THE MYSTERIES OF THE FOUR GOSPELS
Lesson Five. Matthew 26.
Unity Interpretation of
How Do We Drink the Blood of Jesus Christ
CHARLES and CORA FILLMORE
October 23, 1941
CHARLES FILLMORE: OPENING SONGS
Our subject today is the "Blood and Body of the Christ". We are going to sing No.252 — music of 251 and words of 252. I will now read the words of the first verse:
1. O! That is Now Glory for Me.
Banished all burdens of sorrow and pain
My soul's aglow with an infinite flame;
My voice exultant, now sings this refrain
Anthem of Glory, O glory for me.
Chorus:
O! That is now glory for me,
Glory for me, Glory for me!
For by his grace, I now look on hiS face;
That is my glory, O, glory for me!
2.Life, like a river of infinite grace,
Mirrors the light of his glorious face,
Making of earth, a most heavenly place
Filled with his presence, O, glory for me!
That was so good let's do it again. (Mr. Frangkiser: The whole thing? C.F. The whole thing.) That's sure fine. It was worth repeating, wasn't it? Let's all join in the Lord's Prayer: (repeat) ... Amen.
CORA FILLMORE: MEDITATION:
I have a word to say in regard to those who are working for credit: please write the number of the lesson — 1,2,3,4,5 etc. Also we got one or two papers where someone had forgotten to sign his or her name. Put your name on them.
Now as you know, our subject for this course of lessons is "THE MYSTERIES OF THE FOUR GOSPELS". Today is the Fifth lesson in the course. Our lesson today is the chapter of Matthew 26, verse from 26 to 30 inclusive.
This is part of the account of the Lord's Supper or the Last supper, just before Jesus' crucifixion. In it we read:
26:26And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it; and he gave to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. 26:27And he took a cup, and gave thanks, and gave to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;26:28for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many unto remission of sins. 26:29But I say unto you, I shall not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. 26:30And when they had sung a hymn, they went out unto the mount of Olives.
Now the great question has been and is: HOW DO WE DRINK THE BLOOD OF JESUS CHRIST and EAT OF HIS BODY?
In the orthodox church they make Holy Communion of a little ceremony by eating a crumb of bread and sipping a little wine, and through this outer service affirm they have drunk of the blood and tasted of the body of Jesus Christ. Now of course, this does not satisfy the spiritual metaphysician. We take the Bible, as you all know, and resolve it back into the primal ideas. We consider that the whole Bible is a description, or a history we might say, of each soul in its unfoldment from the mortal to the spiritual plane of consciousness. In order, therefore, to think of the blood and to eat of the body of Jesus Christ, the first step is to RESOLVE THIS WHOLE THING BACK INTO ITS PRIMAL IDEAS.
The bread has back of it the idea of LIFE. The body has back of it, as you all know, the idea of substance ... the substance idea. And to appropriate the LIFE and the SUBSTANCE of Jesus' BODY must take place through the activity of the mind; through the most highly accelerated activity of the mind. There would be no other way, would there?
We as a race have settled down and become so crystallized until our flesh is not much more than a mere crust. Now you know, we all know, we should have radiant bodies should we not? We should have illumined bodies, if you will, electrical bodies. That's where we should be in spiritual unfoldment today. Jesus Christ, through spiritual realization, through scientific prayer, through spiritual revelation attained all this. Through this process, he was constantly renewing soul, through the renewing of his mind — and we know the body is the fruit of the soul — and was transformed into pure spiritual essence.
Again, we all know right here at Unity, we have been instructed all through the years, that through Jesus' experience on the cross, he lowered his consciousness to that of the race and thereby was enabled to administer to the race a wonderful blood transfusion which we all understand so well implanted in both soul and body the seed ef eternal life here and now — the seed of divine substance, here and now.
Jesus Christ broadcast, if you please, the electrons of his blood, the electrons of his body, into the whole race atmosphere. [TruthUnity note: Ed Rabel spoke about this teaching of Charles Fillmore in his fourth lecture on Gospel Mysteries given on August 19, 1993.] Oh, what a wonderful achievement! And today all who apprehend this truth, all seeking souls, merely partake of this thought atmosphere, of this divine seed. Today all of us who are appropriating these electrons, we are becoming centers of energy. We are becoming centers of spiritual substance. Thus we are being saved through the blood of Jesus Christ.
Today, all who are working diligently in the silence — and we know a great many in this room are — are laying hold of a new life germ. You can feel it, can you not? We are laying hold of a new substance germ and we really are laying hold of a new mental quality. And in many, we find evidences of a now radiant body coming into expression. We are very, very thankful for these wonderful truths which we have had the privilege of appropriating and are really realizing for ourselves.
We begin this transforming process within, do we not? At the very core of being? And when we do finally reach the surface we are fully transformed. However, Jesus Christ is the only one who has really made this demonstration. In this connection, Paul said, in speaking of Jesus Christ, "We meet him in the air" or we realize this radiant body temple which Jesus Christ demonstrated so beautifully.
Now to drink of the blood and eat of the body of Jesus Christ, we must take the idea of blood, which is LIFE, and the idea of body, which is SUBSTANCE — take these mighty ideas into the silence and really clothe these ideas with life and substance. We have a mighty work to do there. We must clothe these ideas with the realization not only of Life and Substance, we must clothe them with SOUL, we must actualize these ideas. We must realize each of these ideas is a mighty magnet functioning in God-Mind — functioning to the degree it can attach to it all the life-giving, power-giving spiritual elements and thus demonstrate to the fulness, really bring into manifestation the divine life, the divine substance of Jesus Christ. Thus we are transforming the soul and really unfolding the divine spiritual body.
Now this is the time for prayer. The power of prayer! What a wonderful thing it is. May we all with one accord turn within and realize that through prayer the most powerful force is generated in all the earth. Prayer calls for the very highest activity of the mind, the most accelerated mind activity, the most powerful in all the universe. With one accord, let us in prayer, through scientific silence, seek the Presence of God, where God's wisdom and love and power are generated direct, direct from the Eternal Presence which gives us gradually, substance, life, as nothing else can. We hold our minds steadily on God, the one Source, realizing through Jesus Christ that nothing is impossible te us, we take this statement:
GOD'S PURE LIFE, SUBSTANCE AND INTELLIGENCE REDEEMS MY SOUL AND CLEANSES AND RENEWS MY BODY TEMPLE.
I will give it again: God's pure Life, Substance and Intelligence now redeem my soul, cleanse and renew my body temple." Together: (repeat). May we in conclusion realize the triumphant march of the Christ thru the soul consciousness; may we realize we are clothed in bodies of radiant substance, pure, holy, perfect. In the Name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
CHARLES FILLMORE: LESSON
I think you will all agree with me that the lesson today is something of a nut to crack, something we have to think of in the mystery we are studying: HOW WE CAN EAT THE BODY OF CHRIST AND DRINK HIS BLOOD? You know we seek to resolve into scientific facts, (that is realities that we can understand) all these statements by Jesus Christ. We are told that he spoke only in parables. So this must be a parable, and we will have to get away frem the literal eating and drinking of the body of Jesus Christ; and yet it must MEAN SOMETHING. What does it really mean: That we are communing with those eating of it. We find it in all four Gospels, we find all through the four Gospels:
"This is my body take and eat ... This is my blood" "Except ye eat the flesh and drink the blood of the son of man, ye have no life in you" ...
These are pretty bold statements. They must have scientific meanings. I think nearly all the Episcopal people that I talked with told me they accepted it through blind (?) faith; they didn't really understand, but they felt something, when they partook of the Sacrament. Well, there is an inner spiritual comprehension or acknowledgment of certain truths that can't be outwardly demonstrated. We get them from the spiritual side. And so the church has, all through its history, carried as a very important part of its ritual this Lord's Supper, and it has been interpreted in many ways.
Now in the Catechism, the Shorter Catechism, I will read you this:
The Lord's Supper is a Sacrament wherein by giving and receiving bread and wine according to Christ's appointment, his death is shown forth, and the worthy receive it and are not, after a corporeal and carnal manner, but by faith, made partakers of his body and blood with all his benefits to their spiritual unfoldment and growth in grace.
Now that isn't so clear to me. I guess it is all right if you know how to interpret it from an orthodox standpoint.
The Catholic Church gave power to the priests that through exaltation, as thsy call it, of the Host, that is lifting up of the bread, he has the ability, the spiritual ability to transform the bread into the literal body of Jesus Christ. In other words, not every Lord's Supper repeats that process which Jesus Christ told us of.
Now there is no doubt that He had the realization of a body — his body wasn't just flesh and blood, but it had some elements in it that the disciples, or those who looked upon him, didn't perceive and couldn't figure out, when they asked his followers, and He said, "Whom do they say I, the Son of man am?" And they looked at it from the personal: "Thou art Jeremiah, or one of the prophets, or Elias some to earth again." But he asked then, "Whom do ye say that I am?" Peter saith, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Then he said, "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto thee, but my father in the heavens."
That's the same situation as when he told his disciples to eat his body and drink his blood — that was a spiritual realization he understood and they didn't. It has taken us, (because we are the followers) a long time — and we have believed this to be a truth based on faith and acknowledged, accepted it and received a certain result. We have undoubtedly gotten the benefit of the lifting up, the raising of our minds and our bodies because you can't lift up the mind without lifting up the body. They are linked by an invisible chain of invisible elements. You can call it — well — spiritual life germs; you can call it the radiant substance. It doesn't matter so much what you call it, if you admit that it is a fact — that there is an invisible, radiant body, and that our bodies should be manifesting that radiant body instead of the slowed-down flesh-and-blood body.
Now Jesus came to bring to our realization this great Truth that we were not really living in the Kingdom of God. It is here. The poet says, "Earth is clad with heaven and every bush afire with God and he who sees, takes off his shoes — but the hosts sit round and pluck blackberries." Now, that's about the way we live in the world today. We don't see this invisible fire that Moses saw. We don't see everything in the universe is lit up, sustained by this invisible life and that invisible substance. Why don't we realise it? Beeause we haven't attained the ability to see spiritually. How shall we see spiritually? Only through the exaltation, the lifting up of our spiritual ideas, and that's exactly what Jesus Christ told us.
As I say, we have been for two thousand years observing this rite, this ceremony, and yet it is only recently that the scientific world has demonstrated for us that there is an invisible electrical body back of every body, everything in the universe. Everybody in the universe is sustained by an electrical energy, an electrical force and that that electrical force forms the substance that we see outwardly. But that there is an invisible substance also.
Now as I say, this makes fundamentally, makes substance, this inner spiritual life and its outer glow. But as Jesus said, "Except ye eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of man, ye have ne life in you." This outer life we are living is a transitory life. It is an ephemeral lift—isn't real. It isn't real until we lay hold of the spiritual side. How important it is then that we eat this Divine Substance — that is, that we appropriate the vitamins.
They tell us there are vital principles in all the food we eat, but we ean't get them without going through a certain mental and physical process. We have to strip the crust off the outer shell before we can get that vitamin. That vitamin is what sustains the body, gives life to it. Now there, you can see is the key. How can we get into this body consciousness and get that vitamin? Through our inner spiritual meditations: first, by realizing that we fundamentally are spiritual beings, that we have spiritual minds, and through this spiritual mind, we lay hold of these elements. Jesus told us, he said man did not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God. We do not live by bread alone. We think outwardly, we have to have food to eat. You don't have to have very much food to eat if you realize the elements in the food. If you knew where vitamins A B and C were and from what certain foods to get those, you could eat those and save yourself a whole lot of fuss in gathering and cooking the outer food. We are coming into that — and when we took pat in the Lord's Supper, instead of having wine and bread to pass around, we would pass around divine ideas, we would cultivate that side in our churches. We should have that brotherly love. That is where the church got hold of this holy communion, that they learn community in spirit. You find people you associate with and you live with, there is an intelligent or invisible substance there. You find that in everything, you put soul into it.
What is that soul? What composes it? It is composed of these invisible elements. All those elements are capable of multiplying and increasing — why, and that is a clue for you, if you take the negative side and look on yourself as mere animal flesh and blood, if you live on animal food alone, you don't get anywhere. You really degrade yourself. You want to take the upgrade. See yourself as you ARE. Don't allow any negative thought to come in.
I read when Henry Ward Beecher received some very flagrant letters when he was preaching and teaching, especially the abolition of slavery, he used to read them to his class — the letters he got. One morning he got a letter — he brought a letter he had just received. On it was written across tha face "FOOL" in big letters. He said, "I receive quite a few letters. Some with no signature. But this man has written his signature clear across the face, without anything else."
That is what takes place in all of our experiences. If we could threw it off in that happy way, life would be smoother, wouldn't it?
Now we can partake of this spiritual substance — see it as a happy something, a something that has to do with your wellbeing. In this extract from the Catechism I read to you about "this was part of the death of the Lord's body", just skip that — it isn't a body of death — Jesus Christ overcame death, didn't he? He lived, is continuing to live, and lives right today in our midst, as divine substance and divine life.
The emphasis here confusing, in all of these passages where he spoke of his body: "This is my body which was broken for you" ... "my blood shed for you". Where do the words "broken" and "shed" some in — where does that come in at? Because he knew how his radiance was. When we are in association with those we love, we partake of their radiant bodies and their radiant blood. But to associate with a man who had the ability to understand the laws of life to the point he did, radiate his healing character, his healing life, his healing blood, it thrills the attention and the germ cell radiates that state. We could all in Spirit rise into a state of consciousness, partake of and appropriate it, is exactly what Jesus Christ means, and what he did and we are just now beginning to realize that in our silent meditations.
"Spiritual appropriation", eating of his divine substance, and our bodies will be changed. Isn't that a wonderful proposition? You can receive a bodily transfusion from the Lord Jesus Christ at any time that you realize that his body is a radiant body and that you can partake of it; that we can, for example, take one of those divine (fine) cells, these germ-cells of life into the mind and it will work until it leavens through the whole body and transforms the flesh. You can take one of the germs of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ and eat it in our mind by faith. He said all this was to be done in remembrance of him.
Think of Jesus Christ. Think of him as right here, right now, as a radiant spiritual body, a radiant lift flow, and that we are all receptive. We are partaking of that substance. We are drinking, through faith, the Blood everlasting, and our bodies change. A gradual change takes place in tha radiance of the body. The blood circulates quickly. It is transforming into radiant life. This is the real eating and real drinking of the substance of the inner spiritual electrons of life in the blood and body of the Lord Jesus Christ.
CORA FILLMORE: OFFERTORY:
Now is our time for the offering. You know as we give, we receive. There is a law of giving and receiving that applies there. We would partake of the body of Jesus Christ; we would drink of his precious blood. Let us take our offering in our hands, repeating in unison our usual statement. Together please: DIVINE LOVE THROUGH ME BLESSES AND MULTIPLIES MY OFFERING." (repeat twice more) Amen. Blessing: Father, we thank Thee for this generous outpouring of thy divine substance, in the Name of Jesus Christ, we thank Thee. Amen.
HEALING POOL
CHARLES FILLMORE: We now realise that the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ are healing. They are restoring us to our divine inheritance — first in the body. Jesus Christ is here in his spiritual body, that radiant body. Jesus Christ is here with that life, that radiant life. By eating it and drinking it, we come into a new consciousness of life and substance; the vitamins — we are told how to partake just as they had at the Last Supper, or Holy Communion, and realize through it, we are healed. Jesus Christ is healing us here and we are brought together in spiritual communion to eat it. I can feel right now the very Presence of Jesus Christ. The Presence is radiating a divine bodily substance to everyone of you. Everyone of you. And you are receiving it in your mind, that spirit substance, and you are eating and receiving its spiritual life — a blood transfusion, and your blood is being transformed and renewed. In accord with all this, John says: "Put on incorruption. Put on immortality." This is the change Jesus Christ has given all a wonderful transfusion, a wonderful blood transfusion.
We will now take this for those who have asked for help. In His Name, these individuals who have asked for this new substance, new life to be made whole.
CORA: Please Join with us in the healing, prospering thought: I will read the names silently. For health and prosperity, illumination, freedom. (hero Arthur Beal played the most wonderful selection — fine—high—and sweet, almost ethereal music with an exalting, uplifting feeling that hushed every outer sense as one listened, to new music from the new Vox Harmonica I believe it is.) If you have friends whom you want to heal and help, ask for Jesus Christ to be with them. Remember, no separation, no distance, no time in spirit; you are one with your loved ones; your loved ones are all one in Spirit. Now we are asking that everyone of them whose names you are mentioning right now will be conscious of this Body, the Spiritual Body holds the Spiritual Blood of the Divine Self, through the Lord Jesus Christ.
Last week we received accounts of several healings in the meetings. For this we are thankful. There is only one healing power, the Spirit of God, which is now working freely through every soul in this room.
CHARLES FILLMORE: You will rise please.
BENEDICTION: We are asking that the Lord Jesuss Christ shall be consciously with you when you are partaking of your meals, having divine grace. Let's everyone, let's resolve when we eat the bread or drink that we shall give thanks that the inner spiritual body of substance shall be manifest in our substance, in our bodies, and the wine we drink shall be made into a fine life — Divine substance, energy and life. REMEMBER THIS, We shall start a new kind of body, a new kind of life that REDEEMS AND RESTORES ... in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Transcribed by Mark Hicks on August 18, 2016.
