Rabbi, Eat (Rabel)

(Back) Jesus in Samaria Healing the Official's Son (Next)

John 4:32-35

I bring this up because we are coming into something now where you must keep in mind if you are to derive the full flavor of it and your level of meaning on these two incidents may change. That does not mean that the level you once were in was wrong or incorrect, it does mean that you now see another dimension of meaning and the first of these is right after the conversation we are told, (John 4:32-35) "Rabbi, eat." We know what they meant, food, material food because the disciples had gone into the city to buy it. "But he said to them, I have meat to eat that ye know not." Naturally you can guess what went on in their minds, the next question expresses that. "The disciples therefore said one to another, Hath any man brought him aught to eat?" Now, what must they have been thinking of still was material food, "Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work." This is the first point of importance here, Jesus indicates that man has available to him a source of nourishment and a form of nourishment which is not materialistic, of which nature is not the source. That while he does not urge others to restrain from physical food intake to derive nourishment, he simply adds a new dimension to that area of life and shows that man is not yet aware of this, "I have meat to eat that ye know not," that ye are not aware of it yet, but that we will become aware for he says that everything I do you are going to do too, which means that we have in store for us a great discovery, a greater way, a higher way, a less material way of nourishment intake, and he indicates that his way of deriving this nourishment is simply to do the will of the Father that sent him and to accomplish his works which would mean then that this nourishment must not come from without to the within but that it is within and is released when a person does certain things in his consciousness, within himself, that we will not always be killing cows and chickens and uprooting plants and vegetables, this is what we seem to have to do now for survival, for perpetuation of the flesh envelope we have to do this, and many people don't like to do this. Why do they don't like doing it? They don't like to kill animals, they don't even like to kill plants, and I know there is the justification, "Well, the apple tree wants you to pluck its apples." Alright, so we will enjoy our apples, but there is something in man's nature that innately, at least in the more refined and responsive souls that don't like devour other forms of life and long that there will be someday no longer a need for this; however, (and this is personal) I feel that as long as we do need to have our nourishment intake this way we should do it without guilt because guilt isn't going to solve anything, but pay heed to Jesus words, there will be the alternative, there will be revealed at the right time through our own type of unfoldment a manner in which we can get nourishment from within which will certainly be part of regeneration. Later on Jesus will take up this business of our nourishment again a couple of times and then, in the later part of John's Gospel he goes into his great esoteric discourses of the bread of heaven as contrasted to the man in the wilderness and he gives a few further hints as to how one will be able to have this kind of nourishment from within himself rather than, more dependent on manna in the wilderness which suffices but does not really satisfy, but it is significant that in two very important occasions in his life he shows great concern that others get some material food. Does this say something? One is when he raised the little 12 year old girl from death and restored her to her parents, the first thing he says after the girl is restored is, "give her something to eat." and he meant food, material food. In another occasion after his own resurrection and his reappearance in his etherialized body he comes on the scene of his own disciples who had doubts about whether he was going to accomplish this resurrection and actually function for a while longer in a physical body. Here he comes upon them after they had been fishing all night, working hard all night and the first words to them, imagine! his first words to them are not what you and I would shout ... but he says, "children, have you aught to eat?" He could talk about this bread from heaven, this meat to eat that we know not of, yet he is fully aware that while we are not in that stage of ability to do this, then, let's make sure everybody has enough to eat, good place to live and nice warm clothing on the body.

Q. There is another instance when he heals Peter's wife and he urges her to eat.

A. Ed: Another one, O.K. I have to make a note of that, thank you, I had overlooked that one.

Now, the second point we want to deal with is in ithe same paragraph, right after he talks about the meat that he is able to eat he says this, (John 4:35 on) "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields, that they are white already unto harvest." He obviously did not mean that in the agricultural sense, obviously if he said to them, you are going to say in four months comest the harvest, then, agriculturally speaking what must have been the state of the fileds on the farms there if it was not harvest time? Obviously he was speaking of something metaphysical. "He that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal, that he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. 'For herein is the saying true, One soweth and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye have not laboured: others have laboured, and ye are entered into their labour." Then you can just reverse that and it would be true also. What is he pointing out here? First thing that he points out is that there is no need for us to continue the mental habit of procrastinating your own acceptance of your good, of whatever good is rightfully yours at the moment, that we have fallen into the habit of worshipping time instead of the eternal Presence (I did not say present, you don't worship that) but you do worship the eternal Presence and awareness of the Presence in time language is present. So, the first thing to do is to open your eyes, open your mind and your perceptive faculty to Omnipresence, get a feeling of the reality of it, commit yourself, believe in it, totally, and you will then have a greater dimension of power in your entire consciousness, this realization of the Eternal Presence rather than this constant procrastination of "later, later" and so forth. Not that events and manifestations do not occur later but the Presence itself is never a later thing, it is always a NOW thing. Please remember folks that every time you reaffirm or recommit yourself to the Omnipresence or Spirit or Superconscious, immediately if not sooner you have an increased capacity to know or to receive and that increased capacity must be followed by a fulfillment of that capacity either in the form of knowledge or guidance or things. Keep the horse before the cart, the principle first, the Presence first, Spirit, and your commitment and your belief, these come first and this is followed by an increase of consciousness or capacity, that has to be infilled someway, somehow. A lot of people don't realize this and they think that the manifestation occurs first. No, no, the increased consciousness first and then it will be filled up somehow, like attracts like, like begets like. So, this practicing the Presence is the first thing he talks about by, 'lift up your eyes unto the now, the good is here in substance and it will become actuality under the law, but then he gets a little more complicated in the next part where he deals with us a little more on the human level here and he designates sowers and reapers and fields. Now, these fields represent the diversity within the unity (later on he will say, "In my Father's house are many mansions"). Here he is indicating, in the Father's kingdom are many fields, there is only One Presence and One Power but within the Oneness is all the diversity and all the parts serving the grand purpose of the whole and so the fields here for our purpose represent all the various areas of interest and activity and effort and receiving and giving that we go through, many different fields in one day and in these fields we are always, at any given moment taking one or another role, we are there in one or another capacity, we are either sowing or reaping, we are either instigating new causative factors or we are encountering the results of prior causative factors we have sown. You meet your own choices, so to speak, everywhere you go you are encountering your own choices and the making of the choice is the sowing and the encountering the result of the choice is the reaping. You are always wither on the giving end of the blessing, or the receiving end of the blessing and it all can be traced back to you even though the other person or persons may get involved in their own sowing and reaping and stepping into your fields, but then you would be stepping into their fields and nobody is cheated, nobody is overlooked, it can seem that way but it cannot be that way, in reality there is a divine law or there is not a divine law, and if we trust Jesus as being very familiar with that divine law, he is telling us, "As a man soweth, so shall he reap." but not necessarily in the same field, there is where the hang up can come, a lot of people think or believe that a change of fields means a loss of good results and it isn't so, not if your eyes are open but if your eyes are shut and you are still thinking in terms of four months, that the field must always remain the same field, then we will get into very preplexing situations which we won't be able to figure out. Now, of course a person can believe this teaching and be aware that the shifting of fields will not deprive him of his rightful reaping, and yet as ministers we have to realize that many persons are not yet capable of not being upset when the fields change or when their decision in life causes a change of fields and they are not able to do their desire for reaping in the familiar field where they remember they have done the sowing. I am particularly thinking right now of marriages and child rearing and perhaps certain particular jobs that we have. Here is where it can hurt bad, we can say, Oh yes, it is the law, it works, it is true, and yet I can't help feeling this, I worked my fingers to the bone and now he is married to somebody else, or now the kids want to leave the nest without me being able to enjoy them now that they are able to shift for themselves a little bit, or, I did all this and did all that in this particular position, in this particular job and now it seems that I am out and somebody else is in. These things wound and hurt people and even though we as ministers know, assuming you are agreeing with this lesson, we know that in Truth there really is not unjust misfortune if one will just stay with this commitment, keep your faith where it belongs on God, trust the law, keep checking whether your commitment is still total and then you will find, as Jesus says here that whether you are in a field in which you are a sower or whether you are in a field in which you are a reaper, you are going to be able to rejoice because life is eternals, you will know this, labor in fields is temporary but sowing and reaping as activities within one's life are always temporary things but life itself is eternal and that the law will not fail, God is not mocked, the right outworking will occur. The first thing this will do for you is remove any tendency towards resenting another's good fortune, this is a tremendous overcoming, folks, the being able to let go of any kind of judging or resenting what looks to us an undeserved good fortune.

Text of the original transcript from paragraph 5 on page 46 through paragraph 1 on page 50.
Transcribed by Mark Hicks on August 8, 2013