine inner awareness of the Christed Jesus. The important thing is that, at His ascension, Jesus did contribute a consciousness perfected in every detail—an eternal asset to all mankind, to be received by all who desire it generally or about any specific thing.
Jesus’ realization was not thus finished, perfect, until His ascension. After His resurrection, He still bore in His risen body the mark of the wound in His side, and the imprint of the nails that had fastened Him to the cross. That is: He still remembered His suffering. At His ascension, He forgot, He relinquished even subconscious memory of, the past ordeal.
No self-awareness is perfected, one with the Father God, until it has forgotten suffering. God the Father, Principle of Good alone, has no knowing of suffering, imperfection, of any kind—certainly not the knowing of negative memory.
Has the principle of mathematics any knowledge of the mistakes committed by lack of understanding of it, of the disturbing effects on men of such mistakes, or any memory of such occurrences?
If, while using this principle, we add or subtract incorrectly, does mathematics know anything about the error? Does it know that, as a result of our imperfect use of it, we may have to make out a new income tax report? Does it know we may have to disburse more money than we expected in order to pay that bill we added up wrongly? Does it hear a creditor calling up to tell us politely or impolitely that there is an error in our check—because we multiplied nine by six and got forty-eight instead of fifty-four? Does mathematics know of the extra bother to which we are put by having mis-used its principle?
Of course not; and, not having known of our mistakes and our discomfort on account of them, can it have any memory of them? Decidedly no.
So it is with God, Principle of Good, Divine Mind of perfect knowledge. He (It) "is of too pure eyes to behold iniquity”—inequality with the truth of all and only Good all the time. Never having known imperfection, how could God the Father remember it? How could the Son, being completely one with the Father, be burdened with remembrance of it? How can we, one with the Father, in Jesus’ Name, be downweighed with past suffering?
The resurrection marked Jesus’ forgiveness—His "giving” or substituting in His thinking and feeling, the truth for any less-than-truth that had existed there—except for His memory of past suffering. On this, however, He chose not to dwell consciously.
"Touch me not,” He said after his resurrection to Mary Magdalene (the feeling nature where memory persists) "for I am not yet ascended unto the Father.”
The ascension marked Jesus’ forgetfulness—His relinquishment of any memory of anything less than God, Good—to be glorified "with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” (Before the soul journey to perfect realization and manifestation was begun.)
Into this glory about any desired blessing we all may enter in His Name, if we will. We may reap where Fie has sown.
We remember that Jesus stated this law of vicarious blessing: "One soweth, and another reapeth.”
When consciously we will to enter fully into His harvest, our share in it is great. If we accept Him just as Way Shower but not as Way Maker, still we reap to some extent the fruits of His sublime achievement, still we accomplish in His Name.
Whenever we turn for help to the written record of Jesus’ life and His true words, we are turning to His realization of the truth to be strengthened by a spiritual transfusion from it. What are words but the verbal or written expression of the soul (consciousness) from which they take rise? What are deeds but the outward appearance of soul state? Words and deeds do not flow forth from nothing. They flow forth from consciousness, thought and feeling. The causative inner soul awareness lives in them, and is communicated in some degree to anyone who reads the words receptively and is stirred to new faith by description of the deeds.
Even without the written record we could enter into Jesus’ faith. His true consciousness eternally established in the total thought atmosphere at His ascension, lives on forever, everywhere available, and contactible by anyone who desires sincerely to "touch” it with the inner hands of faith. This is so even though the evidence of the deeds has passed from our human sight, and the sound of the words has ceased; at least the sound has ceased as far as our present sense of hearing is concerned; and our present inventive ingenuity has not yet produced a mechanism that will pick up their sound in the ether as a radio does contemporary speech.
Whether it accepts the Nazarene just as teacher and example, or, more fully, as actual saving consciousness for all other men, the whole Christian world, as well as all parts of the world that have felt indirectly the good influence of Christianity, is reaping the harvest of Jesus’ planting—reaping where He has sown, garnering where, of itself, it has not seeded. For who else has developed His wonderful consciousness to sow? All the social reforms originating in Christianity constitute part of the fruits of Jesus’ seed-time. Yet, because so few people, relatively, have been able to understand and believe in as their own His ultimate gift of His ascended Holy Spirit realization, the benefits generally are smaller than they need be; and mixed with the harvest of good from His supreme achievement, is the harvest of tares from the sowing of disbelievers ... the garnering of sorrows, sickness, death and wars. "He that dis-believeth shall be condemned,” warned the Master, not to hell-fire after death, but to the purification by fire of suffering here and now; while "he that believeth on me hath everlasting life” now; conscious, joyous Christ Jesus expression and experience now, according to his desires. "Jesus saves,” and He saves now, from trouble now.
"One soweth, and another reapeth.”
Jesus Himself reaped the Father’s planting of the Word in Him. It was the Father God doing His works through this Son that enabled the Son to become the Christ manifest, the Son Apparent, and so to present to us the tangible Grace of His consciousness of the Father.
This Jesus recognized: "I do nothing of myself . . .” "The Father abiding in me doeth his works.” "The Father is greater than all.” Yet it was through the Nazarene that the full glory of the love and mercy of God became known to men.
Through the receptive Jesus who became the Christ full-embodied, the Father was able to take the initiative towards reconciling man with Himself wholly and completely—of giving to man perfect understanding and realization of Himself as the omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent Good manifest.
To Him who was the channel of this God-expression, we give our loving appreciation. Is it not meet that so we do? Moreover, when we fail in gratitude towards any avenue through which our blessings come to us from the Creator, do we not find that we are bereft of some of the riches of the kingdom made manifest on earth?
"Let gratitude fill your heart to overflowing,” says Paul Martin Brunet. "It is an infilling that will surely bless you beyond your fondest hopes and dreams.” Gratitude goes first to God as Source, then to everyone through whom our blessings come.
Nor should we, as we may be sure Jesus did not, forget the help to Him of the Jewish prophets and seers who had proclaimed the truth of the One God long before Jesus’ coming; and who in Israel had kept alive the worship of this God in the midst of surrounding pagan idolatry. We should not forget that the first Christians were Jews. Above all we should remember that the Jesus who has been taken so warmly to the Gentile heart was Himself a Jew.
So to this Jewish Jesus we pay homage. We acknowledge our Gentile debt to Him and His forbears and we rejoice that this "parfait gentil Knight” fought so good a fight against the Satan of evil-thinking, the adversary of us all—and sowed so fine a planting for all men to reap when His Knighthood was in flower—when He ascended to His Father, and our Father, to His God and our God.
When we turn to written records we perceive intellectually the evidence of the miracle-working power of Jesus’ divine self-awareness, and we receive intellectually by our sense of sight the comfort, strength and inspiration of His true words. More closely even than in these ways we may lay hold of the Nazarene’s ascended realization of truth by finding it in the silence of the secret place. (Suggested reading for information about the secret place: The Silence by E. V. Ingraham.) Here, in us, it exists as the Comforter which Jesus said the Father would send in His (Jesus’) Name, or as a result of His perfected realization.
WORDS OF JESUS
And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; ... ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.
I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.
These things have I spoken unto you, being present with you.
But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you.
—St. John 14
. . . when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me:
—St. John 15:26
It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.
—St. John 16:7
© 1947, Crichton Russ Boatwright
